Category: Nonfiction

Logos

The beginning of Virginia happened . . . when? That moment is lost in time. Early on, she was at the edge of my consciousness but still a writer whom, even as an English major, I had never read. Woolf wasn’t on the syllabus in any of my classes—not required reading in those days just before there were courses in feminist literature. After my graduation, I read Woolf with a vengeance. I liked the experimental novels well enough—Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves—but what intrigued me most was the gradual publication of her letters and diaries.

 

That wealth of material gave me a window on a life radically different from my own. For a period of years, I felt as if her friends were also my friends, and that the conversations she participated in were as important to me as they were for her. It was easy to achieve this intimacy. The diaries and letters are filled with minutiae, nuanced insights, deeply personal impressions, and remembered conversations. They offer more information than most people ever reveal about their lives. The details are so extensive. It would probably be possible to chronicle Woolf’s daily life for decades.

 

I learned about her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and about Virginia’s marriage to Leonard Woolf, a Jewish writer, editor, liberal politician, and the man with whom she founded the revolutionary Hogarth Press. I was fascinated as her relationship with Vita Sackville-West unfolded, a love affair between two married women, flirtatious and communicative—resulting in the high humor and euphoria of Woolf’s novel Orlando—only to find a quieter resolution as they drifted apart.

 

What attracted me to Woolf? My life was completely unlike hers. I was not born into the London literati. I had my origins in a small town in northern Wisconsin. I had no famous father and no brothers at Cambridge. We definitely did not spend idyllic summers in Cornwall in a large house on the English seacoast waited on by servants, walking the beach, and playing games of cricket in the garden. My family took car trips across the American West, slogging along the interstates to see our country, camping out to save money, and eating macaroni and cheese out of a box.

 

I came from people whom Woolf might have dismissed or even despised and ridiculed—from farmers, mill workers, and civil servants, from those who were uneducated, at least by Woolf’s criteria. My people did not read books as a means of understanding the self, defining feelings, or interpreting the world. They worked. They were mostly just trying to survive and get by. I came from them, and yet I still wanted to be like Woolf. I wanted to write. Virginia became, at least for a decade, my higher power.

 

—

 

It’s 2006. My friend Nancy and I are touring London. I am here partly in pursuit of my mentor—Virginia Woolf. At this point, I’ve read everything she’s written. I’ve waltzed through that embarrassment of riches—the printed pages she left behind—her novels, letters, diaries, essays, and articles. Now I’m walking the streets she walked.

 

It’s dusk when we board the London Eye for a bird’s-eye view of the city beginning to turn on its lights. In our glass car, we rise and fall while feasting on this unparalleled view of London. Although it undoubtedly looked different in her time, this is Woolf’s city—a place she inhabited in all ways. After the ride, we choose to dine at the café in the crypt below St. Martin’s in the Fields. I order mushroom stroganoff with delicate new potatoes and a fennel salad. Nancy has a dish with steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and Savoy cabbage. Our globed glasses of white wine fracture light into the vaulted space.

 

It’s wonderful, yes, and isn’t this a moment Woolf might have chosen to memorialize? It seems to me I should write about it. What are we saying to one another? What are my thoughts and impressions of this day? If I don’t get this down somehow, won’t it be lost forever? I wonder. Does that really matter? Isn’t it enough that Nancy and I are here sharing this moment?

 

Later, I lie awake with jet lag thinking about Woolf’s second novel, Jacob’s Room. After a galloping romp through a young man’s life at Cambridge, we learn that Jacob, the protagonist, has died as a soldier in World War I. The final scene of the novel has Jacob’s mother and one of his friends cleaning out his rooms. They find Jacob’s papers strewn across his desk as though he had left for a stroll in the park.

 

There’s a horror in this vision, a sense of futility and emptiness. A person—vital and rich with life—is suddenly gone. The novel poses the ultimate question. What is left of all that sensation, what remains of so much rich lived experience once the person has passed? It occurs to me that, in her novels, Woolf is almost always writing toward the same end game. Yes, this is happening—this vivid and incredibly complex life tapestry. Yet, it’s also disappearing. Suddenly, because of either time or death, a chunk of it is gone, lost forever.

 

Woolf’s most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse, chronicles a family’s summer in Cornwall. But those moments are also lost. When they return to the house on the shore years later, the whole emotional tenor and tempo of their lives has changed. The mother has died, leaving them to struggle. The long-awaited trip to the lighthouse takes on a completely different meaning than it did on a day in the distant past when it was impossible to go because of bad weather.

 

At the novel’s end, Lily Briscoe, a peripheral character, takes center stage. She is a spinster and a Sunday painter, a woman not taken seriously by the male-dominated art world. Yet, she perseveres. Lily is at work painting the Cornwall scene when the family returns. Finally, almost giving up in frustration, unable to express the whole as she sees it, Lily declares a truce. The painting must be finished. There’s nothing more to be done. “I have had my vision,” she announces. And this seems the best we can hope for—to have that vision and attempt to record something about it even as the moment is passing.

 

Woolf tries to preserve those moments that don’t last, the globes of being and experience that simply disappear. She seems to be saying it’s important to celebrate the freshness, newness, and immediacy that make the world overflow. But the other side of this promise is the tragedy of time passing, the heartbreak of death and loss. I can clearly see this is Woolf’s vision. But is it mine?

 

After my trip to London, sick of the insistent need to turn every experience into copy, I stopped writing for five or six years. I told myself it was enough to have my experiences without constantly formulating words to describe them. It was an immense relief.  My mind felt free. And yet, there must have been something of a warring voice within me because I saved my notes—notes about that day in the city and the meal I shared with Nancy. I must have believed that, one day, I would need or want them, and I did.  But when I finally began to write again, it was with a different attitude. I knew I could live without writing, even without Virginia.

 

—

 

The Buddhists say that, to become enlightened, you must actually kill the Buddha, meaning you must destroy your idols. This comes from an old Zen koan attributed to the Zen Master Linji, a Chinese Zen Buddhist monk who founded the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism and who died in 866.

 

The saying says: If you meet a Buddha, kill the Buddha.

 

I guess I did this to Woolf after my trip to London. Not that I actually killed Virginia, but I doubted her. I saw her as a person, brilliant but limited, part of her own time, her class, and her culture. Woolf gave me a window on her world but not a passage into it. She had been my teacher, but perhaps I had learned what I needed to learn from her. She taught me to pay attention, to notice details, to hear my environment, and to listen to my own thoughts.  At this realization, there was disappointment and a sense of loss. It felt a bit like losing an old friend either to death or indifference. It’s all well and good to have idols, but suddenly, I knew I would never be this person who spent three weeks touring Greece with the painter and art critic Roger Fry.

 

Woolf’s festival of words took me somewhere. She got me to London and enriched my time there. But in the end, I returned home, leaving England for my own geographical and personal world. My physical and spiritual home for most of my life has been the northern boreal forest of North America. It’s a place where I walk on footpaths between towering trees, a place where I count my breaths while listening for the air rush of bird wings. This is where I belong.

 

This winter has been a hard one. Nearby, just off the footpath, several crows feed on the remains of unidentifiable dead animal. Busily tearing toward the center of the carcass for red meat, the two companionable black birds ignore this approaching human. Likewise, a soaring red-tailed hawk offers me no greeting as it flies overhead and beyond my field of vision. As I tread my forest path, I experience the spaciousness that exists outside and beyond words.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I love words for their capacity to partially tame the world’s wildness. I adore them as they lean into metaphor and traverse distances. But I see their limitations. Words are temporary containment fields. I believe that, although words were her medium, Woolf understood this. She was always writing into the void, always using language to push toward the no-word zone. In novels that exist on the margins of human experience—Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves—Virginia has taken me to regions where there is simply nothing more to say.

 

What can we know of poor Jacob after he has passed? Lives and loves succumb to time. Individuals exist for a while and then they are gone. The waves roll toward the shore, relentlessly washing away all footsteps on the beach. Eventually, through her suicide, Woolf crossed the ultimate barrier. No one could follow her into that beyond. Still, during her lifetime, Virginia returned to the place of making again and again. She tried to hold her ground even as that ground was slipping out from underneath her. She had a faith I sometimes lose. When I tire of carefully wrought language, I leave my writing desk and head into the woods seeking the place of no-words.

 

Entering this wordless zone is another way of killing the Buddha. But I know he isn’t really dead. I’ll be back at my computer soon enough. Tall pine trees creak in the wind. It seems that, though it is incomprehensible to me, they speak in a language all their own. And suddenly I get it. Virginia is the hawk flying away from me. She was here but she’s moved beyond my field of vision. I can’t say where she is now or what she is like. I’m not even sure what I am like, but I am resolved. I turn back on the path that will take me home. My house isn’t far away, really no distance at all.

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Acknowledgment

You divorce. You remarry.

 

You are already a father; your new wife is already a mother. She has a blooming daughter that you come to love, a daughter to whom, in time, you begin to say I love you. A daughter who later begins to occasionally reply, with no discernible pattern: Love you, too.

 

You write a book for people just her age—that age we think of as between. A publisher buys the book, makes plans to release it, and over the course of many disorienting months these plans unfold as promised. Along the way, you encounter the moment when you must determine how to dedicate the book, when you will choose how to acknowledge the people you will elect to thank. The task is self-indulgently benevolent. You dedicate the book to your wife, first and last. You acknowledge your parents, your teachers, your friends, the people to whom you entrusted the book long before anyone wanted to pay you for it.

 

You acknowledge your son, of course, who is easily named. But when you try to acknowledge your wife’s daughter, who by now has been a part of your life for years, you hesitate. She is your child. Also she is not your child. The sentiment comes easy, but what to call her does not. You contemplate at length how you will identify her role in your life, the way you will declare—in print—what you are to each other. Eventually you end up with these words:

 

To my daughter, for being such an excellent human being to share the world with, and for teaching me so much about being a dad.

 

You send these words to your editor.

 

The day comes when the publisher of your book prints advance copies. These copies are not final; they are still full of mistakes. You show the book to your wife’s daughter, and she thumbs swiftly through it toward the end. While you watch, she slows and reads the acknowledgments page. She sees the way you have phrased your gratitude, sees the title you have bestowed her. She says nothing. She is thirteen. You do not, at first, know what to think of her silence.

 

But weeks pass, the book due to be finalized any day, and you don’t forget what she didn’t say. You remember your words: my daughter, for teaching me so much about being a dad. You begin to suspect that she has said nothing not because she is thirteen, but because she is thirteen and already has a dad. Her dad is not you. And finally one night when you are already feeling melancholy, you hover at the entrance of her room before bedtime and tell her you have a question. A personal question that might feel awkward. She says, dubiously, Okay.

