CLUTTER a Thesis Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University

CLUTTER

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Fine Arts

Michael Dull

May, 2018 CLUTTER

Michael Dull

Thesis

Approved: Accepted:

______Advisor Dean of Arts and Sciences Varley O’Connor Dr. John Green

______Faculty Reader Executive Dean of Graduate School Eric Wasserman Dr. Chand Midha

______Faculty Reader Date David Giffels

______Department Chair Dr. Sheldon B Wrice

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER

I. HE’S DEAD………………………………………………………………………….....1

II. FATIGUE …………………………………………………………………………….17

III. NEW NEIGHBORS …………………………………………………………………31

IV. STANLEY AS A CHILD …………………………………………………………...53

V. RAYMOND SEES AN EXHIBIT …………………………………………………...65

VI. BREAKING UP …………………………………………………………………….77

VII. DINNER AT RAYMOND’S ………………………………………………………89

VIII. VIRGINIA’S LAST DAYS ……………………………………………………….94

IX. THE PARTY ………………………………………………………………………109

X. SPIRIT ……………………………………………………………………………..128

XI. TRYING SOMETHING NEW ……………………………………………………132

iii CHAPTER I

HE’S DEAD

Since it is up to me to remember, I’m afraid to admit that I’ve failed, failed because I can’t quite recall when it was that the sensations, notions, memories, facts, histories both global and personal, all came together to lead me onto pen the words I did that led to my academic disgrace and eventual “deed,” because it might have come over me while on a beach in southern Greece (a flood of black sub-Saharan faces dehydrated from Mediterranean sun), or perhaps I can think of a whiff of that old familiar feeling in

Vienna when I heard the most beautiful Brahms concertos ring out from violin strings bowed by Asian hands. What I felt then, but only realize now, is that I was sensing a change in my academic obsession, my area of study, what occupied my entire adult life.

The legacy of the Western World was changing, not changing, but being toppled, overthrown, right in front of me, and happening quietly, beautifully, right before everyone’s eyes, as well as my own.

But, I do remember, however, the moment that I realized my own life had been moving on without me, the way water moves around a lonely boulder planted in the middle of a stream.

1 When the hospital contacted me—my name, number, affiliation, all stuffed in my father’s wallet—they explained that the most likely culprit was a heart attack.

The only thought in my mind was, He’s dead. Not, My father is dead.

It was the least likely way he would have wanted to go, I thought. One minute there, the next gone, off into whatever was next and no time to take anything with him.

Good. The bastard never let anything go without leaving marks.

After the funeral, I drove to his house, where he spent the last lonely days of his life. I was alone. I didn’t invite Billie to the funeral. It hadn’t even particularly occurred to me to tell her that my father had died.

As I pulled into the driveway of the Victorian, pale-green, wood sided, single- family home with no family, the sky was cloudless, colored by a pink-purple gradient, and all around me the suburban alpenglow along the roofs of the fourplex homes glimmered.

Walking up the four short steps to the front door, I realized that the last time I saw my father alive was almost two years ago. The neighborhood was quiet but not silent. All around I could feel the phantom rumbles of life being lived behind closed doors, shut up inside by dead bolts and glass panes, which flickered like stars in yellows, blues, greens, and reds from images of the evening news, a nightly movie, the summer’s biggest blockbuster, or a violent video game.

When I reached the door, it swung open. From the sag of the man’s jowls I took a stab at his age, taking into account the shot-elasticity of the face like the worn out waist of a pair of sweatpants. Like a gravity thermometer, a marked curvature of the spine told the tale of Earth’s downward tug like a nursery rhyme book. The thickness of the man’s

2 spectacle’s lenses told time as well as the exposed layers of an old canyon’s rock. The fit of his shirt, and his jeans’ shaded fade were a measure of how little he cared for outward appearances and how much he cared for keeping on top of his properties.

“You the son?” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “Stanley Malwell, nice to meet you.”

“I’m the landlord, Ken Bramuk,” he said, swinging the door open a bit further so I could see the rest of him, see the marks of his sedentary life. “I’m glad you showed up, because there’s a lot needs done around here now that he’s gone.”

I hadn’t thought about this. I wasn’t sure what to make of the will except for this important fact: everything my father owned now belonged to me. Oh, the twisted luck of life.

A neighbor, Joyce, served as executor. At the funeral, she explained that my father felt that leaving everything to me would be best and that I could do with it all whatever it was I wanted: sell it all, keep it, or burn every scrap in the pit out back. After the funeral, Joyce said she would meet me at the house sometime that night.

“Come on in,” Bramuk said as he turned to walk back inside.

