My Father’s Monsters

1. Here’s how it started: my father, for reasons unknown to me at the time, would periodically come home, loudly insisting, Jeremiah, I saw a monster, and although he was never drunk, and it never seemed malicious—I never thought he was making fun of me—I never believed him, even at a young age, when he would crow about monsters that were very much in my orbit (he pivoted early on from Frankensteins or Mummies or Creatures from Various-Colored Lagoons and started conjuring up hair-raising encounters with beasts from Gremlins or An American Werewolf in London, stopping thankfully short of meeting Freddy Krueger or anything from Alien or The Thing).[note]The strange thing was, he wasn’t even a huge monster movie fan; he eschewed normal ‘dad’ taste, had no patience for Westerns or war movies, and oddly enough preferred staid dramas like Gentleman’s Agreement, and in the 1980s he acquired a low-grade obsession with My Dinner with Andre.[/note]

2. This continued unabated until it became a source of concern, and then, more powerfully, more keenly, embarrassment, as an assortment of friends would come by to pretend to do homework, only to find themselves in the inquisitorial hands of Alec Sutton, who would casually ask, as one would the weather, which frightful creation of George A. Romero or John Carpenter or Wes Craven or Roger Corman or Rick Baker or Stan Winston or Ray Harryhausen or Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft or Horace Walpole (as if any of us had read Walpole!) or Clive Barker or Ray Bradbury (now he was reaching) or Edgar Allan Poe really gave my friend the heebie-jeebies, the screaming mimis, the willies, and whatever answer my father received from his poor subject would (almost) invariably produce a reaction somewhere along the lines of Well, funny you should say that, because the other night at a stop sign and off he would go, in an admittedly impressive display of extemporizing the chilling proximity in which he had found himself to something from an altogether more ghoulish version of our own world.[note]My father didn’t do this more than once, and most of my friends found it either endearing or just the cost of hanging out with me, but poor Freddy Mackenzie told my father that the car in Christine had given him nightmares, and after hearing that my father had seen a ’58 Plymouth Fury driving by our school with no one behind the wheel, Freddy turned as white as if he’d been blood-let, and both Sutton men got a stern dressing-down from Freddy’s mother.[/note]

3. Once I found my father casually flipping through an issue of Fangoria—on the cover was a Sasquatch, which I never found frightening and therefore never made it into my father’s bestiary—and this I took to be his admission that the jig was up, that he knew that I knew the monsters weren’t real; he didn’t try to hide the magazine, just continued flipping through pages of creature features while asking me in a disinterested tone how my day was going, and it’s not until writing this that I realized reading Fangoria and Eerie and For Monsters Only was his way of centering himself.[note]I’d like to tell you that my father died and willed me a box of musty, dog-eared penny dreadfuls, but like I said, the man was never one for horror, and I’m fairly certain that most of those magazines wound up in the trash.[/note]

4. One time, when I was nine or ten, my father roped his friend Lee in on the act, and Lee told me: “You know, Jem”—he was the only one who called me that, and I always hated it, but it wasn’t for many years that I realized I hated it because I am not and was not a character from Flannery O’Connor or Harper Lee—”all that stuff your dad says, well, it’s not bullshit”—and here my father winced, for he did not swear around me back then, but he did not interrupt—”it’s all true; why, once he and I were on our way to the b—to church”—I knew he was going to say “bar,” but he felt the need to cover himself after his bullshit gaffe, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw his furtive glance at my father, as if for approval and permission, and in that glance I saw just how much my father meant to Lee Hayward—”and we saw an honest-to-goodness vampire, with the cape, the fangs, the amulet, the whole nine yards”—and here he just kind of trailed off, and while his effort was a weak one, I could see that it meant a lot to my father that Lee had made an effort at all, and I understood then, or at least I thought I understood, the strange nature of male friendship, which sometimes requires you to lie to your friend’s son.[note]One of the only truly nice things I ever did (everyone thinks of themselves as nice, I believe, but few people take the time to quantify it) was to visit Lee Hayward in the hospital after he had nearly blinded himself at work; he couldn’t see very well and was muted by painkillers and therefore couldn’t recognize my voice, so I told him, “It’s Jem Sutton.”[/note]

5. When I was in college, my father told me that he had seen the Headless Horseman—which I think was meant to appeal to my newfound sensibilities (I had recently declared myself a Classics major[note]I know, I know, shut up.[/note]), but instead of meeting him halfway and asking about the Jack-o’-lantern head, I tore into him, telling him that first of all, Irving wasn’t what anyone would exactly call a Classics author, I was reading shit like Virgil and Sophocles and Euripides and Chaucer, and I didn’t appreciate being made fun of . . . okay, yes, this was probably the meanest thing I ever said to Alec Sutton, but I never told him I didn’t believe him, that he never saw the Headless Horseman and I was sick of the bullshit with the monsters (my father and I swore around each other by now), so, mean though I was, I never, even then, broke his heart.

6. When Shea and I had kids—Murphy and Connor—they were a little more circumspect around Grampy Alec, not as believing of his tall tales, a trait for which I blame their mother, who was always analytical and practical in a way that, for some reason, deeply turned me on (in hindsight, Grampy Alec might have blown his cover early on when he insisted that he saw “a few Pokémons”[note]The conversation afterwards, in which I explained the taxonomy of Pokémon to my father, is and was the most uncomfortable experience of my life, but I had to admire the nearly anthropological curiosity with which he approached the subject.[/note] by the corner store; the eye-rolls produced, in unison, by Murph and Con are still the greatest insults I’ve ever seen).

7. This put me in a bit of a bind: you don’t want your kids to think that their old man’s old man is a liar, but you also don’t want to lie to the kids, so you go along with it, much to your wife’s consternation (which later, to her credit, becomes bemusement), but everyone has fun with it, and no one gets too scared.[note]Con was spared the sight of Pennywise the Clown, thanks to his mother’s intervention; she (correctly) pointed out that it would “scare the everloving shit out of him.”[/note]

8. I should clarify the word scared: my father’s intention was never to scare me (I never found any rubber snakes or spiders in my bed), and I never was scared (okay, maybe a few times when I was very young, but what child wouldn’t be frightened by the most trustworthy person in their life saying that he had just come from a meeting with the Swamp Thing?)—I think, ultimately, he was just trying to be my friend, to swap stories, to bullshit the way he must have done with Lee Hayward.[note]I should clarify further, because I feel like I’m digging myself a hole: these stories never made me distrust my father.[/note]

9. Only once did an actual monster make an appearance, and here’s how it happened: my mother asked if I wanted to take a walk (Red Flag #1: my mother, although a fit woman, never spontaneously took walks) while my father was conspicuously absent (Red Flag #2: my father was never one to leave the house after he had returned to it), so out we went, down Larkspur Court, to the east, and out from the alleyway, why, look what it is, some Monster from Planet X, plainly a hazmat suit from a costume shop accompanied by a latex alien mask (most likely purchased from the selfsame costume shop [Red Flag #3: my father worked around the corner from Herb Crowne’s year-round costume shop]), replete with bulging, purple eyes and mottled gray skin.[note]My father never liked sci-fi, so I’m not sure why he went with this particular outfit as his first; there must have been a sale.[/note]

10. My mother mock-screamed and ran away at a pace quick enough for me to catch up to her, which I did as well, once I realized that it was what I was expected to do; I don’t remember my own reaction beyond that, but I really, really hope I played along.[note]My father would never break character and address it, nor would I bring it up, so all I have in this instance is hope that I made him happy.[/note]

11. Later, my father’s monsters became upsettingly real, and they announced their presence with beeps and hoarse exhales and the rasp of my mother’s voice, like sandpaper grinding a pearl to dust.[note]Rachel Holcomb Sutton died at the age of 51, and it hurts like a motherfucker to this day.[/note]

12. Monsters stopped seeking my father out after that.[note]Truthfully, I started to miss the monsters, and a few weeks after the funeral, I tried telling him I’d seen Pinhead in the frozen food aisle of Kroger’s, but he must have not have heard me because he said nothing.[/note]

13. Kids are harder to scare these days, or maybe just harder to impress. Shea and I—she’s gotten in on the act too—have taken to watching DIY tutorials on YouTube, in an attempt to make our own prostheses, or makeup convincing enough to make Murph and Con think that one of us is the real deal.[note]Shea and I never got great at fabricating masks, but I turned out to be something of a wunderkind with the makeup brush, and turned her into a pretty eerie facsimile of the Babadook.[/note] They’re too old to believe us, if they ever did, but that never stopped my father. He came to help us once and was almost immediately flummoxed. He dropped some mask-making impedimenta and looked at me, saying plainly, “Jesus, Jeremiah, I just told you stories.” He shook his head and laughed.