 

You ask her about the acknowledgment, if she remembers what it says. She does. You ask her if she would feel better if instead of daughter, you wrote step-daughter, because that’s what she is. You ask her if, instead of dad, you should write step-dad, because that’s what you are. She says, slowly—Maybe?—and in the weight of that word you feel a sick and swollen tide of regret: at having asked the question, at having phrased your gratitude the way you did in the first place, at taking space in this doorway at all. She tells you, because she is an excellent human being to share the world with, that what you said was sweet. But she also describes, because she is an excellent human being to share the world with, how there are competing piles of guilt whose weights she has to measure, whose burdens she must compare. If you do not make the change, she explains, there is this pile of guilt. If you do make the change, there is this other pile.

 

You understand her.

 

You understand her, and you think in that moment that maybe you will never again be asked to undertake anything so parental as this, to gift her this retraction, to express the truth not the way you want to, not the way you feel it, but rather the way she needs you to. And what she needs is to be called step-daughter.

 

She compromises with you, suggesting that you could at least still say Thank you for teaching me so much about being a dad. You don’t realize until later that she is doing that right now. Teaching you right this second.

 

Because right now she argues how important it is for people to hear the true story. They need to have things explained. They don’t like things to be unclear, and you have been unclear. Worse, you have been untruthful. You have used the word daughter.

 

You agree to change the word. She thanks you. And then she tells you—she is so young, she is trying so hard—that at least you will have this copy of the book, this version that still says daughter, this advance that is full of mistakes. At least you’ll have that. You agree with her, even though you have no true idea what she hopes to mean, offering you this consolation. You ache with the possibilities. You thank her for her honesty. You say I love you. She says love you too. You will say goodnight now. You will leave her to her thoughtful room. You will go and you will nurse the strange dear knife in your belly, and you will send an email to your editor with the necessary correction, and for a while you’ll be lost, already fumbling to imagine some story whose words you would never take back.

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No Brakes

In the spring of 1982, at the end of my senior year in high school, I was admitted to a mental hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, named the Institute of Living and was institutionalized there for two years. The Institute was founded in 1823, the first private mental hospital in the country. It was named the Hartford Retreat for the Insane and sat on thirty-acres on a hilltop above the Connecticut River. The first medical director was a brilliant young doctor, recently graduated from Yale, named Eli Todd. Whereas before, the mentally ill had been viewed as possessed, had been shackled, warehoused, or worse, Todd had a revolutionary vision for the humane treatment of the mentally ill: what he termed “moral treatment.” In Todd’s view, the mentally ill were citizens deserving of care and treatment and, ultimately, capable of rehabilitation and recovery. The key tenets of his treatment were “pleasant and peaceful surroundings, healthy diet, kindness, an established regimen, activities and entertainment, and appropriate medical attention.” “The great design of moral management,” Dr. Todd once said, “is to bring those faculties which yet remain sound to bear upon those which are diseased.”

 

I grew up in Hartford, often passing the Institute on Retreat Avenue in our wood-paneled station wagon. Driving by its imposing six-foot-high brick walls, my mother would comment, “There’s the country club.” And looking at those walls that surrounded the entire campus on all sides, I could imagine that it was a sort of English Tudor, turreted type of place. “There’s the country club,” I would echo.

 

I had broken down at school after I received an offer of admission from Yale University, scratching the inside of my arms with a razor blade as tears bled down my cheeks. I didn’t deserve Yale, I thought. I could never make it there. In fact, I could never make it anywhere. I had been a student at a small boarding school for girls in northern Connecticut. I had friends there, and teachers who encouraged me in an environment that felt like love itself. My school home was the opposite of the home in which I had grown up, in which I was despised as a disgrace, a lumbering, teeming, obese, and greasy monstrosity, a source of shame and disgust  for my attractive parents. The love I had felt at school was all illusory, I realized that day in April, the thick envelope from Yale in my hands. I was not deserving of the kindness and care I had received during my years at the school. I could never make it at Yale. I could never make it anywhere. The fact that I had been admitted when my beautiful friends had not was an outrage, a cosmic wrong that could only be made right by taking a razor blade to my arm. When the cuts were discovered, the school psychiatrist recommended admission to the Institute. The recommendation came as a relief. A mental hospital would be a far more appropriate place for me, I secretly believed, than the hallowed halls of Yale.

 

And this mental hospital had a reputation that was equally hallowed, a cross between a country club and a vaguely dangerous sanitarium. I was taken on tour of the grounds a few days before my admission, the first time I had been inside the six-foot brick walls. It was a sunny, beautiful day in May and the campus was almost gleaming. The green sloping lawns, an aqua swimming pool (unused), and the largest flowering dogwood tree in Connecticut lent the impression of a hospital more spa-like than Bedlam.

 

I, of course, had read The Bell Jar, and I could easily imagine Sylvia Plath’s fashionable, intelligent and humane Dr. Nolan here, wearing “a white blouse and full skirt gathered at the waist with a wide leather belt, and stylish, crescent-shaped spectacles.” I had a brief consultation with a psychiatrist at the Institute’s Children’s Clinic. He wore a corduroy jacket with suede patches at the elbow. He puffed on his pipe as I sat in his cluttered office and tried to describe why I had cut my arm.

 

“I think it would be best for you to come to the Institute for the summer,” he told me, “so you can be all fixed up and strong for Yale in the fall.”

 

It seemed a reasonable, even hopeful plan. The prospect of Yale loomed like a leviathan in my mind; a place full of students as disciplined and serious as my father, frugal and ascetic and fiercely intelligent. I on the other hand was gluttonous and hedonistic, a disgrace—too loud, too voluptuous, too greedy, too fat, too emotional, too funny. I had thick eyebrows and fat lips and a tiny, ridiculous voice. I ate and ate and ate and ate. I would be much more appropriate in a place populated by the people of Robert Lowell’s poem about McLean Hospital, “Waking In the Blue.” I didn’t understand the poem then, not really, but it was so extraordinarily lush and generous and almost loving about all those Mayflower screwball patients like Bobby, “redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale in his birthday suit.” I wanted (naively and stupidly) to be in Lowell’s place, where azure day broke, where I could feel safe, where that overwhelming pressure to hurt and punish myself could be lifted, maybe, just an inch, like in Plath’s The Bell Jar, and the fresh air could come rushing in.

 

What I didn’t know then was that the Institute, in its ambitious expansion, had become a far larger and more menacing institution, a hospital of last resort for patients who had failed or been expelled from other treatment facilities. It routinely performed a rudimentary form of electric shock therapy and bound patients in ice-cold sheets called wet packs for hours at a time when they acted up. There was an entire five-story “research” building constructed for the purpose of performing icepick lobotomies on patients from all over Connecticut, as such cruel and brutal operations were illegal in nearby Hartford Hospital. The advent, in the 1950s, of anti-psychotic drugs—like Thorazine—enabled the hospital to control unruly and disturbed patients with chemical restraint using doses of these powerful drugs that far exceeded the therapeutic range. Moreover, and most importantly, the insurance policies of the day, in the city known as the insurance capital of the world, often covered months and years of hospitalization, so an extended stay at the Institute was no longer the purview of the very wealthy.

 

By the early 1980s, when I was admitted, the hospital was taking full advantage of an adolescent population whose parents had good insurance. At the time I was admitted, the Institute had more than four hundred inpatients, nearly all of them hospitalized for long-term care (often called custodial institutionalization), and nearly always paid for by insurance policies. This was also the case with me. When I was admitted, I was covered under my father’s policy, which provided full coverage up to $1.5 million dollars—the equivalent of thirteen and a half years at the Institute. And I was stepping into an Institution whose financially savvy (or cynical) directors were more than ready to take advantage of an insurance policy that covered everything for a long-term stay and a family that wanted their troubled adolescent off their hands, and even out of their lives.

 

The Monday following my consultation, my parents and I drove through the black wrought iron gates for our admission appointment. An aide helped my father with my suitcase and then took it away. We sat across from each other on upholstered chairs in the mustard-colored lobby, my parents silent, holding hands. My mother was wearing a beige suit with gold buttons and sling-back spectator pumps. There was an air of excitement, almost giddiness about her, her hair glistening and her legs crossed prettily at the ankles. She had shopped carefully for her new outfit, spending Saturday at Lord & Taylor’s while my father and I watched old episodes of Hill Street Blues my mother had recorded on VHS tapes. My dad had been silent waiting for my mother to return, sitting next to me in front of the television, his pipe in his mouth, watching one tape episode until its end, and then replacing it with the next, in our old machine that ground and clicked.

 

My parents were instantly infatuated with my doctor, a tall, lovely Norwegian psychiatrist named Erna Mugnaini. She had blue eyes, wavy blond hair, and a daughter my age who was going to Smith. She spoke with a mesmerizing Nordic cadence that seemed intrinsically kind. My father dubbed her, “The Good Doctor.” She would speak to my parents first, she told us, while I got settled in the unit. Later that day she would come and talk to me.

 

I have the record Dr. Mugnaini wrote of her first meeting with my parents. It is telling that her first impression of me came from my parents, rather than from me or from any of my teachers. I had been in boarding school for four years and saw my parents only on breaks. I had not lived with my father, at all, for more than six years, not since I was twelve years old. She did not hear from any of my teachers, or my friends, or my house-parents, or any of the people I had been living with for the past four years. My parents, whom I seldom spoke to or saw, became instant authorities on my condition and adjunct therapists.

 

In the intake summary, Dr. Mugnaini writes: “Dolly’s emotional difficulties date back to childhood. According to both parents, she has always been a moody, demanding, oppositional and jealous child.” She describes my father: “Mr. Reynolds is an attractive, slim, healthy-looking man in his middle forties. He is friendly and polite but does not reveal many emotions and was rather factual in his account about the daughter.” About my mother, she writes, “Mrs. Reynolds is an attractive, slim, forty-year-old[note]Actually, on that day, she was forty-one. I don’t know whether this is a small typo by Dr. Mugnaini, or, more likely, a small vanity on the part of my mother.[/note] woman, looking younger than her age, well-dressed, pleasant and cooperative.” My younger sister, Kitty, was described by my parents as, “outgoing, friendly, easy to get along with, a bright girl but not particularly interested in schoolwork.” She goes on, “Kitty was born when Dolly was almost two years old. Mrs. Reynolds believes she ‘catered’ to Dolly to prevent her from feeling jealous, as both parents describe Dolly as moody and attention-seeking since early age.” Clearly there was only one problem in this family, soon to be behind locked doors.