What I thought I’d known, the house I had catalogued in my mind, was not the one I saw. Splayed out in front of me was everything my father felt fit to leave behind. I didn’t feel like I was visiting the home of someone I knew, let alone my own father’s.

Standing in the doorway, I could hardly see into the rest of the house, an amalgam of haphazardly stacked boxes formed a wall. It wasn’t the house I grew up in; only a few objects, a lamp here, an end table there, that gave it the resemblance of the father I’d known.

3 He was always a collector of things, never one to let anything go. After my mother died, he retreated into his self-imposed hoarderdom, although I’d had no idea to what lengths he eventually went.

The smell wasn’t unbearable, only faintly fecal with an occasional urine whiff.

“When I got here, I took a look around,” Bramuk said. “Looked like he hadn’t flushed in a while.”

“I was just thinking that,” I said.

Even the certainty of the very room I stood in was called into question because of the clutter. Since the rooms of a house are defined by their difference from those around them, a living room being a living room only because it isn’t a kitchen, it’s hard to say where it was in the house I was standing. The word “foyer” is a possible match. But is it the physical space and its geographic location within the larger structure of the house, or is it the things within it that make it a foyer? I looked for a big rug to stomp my feet, or a rack filled with sets of important keys. It wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but surely somewhere there was a mirror to the left so that one might see what they looked like after encountering the outside world.

When I turned to close the door behind me I felt how warm the house was inside.

I looked for a coat rack, maybe one with three moth-eaten coats and a few hole-filled hats hanging limply from the top.

Next to the door I found one, albeit one that was empty. When I hung my coat on the hook, the weight slowly toppled the rack and it fell over, setting off a chain reaction of clattering boxes, books, clothes, magazines, and newspapers. Everything in the house subscribed to this sort of butterfly effect; an untimely fall for a box of soap in the

4 bathroom might shift a spoon in the kitchen. The house, though empty, felt animate, like a living, breathing, moving organism: its motion observable, its breath like shit and piss, its memories as axiomatic as an electromagnetic field.

“Sorry,” I said, and, as if it mattered, I hung my coat on the dilapidated coat rack now leaning up against the wall.

“Don’t apologize to me,” Bramuk said. “It’s yours now.”

In me I felt the sensation to turn around and run away grow, to forget about my father, his house, his possessions, to laugh at and turn tail to the idea that the living owed any sort of debt to the dead. At this moment, I thought, I can rid myself of all the trouble.

At some point in each person’s life filial roles reserve, parents regress to children and vice versa. I had observed the cycle. As a child, I wished for, and garnered, nearly all of my mother’s attention. I succumbed to all of her and my father’s judgments. The cycle involved surrendering in a rigid order: physically, emotionally, and physically. The chain of authority takes an about-face, seemingly in abrupt fashion, but when I thought about it, it had been happening all along. The point of offspring is succession into the future, the assurance that one’s own collection of molecules and unique traits moved on, a way forcing someone, anyone, even a child, to bow in reverence.

It is the children’s role to make the death of the parents easier for the rest of society. They are the forward-thinking plot device which will later tie up all of death’s loose ends.

“So, this is it,” Bramuk said walking from the foyer and into the living room.

And it was here amongst these boxes stacked high with papers, envelopes, cords, clothes and books sticking out of them that he died, I thought.

5 I followed the walkways, forcing my way through the materials scattered about, finding, water-like, the paths of least resistance.

Must permeated the air, so thick it felt like another object in the room to tread through.

For the first time in my life I felt an uneasy claustrophobia. I was unable to shake the house’s sealed-off nature, its tombness. The wallpaper was visible, but peeling away, the dry wall beneath exposed. Whole sections of it hung loose over-top of framed paintings dotting the walls. A thin layer of dust lay like a translucent skin over everything.

Bramuk kept walking and disappeared around a corner. When I caught up with him he stood in the middle of the kitchen. Boxes were stacked one atop the other, all of them, like the cupboards: filled—in one, the corners of cracker boxes, another, the metallic shine of potato chips, and the next, the obscure oat and wheatiness of granola bars.

The kitchen was slightly more open than the living room. I understood why

Bramuk chose it as the best room to talk.

“Thankfully he had enough sense not to keep anything that would spoil.”

I opened the flap of one half-full box. Inside it there was a bed of fruit snacks. I took two pouches. One I put in my pocket, and the other I began to eat from.

“What’s up?” a shrill, choked voice said from the corner of the kitchen.

On top of a stack of phone-books with still fresh, uncracked spines, was a bird cage. From inside, a grey cockatiel with orange blush, side-stepped back and forth across a wooden rod, darting his ink-blot eyes around as if he were a watchman over the room’s

6 relics.

“That’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about,” Bramuk said. “Any idea what to do with the bird?”