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Interview: Ha Jin

Ha Jin is the author of seven volumes of poetry, four short story collections, eight novels, and one collection of essays, and cowriter of an opera libretto. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including a National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and the Flanner O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born Huefei Jin in Liaoning, China, Ha Jin served the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution from the ages of fourteen to nineteen. Afterward, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China before coming to the US to study at Brandeis University, where he earned his PhD and began writing poetry. While there, he witnessed the Tiananmen Massacre and decided to remain in the US and eventually to become a citizen.

When Jin decided to make his life in the US, he also decided to write in English. As he noted in “Exiled to English” in The New Yorker in 2009, he felt that “the Chinese language had been so polluted by revolutionary movements and political jargon” and that anything he wrote for a Chinese audience would be subject to censorship. Therefore, he chose English, “to preserve the integrity of my work.” Though he still focuses on issues and characters concerned with China, over the more than fifteen years that he has been writing, his English has grown more fluid and natural, and his more recent work is set more solidly in the US.

In this interview, we focus on The Boat Rocker, Ha Jin’s most recent novel, published by Pantheon in 2016. The Boat Rocker is the story of Feng Danlin, a Chinese immigrant living in New York and working as a culture reporter and writer of exposés, who sets out to reveal the corrupt network of support around a new highly touted but low-quality novel. It turns out the novel has been penned by none other than his ex-wife, Yan Haili. Needless to say, Danlin’s motives get murky. The book provides an intense, but humorous, look at not only Chinese political corruption, but US publishing shenanigans and the impact of politics even there. As always in Jin’s work, the human struggles with love, envy, and betrayal exist on the same plane as larger cultural and political ones.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
One of the things that I wanted to note was that this is only the second time that you’ve set a novel completely in the US. A Free Life, in some ways, reflected your own sudden decision to immigrate to the US after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and now The Boat Rocker‘s main character is a long-term resident, as you are. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your consciousness might have shifted as you, yourself, made your adult life in the US. Do you feel more embedded in life in the US? Do you still think about setting most of your work in China? How are you thinking about place in your work now?

Ha Jin:
In recent years, I think I have set my work in between, between the United States and China. In fact, the novel before this is A Map of Betrayal. The narrator is an American history professor. Part of the novel is set in China, but more than half is set in the States. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I wrote a collection of short stories that’s set in Flushing, New York [A Good Fall, Vintage International]. Basically, this is my territory—the in-between.

TFR:
I think that seems to be more and more true for more people, as people move all over the world. Even I, who have always lived in the United States, have lived in the North and the South, and there are such distinctions.

Jin:
Yes, even within the States, I can see among my students, often, they are in-between, too.

TFR:
How do you think that impacts your work in particular, living in between, writing in between?

Jin:
I think it really sharpened my sense of survival, because this is a very slippery region, and so I had to be more cautious. Also, it is by definition, marginal. I had to accept that as my condition, a condition for existence as writer, as a human being. A lot of things, I think, I knew, especially I had to figure out by myself. I can’t make a clear statement, because there’s a lot of uncertainty, but uncertainty is a part of the environment, in this space, and so that’s why I had to accept it as my own way. [Laughs]

TFR:
Has it changed as you’ve been in the US longer? Do you feel more American now?

Jin:
Yeah, I do feel that way, because I’ve been a citizen for almost twenty years now.

TFR:
My husband has been a citizen for two.

[Laughter]

Jin:
For two! From where?

TFR:
Canada.

Jin:
Canada. Oh, Canada is a great country, but you can have dual citizenship. That’s great. I wish I could. That would make life easier for me—because for me, because China does not accept the dual citizenship, I had to resolve. The door is closed. There’s no way it’d be sane for me to think of going back. There’s no way to go back. I have not been back to China for thirty-one years, ever since I came to the States. That’s the situation. I have to be very rational about this. There’s only this space now, and ahead. There’s no way to go back. It’s very hard for me to think that way.

TFR:
One of the things I loved about The Boat Rocker is that there are such great moments of humor in it, too, even as Danlin struggles with this in-between space, as you describe about yourself.

Jin:
Yes, I set out to write comically.

TFR:
What inspired you to have Danlin’s investigation focused not on just corruption in Chinese cultural life, but also on his ex-wife?

Jin:
That would make the project more exciting, more personal. Because, otherwise, it would be just a political investigation. I wanted his motivation, somehow, mixed. There’s an element of vengeance here, and he’s not perfect. He’s traumatized, but, in a way, his motivation is nuanced. That’s why—I wanted this to be more subtle.

TFR:
I thought he was a wonderfully complex character. Could you talk a little bit more about your development of him as a character?

Jin:
Yes. In fact, a lot of people think this is too bizarre, too far-fetched, but, in fact, for almost every incident here, there is a factual happening. I just unified them and picked them from different places. There were a lot of Chinese, many Chinese men I know, as soon as they arrived here, their wives gave them the divorce papers. I have a friend who was given divorce papers at the airport. There was also a freelance writer, so I combined different people in life to create a character.

TFR:
One of the things I was interested in, also, was that sometimes I felt that you do have a certain amount of sympathy for Niya and even Haili. I wonder, do you feel that a fiction writer is obligated to love and sympathize with all of their characters somehow?

Jin:
No!

[Laughter]

No, I don’t agree. Often, even when you are disgusted with a character, people like him or her. I just want to be factual, to see the psychology, the motivations, the situations. I don’t have sympathy for everyone, no. It’s impossible.

TFR:
Which is a character here that you have the least sympathy for?

Jin:
The wife, Haili, I have the least sympathy. I have more sympathy for Danlin, for Gary, even, because he’s in the dark most of the time. Niya—I can understand her, where she comes from, but she’s really somehow, brainwashed in a way. I can understand them, why they have become like that, but Danlin, I do have a sympathy for him. I can see he’s traumatized. He’s troubled.

TFR:
When I was reading all the copy about the book before reading the book itself, it was talking about him as a pure, anti-corruption kind of crusader. I was like, “I don’t think that Ha Jin believes that. I think that there’s much more subtlety to him, even as he takes up this position of investigating his ex-wife.”

Jin:
He just got into it emotionally, couldn’t get out, and just got deeper and deeper, and was in a way trapped in there.

TFR:
You deal mostly with corruption in government and culture affairs kinds of offices, but you also, especially in chapter four, you satirize the publishing world a bit. What do you think are the biggest problems in the publishing world today?