 

Later, when my parents came to say goodbye to me on the unit, my mother told me excitedly that they had all come up with a name for all my problems: “no brakes.” I had never been able to stop myself; I had insatiable appetites for food and love and attention and jealousy and rage and despair and hopelessness. “No brakes,” they would repeat throughout my life, when they described the enormity of my appetites and emotions. But “no brakes” is what happened to the Institute, my doctors, and my parents as I rapidly descended into the world of an institutionalized patient and my father’s insurance company mailed the Institute reimbursement checks for my care, regularly, on the first of every month.

 

Dr. Mugnaini placed me on an intermediate unit, meaning the doors were locked but most patients were allowed on the hospital grounds in scheduled, supervised visits. The aide, Patty, who escorted me from the reception area, had a set of keys clanging from a chain she wore around her waist like a belt. Patty was tall and soft-spoken, knock-kneed in her white Levi corduroys, a kind and patient young woman who wore tinted glasses and treated us patients with compassion and gentleness. I could sense this on that first day, and I was not afraid, even as I saw that the entrance to my unit was a double door with a small pane of prison glass at eye level. Patty unlocked each door with a series of clicks, and then barked at Debby, a patient who was peering out as we were peering in. The name of my unit was “Todd,” for the great and humane Dr. Todd, the Institute’s founder.

 

The unit itself was quite dingy—walls covered with chipped mustard paint, mismatched, sagging couches, a brown carpet badly stained. It was hot and muggy, and all the windows were closed. In the center of the long hall was the nurses’ station, walled off from the patients by a double layer of thick Plexiglas, with a small opening at waist-level through which the staff passed medication at four scheduled intervals each day. Next to this Plexiglas window the cigarette lighter was mounted on the wall, a small burner with an on-button the patients could press and then light their cigarettes off the hot orange circle, a mental patient’s kiss. Patty, whom I would come to know over the next two years, was one of the most humane and accepting aides in the entire hospital. It was fitting I met her first, when I was still a person on the outside. Stepping through those Todd doors with her was like stepping slowly into the pool, step after step, as the freezing water moves up your body little by little, until you are submerged.

 

Nancy, another aide, showed me into my room across from the nurses’ station. Nancy was what I would have then called prissy, her hair permed into perfect waves around her face, her lips pursed in vague disapproval or disgust. She blinked constantly—a tic. She had me remove my clothes and stand naked while she emptied my suitcase and searched through every crevasse. She took my driver’s license and cash and returned my empty wallet. After snapping on two layers of latex gloves, she had me bend over so she could pry open the lips of my most private parts, to search inside.

 

After I had gotten dressed, she handed me a small plastic cup containing three pills, two small tablets and a bright red capsule. After I had swallowed the pills, she had me open my mouth again and probed my cheeks and under my tongue with a wooden tongue depressor. Satisfied, she left me alone.

 

I found out later that the three pills were: 1) an antidepressant called Asendin (an older tri/tetracyclic no longer prescribed. Also, what a name!), 2) a catastrophically potent anti-psychotic in the same class as Thorazine called Trilafon, and 3) a drug called Symmetrel which is now used to treat Parkinsonian movement disorders. It was prescribed at the Institute because the older anti-psychotics like Trilafon have a terrible side effect: dyskinesia, which causes uncontrollable muscle movements, twitches and rigidity.

 

Most of the patients at the Institute looked like they had Parkinson’s. Those terrible drugs—Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Navane, Haldol, and Trilafon—were liberally and universally prescribed, in very high doses, and not only to patients with schizophrenia, but also to nearly all adolescents in the locked units, especially if they were unruly or acting out, which was also fairly universal. The discovery of these drugs in 1950s is considered a revolution in psychiatric care, allowing schizophrenic and other psychotic patients the possibility of an actual life. The way those drugs were prescribed at the Institute had the exact opposite effect.

 

Of course, I didn’t know any of this when Nancy handed me that first cup of pills, offered on a tray so that our hands would not touch. I had never heard of any of these medications. I had no idea that depressed people would be treated with medication instead of what I had imagined: kindness, insight, rest, and poetry workshops led by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, as had happened McLean’s and the other asylums I had read about.

 

I also didn’t know what my own initial diagnosis was, and didn’t learn of it until years later, when I read Dr. Mugnaini’s intake summary and discovered the catastrophic sentence: atypical mixed personality disorder with borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic traits. This very rococo description was, I’m sure, a result of Dr. Mugnaini’s conversation and collaboration with my parents and meant there was little hope for me in the world. My prognosis: “very guarded.”

 

Over the course of the my first few days and weeks in Todd, the medications were increased incrementally. I was lining up at the nurses’ station to swallow pills four times a day, until I was taking the maximum dose of the anti-psychotic drug Trilafon. With each swallowed dose, I lost progressively more control over my consciousness and my body. It was so sedating at first that I began to count the minutes to the next time I could sleep. I would get into bed one second after swallowing my 9:00 p.m. meds and fall into a black hole until Nancy woke me the next morning, rapping loudly on the wall above my head with a flashlight, her clipboard in hand.

 

I got to know some of the other patients. They were all women, and young, from age fourteen to about thirty. They introduced themselves with their diagnosis, the self and its affliction inseparable. Many of these women suffered terribly. There was Brenda, a lovely dark-haired woman a few years older than me, with violent manic-depression, cycling disastrously from psychotic mania to catatonic depression.

 

“My doctor can’t regulate my meds,” Brenda said to me, her hands shaking, a light sheen of perspiration across her forehead. Her doctor was Mavis Donnelly, the scion of one of the Institute’s previous luminaries, John Donnelly, a chief psychiatrist with a building erected in his name during the expansion in the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Mavis Donnelly was young herself, a few years older than her patients, brutal and profane. One terrible day Brenda was out of control, wild with mania, and the nurses called Dr. Donnelly to the unit. When the doctor arrived, striding in in her tall black boots and wrap-around skirt, Brenda was jumping on and off the side tables next to the sagging couches in the dayroom, flapping her trembling arms unevenly like mismatched wings and laughing hysterically. When she saw her doctor, she cried out, “Dr. Donnelly! Dr. Donnelly! I can fly! I am flying right now! Look at me! Look at me!”

 

I was scared; scared for Brenda, scared she would hurt herself, scared for how wild her mind had become. I looked to Dr. Donnelly to help, but what she did instead was point her finger angrily at Brenda and scold her as loudly as she could. “Get down!” she yelled, her voice a guttural growl. “Get down RIGHT NOW!” I saw her snap her fingers at the nurses, and suddenly the aides were pushing us all into our rooms.

 

“What’s happening?” I asked my roommate.

 

“Brenda’s getting Gooned,” she answered.

 

And then I heard it, the thunder. When the staff hit the “Goon” alarm, five or six burly male aides came charging onto the unit and tackled the unruly (or offensive to staff) patient onto the ground. My roommate cracked open our door, and I watched as the Goon squad held a screaming Brenda face down on the unit’s filthy carpet and bound her wrists and ankles with leather straps. One of the Goons knelt with his fat knee in the small of Brenda’s back while she pleaded, “Please sir, please sir,” trying to catch her breath. Another Goon lay down a long black canvas bag with handle-straps next to her body. He pulled open a zipper that ran the entire length of the bag.

 

“What’s that?” I whispered.

 

“Body bag,” my roommate answered. “Like, for dead people. They’re taking her to Thompson.”

 

Thompson, the lowest of all the units, actually underground, in the basement, next to the steam room. Thompson contained the seclusion and restraint rooms, each bare except for a vinyl bed, like an exam table, in the center of the room, cemented to the floor. There were straps at each of the four corners, where patients were tied into “two-point” (wrists only) or “four-point” (wrists and ankles) restraints. The seclusion rooms were also where hysterical patients were “wet-packed,” a brutal and archaic form of “hydrotherapy,” abolished in nearly all modern hospitals[note]None of the psychiatrists I have seen in California, over more than twenty years, has ever even heard of wet packs, and had no idea that such practices were ever used on mental patients.[/note] but still raging away at the Institute. In wet packs, patients were bound, naked, between freezing sheets that had been soaked in ice water. The patients were left between these icy sheets and tied down for hours or even days. These descriptions now sound so baroque, unbelievable, even laughable, like some dark dungeon feature of a Gothic novel. But this barbarism was very much real and alive in Todd with a terrifyingly ill young woman and her angry doctor who could not tolerate seeming not in control of her patient. I watched as the Goons zipped a bound Brenda into the bag, lifted the bag with its handles, and carried it through the unit’s double doors, single file, like pallbearers. I also saw that Dr. Donnelly had been watching it all, her face frozen, impassive, her arms crossed tightly across her chest. It seemed incredible that ten minutes ago I had been happy to see her on the unit, thinking that she had come to help.

 

Where were the brakes then?

 

Brenda did not come back that night. I didn’t see her for another month, until I had been moved to Thompson myself. Brenda lay face down on her cot, immovable, nearly catatonic, as menstrual blood ran down her naked legs and soaked the sheet she was lying on. The Thompson aides screamed at her to stand up and clean herself up. Brenda was gone, unresponsive, unmoving, almost unconscious but still alive, her private blood sticky and red, a rebuke for all the world to see. But I was still in Todd when the Goons packed Brenda into the body bag. It was still early days for me at the Institute. I didn’t know any of what was yet to come as the unit doors in Todd slammed shut and the Goons disappeared. Dr. Donnelly walked into the Nurses station to write her report. That night I swallowed my meds and let the blackness fall.

 

—

 

The incident with Brenda had left me badly shaken, and there were other things that scared me as well. I asked Dr. Mugnaini about the side effects of my medication. My vision had become so blurry that I couldn’t seem to read. It felt like my eyeballs were quivering back and forth in their sockets. I had been a voracious reader, but now that I had lost the capacity to see the words I had lost a part of the world that had defined me. My teachers at boarding school had given me books to read outside of class, Chekhov and Ann Beattie and Toni Morrison and Eugene O’Neill, and then had talked to me about what I read as they drove me back to the dorm on a Saturday night after I had babysat for their children. My English teacher would even ask me what I was reading and what I would recommend. My father, when he came to visit me at the Institute on Sundays, would bring the Sunday New York Times for me to read, the Book Review thoughtfully pulled out and placed on top. It is hard to think of this now, my sense of my father and his gift of a life of the mind. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t read; I was ashamed. I carried the paper around the unit on Sunday nights, opening the pages and folding them back, holding them in front of my face and refolding them from time to time, a mechanical image of the person I had been just a few weeks before.