“I didn’t even know he had a bird,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

I looked in the cage at the bird. He stared back inquisitively, as if he recognized something in the features of my face.

“He’s a noisy bastard,” Bramuk said. “But since I’ve been here, I’ve noticed he can say a few phrases. Your dad must’ve have taught him.”

I imagined my father in the kitchen, in his own little universe, his bird squawking at random, “What’s up?” to which he’d say, “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Then the bird would ask, “What’s up?” to which he’d say, “Nothing, Frankie. Not much at all.”

During my imaginations Bramuk had slipped out of the kitchen. I walked back into the living room where I heard Bramuk shuffling around.

I snaked through the pathways, turned a corner, and hop-skipped over the spilled contents of a pulverized box. A few papers gained some breeze in the air and went their way—bank statements, clumps of Tuesday ads, wrappers, car dealerships advertising

President’s Day deals. My father’s things felt as if they were pulling at me, attempting to draw me into their disorder.

After charging through one last tight-rope line between two mounds of my father’s possessions, I found Bramuk standing in an open area just in front of four milk crates stacked two-by-two on top of which a lop-sided wool olive-colored military blanket lay across. I sat down on one and continued to chewing my fruit snacks slowly, staring at the television a few feet away.

7 “Here’s where they found him, on the rug,” Bramuk said. “Must’ve been sitting there.”

On the floor, beneath my feet, there was a circular rug, voidish black and tinged with purple; this is where they found him: milk-white, string-like arms and legs attached to his gut, his bulbous center, around him his possessions lay about like the accrued material residues of a human life, a dead hermetic mystagogue of modern America surrounded by his trappings.

I felt a rootlessness.

A deep unconnectedness colored my view of all that left-behind effluvia, my father’s possessions that outlasted him and had stories of their own, stories which they told, not with voices, but by the sheer magnitude of their numbers, their multiplicity, and the vast swaths of places and times from which they’d been collected. Even through the bird—that avian minstrel of mimicry who croaked “Whatchu doin?” from his silent corner of the room—I could still hear my father’s voice.

I stood up from the crates and tottered toward the bathroom, excusing myself. I stepped over a phone cord and walked past mounds of unopened envelopes, furniture advertisements and old newspapers with outdated news.

“What do you do?” Bramuk said, stopping me. “If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”

“I teach history. I’m a professor at the university.”

“I always liked history in school,” he said.

Every stranger I ever told about my profession answered in a similar way. By then, I was numb to the statement. But, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that he really

8 didn’t, like history that is. People, I’ve found, only enjoy the certainty of knowing where it is they’ve come from. They enjoy history as a kind of novelty, an old re-run. They always seem to forget the horror of the past’s ability to predict our possible futures. No one ever takes into account that the past is never past.

I saved Bramuk the diatribe and muttered in agreeance.

“Mind if I ask what it is you’re teaching right now?”

“I’m on sabbatical.”

His eyes widened and head nodded in such a way that he wasn’t sure what the word meant.

“It’s an extended vacation from teaching for professors,” I said. “For research, among other things.”

The debacle, as I’d come to call it, was a bit of a blessing in disguise. The leave that the university allowed me to take, even though I wasn’t up for sabbatical until the following year, was given because the chair of the department felt that it was probably better if I took my break until things had settled down.

“Well, that’s good for you then,” Bramuk said. “Would you like me to show you around the house anymore?”

I shook my head.

“That’s alright. I’ll be okay by myself,” I said.

“Well I’ll leave you to it then,” Bramuk said. “But I’d like it if sooner rather than later you could get this place cleaned out, alright? Your father was okay, but damn was he one messy bastard. And my deepest condolences, but if you could have it all cleaned out by next month I’d appreciate it.”

9

“What about his lease?” I said.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I’ve owned this house for a long time, own most of them this side of the street. I don’t even think I’ll look for another renter, to be honest.”

“Why’s that?”

“The university is planning on buying me out on these houses so they can put in an esplanade.”

After Bramuk left, I went through the upstairs bedrooms. They were in a better state than downstairs. It looked as if he spent little, if any, time up there.

I finally made it to the bathroom. A stack of tissue paper boxes and sixteen-count

2-ply toilet paper sat on top of the toilet bowl. I picked them up and placed them on the corner of the vanity, pushing a chain of more tissue boxes and empty bottles of liquid hand soap into the sink.

She died without her dentures in; that’s why they fell onto the floor. I looked down at them closely, picked them up. The fluid that kept them moist and clean had vanished, evaporated into the air. I looked at their shape and contour. The dentures were molded to my mother’s mouth, rugae still fossilized in the roof like evaporated ancient rivers of blood. Like Mary kept Percy’s heart, Francis kept Virginia’s teeth. He kept them, like everything else, because there was no reason to throw them away.