Jin:
I have a lot of sympathy for publishers. Firstly, they are businesspeople. When they publish a book, they have to think of a market, otherwise their argument is, if you’re a new author, why should I waste money, lose money on you? I do have sympathy for that. But, it really is a business world. They don’t care too much about literary merit at all. I had the experience that my first few fiction books were all published by small presses. At the time, I got a lot of rejection letters. They would say, “We like it. This well-written, but it’s too poetic, but it’s very good. I remember episodes and characters—they stay with me, but we don’t have a market. We can’t see a market for it.” In a way, sometimes publishers are near-sighted, I think. They think too much in profits. A lot of books—you don’t know. They might yet have a different life once in print.

TFR:
How do you see that influencing our literature?

Jin:
That’s why commerce, the business part, is really not about good literature. I think that there should be some kind of balance. Some publishers have been doing this—they have a special series. Even if they know they might lose money, it still is good for the press. In the long run, we don’t know what a book may do—maybe the press will benefit in the long run. Like New Directions—basically, they’re still supported by the early high-modern poets [who never made money in their time].

TFR:
You’re a teacher as well as a writer, and I wonder if you could comment about creative writing programs. There’s been so much criticism about how “writing can’t be taught” and all of that, though I think there’s also the matter of cultivating a readership, which we do through our teaching of creative writing.

Jin:
I think it’s a democratic thing. In the book, I talk about the Chinese literary operators. You have to really tow a line with the officials, you have to be very active, accepted by the powers that be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a chance. At least the creative writing programs are open. It’s open to everyone. We give people an equal chance.

People elsewhere may think of faculty like literary agents—this was new to many other countries. I think they, in fact, compare MFAs with other, more commercial aspects. MFA programs have done much for aspiring writers. But we don’t take money personally. We don’t benefit. We don’t get a commission from it.

[Laughter]

TFR:
You commented in your Paris Review interview in 2009 that you are open and outspoken, and that’s certainly something that I have long admired about both your work and about your reputation as a person. Why are these traits that you’ve cultivated, and in what ways do you think they’re important in addition to, obviously, allowing you to speak out about political corruption?

Jin:
As human beings, we must find some basic principles that we must go by. For instance, consistency, integrity. These are very basic principles. Otherwise, how can we act in the world? We might just get lost in our own confusion. That’s why I believe in speaking about the Tiananmen Massacre, ever since it happened. I have to keep on, continue it. I can’t cancel myself. I can’t go back on it.

TFR:
What does your knowledge of and experience of Chinese situations make you think about what’s going on in the US today?

Jin:
I think, really, China has been very aggressive in recent years. In fact, this novel is set twelve years before now, and so, at the time, China was very cautious, but China, because of the crisis in 2008, China has done well. In fact, even developed. That gives some kind of legitimacy, or justification, to the system. Basically, they’re trying to, now, denigrate democracy. The new election—basically, I think China is very happy about the results, because Trump is a businessman and has business dealings with China. The Chinese side—I think they believe he can somehow have more influence.

TFR:
Do you think that your writing will go in a direction where it approaches American politics in addition to Chinese and Chinese-American politics?

Jin:
Maybe in the future. I’m not sure. [Laughter] I’m not a political writer. That’s another reason I’ve written this—because I really wanted to make the subject personal.

TFR:
What else would you like to say about The Boat Rocker? What else was important to you about the writing of The Boat Rocker, and how does it mark the next step for you? Where are you going next?

Jin:
Stylistically, it’s different from my previous novels, because I wanted to make this somehow comic.

TFR:
Which it was.

Jin:
That was the challenge to me. Basically, I want to be serious, but at the same time entertaining. That’s my ambition.

TFR:
Great, and any news about what’s next? Are you working on a new project?

Jin:
My wife was sick, gravely sick for some years—she’s well now, but I couldn’t pounce into a long novel project. So, I’ve been writing a lot of poetry in Chinese. I published two books of poems in Chinese, and then I re-wrote some of the poems in English, so basically I have a book of English-language poems I’ve been working on. [A Distant Center, Copper Canyon Press, 2018].

TFR:
I wish we had another hour to talk about poetry.

Jin:

Yes.

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Fantastic Voyage

My father’s silver Chevette pushes past refineries along the turnpike,
fields and farmland tucked back behind the Raritan River bridge.

I strain my neck to catch glimpses of skyline, growing larger
with each exit. I mouth exotic names on signs—Rahway, Weehawken.

We begin the long, slow, curving descent to the mouth of the tunnel,
an impatient caterpillar of cars with glowing red eyes, inching

towards a collective cocoon. At the entrance we pick up speed, my pulse
quickens in the half-light. Everything’s possible below the surface:

The white-tiled walls are relics from an ancient civilization.
The curve of the ceiling is the belly of a massive river-beast.
We are passing through a half-world on the way to a new planet,
the invisible NJ/NY line is a strobe-light stargate.

The road twists, slopes upward—leaning in, we slingshot forward,
there’s no turning back: the glow of the City is just around the bend.

The cocoon splits open and spits us all out: fresh butterflies, bright wings.
Drenched in golden light, the City’s an endless meadow to flit about.

We bury our faces in it, we drink its nectar.

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Standoff

It was February, mid-afternoon and sunny, but the wind was blowing, and the sun wasn’t doing enough of what I needed it to do: smother the chill, whisper something warm in my ear, something about spring and starting over. I was back in my hometown, about an hour’s drive west of Philly, after thirty years away—kids in college, a divorce in the offing. The world thinks Pottstown is the kind of place people go to, or get stuck in, when they have limited options, the kind of place abandoned once upon a time by Bethlehem Steel, Firestone Tires, Mrs. Smith’s Pies, me, and people like me, the ones who went to college and didn’t come back. Until they did.

I was across town at the local radio station when I first heard about the standoff a couple of blocks from my house, and I got into my car and headed toward it. It wasn’t the first time I’d run toward confrontation. I was the tomboy who picked fights with the older boys, and for as long as I can remember I’ve also needed to know what was going on around me, what I myself might be up against. As I approached the area, I squeezed into an open parking spot on the street. In the rear view mirror I saw people standing on the corners behind me, just one long block from the SWAT truck and police vehicles stationed in front of the three-story, brick apartment building where all this was going down. I heard a series of bangs then, and something inside me stiffened. They sounded like gunshots, a sound I’d heard throughout my childhood as my dad test-fired weapons in his gun shop in our backyard in a residential neighborhood not far from where I now sat; he was a full-time German teacher then and a part-time gunsmith. I waited a few seconds. It was quiet, and I figured it must have been tear gas or something like that. The cops wouldn’t let all these people get that close if they could get hit by a stray bullet, right? So, I got out of the car.

I went up to a man and woman on the closest corner and asked what was going on. The woman was young, maybe in her twenties; she looked like she might have Down syndrome. She let the young man do all the talking, and he told me what I already knew: there was an armed man holed up in the Logan Court apartments. He’d been in a standoff with the police since that morning. I got the impression that they themselves had been there for hours. They weren’t holding hands. I don’t think their arms were even touching, but there they were, together, like sentries. They turned away from me and continued their vigil, staring ahead. My eyes followed. A SWAT team was poised behind an armored truck, which began to move, slowly turning and facing the apartment building head-on. A police car was nearby with officers hunched over the hood, weapons trained on the building.

On our corner a man in a navy work jacket and thick glasses arrived, along with a woman with reddish hair and crow’s feet. At first I took her to be his wife, something about the way she corrected him several times, the implications of ownership, how we’re allowed to do that to those closest to us, or how we slide into it, one person doing it, the other person accepting it. He was wearing a cap, though, so it was hard to discern his age and, at some point, it occurred to me that they could also be mother and son. Apparently, they lived in the building that was under siege—Building B—and they knew the gunman. He was their neighbor, Albert. They put him at about seventy years old with an arsenal in there.