 

There were other things happening to me in what felt like from the inside out. My muscles felt rigid, my fingers splayed out and my hands held out in front of my waist, like a Tyrannosaurus rex. I shuffled and sweated and felt anxious all the time, like the area inside my body wall was quivering, being tickled unbearably by some internal torturer. These feelings were probably a result of my anxiety, Dr. Mugnaini told me, pen in hand, bending her blonde head to write the orders increasing my meds.

 

“You can have an extra Trilafon as a PRN,” she told me.

 

“A PRN?” I asked.

 

“A little extra medication you can take to help you when you feel upset,” she answered. I was already on 40 milligrams of Trilafon a day, but I had the capacity to take 8 additional milligrams, which would bring me to 48 milligrams, near the daily maximum and a very, very high dose of powerful elephantine drug. The Trilafon had knocked my brain with the force of a two-by-four. I did not have thoughts anymore, not in the way I had at school, and the thoughts I did have seemed to take forever to cross from one side of my brain to the other. It was becoming harder and harder to speak, both the act of moving my increasingly slack lips and the mental capacity to find something to say.

 

“You are quite ill,” Dr. Mugnaini told me. “You will need the support of the hospital for quite some time.”

 

And there were also other, more intimate shames that I was also keeping from Dr. Mugnaini. When I stood under the warm water in the shower at night, something was coming out of my breasts: a thick, milky yellowish fluid I thought was pus. It seeped and even squirted from my nipples, staining my towel, my nightgown and my bra with this unspeakable fluid.[note]Later I would find out that this was a bizarre side effect of the Trilafon called “galactorrhea.”[/note] And even worse, it was becoming harder and harder for me to urinate. It seemed to take longer and longer for my bladder to unclench. It was like I no longer knew how to send the signal for the muscle to relax. I had always, always been ashamed of my too chubby body, from the time I was in kindergarten and was not allowed to wear pants because people would see how fat my legs were. I had large breasts and thick lips and fat fingers; I believed that everything about me was grotesque and the filth on the inside of me was now seeping out as well. What kind of animal doesn’t know how to urinate? I was too ashamed to tell anyone what was happening.

 

By this point I was barely speaking at all. I had lost the capacity to read, I could barely think, I drooled when I opened my mouth, and unspeakable things were happening to my body from the inside out. I was eating almost nothing. It was the end of the world. I asked Dr. Mugnaini repeatedly if this could be from the medication. She looked at me thoughtfully and shook her head.

 

All brakes were gone.

 

—

 

All these years later, all these miles away, I think about what had happened to me as an eighteen-year-old, how I became an institutionalized, backward patient, sitting on the filthy floor of the basement unit Thompson, shaking and drooling and praying to God for each moment to pass, for two endless years, until the insurance company cancelled my policy and I was released, blinking, into the sun. I think about how the good Dr. Mugnaini kept increasing my Trilafon as I increasingly devolved, mistaking the side effects of the medication as symptoms of my ever-worsening pathology. I think about how this was all allowed to happen in an institution founded on the most humane and revolutionary treatment of the mentally ill, and how this institution lost the brakes on its greed, happily depositing the reimbursement checks from my father’s insurance policy as my life seeped slowly away. But most of all, I worry that I have lost the brakes on my own memories, that I can slip from being a mother and writer three thousand miles and three decades away from this experience, right back to the drooling and tortured mental patient I had become, and, in my most secret places, am still. And what I cannot seem to fight is the sense that my slim and attractive parents, mother in her spectator pumps, my father with a legal pad on his lap, the good doctor listening attentively, had been right all along. There are no brakes for that.

 

———————————

 

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I Live in Grandma’s Kitchen

I live in Grandma’s kitchen. The walls are the blue and white she painted them a few years ago. The cabinets have the tiny white knobs I reached for when I learned to walk. Through the window above the deep sink, tonight’s overcast sky creeps its way over the setting sun and into the chilled gray room.

 

While pouring a bag of beans in a pot to boil, and before I grab a jalapeno and cut an onion in half so that I’m just on the verge of tears, I hear Grandma yell from the living room.

 

Don’t be dumb, you’re making them wrong. Rinse the beans before you boil.

 

I stop what I’m doing and rinse them or else she’ll make me keep doing this until I do it the right way.

 

—

 

I’m washing the dishes. They’re all perfectly matching, off-white and no chip in sight, except for one plate. It’s brown, bigger than all the rest, and has this sketch of a cottage in winter on the face of it. It’s the only one she will eat off of. It’s covered in the remnants of food that she didn’t end up finishing off with her tortilla. The little cottage’s windows are coated in the marks of beans refried with Manteca. As I rinse off the plate, with the rough side of the small yellow and green sponge, I see the windows open and the snow-covered photo pop amongst the sea of off-white in the silver sink. The dishwasher is full. I bully around the bowls, shift the silverware, and arrange the cups so that I can fit this one last dish in before I pour the detergent and finish off the sink with my pruned fingertips. Scouring for something sweet after dinner, I hear her shout from the pantry.

 

That’s not how you’re supposed to wash dishes. If you break a plate or my washer, you’re going to pay for it.

 

I pull out her dish and wash it by hand. It is her favorite.

 

—

 

I fill a bucket with Clorox. I feel the bleach burning the insides of my nose as it swims with the tiny bit of hot water and soap. I push all the kitchen chairs into another room, pick up the mat from the sterile grey linoleum and sweep away the red-brown pine needles I tracked in after school with my boots. The mop slushes around in the suds as it prepares to douse the floors. I roll up my jeans to avoid the splash the little gray braids will make when they hit the floor. I will feel the warm water underneath my now bare feet and move my way from one corner of the kitchen where the cabinets meet the wall, all the way to the tiny forgotten space where the refrigerator just barely misses touching the ivory-colored baseboard. From the TV room, I hear the sounds of her Mexican soaps go silent.

 

Stop being lazy. Just scrub the floors on your hands and knees.

 

I listen because I’m tired.

 

—

 

I turn off all the overhead kitchen lights but keep the dim stove-top light on. I rest. The kitchen table is small, tan, and the chairs have no cushions on them. The hard oak starts to hurt if you sit for too long, but it feels better than standing does right now. I sigh and pitter my fingers, reaching for an orange in a basket to squeeze and play with so that I don’t need to think anymore. The hall out of the kitchen is dark, but I can make her figure out, shuffling to bed, dragging her slippers on the dark, plush carpet. With her hands stuffed warmly in her robe, ready for bed, she says.

 

It was all delicious. Good job, Mijo.

 

I smile and tell her I love her because… well, because.

 

—

 

Now I’m sitting here, and I finally have nothing to do. The food is all done, the dishes are dry, and the floor is sparkling in the tiny bit of light that’s left in the room. I ask her what to do now, but there’s no response because hospice came and took back their oxygen machine, the shelves of her medicine cabinet are free of pills, and a bottle of Chanel is sitting on her vanity unmoved for four years now. Now all I do is live here in her kitchen and wait for her to yell again.

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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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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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Among Schoolchildren

Like a cormorant turning on the wind before tucking its wings and descending into the ocean, my mother, five days a week for forty years of her life, submerged herself in the primary schools of small-town Texas, each brick or stucco campus at which she worked named for a hero of the Alamo: Travis, Crocket, Bowie, and Bonham, garrisons of the alphabet and basic arithmetic—crumbling and underfunded missions all.

 

As the school’s lone counselor, my mother traveled from classroom to classroom, her materials piled on a Rubbermaid cart as if she were a vaudevillian or ventriloquist, boxes and suitcases filled with dolphin puppets, marionettes of creatures from the sea, and stuffed-animal pirates, each one with an accompanying picture book to teach children about difference and compassion.

 

Abandonment was the fear that trumped all others, and the children carried it always, the fear dissipating only at the sight of a father’s arrival, or spreading like a fever at the close of the school day when a mother was not readily seen.

 

How deeply the children sank into worry, withdrawing into hooded sweatshirts like miniature monks, or carving row upon row into their desktops with the tip of an inkless pen.

 

To be sure, the children had cause to worry.

 

Parents deployed to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and though most returned to the Air Force base on the city limit line, some did not: the brother ambushed in a sandstorm at night, a father’s helicopter losing sight of the ground, a mother’s Jeep triggering an IED.

 

There were the domestic and financial worries as well, and my mother scrounged shoes for the shoeless and glasses for the sightless, arranged pro bono visits from doctors, marriage counselors, custody advocates, and lawyers.

 

Each Friday, she filled backpacks with nonperishables for the poorest children to take home for the weekend, without which they would have nothing to eat, the great isolation of hunger, each child, not adrift for days, but helpless, inert, a boulder in a river around which all water flows.

 

For loneliness, consider the third grader born without cheekbones, a shrunken jaw, Treacher Collins syndrome, who met with my mother when a surgeon was found to perform a procedure in Dallas for free.

 

The recovery required that a helmet be worn for weeks to secure her features like clay dredged from a riverbed to dry in the sun. The young girl’s concern was not the surgery but the wearing of the helmet, conspicuous to all.

 

A deal was struck, and when the girl arrived back at the school, my mother was wearing a helmet as well. Other teachers and students joined in, and for two months all manner of headgear—whether bicycle, beanie, lacrosse, or hockey—bobbed through the halls.

 

Like Janus, the Roman god with counter-gazing faces, the god of new beginnings and transitions, the children relied at all times (naively, stubbornly, irrespective of evidence) on hope. Each six-week block, each promotion in grade, was a chance to start again, and if hope flickered and dimmed like a struck match, their final refuge was laughter.

 

When the vice-principal, svelte as an offensive tackle for the Houston Oilers, the muscles of her right forearm hard as an ox’s neck from swinging a hole-bored hickory paddle (in a time before spanking was banned from public schools), tucked her mohair skirt by accident into the rear of her floral-print underpants and inadvertently promenaded through the hall, the laughter, shrill and instantaneous as the city’s lone tornado siren, overwhelmed the vice-principal’s calls for order so that, red-faced, defeated, she was left with no choice but to skulk to her office and brood.

 

The pièce de résistance (French, spoken with a Texas accent, could peel paint from the Eiffel Tower itself, and for two semesters in high school an English teacher referenced the “Bore-gē-OH-ēs,” the word seared in my mind until, in a Marx Brothers movie, I heard Groucho correctly pronounce “bourgeois”) was the story my mother told about puberty education, how, on one day every school year, the fourth-grade boys were sent en masse to the cafetorium as the girls retired together to the gym.