“Not everything has to be useful,” he would say. “Because something passed its purpose, should it be thrown away?”

I wondered what would happen if he did throw them away. They would take up space somewhere else on Earth, out of sight out of mind, just another bit of trash in an

10 even larger heap.

I put the teeth on the back of the vanity.

I went back to the kitchen to look for something to drink. I found a bottle of scotch, Macallan 12, in the bread box and carried it into the living room.

I sat on the milk crates in the middle of the room and sipped from the bottle. On an end table to my left I looked through an unstable stack of books: popular fiction,

Chrichtons, le Carrés, Grishams. I rifled through them, placing one after the other on the corner. While reading through their opening chapters and the dust jacket flaps I tried to imagine my father reading through those books, but I couldn’t. Their virgin spines, new- book smell, betrayed any notion that they were ever read. It wasn’t their fictional function he’d wanted, it was the space they took up, their potential to stave off emptiness.

As I picked up all the books I’d taken out of the stack to file them back into their original place, one fell from the top of the few in my hand. Everything piled high on the end table sprawled out onto the floor. I hear something hard fall from the back of the table and onto the floor behind me.

After I picked up the books and papers from the floor, I found beneath a small mound of mail my father’s .22 pistol, charcoal black underneath the lamp’s glow.

Of all the things in this house, I thought, this is something that shouldn’t be left out. I walked it over to my jacket on the rack in the foyer and put it in the pocket. Then I went back into the living room and turned on the television. A short time later I fell asleep.

*

I woke up a few hours later, slouched on top of the milk crates, a dim lamp in the

11 corner the only light. My head ached. The bottle of Macallan 12 I’d found lay next to me.

On the TV, a long-form television series featuring an ensemble cast of superheroes, the new wave of television show which contented itself with successions of never-ending open-ended questions, unclear motivations, deferred resolutions, complex tapestries of connection between characters, and attractive women in tight costumes. The plots were dull at best, the acting sub-par, but the sheer spectacle was always able to rise above all the flaws. The show made me think of a conversation I’d had with possibly my only friend, a fellow professor, Raymond, “We see a shift at the visual aesthetic level to ornate woolgathering and wanton excitations. The elevation to prominence within mainstream visual cultural practices of formal attributes in and for themselves and an obvious proclivity toward technique and image as opposed to content and meaning, for most film scholars, is evidence of apocalypse, reasons why it’s all over.”

I felt that way, too. Like something was all over.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette. It was now dark, but the televisions still cast their flickering light upon the windows throughout the neighborhood. It was cool out, the crisp fall air’s chill descending rapidly. From across the street a woman walked toward me. When she reached the steps, the porch light illuminated her features; it was Joyce, my father’s neighbor-executor.

She was in her early thirties and an amalgam of Jewish beauty. On top of a long oval face, her lips curled backward toward her pale skin. Her nose was thick, her eyebrows inverted shallow black Us, a body like a female Semitic pastiche. Still foggy from the scotch, I couldn’t help but stare at her. Her breasts, her body, were distracting and within them the power to bring out any man-child’s infantile wants, wants which

12 made one miss the life of an unwrinkled, unmuscled pink blob whose only job is to shit, cry, and suckle tit.

I stared up at her, she looked as if she understood what I was thinking. I’ve found women are always much better at this than men. This is who I am, I thought. People distrusted my singleness, my refusal to settle down. If I’d had any friends they would have tried to hook me up, tried to play matchmaker, signed me up on dating websites. As it was, I remained a deviant, an unmarried forty-five year old mildly successful history professor.

She said hello, and that it was good to see me again.

Joyce looked as if she wasn’t sure what to say. I couldn’t think of anything either.

There wasn’t anything to say. But she was the one to break the silence.

“I didn’t say anything earlier, but I was the one that found him,” she said. “Or at least I was the one who called the police who then found him.”

She explained that every Tuesday she would take him to the supermarket to buy groceries, so when he didn’t answer the door, she knew something was wrong.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. It was the most banal and predictable sentiment that always follows a death.

I nodded, knowing it was more for herself than me. It was simply a burden she wanted to ease off herself. She brightened up a bit, perhaps knowing she’d done her duty.

Joyce began to tell me about all the times she had taken my father to the store, but

I knew her own stories couldn’t be any different from the ones I’d experienced myself.

I imagined my father there, awash in the supermarket spectacle. All of it coming to him at once—the noise, the colors, the shapes, aisles upon aisles of food, drink,

13 condoms, and cookware, all of it laid out in straight lines and priapic ordered rows, the blast of air like a cleansing effect of a spaceship airlock when he walked in.