Just the word—arsenal—made me think of the weapons that have always been a part of my dad’s life and our family’s life when I was young—his guns, his customers’ guns, the metal cases of ammo. All that firepower, all that just plain power, amassed to defend against “it,” my dad’s continued reference to some sort of anticipated invasion or revolution, the parameters of which seemed to change with the times. During my father’s childhood, the enemy was the German army, when all Americans were alert to the possibility of U-boats just off the coast. During my childhood in the ’60s and ’70s, the revolution might have involved black militants attempting to overthrow “decent” white society. During the Clinton administration, to my father “it” meant the U.S. government trying to take arms from its own citizens, in which case secret militias and individuals like him would have to fight it out in the streets against their own government. Or “it” might have meant the United Nations’ stripping sovereign nations of their military authority, forcing people like my father to defend themselves against an armed international agency. And in a post-9/11 world, “it” might be the “foreign” terrorists among us, or again, “lawless” black and Latino gangs, venturing from their cities to attack law-abiding citizens in the suburbs. I didn’t understand or agree with him on any of this—the fearsome “it” always haunting my father.

There at the standoff, a small amount of clear drool trickled from the left corner of the man’s mouth—the man in the navy work jacket—as he described some kind of metal framing around Albert’s doorway so no one could see inside his unit. I couldn’t really picture it, but I felt a sense of impingement, started to imagine Albert as a secretive, paranoid type who barely cracked his door open when anyone was in the hallway, and then I became aware of the way the bone cold of the pavement sent a chill all the way through me. I hadn’t planned on being outside for any length of time that afternoon. I hadn’t planned on being at a standoff. The man did not wipe away his drool, and I wondered if he was cold, too, or if his mouth was numb from dental work. He kind of talked like that. He mentioned that he had seen the police arrive that morning, but then he had to go to school. He would mention that again, a couple more times, while we’re all standing there—how he goes to school. At first, I assumed he meant college, but then I didn’t know. I mean, he never really said what kind of school.

Another neighbor joined us then. She was petite. Her hair was dark brown, dyed, and teased. Her teeth were bad. She was just a little thing, but she talked tough. She had a smoker’s voice and she was smoking as she talked. Every movement was quick and sharp. Inhale. Exhale. Her beady eyes darted here and there like a nervous bird’s. Puff. Puff. Apparently, Albert had had previous altercations with the building manager.

“That manager has got to go,” said Bird Woman. “This is ridiculous.”

It was implied, and the others murmured in agreement, that the building manager didn’t deal well with people, that things had been known to go missing from people’s apartments, that maybe he was partly responsible for Albert’s behavior. Not that anyone should ever shoot at someone else, but … still. The consensus of the group was that this was a waste of their tax dollars. Then, they turned on a dog. Apparently, a dog might have been at the root of it. Someone’s dog in their building. It would start barking early in the morning and it wouldn’t shut up. Albert got mad, complained to the manager, an argument ensued and escalated to the point where Albert shot a hole through his own door and the manager’s door across the hall. Supposedly, the shot through the doors did happen that morning, but it wasn’t clear to me if the dog’s barking was the actual inciting incident that morning, or if the current standoff was being conflated with other annoying, dog-barking episodes, arguments, and slammed doors.

It hit me then that I was in the midst of a self-selected society, or at least a subset of the self-selected society of the Logan Court Apartments, Building B, and they were letting me, a stranger, in on the particulars of their lives there, some of the comings and goings, the things they knew, or thought they knew, about Albert and the manager, the way a doorway was constructed, the way we can or can’t see inside people’s lives, the mystery of it all. This was what people did in times of crisis: huddle on the sidewalk and squint into a weak winter sun and try to make sense of it, worry about what might have been, the what-ifs. I definitely felt like an outsider. Or maybe I was dissociating in that moment. Maybe I was still too good at that, and that was why I felt this wasn’t really happening to me, except to the extent that I had grown up in this town and felt a kind of ownership of it; or to the extent that I had moved back in midlife and could see the back of Building B from the alley behind my rented house, where I parked my car; or to the extent that gun violence seemed to be a fact of life in these United States.

“It’s a yappy dog,” said Bird Woman. “A REAL yappy dog.” Puff. Puff.

Everyone nodded in agreement.

One of Bird Woman’s fingers was bleeding. When she swiped at her hair, she smeared blood across her right temple, a macabre kind of make-up. She was aware of the bleeding finger and periodically dabbed it against her coat, but none of us told her about the blood now on her face.

Down the street, the SWAT truck changed its position. The lid at the top lifted up and someone poked his head out. Men outside the truck moved as the truck moved, using it as a shield. The tank rolled slowly up over the curb and onto the grass, heading straight toward the building. I couldn’t actually see the tank’s point of contact with the building, but it seemed to be backing up and going forward a few times, as though it were battering its way into the building. I wondered if everyone else was out of the building, and how the police could batter it without causing structural damage, and whether they were going to demolish the entire building just to get to Albert?

“How do they know if Albert is still in his unit?” I asked. “Could he move through the hallways, up the stairs, and shoot his way into another apartment?”

I was thinking he’d then have a sniper-perch from a second-floor window, in which case, we were all easy prey, just a couple hundred yards away. Just as I needed to be aware of my surroundings, I sometimes thought about the speed and paths and trajectories of bullets.

“Nah, there were cops in the stairwells this morning. He can’t move,” said the man who drooled and went to school.

It welled up in me then, unbidden, the memory of the mental fortress of my childhood, the feeling that someone was out to get us, our family, our dad, me, and it came to rest on Albert, the sense of his being trapped, pinned down by the police, a militia. Was this Albert’s “it?” Who did he think he was fighting right now? What did he think they were trying to take from him or do to him? If we could have looked out Albert’s window, through Albert’s eyes, what would we have seen? The police or someone else or some sort of monster? If he had, indeed, exchanged gunfire with police, then he must have had a death-wish. And I was struck again: He would not come out of there alive. When you got to that point, the point where Albert was at just then, how could you give up? How could you make it stop, the narrative running through your head, the one where the whole world is against you and right outside your window, pressing in, battering their way in? And let us be honest: Your manhood is at stake. Yours versus the guys’ in uniform, the ones who have rolled in their military vehicles to bring Albert to his knees.

Another woman joined the makeshift community on the corner, these partial witnesses, who lived up close to Albert, and me, the interloper, the eavesdropper. This woman’s elderly aunt lived in Building B and she didn’t know if she had been evacuated or where she was. She didn’t think her aunt would be able to handle this; it was too much.

At the radio station I’d just been interviewed about my new job as the executive director of a small, nonprofit, community land trust, albeit part-time, ten hours a week. I was between things then, without knowing what the next thing was, only the ones that were over: a long marriage, child-rearing, the silences, the words holed up in my head, trying to shoot their way out. The land trust’s first project was to build a community garden right in the middle of what was supposedly Pottstown’s most-troubled neighborhood—historically occupied by African-Americans in what was overwhelmingly rental housing, much of it subsidized, much of it rundown, in what had been the arena for a drug turf war during 2010 that had resulted in several shootings. Now here was this standoff taking place in the North End of town in 2012. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen here, where the white people lived, and it became a repeated refrain of the standoff audience: “I moved to that apartment [or this part of town] because I thought it was safe.”

They seemed to have forgotten about the armed robbery four months earlier and, literally, two blocks from where we were standing. The cashier at the Turkey Hill Minit Market was robbed at gunpoint the prior fall just after midnight. The police were on a stakeout—there’d been a rash of late-night, armed robberies of area Turkey Hills and other all-night convenience stores—and the police saw this one unfold. An African-American male with a white t-shirt over his head pointed what looked to be a handgun at the clerk. As the robber left the store, they told him to stop and drop the gun. He turned toward them, and they fired. It sounded very Wild West to me. The robber was struck in the leg, but managed to get away, leaving behind what was actually a BB gun. The police couldn’t find him for several hours. They roped off the street in front of my house. Helicopters with searchlights hovered overhead around 5:00 a.m., when he was finally located, bleeding, in the Presbyterian church one block over. I slept through the whole thing; sleep has always been my release.