 

Television stands with VCRs were wheeled down from the A/V closet, and for forty-five horrifying yet fascinating minutes, as the teachers popped in the tapes and slipped out for a smoke, the children suffered a barrage of gender-specific information from menstruation to dropping testicles, body hair to voice cracks.

 

On one such appointed day, my mother heard shrieking from the cafetorium and gym at once, and as she rose from her desk, a teacher ran through the hall, her just-lit cigarette trailing smoke from her undulating hand like a priest swinging incense.

 

“The tapes are switched!” the woman yelled. “The students are watching the wrong tapes!” as the vice-principal, gopher-like, peered out from behind her office door.

 

In the end, parents had to be called, and though no explanation would fully suffice, the secretary (who got stuck making the calls) offered only a shrug and a halfhearted, “They would have learned about it all sooner or later.”

 

The one indisputable truth about children is that they grow into adults where personality, instead of evolving, calcifies.

 

“Joey!  We taught you better than that!” my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, would exclaim and slap her hand down on the newspaper article she was reading when a now-adult student was apprehended for robbing a convenience store or absconding with a neighbor’s car.

 

For my mother, the adult was never severable from the child, which became the measure of her work. Student replaced student each year until, at last in retirement, the progression, like the volley of soldiers against the walls of the Alamo, subsided.

 

I shall never retreat, Lieutenant Colonel Travis wrote in his final hours.  Victory or Death—the scene reenacted each year in the spring while the teachers mouthed lines to the costumed martyrs, and their parents, knowledgeable of history and fleeting time, raised cameras and tripods like bugles and swords.

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Some Trees: An Incidental Elegy

This essay was a finalist in the 2018 Editors’ Awards
competition here at The Florida Review. We’re proud
to present it here in Aquifer.

 

Let me be clear: I read the classifieds because I had nobody. Five or six years into the new century, I trudged through Southeast Portland, rented the upper level of a duplex across the street from a bar that served fried chicken all night and $1.75 domestics. I never cut back the ivy that crept all the way over the second floor windows, so the light in my room was always dim. In any case, the sky was invariably grey. The rain was less rain but fine mist.

 

In the mornings, I waited for the bus with the smell of yesterday’s oil in the fryers. I took the local newspaper from a dispenser outside the bar, then the same seat on the same bus every day. There were poems tacked above the windows as part of a citywide initiative to bring art closer to daily life. Each morning I read the same John Ashbery poem opposite my seat then opened the local newspaper and turned to the classifieds: the personal ads; items for sale or trade; miscellaneous services; missed connections. I never bought anything. I never replied. But I needed the idea that there were people on the other side. And the newspaper let me believe that even though I stayed so isolated. Other people existed, and as they existed they felt, and reached out with their advertisements. Not only did they exist but they were also alone and—since moved to action—maybe even more alone than I was.

 

Through these grey months, there is a single ad I remember most. It stood out among the used microwaves, gently worn tires, and everyday loneliness. It was exuberant. I could not believe it was real: a man, beneath a name eccentric and rich with consonants, offering formal pinball lessons at a location close to my duplex, and offering them in a tone ripe with awareness that these lessons were precisely what the world needed. “Master the flipper. Amaze your friends.” I tore the ad from the newspaper, circled it with a blue sharpie and tacked it on the fridge. I did not call. To call would invite the possibility that it wasn’t real. And I had to believe it was, that this person existed, offering his service at a time when all I could muster by way of invitation to the world was to drink too many $1.75 beers and in the morning peer into the semi-darkness through the windows of a bus.

 

—

 

A mile or so southwest of Fish Lake, Utah, there is a run of aspen more than 80,000 years old. The dendrologists have given it a name—Pando, from the Latin to mean “I spread.” Although Pando covers over one hundred acres and appears to be a forest containing a multitude of separate trees, it is in fact a single organism with a vast, interconnected root system, a clonal colony of Populus tremuloides or quaking aspen. Pando’s approximated mass of 13 million pounds lands it in the running to be the heaviest organism on the planet, and at 80,000 years old, very possibly the oldest. But even such an unfathomable lifespan may be an underestimation: some dendrologists argue that traditional aging techniques are inappropriate here and in fact Pando is closer to one million years old. One million years. I am thirty-eight. Yesterday I was looking at photographs from the early 1980s and felt a bodily dissonance between the world then and now. But Pando met existence in an era before human language and still exists today, adjacent to our sphere of depleted fossil fuels, snowballing automation, and deceit.

 

I keep saying “it,” but Pando is a “he.” This proliferation is the result of the asexual reproduction of a single male plant. It seems strange to me that such plurality could be contained in a male organism. I would immediately assume such capacity to be female, although it should be noted that in keeping with a cardinal condition of maleness, Pando has thrived and spread in the most favorable conditions possible. Geographic and climatic variations over the millennia have effectively wiped out competition from species of conifer or other younger aspen.

 

If there are degrees of solitude then Pando represents an exponential function. He may be prolific, but he is alone and—with only countless iterations of himself for company over thousands and thousands of years—compelled into an everted kind of introspection. It has been 10,000 years since Pando’s last successful flowering. The climate of central Utah is gradually warming, and, despite his monumental proclivity for survival, it has been agreed by the various dendrologists, environmentalists, and biologists that Pando is dying. The experts cannot be certain why. Grazing elk may have depleted new shoots and stems to replace the old. It could be the result of drought, of insect infestation. Or it could be that after multiple epochs, Pando has finally had enough. Regardless of the reason, without new growth the end is coming, and when it comes it could be sudden.

 

—

 

I am interested in impossible writing. As such I am interested in the plural text: how facing the impossible in language may necessitate and birth a text that dwells in the fractured amalgam of two or more known forms. I am interested in the new text that finds form in the aperture that this fracture creates: the text that becomes possible as the imprint of writing into the impossible. Such a work is realized through the multiplicitous capacity of that imprint, which is itself a function of the multiplicity inherent to language itself. Every word is a kaleidoscope of subjectivities, tamed by the socially determined conditions for its usage. The word was not complicit in this agreement. And words are not, by their nature, tame. To assume they are is dangerous. Every word maintains the radical potential for departure, and as such this potential for movement is retained by any sum of these parts. You cannot build a house of mirrors and not expect it to reflect the light.

 

So then a text that may appear in prose, in service to the form of the essay, may be constructed around an architecture more readily associated with poetry, containing further architectures beneath its surface, narratives that exist independent of the semantic value of the language. I mention this now because these are the ways a singular text might transcend its apparent plurality, how every word leads multiple lives in the air and on the page, and most importantly how a run of trees near a lake in Utah may indeed be the single oldest and most massive living organism on our planet.

 

This morning I flicked through images of Pando I found on the internet. Some had verses of scripture superimposed on the photographs. Others diagrammed the connection of each tree to its shared system of roots. Almost without exception, the photographs were taken in the annual interlude when the aspen leaves hang golden on pale boughs—that moment of transition, multiplied across acres of forest in singular association. I reread the poem I had read hundreds of times from my seat on the bus, John Ashbery’s “Some Trees.” Here it is again, today, opening in quiet triumph, moving through a quaking order into ordained stillness, deferring meaning toward a reality in which different perceptive realms are allowed to exist simultaneously. In each, the world is reborn: into the collapsed dimensions of space; a new desert music; the ramshackle frames we place upon time; the universe of the poem. “These are amazing: each / Joining a neighbor, as though speech / Were a still performance.”

 

—

 

Several years ago, at a time between the bus rides in Portland and my life here today, I went on a weekend training to become a hospice volunteer. I ascended an elevator to the fifth floor of the largest office building of an out-of-town business park and took my seat in a loose horseshoe of Formica trestles that opened onto a cheap-looking podium. A young woman stood in front of the podium and greeted each prospective volunteer with a cheerful nod. This disposition, complemented by her yellow pantsuit, suggested she was only stopping by en route to a less somber occasion, so much so that when she spoke I was disarmed by the soft attention in her voice. If we had been recently bereaved, she explained, we were encouraged to withdraw from this session and enroll at a later date. She did not specify how much later, how long grief might linger until it became manageable, until we felt able to move beneath it and perhaps take on some portion of the grief of others. Nevertheless, her message was clear: if you think this may be too much, it will be.

 

Morning sun cut through the Venetian blinds leaving a thatch of light and shade on the Formica. A man in navy plaid cleared his throat. His cat had died the previous weekend. The room mumbled condolence. Nobody left, though soon enough the cheerful woman surrendered the podium to a middle-aged chaplain in a purple cardigan and red eyeglasses. She stayed for the chaplain’s introduction then issued a final smile and nod into the room as she turned and departed.

 

That morning we made our own introductions, talked a lot, drank coffee from diminutive paper cups, and assembled into various combinations of small and large groups. We watched films and slide shows about the ways people might leave their lives, about the companions who surrounded this passage, how they had begun to find meaning there, the way such rupture could not be closed but could become more familiar. Each table had a small box of tissues and a pale blue wallet folder with our agenda. We worked through it together, establishing a solid but temporary kind of trust. We ate sandwiches in the lunchroom. We did not really become friends.

 

On the second day, the chaplain led us through what she described as a difficult but important exercise. She closed the blinds and dimmed the lights in the room. She pressed play on a portable CD player: the sound of waves breaking, then piano, a harp. Close your eyes. We were to imagine ourselves in a private room, months after our own diagnosis of an aggressive cancer. There had been many treatments, visits, hopes, painkillers. Over the last few weeks, though, a new weakness had set in. Breathing had become labor. Movement required disproportionate effort. The time was drawing close.

 

In the midst of this scenario, the chaplain had us compose a list of those we held closest, and at the threshold of our departure from them, to select one name from that list and write. What would we speak on the cusp of speech becoming impossible? How would we locate the language of this transition? What would we say if we could?

 

—

 

Over the next months, I could not shake the idea of this utterance when facing the impossible; the language that originates both with and against death. I read deeply toward and around it. I found an anthology of Japanese jisei—haiku-like poems composed on the verge of death. I read Akutagawa and Edouard Leve. Desiring something more immediate, I found suicide notes collected on the internet and read them, and read them again. I felt suddenly like a tourist and withdrew and returned to the exercise I had learned in hospice training. I selected a name. I wrote toward them. I read. I returned again.

 

And I still return. Because it is this utterance that forms the center of everything I would write—this text spoken into the impossible, its capacity to contain all that it contains which is the impossible itself, the uncontainable. I want to bring language to approach the unapproachable. I want to bear witness to a singular text that holds these infinite pluralities. I want to watch it buckle. I want to see it fall.