It was one of his few excursions—house to store—where he could get everything that he needed, the supermarket convenient convenience store. At least twice a week,

Joyce explained, he decided that he needed some new product, a new tropically scented floor cleaner, the most recently advertised snack. He was, by all visual accounts, a kid with candy, a grandpa in a grocery store.

In clunky diabetic shoes—faux-leather Dutch clogs—that forced him into an equilibristic tottering act anytime he walked, he leisurely strolled up and down the aisles, serpentining. He studied the labels of products on each shelf like a student. He observed the price tags. He glanced at UPCs as if they were sacred hieroglyphics. I pictured his face, wrinkle-ridden, wan-complected, and contorted, as if he was trying to hold something back. But most of all, Joyce said, my father looked like he was in a state of astonishment. To a passerby he might have struck the image of a third-world refugee, some unlucky soul born in the wrong place at the wrong time, on his first trip to the supermarket. What befuddled and bemused him, I knew, was not the simple allure of shiny things, but the concept keeping it all in check, the order. He was frightened by it, order. This train of thought—that the architecture gives force, pushes from A to B, beginning to end, birth to death—was always on his mind. He shopped without a list. The prospect of a list might have made the trips shorter. He could, if he was so inclined, use the aisle labels that hung above his head, telling customers what was where. He could consult and take advantage of both conveniences of order and they would make his trip shorter, less stressful, turn his quest for nourishment into a robotic predestined and pre-

14 designed mouse maze. But, like all mazes with rodents scurrying through its aisles, this maze was designed with the things of most importance in the middle; he would be led up, around and back down in a strict straight-line fashion, ensuring that he saw everything the store had to offer. But, evidently, it was the spiraling motions, the pattern-less path that he preferred.

When it came time to check out, he watched as the cashier used lasers, computers and software to calculate the value of his purchases.

“His eyes were constantly watering,” she said. “Not tears, just something he did often.”

“A symptom of his diabetes,” I said.

“It was worse while walking through the store, though.”

I’d seen it before. He’d flip his hankie back and forth across his eyes. Perhaps, if one didn’t know any better, it would have looked like a call of surrender, or a goodbye wave, like the people do in old films showing ships leaving port.

He hadn’t changed then, I thought, after Joyce finished telling her story.

Joyce said that we should get together some time for coffee, wanted to talk to me more about my father. I smiled at the hollowness of the proposition, hoping it was sincere, but I wasn’t sure.

“I enjoyed my time with him very much,” she said.

The remark satisfied her and she turned and walked back across the street.

A small bit of me felt remorse, but another part of me felt released, as if I had become, finally, an adult.

I went back inside and sat once again on the milk crates and turned the television

15 on. The nightly news’s headline story involved a biology professor who was being pressured by students to resign. The newscaster explained that the professor suggested in his lecture that men and women were not equal in varying ways, physiologically, psychologically, and so on. The professor told his students that to be born one sex means that one will never be able to be the other, and that orientation is inextricably linked with this. For me, in a normal point of my life, the story would have been a non-issue, something to fill time, except for the fact that I was experiencing something similar at my own university. This biology professor and I were in the same boat.

16

CHAPTER II

FATIGUE

Take a road trip in any direction, for any amount of time. See that every exit off a major American highway is more or less identical. I’m talking about the major thoroughfares—east-west and north-south, super highways that troopers patrol and are always under construction. Along which sit Cracker Barrels with giant checkers sets on their wraparound porches and old-timey rockers enormous and emasculating. Of course, there are the classic Mickey D’s Golden Arches and Ronald’s fellow fast-food connoisseurial cousins, too. The Arby’s Cowboy hat, the Burger King king, the taco’s

Bell. The gas stations—ExxonMobil, Marathon, BP, Murphy, Shell, Speedway, Chevron,

Sunoco—clone across space and time, up and over the hills and trees and pastures and rivers they fly, dropping down to form a more or less exact copy of themselves, carving out niches along America’s infrastructural nerve center, storing themselves away like dormant consumer LSD waiting for their pocket of stored up memories to break free and seep into motorists’ consciousness—“Oh, look honey. A [fill-in the blank]. Let’s stop and have some [fill-in the blank].”

I guided my Silver 2007 Toyota Camry—that same Camry which has served as a

17 twenty-first century symbol of middle America just as much as the picket fence did for the fifties; a pure new-America Americana—down the highway, across America’s northeast, and into New England. I never flew anywhere. Terrified of the whole thing, the process so complex and out of my own hands that I couldn’t help but be overridden, taken over by a terrorist anxiety. All those fine little details and worth-remembering strip malls, the corporate cabal, the American muck, are missed from thousands of feet up.