These neighbors didn’t mention the Turkey Hill shooting, and now we all stood, voluntarily and in broad daylight, as close to danger as we were allowed to get, to men in uniforms with guns drawn, to a man with a gun or guns, who had snapped. There was no getting away from it, no neighborhood you could live in and get away from it. Well, no, I take that back. I knew there were places where money still insulated their residents from poverty and the rumbling aftershocks of poverty. I had lived in those places for thirty years. Anyway, you couldn’t get away from guns and violence in a place like Pottstown, couldn’t pretend it didn’t concern you. And, after all, there was danger all around, everywhere, not all of it having to do with guns. Most people don’t want to admit that. If you really thought about it, if you really faced up to it, how could you even get out of bed? How could you leave your house? To go to work, say, if you’re a woman. To be a person of color or an immigrant or someone who wears a hijab or a turban. For that matter, in a lot of cases, how could you stay in your house? You know what I mean. You go to enough memoir workshops, you teach enough adolescents, you listen to enough people talk about their lives, their childhoods, their parents, their partners, you really listen, you allow for the possibility of violence, and you begin to see what I mean. You read the newspaper, you read between the lines, you think back, you remember—you have to remember—if you do not want to remember what it was like to be a child, to interpret the world for the first time—your parents, other adults, other kids, the systems at work. If you do not want to remember what it was like to not know how they worked, what it was like to not know the rules, and the moment you started making one assumption or another, one interpretation or another, then, of course, you are not going to begin to see what I mean. There’s not much this story, or any story, can do for a person like that. You have to allow for the possibility.

At first, I thought it was mainly girls and women who were in danger in the world, and maybe that’s true enough anyway. Now, though, when I think about someone like Albert, I think about my father. I think about a little boy who was once in danger. I didn’t know who put Albert there, in Building B, surrounded, guns trained on him on February 9, 2012. I didn’t know if it was someone inside his house, someone outside his house. I’m talking about when he was a boy. So, of course, we can’t always know, because they don’t always know—someone like Albert, in Albert’s position during that standoff—and they’re the only ones who could tell us, but only if they know and, then, only if they want to tell.

—

Here’s a story: A six- or seven-year-old boy has to go down the street along the railroad tracks and around the corner into the firehouse to tell his dad to stop drinking and playing cards; it’s time to come home. One time he watches as the ambulance takes his dad away; he’s had so much to drink, he’s got the DTs. That’s how my dad put it when he told me this story a few years ago, around the time of the standoff. So many times my father has erased the stories of his father’s sometimes violent alcoholism with one line: “He was a good man.” Yes, in some ways I’m sure he was. And he drank too much, and he hit you, and you stuttered, and you pointed a loaded gun at him when you were sixteen and he’d been drinking and was coming after you, and he left you alone after that. And you’ve surrounded yourself with guns ever since. He was a flawed man, like the rest of us, and you loved him, like I love you.

“So,” I said to him after he told this particular story, “Your mom sends you out to bring your drunk father home on a regular basis. You watch your dad seizing up. You were just a little kid. We call that trauma, Dad.”

The blank look, then a shift, something coming into his eyes. My dad is not stupid. He is a reader and a storyteller with a beautiful singing voice. He is friendly and generous; his former students, relatives, and customers seek his counsel. He is really quite perceptive, but I could tell this was a whole new way of seeing the world, himself: vulnerable, trusting, the child he was before he ever had to look at his father in that condition, before he had to start making calculations about his own safety. His father’s steps heavy on the staircase leading up to his attic bedroom. Where is Richard? Where is he? This is what I mean about remembering, about wanting to remember. But in the end, how much does he want me to know or tell? He has told his stories to me out of order, and since they didn’t happen to me, I can be something of an editor and put them back in order and draw my own conclusions. Your father. Coming at you. The enormity of it. The stated enemies may have changed over the decades, but I can’t help but believe that my dad has armed himself his whole life for a standoff with his father, the real ones and all of the imagined ones.

We already know that domestic violence begets domestic violence, like sexual abuse and substance abuse, cycling through generations until it is consciously broken. And we are now learning of the correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings. I understand that my attempt to understand someone like Albert—and my father—makes me susceptible to accusations of pandering to white males, to giving them special dispensation perhaps because of mental illness, to accounting for their fragility. But I am not saying that Albert, or anyone who takes up arms against fellow citizens or the police, should get any special treatment in the moment or after the fact. I am not talking about letting them off the hook for their actions as adults. I’m talking about preventing them from being harmed in the first place, from feeling the need to pick up a gun and aim it at innocents, as if that will avenge the original harm. Or from feeling the need to own an arsenal, as if that will prevent additional harm. My grandfather has been dead for more than fifty years; he’s not coming for my dad ever again. And so, I wondered, and still wonder: What about Albert? All the Alberts? All the white men with guns? What to do about them? And more specifically, what to do about them when they are boys? People are mysteries, will always be mysteries, every single one of them, but I can’t let go of the notion that there are clues. There are always clues.

—

Before I left the standoff—I didn’t see how my waiting there in the cold meant anything—I ran into the Borough Council president and his wife, who lived on the block where we had all gathered.

“Congratulations on the new job,” he said. “I caught the tail end of your interview.” And then he said something like, “Thanks for moving back. It’s good to have you here.” The way he said it made it sound like he was referring to right then, at the standoff. You know, like he was glad there was, perhaps, a kind of outsider to be a witness. He knew I’d been gone for thirty years, knew I’d become the town’s cheerleader on a town blog I’d created, knew I’d been volunteering in several capacities. What he could not have known was that these gigs were a limbo for me— my own standoff with the things closing in on me: middle age and the whole of my childhood, the need to make meaning, to make sense of the past before I could make some new future.

—

In the end Albert did give in. The paper said his full name was Albert J. Dudanowicz. He wasn’t seventy; he was fifty-six, not much older than I was at the time. He had shot through the manager’s door, but there was nothing about the yappy dog, nothing about Albert’s mental state. It turned out there was no arsenal either, although he had a .50-caliber Smith and Wesson five-shot pistol and a Remington .375 H & H bolt-action rifle, which was powerful enough to kill an elephant, according to the paper. It was reported that he was bleeding from one hand, where a sniper had hit him. The photo in the paper showed a burly white man, alive, walking, unshaven, his chest naked, massive spotlights shining on him, darkness around the edges.

Three weeks later, a local reporter pelted Albert with questions in an online video taken as he left a hearing.

“Albert, do you have anything to say?” she asked. “You want to apologize? Why’d you shoot at those police officers that day? You’re not sorry? Why wouldn’t you come out of your apartment? No apology? You’re not going to apologize?”

Rat-a-tat-tat. She sprayed him with questions.

Albert’s beard was full then. His right hand was heavily bandaged. He shuffled from the chains around his ankles. His eyes didn’t seem to see, and then he cast them downward. At first, he whimpered, and it was high-pitched, until all the whimpers started running together, animal-like and wounded.

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City of Cobwebs

City of Cobwebs is an interactive narrative built using the open source tool Twine. It tells the story of a person wandering a city, in search of his/her sister.

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A hose outside a house in a suburban backyard

My brother has always had a knack for crafting memorable metaphors from complex ideas. He tells me this one about my mother’s Adult-onset Leukodystrophy—the disease then in its earliest, most unnoticeable stage—when I am young, maybe eight, and I remember it forever.