 

I want the elusive syntax that embodies multiplicity, that collapses the moment and makes “tense” unnecessary, that creates a new pronoun rare to the ear but personal to all such that as I write I might address not only a named individual but everyone I have ever known and loved with no lapse in intimacy.

 

—

 

It wasn’t long after I found the pinball ad that my life changed. The events were as independent as two events in a single life can be. I met my partner in a different bar. The loneliness I had worn as a badge of honor began to subside. I rode the bus less frequently. I took myself and my life less seriously. My need for the classifieds diminished. The landlord’s son came by to cut the ivy from the windows, and it was too bright in the mornings. But the ad stayed on my refrigerator the whole year until I moved out of the duplex, then found a new space on our new refrigerator in our new apartment together. Then the next year when we made the cross country-drive to Colorado and started up again, we started up with the ad on the refrigerator. Master the flipper. Amaze your friends.

 

More than ten years passed. I don’t know why I googled the pinball guru. I don’t know what it was about that particular day that made me remember his ad, made me want to know. Considering it now, it was something more gradual: coming to a place where it didn’t matter if there had been a person behind the ad, if the man with the eccentric name had not been real. I no longer needed anything from him, and in turn, now feel an almost insurmountable distance between the person I was, drinking and sleeping alone in Southeast Portland, and the physician, husband, and father of two who is writing this.

 

I typed the name into the search bar and found an article from around the time I’d seen his ad, the top hit, an interview, conducted by the first and only person to take him up on lessons. They were real. I found a photograph of him beside a pinball machine, wearing a black and red shirt, not quite smiling. I found his real name, his photography and artist’s statement. Then I found the news of his death, tributes from the local pinball community, and, finally, posted by close friends on a personal blog, I found his suicide note.

 

It was long, more than four pages in single spaced ten-point Times. He had mailed it to arrive after he was already gone. And I realized that somebody must have sat and transcribed it, word for word, from the copy that arrived in the mail into the version published on the blog. I wanted to know if it had been written by hand. I wanted to know how. And then I felt stupid and invasive, that this wasn’t mine and could never be mine, and I closed my computer and sat in silence.

 

I turned over the basement trying to find the ad. I sorted through boxes looking for a scrap of newsprint with a classified circled in blue sharpie. I did not find it.

 

I came back the next day and clicked through his photographs, many of them arresting and beautiful, one in particular: the corner of a large building in black and white, spindled winter branches reaching over the foreground, silhouetted against grey concrete; pages and pages before the posts stopped abruptly in February 2011. I thought maybe there was another folder in another box in the basement. I continued this way for several days, turning toward him, then away. After nearly three weeks, I read the note.

 

—

 

It opens with love, apology, the blunt necessity of his action. That it would arrive after he was gone was long planned: he admits the prose itself had been through several drafts and revisions. His suffering is palpable throughout. As is the brute fact of his last desire—that he might cease to exist, that he might never have existed, caught in an excruciating balance with a fear of hurting those around him, of whom I was never one. His life touched mine in only the smallest way. It feels close to ridiculous that I need to take this so far.

 

“Pain is a relative beast,” he writes. And I understand that although sadness exists on a spectrum, despair is a singularity, whose gravity is infinite and cannot be escaped. There is sadness that drinks $1.75 beers alone. There is a far deeper sadness that casts spindled silhouettes over everything we build.

 

In the basement of the safety-net hospital in Denver is the Correctional Care Medical Facility. It is effectively a jail where patients who are incarcerated or in police custody can receive care. When I started my training there, a nurse told me about two women who had transferred from a regional prison with infected upper extremity wounds. They had cut into their arms and stuffed scraps of food into the lacerations hoping for the very infections they developed, for their transfer to the basement of the hospital where they lay handcuffed to the bed, hoping, because even this was better than where they were.

 

What I read over the single-spaced pages of the suicide note was that any previous capacity for hope had been absolutely depleted. Not only was it gone, but there was nothing that might bring it back. Not art, nor companionship, nor medication or other drugs: nothing that could imprint upon this pain. I like to think I may know something of distress, and that in turn I am developing a capacity for a broadening empathy. I have tried to place myself in such proximities, to be present and to listen. But I realize I know nothing. Because beside this darkness I have nothing, no true frame of reference for these emotions, no apparatus to understand this despair. It remains, always, around the next curve of the bay, hidden by the rocks and crashing waves, immense and impossible.

 

—

 

Midway through the note there is a volta, away from the devastation of personal struggle and toward the collective failure of humanity to examine ourselves, complicity in the gross disparities that are the engines of capitalism, our shattering capacity for willful ignorance, that cruelty. But it is in this bleak assessment of the world he is leaving that something emerges, that there could be a collective engagement to remedy our failures. “We must all learn to think on a vastly larger scale,” he writes. We must cultivate our capacity for empathy. We must indulge the pure qualities of our consciousness through education, through creativity, and through art.

 

It is art that has the negative capability to address the impossible, the potential to perform various grammars of simultaneity. The practice of art is an engagement of the imaginative mind at its intersection with the practical and as such a gesture toward simultaneity. In turn, a gesture toward simultaneity is a gesture toward the impossible. I want an art with the capacity to stack our multiple perceptual, introspective, and reflective realms into a simultaneous moment of consciousness, a mirror for the plural activities of thought. I want these moments multiplied across our numerous essays and failures. I want their silhouettes to thatch our daily lives, fading and brightening with the light and shade, for it is these oscillations that are the motor of our transcendence: to breathe, to fail, to return, to create.

 

When we realize this capacity is when we begin writing the impossible. A poetics of mortality depends on failure just as art is itself both a practice of failure and the persistent return from that failure. In this respect, the only requirements of the impossible are honesty and imagination. We need be nothing but ourselves: luminous beings that somehow occupy bodies, displacing in our own crude echoes the invisible matter that surrounds us, a silence already filled with noises.

 

—

 

On June 4, 1923, Frank Hayes, a thirty-five-year-old stableman, horse trainer, and occasional jockey, won the Belmont Steeplechase despite sitting dead in the saddle. He had been alive when the race began, had suffered a massive heart attack at some point before his horse, Sweet Kiss, crossed the line at 20-1 to win by a head. It was only when the owner and stewards approached him with congratulations that they noticed something amiss.

 

There is a middle-aged white man at the counter. He orders a cup of coffee. “Small, medium, or large?” asks the barista.

 

“Medium,” says the man, before the barista can finish the word “large.”

 

“Room for cream?” she asks.

 

“No,” says the man, “room for milk. For milk.”

 

But, I want to tell him, this is an absence that does not specify. It cannot decide on the presence that will take its place. As when god withdrew from the world to make room for creation, there was no specification for what would fill that space. Absence cannot see beyond itself because it has no beyond, the way grief is a kind of gravity: it doesn’t care who you are. What I am trying to say is that we will not be present for our own deaths, only the moments leading up to them. We cannot orchestrate the absence we will leave, despite our best attempts: notes left, debts paid, jockey’s silks pressed, 2% not half and half.

 

It’s all just around the next curve of the bay: children sleeping under blankets in the back seat of a 1980s sedan; a racehorse at full tilt with a dead man in the saddle; the tremendous quaking aspen southwest of Fish Lake; the moments in which we are able to move, to take on some portion of the grief of others; a man, an artist, in so much pain that he has tragically and meticulously chosen absence over presence.

 

—

 

When I was working the night shift at the safety-net hospital, I admitted a man to the inpatient mental health unit. I admitted hundreds of people for various ailments that year, but this man I remember so clearly. He had been seen in the ER for “suicidal ideation,” sent directly to psychiatric emergency services where upon more thorough evaluation had been adjudged an imminent danger to himself. He did not dispute this.

 

We sat a table on the acute unit where any means for self-harm had been meticulously removed. There were no door handles from which a noose might be tied. The blue plastic chairs in which we sat had only the softest contours, weighted so heavily as to resist being easily picked up or thrown. He kept his spine straight in his seat. Behind him through the wide windows spread out the condominiums and office blocks downtown. I will not describe his face, the color of his hair or eyes. I will leave unmentioned the particular timbre of his voice, but from this plastic seat with the city behind him, he spoke as an observer of an utterly impenetrable world, not as one who dwelt within that world but as one who had become only witness, removed from immediate experience, envious now of the objects around him: the table in his apartment, the books on the shelves beside it, the quiet trees outside his own window at home, their bare branches, their fallen leaves.

 

“When my body becomes ashes,” he said, “then I’ll become an object, too.” And he showed me the scars on his forearms, an inch or so proximal to his wrists, on his right side creeping onto his palm. They were mostly signatures of older wounds, years ago, the result of burning himself with cigarettes in brutal but earnest inquiries into whether he might still feel pain, feel anything. Most—aside from one fresh blister, that one seared only days prior to our encounter.

 

I saw such visceral self-interrogation on a disarmingly frequent basis that year. What marked this man apart was his attitude to these injuries. As he held his wrists out to me, he was not proud or ashamed. He did not wear his scars as medals, as intended testimony to the pitch of his suffering. He wore them with utter indifference, carried them as one would carry only the brute facts that returned him to an exhausting and circular logic: the drive to become object, accessible only through an act of ultimate subjectivity.

 

—

 

For the three or four years that bridged the 1980s and 1990s, after school was out for summer, we packed up the family sedan until it could bear no more weight. My father took his two-week holiday, and we crawled out of the driveway, to the south coast, on a passenger ferry, then along the Autoroutes of France until we came to a campsite by a lake about an hour south of Bordeaux. We unloaded the car into our rented trailer surrounded by maritime pine and spent every day at the freshwater lake. We were children. The water at the edge was shallow and warm, gradually deepening until the temperature chilled and the depth dropped off dramatically. The sudden difference meant you could stand chest high as a ten-year-old and stare out into the dark expanse of open water. We swam into that darkness and tried to find the bottom. We treaded water with no grasp of what might lie beneath. Younger siblings played closer to the shore. Our parents reclined on beach loungers, but my cousin and I, this is where we stayed, close to the darkness, swimming in and out, diving as deep as we could then returning to the shallows.

 

I have made several resolutions. I will make the journey to Fish Lake, Utah, and I will stand among the aspen. I will return to Portland, ride the same bus route and recite the poem I will have learnt by heart. When I do so, I will speak clearly. My voice will be sure. I will continue to place myself as close as I can to these things that I cannot fathom. I will swim into them. I will establish a new syntax of transition, I will live and write inside it, then I will burn it to the ground.

 

To write toward death is to engage the impossible. It is to pace the same ground over and over, to initiate and repeat, to mire oneself voluntarily, to sink. But it is also to remember oneself as an embodied being, with a beginning and with an end, capable of touching other lives in unknown or apparently trivial ways, seldom in plain sight, but in an unseen and tantalizing proximity.