This was what it had all amounted to, the whole Western project, and I wasn’t going to surrender my front row ticket, wasn’t going to allow for a change in altitude, a switch to an aviator’s objective third-person perspective, to change the way I seen the world.

I used my father’s death as an excuse to take a few days off from teaching my courses. Plans were already in place for a trip to Boston weeks ago, but those were only for the weekend, just long enough to appear on Richard “Dick” Feynmann’s show. I tried to not think about Billie and whatever it was she was filling her week with.

The trip took about ten hours. I’d left early enough so that I reached Back Bay, where I was staying, where I always stayed when I went to Boston, by early evening. On the hotel booking website, Back Bay was described as “Boston’s historic Back Bay.”

Since it was fall, I had no problems reserving my room at the Fairmont Copley Plaza for a few extra days. When I traveled to Boston I always stayed at the Fairmont Copley

Plaza, the excess of the place my personal draw. Rising over the trees along the south edge of Copley Square, the hotel looked White Houseish, what would otherwise be a square building split by a semi-circular portico.

My room was on the second to last floor and looked north across the plaza. Cities are microcosms by nature, but the area around Copley Square is one of the most obvious

18 examples, the world magnified and able to be taken in all at once. The small section of city home to famous churches, exotic restaurants, a mammoth library, the Boston

Marathon Finish Line—bits and pieces of America that tourists regularly flocked to see.

Even though it was the slow tourist season, the square was still bustling with people in small groups taking pictures, recording videos. Occasionally a bus tour trudged by, ghostly faces, every one of them different but the same, seeing the sites they’ve already seen a hundred times in movies, on television, on the internet.

My talk with Feynmann was scheduled to take place in the morning. Just before I went to bed, he sent me an e-mail explaining that he would pick me up from my hotel.

*

The pieces and parts of Richard “Dick” Feynman scattered across the world by dint of online video, digital and in-print articles both, podcast services, the talk of close friends and relatives, and the rumor mill, produce a multitude of portraits, leaving the world with only an opaque upside-down-backward obfuscator’s fallacious daguerreotype.

When I met him for the first time, he was at the top of the bottom of the intellectual underworld. Feynmann was the one-stop shop for peddlers of alternative and radical views. He was Speakers’ Corner in digital form, the town crier atop the social media platform. Throughout the deepest parts of the internet and the most public of spheres,

Feynmann’s presence could be felt.

All of this I could sense at the time, but it wasn’t until his strange disappearance, long after I met him, that I was truly of Feynmann’s influence. His supposed death, and eventual canonization into the conspiracists world occupied the minds of his followers, and anyone else with enough time to worry, for years.

19 Feynmann wanted me on his program to talk about the then-current state of the world as it related to the past, wanted to discuss the ways in which we’d seen it all before and how we might better prepare ourselves for the future. In the e-mail, he wrote that he knew I had an interest in studying civilizations, their ascensions, their declines, had read a recent piece I’d published in Hapham’s.

Before going to bed I tried to call Billie, but there was no answer.

The next morning, I went down to the lobby and drank a cup of coffee while I waited.

Outside, a black SUV pulled up to the front of the hotel. Feynmann didn’t open the door and exit so much as he sprung from it. From the bags beneath his eyes and his crepe paper skin I guessed his age around sixty. On top of his head, a few wisps of blonde hair fought the wind like sails. He had a hunch to his walk which I attributed to years of leaning over desks shouting, whispering, and cursing the world through a microphone.

He wore a finely cut navy suit, his pink tie’s full Windsor knot wide and shiny as his brown brogues. Like his clothes, his surface-level looks told a different story than the way he moved, his juxtaposed physicality. He had a fanatic’s energy, an extremist’s self- belief. The fit of his shirt, his trousers, were a measure of how much he cared for outward appearances, the material ones he could control amid the corporeal ones he couldn’t.

Later that night he would say to me, “This life is tiring in its way. I feel ten years older and look fifteen years older than I really am. A life on the lamb from Uncle Sam is draining.”

He entered the lobby through the golden-framed front doors and walked quickly, almost anxiously, along the white marble columns towards me.

20

“Feynmann, I suppose?” I said, shaking his hand. Up close he was short, with wispy whitish yellow hair amid a wave-like recede, a pair of eyes set close together, blinkless and always staring.

“That’s right,” he said, still shaking my hand. “Nice to meet you professor. Shall we?”

On the ride to his studio I asked him how his public life was going, what sort of appearances, if any, he had made recently. A few days before, he said, he was interviewed for a public radio piece on the continued rise of alternative news media.