The myelin sheath is a greatly extended and modified plasma membrane wrapped around the nerve axon in a spiral fashion. Picture it as a hose.

A hose outside a house in a suburban backyard. Imagine the hose is green; the yard, too. At the crank of a wrist, fresh, clean water sprints up from the property’s subsystem, glides through the casing, and pours itself into place effortlessly. Prior to appearing at the spout, water is an unthought. The ground drinks up. Grass and flowers flourish.

But eventually, the hose begins to peel; its vibrant green wears. Yes, all hoses deteriorate over time, but this one specifically has a certain defect that makes it deteriorate faster.

Are you following?

Deterioration. A hundred holes leak fresh, clean water. There is nothing wrong with the water, it just doesn’t get to the spout and therefore the grass.

. . . so the myelin sheath is like the hose, right, and Mom’s neurotransmitters—or the messages from her brain—are like the water that’s supposed to flow through the hose and arrive at the grass, except it keeps leaking out. Does that make sense?

I remember this. I repeat it and relay it to a select few throughout my childhood: a best friend, a teammate, and once a grade-school teacher I shouldn’t have told. It spilled out how lies do, nervous and quick.

Signed proof by a parent that I had done my homework—that was the hurdle I was trying to clear when my tongue tripped me up and I went down a precocious-sounding rabbit hole on the intricacies of the Leukodystrophy and the function of the myelin sheath. I was in fifth grade and had forged my mom’s signature, something I’d done tens of times before and never felt bad about. It was a ridiculous requirement. Of course I had done my homework, it was right there in my handwriting. Why all the extra red tape?

The overbearing administrative aspects of school irritated me and my mom both. When she first learned of the new nightly oath demanded from her, she flippantly filled four weeks of pages at once with her initials. My teacher, Mr. Smith, took notice of this when he looked through my assignment book the next day and sent a snarky note home explaining to her how that wasn’t the point of the exercise and if she could please just cooperate and sign nightly, that’d be great. Instead, my Mom, a teacher herself, and I, a rambunctious but nonetheless A-student, entered into a kind of low-key rebellion together: she taught me to forge her signature.

With practice, she coached me on the rounded curve of a capital n and taught me how to loop a lowercase y. She handed me an interest in untangling letters and an attraction for working them back together. Excavated from this experience were my first small associations of art with pen and of pen with protest. Why sign on the dotted line when you can sign through it? By now, I have written my mother’s name a thousand times; it is an act of love. Still, I practice it.

For months, the forging was a non-issue until suddenly it was. Mr. Smith was intimidating and I was ten. His voice boomed when he yelled, and I knew he just didn’t like me. I had a propensity for talking without raising my hand, shirking the rules, and just kind of being a high maintenance student in general. He must have been waiting for a reason to let me have it. So, one day in early spring when I routinely handed in my homework and showed him my assignment book that held an unusually messy—and of course forged—signature (I had fallen into the sloppy trap of comfort), he challenged its validity. I froze.

He asked if it was my mom’s signature: Yes that’s it wasn’t enough to appease him. Then he asked again. And again, giving me that look that told me he just knew, and I, feeling as if I had nowhere else to go, mumbled down a path about my mom having Leukodystrophy, which made it so her handwriting was sometimes poor. At that, his voice and eyebrows rose and he said Leuko-what? There was no turning back. I picked up speed: Yeah it’s because of neurotransmitters and this thing the myelin sheath . . . We all have it, but hers is deteriorating . . . So it’s like a hose, right . . .

I went through the whole metaphor.

He was disarmed out of confusion and let the challenge go, but I held onto it for weeks, angry at myself in cycles for letting out secrets I knew not to under the slightest, most selfish pressure; for betraying my family’s trust. See, my mom worked as a teacher in the same school district, and while her condition was only just beginning to show in brief, elusive bouts, we were explicitly told to never, ever discuss it with anyone.

For weeks I waited nervously for the moment I’d be found out. I imagined my mom waiting for me when I arrived home, arms folded in disappointment, or maybe it would come through in the form of a call during dinnertime from Mr. Smith or an administrator to my father: Mr. Chen? Yes, we’re calling about Mrs. Chen’s Leukodystrophy. We know all about it.

And then what exactly would happen? I didn’t know for sure, I just worried about it happening at all. Later, I learned that my parents were concerned my mom wouldn’t get tenured if the district knew she had a neurodegenerative disease. We were all on her insurance.

The anxieties of secrecy root inward early and become near-impossible to purge. In fifth grade, I not only knew what the myelin sheath was, but I had been disappointed with myself for talking about it with the wrong person and worried about who might find out that I spilled the beans. Some grade-school gossip that was.

Weeks after the event, I would finally find relief. I arrived home on a Friday, hands full of dandelions.

Put your weeds down, will ya? Hurry up and come inside. It was my brother, waiting for me on the front steps. I couldn’t understand how a flower so perfectly bright could count as a weed, but before I could defend the wrongfully categorized, he ushered me inside quick. Mom and Dad have big news!

Inside, the sun-filled kitchen felt as light as the outdoors actually was. There was a pitcher of lemonade on the table and an already-dug-into plate of cheese and crackers. The whole family sat down in our unofficial spots on the big white cornered couch in the living room where we always had important conversations. Usually it was where I was spoken to when in trouble. In that moment, despite the mounting anxiety of Mr. Smith and the myelin sheath, I knew I wasn’t. Finally, my dad spoke: he was quitting his job up in New York and taking a shot at starting his own business around town. This was huge news.

I now realize it was less about business, and more about being home for Mom—for us—as the Leukodystrophy progressed, but at the time, we were all elated nonetheless. To be home together as a family.

Oftentimes, the only way to rid oneself of a big anxiety is to occupy oneself with a bigger excitement. From that moment, I never worried about Mr. Smith again.

Life felt new. I forgot my mishaps and forgave myself. Summer arrived. All July and August that year, in the evenings, Mom and Dad drank wine on the deck—or in the garage if there was a thunderstorm on. Jesse and I indulged in endless cheese-and-cracker plates and got along. On the best days, we’d connect the garden hose to the sprinkler and run through over and over again, not once thinking about a disease of any kind. Sometimes, we’d chalk the entire driveway. Sunflowers, hopscotch, the usual. Once, I covered the entire front steps with my mother’s name, a hundred perfect signatures. When my masterpiece was finally complete, I called her to come see. Look, Mom, I can really write your name perfectly now.

It’s great, sweetheart, she replied, now let me see you write yours.

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Nomads

In the night sky, Arabs see al’awa’id,

the Mother Camels, a pattern of stars

that seem to gather around a calf

and protect her from hyenas.

In the life before this one, daughter,

I might have carried you for just over a year,

and delivered you to your first slow,

searing desert breaths.

The camel mare is the only mammal

who does not clean her infant

after birth, nor bite through the umbilical cord.

Another cord binds me to you;

it runs from brainstem

to lumbar region, with nerve roots,

dorsal roots, ventral roots,

the peripheral butterfly columns,

and the cauda equine (horse’s tail),

motor supply for the perineum

that brought you into light in late

September, a desert sunflower,

your eyes dolly-blue, to gift me

my happiest autumn.

A calf is born with eyes open.

Did you know camels always face the sun?

Their lovely long eyelashes

and their tears protect their eyes

from sand and grit and blindness.

We were nomads, in that other life;

maybe that is why I do not see you

as much as I would like, but we are bound

to each other nonetheless.

You’ll find me waiting in al’awa’id

even at the dawn of my next life.