 

You will be with me at the bus stop in the smell of last night’s fryers. You will be with me in the dark, on worn upholstery. You will be with me in the places where language refuses, light thatched on Formica, when breath becomes labor. You will be with me as our silhouettes rise and depart from each other, dappling the tallest buildings, taking leave from our bodies to maunder the city alone. Pinball is dying. Pando is dying. But for this instant, in these golden minutes we are here together, and everything I say to you, I say to myself:

 

If you think this may be too much, it will be.

 

Learn to think on a vastly larger scale.

 

Master the flipper.

 

Amaze your friends.

 

You and I are suddenly what the trees try to tell us we are.

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The Cut-Through

Over Cobb salad and mushroom ragù our youngest son tells us he was pulled over by the LAPD, their guns drawn as they approached his 1994 faded turquoise pickup.

 

He delivers this news while we are finishing up Sunday dinner at a local French bistro on Green Street in Pasadena, a small town just east of Los Angeles where the wide boulevards are lined with palm and oak trees and former Rose Bowl Queens reside.

 

I put my fork down, look at him sitting across from me.

 

“Where did this happen?” I ask.

 

“On Alameda, right by Chinatown, at 4:30 in the afternoon.”

 

I know this stretch of Alameda, on the edge of LA’s Chinatown. The tracks of the Gold Line subway looming high above. This is an isolated spot, a cut-through where a young man could be killed and the story never told.

 

My son looks away like his eyes are being drawn back to an afternoon memory of officers with guns.

 

“They came up to my truck and asked what I was doing.”

 

I can only imagine what went through his mind. Did he think of us? Did he remember my departing words, “be safe and I love you,” said each time he walked from my door? Did he think of his father, a teacher at a high school a few miles away from where two LAPD cops have guns pointed at him? I know he must’ve thought of those other Black boys—Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin…gunned down, gunned down, their blood flowing in America’s streets.

 

“What did you do?”

 

“I put my hands up. I didn’t want to get shot.”

 

“What did you say?”

 

He waits until the waiter fills our water glasses and leaves before he answers.

 

“I told them I was moving a sculpture from my art show. Then I said, ‘What’s up, dude?’ They were young, young like me, Mom.”

 

Our son is an artist; his rebellious nature and questioning mind was subdued that afternoon in front of officers with guns drawn. Perhaps it was the “What’s up, dude?” his hands in the air, but guns were put away. My son was told to go on, no ticket written, no violations, only by the LAPD. Somehow his Black body is a threat, his Black body can be violated, his Black body still must bow down, even now…yes’em, master.

 

The waiter returns and asks about dessert. Crème brûlée, flourless chocolate cake and a raspberry tart.

 

What does one order when your son is telling you about having guns drawn on him?

 

“Just two coffees, please,” my husband says. The waiter leaves.

 

“Were you afraid?” Such an obvious question, but it needs to be asked.

 

The answer is yes, but now anger and confusion fills the table. His voice becomes louder. His fist comes down near his plate. Water spills and a couple behind us look up. This is what he knows: his white friends never have this happen. They never are pulled over for no reason, lives threatened, their mere existence questioned.

 

—

 

When he was a baby I would kiss him over and over again, telling him how beautiful his dark skin was, it was the best. He believed me and as a boy always thought this skin, his skin, his deep dark blackness, his fine mind were blessings, something to be honored and praised. He now stomps around our home, declaring that young Black men are engaged in an endless battle, “They are trying to kill us, Mom. It’s a war.”

 

Each death is personal to my boy.

 

“It’s worse since Obama was president!” he says. “A Black man was president, and they still can do this shit to us.”

 

My husband says he understands. “I used to get pulled over all the time back in Boston. The cops always said a car that looked like mine was involved in a robbery. I drove a silver vintage 1965 Mercedes. There were no cars like mine.”

 

The waiter brings the check. A credit card is placed down on a silver tray.

 

“When did this happen?”

 

“April.”

 

It is now December.

 

“Why didn’t you tell us then? Why did you wait?”

 

My son looks at me now.

 

“Because, Mom, you already worry enough. I didn’t want to scare you.”

 

So this is what it looks like when you unpack this oppression, this seemingly bottomless pit of racism. He carries the responsibility of protecting himself, of calculating how to walk safely in the world that often doesn’t see his worth. In his America, where he knows his education and class sometimes protect him, his “What’s up, dude?” might have saved his life, this time. He feels he has to shield me from this.

 

“You should have told us then. Maybe we could have done something.”

 

These are hollow words, seem empty as they leave my mouth. I wonder what we could have done. Two armed police who left no visible trace. They hadn’t killed him after all, only drawn guns. What harm in that, easily erased, never recorded?

 

Dinner is over. The table is cleared. We make our way towards the door. The restaurant is more crowded now. The hum of conversations mixed with laughter and a mother soothing a crying baby fill the air. On top of each linen-covered table is a small candle, giving the restaurant a soft amber glow. Most times I would have been comforted by this place, by a good meal out on a Sunday night, knowing we have earned membership in this world of candle-lit dinners, chilled wine, and crusty bread pulled and delicately dipped in seasoned virgin olive oil. Yet, tonight this restaurant with its seemingly polite people dining on carefully crafted plates feels like a surreal tapestry, weaving itself around me as I try to find my way out.

 

In front of me I see a white middle-aged couple with their adult son. They are laughing. The mother reaches out and rubs her son’s arm tenderly. Clear long-stemmed glasses filled with deep ruby-colored wine are raised in a toast of celebration. The mother glances up at me and smiles. She thinks we are the same, out on a Sunday evening with our grown sons. She looks like someone I could have been friends with once. We would have shared a carpool, arranged play dates, worried over how to set limitations for our little boys while we organized a fundraiser gala for the PTA. I would have been her one Black friend. Yet, we would never truly talk about how my concerns for my little boy might be different than hers. She would never ask, and I wouldn’t reveal the things that divided us. I have no smiles for her tonight, no balm for my own rage. I look away and follow my son’s lead out of the restaurant.

 

I pause at the glass door, waiting for a moment before stepping out into the night. There are little sparkling white lights strung outside along the restaurant’s wrought-iron patio railing. Beyond the lights, I see my son and husband standing side by side. These two men, one young, the other older, sharing the same American story. My husband reaches up, hugs our son in a deep embrace.

 

It is winter in this desert. A cold chill sweeps across my face as I step outside. My son puts his hands in his jeans’ pockets. I’m standing next to them now.

 

“I love you, son,” my husband says.

 

“Me, too.”

 

My boy is lighter now, the dinner conversation behind him.

 

“Where are you heading?” I ask.

 

“Over to Echo Park to meet some friends. It’s still the weekend, you know, Mom.” He smiles.

 

“Okay. Be safe and I love you.”

 

He grabs me around the shoulder, kisses my cheek and then makes his way down the alley towards his truck.

 

My husband and I watch as he walks away from us. We don’t say anything, just watch his tall thin frame in black skinny jeans and a blue oversized jacket go off into the night.

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Good Pressing

[1992, Nevada County, California]

Grandma takes my beating heart in her warm hands and holds it until it softens, until it knows it is safe to open. She sings stories so it will remember things it has never felt. She lulls its redness with her touch. When the heart opens she pours in all her love and all her fears with it. She pours in all her dreaming and her bruises. She touches its tissues to her swollen lips and weeps. The muscle grows bigger with her tears. The muscle grows tender, skittish to the touch. She sets a kettle on the stove and stirs in possibility, measuring out worries in her palm before sprinkling them in. She ladles the brine into a bowl and serves it with oyster crackers. She spreads the heart with a butter knife on toast and tells me to eat, to help myself to more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since age five there has been one constant: transit. Joint custody, foreign exchange, weekly commutes, overseas living. I left the home I knew because there were no other options for a girl who picked up the scent of rotting bodies buried in the women around her, who saw despair seething out tiny pores and ragged cuticles, the bloodied carnage piled high from generations before her, around her, closing in. Wasted. All this utterly wasted human capacity and the lethal rage it breeds. The biting perfectionism of the frustrated woman. The broken women who break babies the way they break mustangs. At twelve, I signed a pact in blood with momma swearing I would not marry or have babies. It was a pact with myself to remain human. At the first chance: a high school exchange program in Colima, Mexico. Free, except for airfare. Only two students per semester in a school of three thousand. I applied. Anywhere. Anywhere but here. I saved money for the ticket from an afterschool job. I was sixteen. Because the violence of gendering was not taken seriously, I could not call myself a refugee. I could only say: Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, Madrid, Sacramento, Chicago, New York, Brasília, Rio. I could only see my smiling white face in brochures and on billboards across Mexico advertising the international school I attended for free in the exchange. I could only say: I was privileged. I could only say: I was lucky enough to get away.

 

 

 

 

[August 2001, St. Louis University, Madrid campus]

I made it to college. I read Alice Walker’s recollection of three gifts her mother gave her when she left home and went off to study. I underline one gift – a sewing machine – and the rationale for it: that it was the one tool she could use to make anything she needed so she wouldn’t have to depend on anyone else. It stuck with me: the image of that sewing machine being part of feminist theory in an academia in which I felt so alien. I spent a day and a night in that basement apartment scrubbing the tile walls of their years layered in oil spatters, and in those hours, instead of the familiar shame, I felt proud of my mothers, my grandmothers. Of the practical skills they had gifted me. Of all they could give.

 

 

[September 2013, Rio de Janeiro]

I grew fascinated with language because language was the thing used to contain, to beat me into smaller pieces so that I would be easier for my family and my culture to masticate. They were busy. They didn’t have space for the room I needed. So, I studied the words, the syntaxes. I kept a spiral notebook where I composed rhyming poems, copied down strings of letters I didn’t understand and looked up their definitions. I made lists from a thesaurus of words to use in future rhyming poems. I turned to paper when punished for speaking. Dish soap and thumbs down my throat, the larynx closes. Be seen, not heard. Be accommodating and sweet. I was told terrible stories about myself, explanations for why I was so strange, so troublesome and mean. I became a bully who was bullied. I had no other way to say things. Bad words were off-limits but bad words turn toxic when kept inside a body. They eat away at the esophagus, erode the trachea. The difference between Brazilians and United Statesians, between those raised male and those raised female, it seems, has something to do with the way words are held and released.

 

It is strange to use text in this quilt, to employ written language in a tradition developed largely by silenced ones: the slave, the wife, the woman. But this is my reality now: writing, the privilege of my education. This is my contribution to the tradition, then. An expansion, not a breaking.