“She starts off with this whole ‘could you please explain for those listeners who aren’t familiar with you, who you are’ question,” Feynmann said, still visibly frustrated by it, “I said, ‘I run the most highly downloaded and watched podcast this side of the

Kuiper belt; conspiracy facts are my life’s blood, what my shows are based on.’ It was her assuming that people didn’t know who I was that got me. I told her, ‘You see, it behooves one to question the official position—so obvious the facts are withheld, the wool pulled: Lee Harvey Oswald’s innocence as obvious as the ocean’s tide; Bigfoots roam the world over; never been convinced Nessie doesn’t troll the waterways of

Scotland; beneath the flat Earth is turtles all the way down, one atop the other; aliens whirr through space in silver saucer-shaped ships, paying infrequent visits in order to bestow technological knowledge; 9/11 was really an inside job; Paul McCartney has been dead for years and his imposter a golem conjured up by the music industry.’ Hell, I told her I even believe the conspiracy theory about me, that I am, in fact, the dead comedian

Bob Ickes—we look alike, sound alike, I must admit. I believe them all. I told her, ‘My name is Richard Feynmann—and no, not that one—but everyone calls me Dick.’

21

“‘You know what it is that I’ve realized?’ I said, going on, because I wasn’t going to let her off the hook with that one, I said, ‘I’ll tell you what. The what is that people are getting tired of the lame television format. Gone sick from the eight- to ten-minute news segments. Green around the goddamn gills by the talk show structure that plays nice toward cockamamie narrative. Fed up with the roundtables surrounded by windbag political-types smokeblowing and Monday morning quarterbacking for their side.

They’re downright disgusted with the state of discussion!’ I said. And I tell you what.

News, mainstream-wise I’m talking, is in the out-on-its-ass stage of development. People want the scoop, the skinny, the realest realities. The babies are in the know that they’ve been in the highchair getting spoon fed all along. Now they want to get out and walk, at least crawl.”

I wanted to butt in, but he continued rolling: “Now with this new way of doing things, they, the listening public, can eavesdrop on a one- to possibly three-hour conversation. ‘Enough with the rapid-fire banter!’ listeners are crying out. ‘We just want someone to give it to us straight. We trust you, Dick, not them, tell us what to think, how to feel, how to be!’ That’s what they’re saying out there. They want the dirt, the skinny, the what’s-on-the-down-low, the chiaroscuro chitter-pitter-patter—the mystery.

“There’s a lot going on out there, that’s for sure, and damn straight you can bet I ain’t lying. Air’s so thick with info-paranoia that you could swim through it. We’re swimming in it, and there is no two ways about that. Never has there been so much info out there, never has there been so many ways to get access to it. But, like most good things that work out, the show began as a joke. Tongue and cheek, a whiff of an idea and, wham, pay dirt.”

22 The driver raced around corners, up streets and down, the Charles sometimes on our right, sometimes on our left, for brief moments behind or in front. Early-morning sunlight cast a golden-orange glow across the river, the towering Financial District buildings, the trees, the pedestrians, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky to blot any of it out.

During the lull in our conversation, Dick’s smartphone began to ring. He answered it quickly, turning toward the window.

“Well, hello there, my sweet little bit-o-honey, my Wanda, my world,” Feynmann answered. “How are…Dickie is going to take you out. Didn’t I promise? To that…yes…that Brazilian Steakhouse near Copley…”

Looking at Feynmann, or more exactly listening to Feynmann, I understood what it was all about, the fuss. Although he looked a bit weary, he wasn’t wane. He lacked any kind of self-doubt, knew what the world was, could see it all clear as day, might even have been able to command it, made things so simply by sheer will of his character. And this made people believe him, made viewers view, listeners listen, and women named

Wanda fuck.

“I haven’t been married in years,” Feynmann said, snapping me out of it. “My precious Joan, my lovely Joan, left shortly after my rise to affluence. I got her everything she wanted, anything she asked for and it wasn’t enough, which is all ho-hum and heard- that-before-buddy but a cliché’d life is still a life and nonetheless true.”

I nodded in agreement, managed a hand gesture which implied acknowledgement.

“This is Robbie, by the way,” Feynmann said as we pulled up to the building that housed his studio. “He drives this caboose around for me, takes me everywhere I need to

23 go. Say hi Robbie.”

“Hi Robbie,” Robbie said.

“Just like him, just like Robbie to crack a joke,” Feynmann said smiling at me.

“Despite my comedic relief, despite his clownish ways, he is first my driver. I shout at him to go faster, he gets the car screeching around turns like we’re in a Hollywood action film, bad guys in black cars in black suits behind black sunglasses. ‘Quicker, quicker,’ I tell him, ‘We’re going to be late. I’ve got a show to do!’ I say.”