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Conjuring Gossamer Ghosts

House of McQueen, by Valerie Wallace

Four Way Books, 2018

66 pages, paper, $15.95

Winner, Four Way Books Intro Prize

When I was seventeen, big-haired and blonde in 1980s Texas, I was invited to walk in a fashion show with other members of my high school drill team. We were cheap labor, and the local bridal and prom store needed pretty girls to parade the latest Gunne Sax gowns for a hospital fundraiser. Looking back, I’m embarrassed. The fashion was about as forward as our mall’s food court. Still, there was drama in it. A girl could imagine a bolder version of herself under all that lace, pouf, and pantyhose. I have since discarded the excesses of that era but hold on to a few prom dresses and the feeling of being transformed by fashion. I inhabit other personas on the page now and indulge in only the occasional Vogue, but I’m aware that the industry remains a tough club to break into. Occasionally, someone unexpected breaks in and ruffles fashion’s feathers. In the 1990s, that someone was a young, English, working-class dropout named Alexander McQueen. This is all one needs to know to gain entry to poet Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen, a debut collection of equally startling poems about the famed designer.

Wallace—who teaches with the City Colleges of Chicago and works for the project Virtue, Happiness & The Meaning of Life at the University of Chicago—presents her book as this spring’s couture collection. There are so many different lines of entry into these poems: via fabric, gender, fairytale, class, and especially the life of the singular man. In “Autobiography of Alexander McQueen,” the poet gives voice to this man directly:

I’m trying to weave a new fabric, but the loom doesn’t exist.

Born in 1969, McQueen was the youngest child in a large family who quit school to apprentice at tailoring on Saville Row. Lee, as he was known to friends, had talent, and it gained him entrance to fashion school, where he caught the eye of influential doyennes and a voyeuristic, image-saturated society. At times Wallace lets the designer himself write the poems, taking phrases from his interviews and playing with form and function. “Joyce & Lee” is a touching erasure poem from a conversation between the designer and his mother.

Rumored to have been abused by a brother-in-law, whom he later witnessed brutally beat his sister, McQueen said he wanted people to “be afraid” of women wearing his designs. One can feel the fear in “Charmed for Protection”:

Hood be cowled for private thoughts

Sleeves be lined for smell of Night

Let none harm you Let none betray you

Wrap yourself in no Spektral affliction

Your Wound your strength Wild wanted

This air of fantasy is augmented by the fact that these poems take place across the pond in England, which itself lends an air of fantasy for American readers—it is the birthplace of so many of our fairy tales. Skillfully woven throughout the collection is thematic, mythical imagery also seen in McQueen’s collections, especially birds and mirrors. From “McQueen’s Bop with the Interviewer”:

Waif who needs rescuing

isn’t romance.

I’ve seen naivete

I know what can happen.

Someone’s life is burning

from this world’s brutal kiss.

I am │ you are

The voyeur the mirror.

The poems, however, never lose touch with the real world. Within Wallace’s skillfully crafted poems we are in school, under the presser foot, discarded on the shop floor, almost literally threaded through the poems. “Bumsters,” for instance, virtually unzips down the page. “McQueen Linen” cleverly plays with white space and columns to mimic linen’s loose weave. The poet’s shrewd use of form means we arrive at the man through his medium. Wallace gives this poem space to breathe, and it can be approached either horizontally or vertically to elicit different meanings:

I design the shows as stills If you look they tell the whole story

When I find I’ve no place for fear I show myself

The body’s tried to tell you it’s intricate altered

Perimeter what I see our bodies’ silver / dream

In “[When staggering down the runway wearing tartan over torn lace],” the reader is even thrust into one of his radical shows:

When stocks edged with a Stuart ruff enclose the neck

When obsolete colors, fulwe, sad, vernal, watchet

When sleeveless torn satin & cutaway shorts

When strewn with cigarette butts

When a buried history of England & Scotland

When a man yelling, Have I offended you then?

When the body becomes everything it is given

Throughout, the poems evoke experience, putting the reader into experiences otherwise inaccessible.

The language that Wallace sometimes uses likewise may be unfamiliar (pronk, skirr, chthonic)—made up or resurrected in a way that puts the reader in a strange and different realm. In addition, the poet revels in trying on a variety of forms, including contemporary free verse, slant sonnets and rhymes, shape poems, lists, acrostics and more. The poems also draw on an array of sources, from interviews, articles, biographies, and McQueen’s own words. As a collection of new fashions, where every stitch and fabric can be examined, this collection of poems reveals many details that merit scrutiny, study, contemplation. Alexander McQueen himself was mysterious in life and even more so since his death—and, like her subject, Wallace’s work is not easily accessible. Beauty does not so much blossom here as blur. These are studied poems by an accomplished poet for a reader wanting more.

At times the book feels like an intense research project into the man, except the traditional roles of male artist (albeit gay in this instance) and female muse are reversed. It is terribly exciting to read a series of poems about a man observed and interpreted by a woman, about sexualities that openly defy bifurcated norms. The reversal (maybe even obfuscation) elicits new avenues of exploring and questioning gender roles in fashion as well as poetry, and I can only hope that both worlds will make room for more of that.

The collection comes at an important time for both English and American audiences following Brexit and the election of President Trump. Wallace’s poems hold up a mirror to the reader, daring us to feel disgust or delight, to challenge the status quo. This is not unlike one of McQueen’s most talked about show stunts for his collection Voss, where the audience was forced to stare at their own reflections from a giant, mirrored runway box whose walls dropped—after an uncomfortable hour—to reveal his models inside a makeshift psychiatric hospital. The poems are likewise in turns beautiful and confrontational and sometimes both at once.

I finished this collection feeling like a fortunate grown-up guest at Fashion Week, sitting stunned beside Anna Wintour in a front-row seat, thinking about how far I traveled to get there. Alexander McQueen’s tragic death in 2010 means the designer is not alive to see his portrait painted on Wallace’s page, but House of McQueen is an artistic, imagined collaboration worthy of our attention. Readers will leave swaggered.

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Intervals

Matt builds makeshift bridges across creeks in the woods behind his house. He takes bush axes and handsaws to cut down small trees standing in the way of his new bike paths. Sometimes he brings lighter fluid and gas station cigarette lighters when he needs to kick the demolition up a notch. He can’t stand school, studying, or too much time indoors. He thought about playing football, but he’s not looking for any kind of afterschool prison-yard where a bunch of men his dad’s age bark orders and blow whistles all day, even if he does know a few kids on the team. He’s got a lot to do and can’t be bothered with others’ demands.

At night, Matt’s sister Mallory studies through her tears. She weeps into the wee small hours over her US History AP notes, memorizing details next to names like Henry Clay and Cotton Mather, and phrases like “The Monroe Doctrine” and “Manifest Destiny.” She traces the names and phrases with an orange highlighter, their definitions in yellow. The ones she can’t remember after three tries, she underlines with a purple highlighter. She works at the bar in the kitchen, her books and notebooks spread everywhere, and all the lights on like no one in the house is trying to sleep. Sometimes when Matt wakes in the night, he witnesses this scene on his way to the bathroom. He never says a word to her, but pissing in his half-sleep, he makes a vow never to strive too hard for academic success. Why trade hard classes for even harder classes? She watches him as he silently walks back to his bedroom. Back in bed he notices the thin line of light under his closed bedroom door. He pities her.

One night after dinner, Matt plays Mega Man 2 in the kitchen while his parents watch Columbo in the living room. Mallory’s in her room practicing runs on her flute. Now that the marching band competitions are over, she’s learning a few solos in the hopes of making all-district band—an extracurricular ensemble students from all over the eastern half of the state audition to play in. It’s a classical piece, and the sixteenth-note run she practices is swift and complicated. As he blasts flying buzz saw blades at mechanized birds and gorillas, he shudders at the shrillness of the instrument. For fifteen minutes she’s played the run at a faltering tempo, stumbling over the notes, missing accidentals. In the next ten minutes she learns the fingerings and picks up momentum, hitting each note with clarity, until at last she’s found she can play it perfectly—perfect notes, perfect pitch, perfect timing, over and over, and when a mechanized rooster takes his last man, Matt curses and pounds his fist on the kitchen counter hard enough it resets his Nintendo. The screen blinks and the game’s opening animation begins anew. The game is lost.