 

Bringing quilting into writing, integrating it: the only way this work is real. For it to exist only as Roman script on white paper would be a false making. Forced sterilization.

 

On paper, I cannot move my pen in a straight line. I have tried and it is terrible. Some would say good, but that’s not true. Things move sidewards. Lines round, contain too many hyphens, rests, commas, internal rhymes, refrains.

 

 

I give my head to clear thinking

My heart to greater loyalty

My hands to larger service

For my club, my community, my country, and my world.

– 4-H Pledge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[2003, California State University, Sacramento]

I design a Special Major in Chicano/Latino Literature & Art. It is not the novelty of an assumed cultural “other” that I find engaging, but the histories and articulations of rural, working class and Far West experience otherwise absent in academia. I resist the narrative that culture only travels East to West, North to South because I have seen it move in all directions. I know Indigenous America and Africa have had extensive influence on U.S. and European cultures. I know that Country & Western ballads are just boleros sung sideways and that cowboys are adaptations of Mexican vaqueros. I rebel against the cultural hegemony of an English Major. I study the ancient civilizations of this land, the Silk Road and the Islamic Empire, how Africa made its way through Portugal and Spain and into the so-called New World in ways our national narrative does not allow. I study how plants native to the Americas became the base for contemporary Italian cuisine because Italians were the only Europeans willing to experiment with fruits and vegetables new to them. I study the undocumented intermixing of our One Drop heritage, and the ways languages change and adapt just as readily as culture even in spite of institutionalized racism. It is through the language of Chicanismo that the Eurasian aunt who raised me and I can speak about our family: my Dust Bowl kin who call themselves White who were once High Germans who shame Low Germans who lie about Gypsies who marry poor Mexicans who marry poor Swedes who marry poor French Canadians who lie about any kind of Indian who marry poor Nicaraguans who marry poor Blacks who marry poor Blackfeet who marry elite Japanese who marry wealthy Englishmen who marry whomever the fuck they please. It is in the overlaps and blending, in the mestizaje I feel most at home.

 

 

 

[2012, Rio de Janeiro]

I cross the street to the pharmacy. The military police are outside yielding assault rifles, occupying the entrance to the favela down a side street. Rio has just secured its bid for the 2016 Olympics. I notice my visceral response to assault rifles on men in uniform is different from other passers by. I notice myself as foreign in this instance, as gringa hailing from the radical left and libertarian hills of Northern California: my response is terror, then rage. Milling around me are faces that convey we are used to this. This is normal. I mask my reaction. I enter the pharmacy, buy toilet paper, toothpaste. Commerce drones on down the boulevard: un suco de abacaxi e um pão de queijo, por favor.

 

 

 

[2013, Rio de Janeiro]

Apathy in a year’s time has turned to outrage, action, political mobilization. Protests one million strong all across the country finding solidarity in a global network of anonymous sites, authors. There is deep fear in the daily proof that life here is not valued. But there has been enough. Basta já! There are reverberations of Brazil’s past revolutions, of the Arab Spring, of Occupy. There is no face, only moving.

 

[2013, São Paulo]

We set up our table at Feira Plana, the largest artist publications fair in the country. Makers are enflamed. The medium itself again becomes an active one, full of nuance and risk. R staffs our table while I hop from press to press examining new work, swapping samples and talking shop. I return to staff our table while she tours the fair. We have become part of a traveling band of independent publishers in a place where independent publishing was long illegal. Until the mid-1800s, printing in the colonies was forbade; all published materials had to be printed in Britain and then imported from the Portuguese crown. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to acquire a printing press (Mexico was the first), let alone to legalize publishing in the colony. This is part of the reason we have found it hard to buy paper or print books locally: there is no strong tradition of papermaking or printing, and, by extension, a limited number of well-trained printers. There are letterpress printers from the Cordel tradition, but not much by way of commercial printing. Our small press had to limit a recent edition to 750 copies because that was the maximum quantity of a particular paper to be found in all the country. The past is present is not philosophy, but economics. Today at Casa do Povo, we are part of a blend of small presses, fine art presses, self-publishers, poster makers, book artists, artist-instructors, cartoonists, zine makers and poets. Many print with the aid of salvaged technologies that allow hands to smudge ink: letterpress, silkscreen, risograph, Xerox. The immediacy and resilience of our mediums are especially resonant now. Again.

 

 

 

You repair the thing until you remake it completely.

Louise Bourgeois

 

 

It is the compulsion of the Western fine art tradition to break from that very tradition. We call this Innovation and True Art and deny that it came from anything but Pure Genius. We are often blind to the continuity, even the continuity of the impulse to make it new.

 

It was not until age thirty that I could write in first person plural. It was not until age thirty that I felt entitled enough to write using the word “we,” to claim myself as part of a larger cultural conversation.

 

I resist the act of writing to be fully present in my body – stitching, making, moving. This need makes the shaming come alive: you are lazy, too feminine, too poor to be smart, too rural. A bumpkin. But if I keep moving, if I stay in this wordless making, I soak in its power on its own terms. I am released from the peculiar colonization of the written word upon my flesh.

 

 

[April 2014, California]

I begin sewing a welcoming quilt for my new nephew from scraps of worn-in clothing from each member of his family. Sometimes we must make a thing only for our love of the person receiving it. I am pulled to make him something to touch, something to hold over his little boy body when it feels fragile or alone or battered by this world, something to remind him he is loved. Something to protect him from the particular brutality this world holds for his little boy body.

 

The making of his quilt takes months away from my studio practice, places me in the bedroom with a fold-up table, sewing machine, chair. I love this making. It returns me. But, I cannot help but feel plagued by the notion that turning my making toward a loved one minimizes my work, places me back in the world of country crafts and women’s work –quilts, scrapbooks, embroidery. I have swallowed the myth of male genius, too, despite my body’s attempts to reject it. It poisons my love of other ways of making, insisting that I am less of an artist when I care for those around me, when I hold the capacity to hold them close and give.

 

I refuse this. I see all around me a world of makers, many of them women, equally adept at committing to their own making and at elevating those around them. I slash open a vein to drain the poison. I suck out the altered blood and spit mouthfuls on the ground. I cauterize the breakage, begin interviewing makers who also make space for others. I make plans to publish a series of these interviews, then a book.

 

In their most active years, members of the Royal Chicano Air Force —originally called the Rebel Chicano Art Front— did not distinguish between those who secured the grants, organized the events, repaired the engines, and those who made the artwork. This act of denying divisions was a conscious subversion of Eurocentric frameworks of art and life and culture. Or, as Dr. Ella Maria Diaz writes, “An important component of the RCAF’s creation of a Chicano/a mural environment was their collapse of artistic hierarchy in opposition to the idea of beauty and artistic genius as the realm of the individual artist.” In the tellings and retellings of their story in the popular press, however, this ideology is downplayed and the more conventional story of the RCAF as a core group of visual artists becomes History.

 

How does one convey a different narrative to a reader unwilling or unable to read any other way than the one they already know? The widespread exclusion of historically marginalized voices from prominent venues of culture is attributed to this unwillingness to think beyond convention.

 

People who have survived atrocities … witnesses as well as victims are subject to the dialectic of trauma. It is difficult for an observer to remain clearheaded and calm, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and persuasively what one has seen.

Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery

 

Everywhere I carry my North American body – Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Japan as reconstructed inside the Sacramento home of my WWII-surviving great-aunt – there is a physical layer I must shed in order to be in that place. I am made acutely aware of a covering I carry in the place I most often call home, a shield crafted against the daily violence of life there. It is a different kind of shield than the one I carry in Rio on my way to work where the violence is honest – armed robberies, murders, looting. There are other kinds of violence, too: class warfare, threats of another military coup, hate crimes, rape. And yet my body remains open in particular ways as I walk the street aware of very real danger. I am guarded, yes. I am hyper-vigilant all the time. Watchful. Weary. It is exhausting. The artist Alma Leiva crystallizes this feeling in her installation-photograph series Celdas (Prison Cells), in which she recreates the interiors of homes in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras and a narco-city now infamous for being the most violent in the world. Leiva brings outside elements such as playground sand and teeter-totters inside, giving the intimacy of home space the weight of the prison cell it becomes in a city where the danger outside seeps into everything. In her essay, “The Other Side of Fear: Alma Leiva’s Prison Cells,” Dr. Tatiana Reinoza writes, “Home spaces are records of embodied and situated knowledge that allow viewers to connect the private with the collective sphere of experience.” Reinoza goes on to cite the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains, María Brito and several artists in diaspora whose work focuses on intimate space as sites of violence and memory. These troubled intimacies are more common than we care to admit.

 

We drink excessively in Rio. Drinking allows dance and laughter, but the weight of history and its consequences is left unaccounted for, untended. The body doesn’t close, but it craves numbing, a safety. We spend our days off from work indoors, attempting to unravel. When I am designing Leiva’s exhibition catalog years later, the sight of her photographs causes blood to rush to the surface of my skin. The feeling that radiates from the pixels haunts, finally distilled.

 

In the United States, it is the body that closes. It shuts in on itself to ward off the myriad micro-assaults to the senses: separation, subdivision, the aggressive insistence of a thing called personal space, the sound of English in the way we speak it, the threat of white male terrorism that knows no consequence: mass murder, serial rape, shootings by police. My skin braces for the chill of contact: the handshake, the monotone speech that inquires about what I do for a living, the askance looks at any slip into vulnerability, desire, feeling. There is little space to be human here unless I am alone. And while solitude can be cause for elation, the prolonged isolation of one human from others causes the heart to stop. It incites death by a slow, steady calcification layered upon the flesh. This subtle closing is not the same as one that threatens immediate survival, of course, but it threatens survival all the same. The body only breaks more slowly.

 

And what happens when intimate space itself is a warzone? Where does the body break then?

 

In empire, violence becomes a proud part of family narrative. We are sons and daughters and grandchildren of heroes who fight in wars to protect our freedom. We absorb the trauma of the soldier. We treat their pain as elevated, as honorable and just. And yet our domestic homicide toll accounts for more of our own deaths than all the soldiers in all the wars we’ve fought, but we do not honor these sacrifices or their repercussions. Violence becomes a comfort when tied to home life, like the scent of vanilla or a wood-burning stove.

 

[1992, Nevada County, California]

Grandma dresses me in a button-down shirt, pressed with starch, dried by the fireside. She talks me through the binding of a tie, pointed at the end like my father’s, knotted perfect. Don’t you never kiss no man’s foot.

 

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