He opens her bedroom door. “Can you shut the hell up? You’ve been playing that same piece of shit for hours.”

“I’m practicing for all-district.”

“Well, play something different; you’re making me crazy.” He slams her door and goes back to the kitchen.

“Matt,” he hears his mother say.

“Leave her be,” his father says.

He selects a new first boss, Crash Man, from the screen as his sister starts slowly playing a chromatic scale.

“Oh, God.”

—

Mallory drives them both to school. Sometimes she puts on her makeup in the rearview mirror while she drives. Matt insists on sitting in the back seat because it gets on her nerves. He likes to pretend she’s his chauffeur. When he does this, he attempts a British accent and pretend-reads an imaginary newspaper. He says things like “Tallyho!” and inquires about the current price of “petrol.” Some days he lies down in the back seat.

Near the end of the school year, Mallory has a bad week. She learns that even though she will be a junior marshal for graduation, her best friend Shannon will be head marshal because her GPA has surpassed Mallory’s by a few hundredths of a point. As head marshal, Shannon will be wearing the coveted red sash over her white dress rather than the standard navy blue. Yesterday the band director informed her that she did not make all-district band this year in spite of a near-flawless audition. To add to these calamities, she still doesn’t have plans for the prom. These all weigh heavily on her mind one morning as she applies eye shadow on the way to school. The roads are wet, and they are running late as usual. Matt is prostrate on the back seat, his face resting on a duck-print pillow he grabbed from the living room couch, when he feels his stomach fall with the screech and skid of tires on wet asphalt, followed by the jolting GHUZZS of the Honda’s front bumper and hood colliding with the back end of an older lady’s Buick LeSabre. The impact rolls Matt and his pillow harmlessly into the foot of the back seat. Everyone’s shaken, but nobody’s hurt. Busted radiator, burnt rubber, engine smoke, fire truck, sirens, strobes, police, license-registration, insurance, telephone numbers, classmates driving by, disappointed father, more tears, and all of it while standing in the rain.

But Matt’s a few years from learning how to console another human being, let alone his sister. He doesn’t even give her a hug there in the rain before the melee arrives, an unfortunate detail from this memory she’ll never forget. Sensitivity is the kind of thing that gets you punched in the arm in the hallways, roughhoused or head-locked outside the locker-rooms, verbally emasculated in the cafeteria, always in front of the prettiest girls, and always at the hands of the most abnormally tall or muscular boys.

Mallory exiles herself to her bedroom nightly. She doesn’t study quite as much. The prom feels less important, and being “good” at anything seems like a dream deferred. She no longer has a car. The world has become a quiet, claustrophobic, suffocating mess.

But time begins to heal her eleventh-grade wounds. Soon music comes from her bedroom again starting with her favorite classical pieces, but also a few jazz standards, ballads mostly. She again pours herself into precision, practicing scales, arpeggios, and new songs. As a result of her proficiency, the summer before her senior year, she’s progressed to section leader in the marching band. Before the start of band camp, the band instructor loans her a piccolo, a new flute half the size of her old one, an octave higher in range. This transition further renews her zeal for music, and she plays twice as much on the shrill new instrument.

Matt loses it.

One Saturday night his sister leaves with friends to go eat by-the-slice pizza at the food court. Matt rummages through her book-bag, through her closet, and under her bed for the piccolo case. He finds the case under a pile of clothes.

Matt hops on his bike, pedaling furiously eight, maybe ten miles. When he finds a road that looks desolate enough—no houses or anything too close, just woods—he stashes his bike in the ditch, walks through the forest a bit, and flings the case into the air as far as he can. He hears it bounce twice in the fallen leaves, and then silence.

There are many kinds of silence to a boy of fourteen: there’s the grim, caustic silence of scribbling sentences and filling of bubbles meant to measure the scope of his future; there’s the anguished silence of ever-smoldering swallowed words when fear of adult authority trumps his sense of justice; there’s the wakeful silence he feels, stirring and restless, groaning in his lengthening bones before he finally sleeps; and there’s the possessing, lonely silence when he first understands his actions are no longer those of the man he envisions himself becoming.

He remembers how pathetic she looked in the rain the day she totaled her car, her frizzy hair, her unfinished makeup streaking down her face. By the time I’m home, she’ll already know, he thinks, and he wonders if she’ll ever forgive him. He begins to walk back to his bicycle, but then, no, he turns in the direction he believes he threw the instrument. It’s a nearly moonless night and his only light, he recalls, is affixed to his bike. He kicks around leaves in the darkness hoping his shoe will land on the small case. Suddenly, one step finds him up to his knee in a hole a dead tree has left behind. It’s hopeless without a light.

He walks, one minute, two in the direction he believes his bike to be. He’s soon aware he’s walked longer now returning than upon arriving, but he can’t yet see the edge of the woods. His breathing quickens. He’s sweating now and close to panic. Get quiet and calm down, he thinks. He stands there in the woods, controlling his breath, trying to remain motionless so that even the leaves under his feet are quiet. Alone he waits, listening through the silence for anything at all. Eventually, he hears the faraway sound of a passing car. With a sigh of relief, he follows the memory of the sound out of the forest. He walks up and down the road a few times until he stumbles over his bicycle.

In his fear he’d momentarily forgotten the flute, but as he begins pumping the pedals homeward, knowing what lies ahead, the enormity of it all takes his wind. His arms tremble at steadying the handlebars.

She’ll forgive me for this, he thinks. Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll come back. I’ll find it.

—

But Matt never finds the flute. His sister is more devastated than angry at first, and privately his parents contemplate corporal punishment before deciding he’s too old for a spanking. “He’s clearly upset,” his mother offers. His father agrees and decides waiting on a sentence is a nice phase-one for his punishment. Matt searches after church and every afternoon that week and the following weekend to no avail. After conferring with Mallory’s band director on the cost of the piccolo, Matt’s father arrives to a solution: Matt’s first job.

Matt makes minimum wage—almost five dollars an hour—at a small shop in town called Computer Connections. He knows little about computers beyond Oregon Trail, Solitaire, and control-alt-delete, but the proprietor finds busy work. At fourteen he can only do a couple hours on school days, and his father finds him unpaid labor in chores at home on the weekends, so by the time Matt’s earned enough to pay for the piccolo, Mallory, through hard work and strategic scheduling, satisfies the academic requirements of the state a semester early, and she moves away to start college in the new year.

On the day of the long-awaited recompense, he hands the money—to the tune of at least twelve decent Nintendo games—over to his father, who writes a check to the band director, who thanks him on behalf of the county school system and promptly deposits the check into his own personal account to help pay for an in-ground pool he plans to have installed in his backyard that summer. All those hours spent dusting and defragging customer computers, stocking recordable CDs, cables, and hardware, manning the register and phone, he felt sure settling his debt would feel better. However, in the coming years, when he recalls the whole business, Matt will always remember how hollow paying the debt felt in Mallory’s absence, how quiet those four months were without her music, and how back then he wondered if his sister kept someone else’s brother or sister up all night, studying and practicing in her dorm room.

“The Hidden Flute,” a companion story to this one, appears in 42.1 of the print Florida Review.
To find out what happens to the piccolo, order a subscription or copy of 42.1.

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Category: Aquifer