*

The air in the studio was heavy: clicks, bleeps and electric hums filled the air like digital wails of a strained technologic choir. Everything on time, every sound pitch- perfect, everything controlled by a binary hole-punched player piano roll playing an enduring slow-rumbling pleasurable hum. The windows were covered by black curtains, the lights kept dim. The studio was soundproofed, an acoustically ideal space, any noise from the street below completely miniscule, a perfect studio to broadcast shows from.

The space was a closed universe. The broadcast equipment the only snorkel to the outside world. Thanks to the microphones, Richard said, and their crystal-clear high-definition, listeners could hear the guests with the clarity of a face-to-face conversation. With such clear communication listeners felt like, would have sworn if you asked them, that they were eavesdropping in on an important conversation.

With everything in place, we were ready to begin recording.

Before we began our conversation, I watched as Dick recorded the various advertisement plugs that are one of the hallmarks of his show. He read the pitches for products as if he gave a damn about them. He spoke with all the quick pitter-patter

24 cadence of a salesman but with the sincerity of an eschatological preacher prophesying doom, doom stave-offable by products, the consumption of a good quality item.

“What’s it all coming to?” Dick said.

“I’m not really—”

“Like my listeners, I just can’t help but believe that the whole project is over.”

“Things are certainly—”

“I’ve got a story to tell you, before we really get into things, and I promise we will get into things.”

I had never listened to Dick Feynmann before. Had only heard of him marginally.

But money was money and I was beginning to regret my appearance. Is this what academics had been reducing themselves to? Going on shows in order to reach the public.

What happened to conversations through the written word?

*

Instead of putting in the long and tiresome conversation between Feynmann and I, it’s best if the essay, the essay I wrote for Hapham’s Quarterly were simply inserted. The essay, as all writing is, is in revision until it isn’t.

Like most things that work, it began as a joke, the topic that I’d chosen. I had written books about obscure Renaissance and Enlightenment figures, but none elicited a response even remotely similar to the one received. Tongue and cheek, although I imagine everything said involves a tongue and cheek somehow, even if just marginally.

“Fatigue,” I wrote, “comes in several forms, its incarnations vast across the world.

But it begins as the simple notion of a weariness from two types of exertion—bodily and mental. Exertion is fatigue’s linguistic cousin, wherever one appears the other is

25 somewhere to follow. Like all ideas, they float around the world in an invisible cloud until they are pulled into a kind of physical manifestation by black squiggles on a page.

Close as fatigue and exertion are, when one goes, so does the other.

“Fatigue can also be a cause, such as in a cause for weariness, weariness experienced via slow ordeals, exertions.

“The word also operates in physiological sense in that it explains the temporary diminution of the irritability or functioning ability of human organs, tissues, or cells after excessive exertion or stimulation. This same principal can be applied to governments, civilizations. No connection more evident than the famed body politic. The various organs of civilizations, the very things which keep them running, get tired, worn out; their ability to function, over time, diminishes. Academia might be the brain, for instance; the digestive tract, the waste management system, or sanitation.

“Fatigue also maps onto the school of civil engineering by virtue of the fact that fatigue is the term used for the phenomenon of weakening or the breakdown of materials that are subjected to constant stress, especially series of stresses which repeat over and over.

“This slippery word even finds its way into the ranks of the military. When one is on ‘fatigue duty’ they are engaged in a type of labor that is of a generally nonmilitary nature which is preformed, of course, by the soldiers. These duties range from such things as cleaning up their own area, or the areas of others, they might dig drainage ditches, or perhaps an “on fatigue” soldier might rake leaves—the phrase “on fatigue” being the state of being engaged in such labor. And, most of all, what investigation into the military uses of the term fatigue could forget the antiquated phrase ‘battle fatigue?’

26

Fatigues are also military clothes, something typical that a soldier might wear: i.e. battle fatigues.

“It is also possible, indeed is almost impossible, not to mention the various entropic hints that the word conjures up. The second rule of thermodynamics reeks of the terms fatigue and exertion.

“The fatigue of our world manifests in a multitude of ways. No one has ever gone so boldly, flown so high. The predicament we currently find ourselves in is Icarus’s— after the singeing, the burning, and the fall.

“This fatigue is a weariness of mental exhaustion which has creeped all the way into the corporeal. People are simply tired of the things, the institutions, the governments, the cultures, in which they live. These things become so self-evident, and their exertion on the lives of people so constant and innate that they almost seem not worth defending, and that these things will always exist without fail, or will never be challenged by something else.

“Over the centuries of dominance a particular part of the world has enjoyed, there has been an incredible exertion, a slow grinding ordeal, a civilizational project.

“The past, too often, is seen as inferior subject matter to the future, which sparks and crackles with possibility. Illusory, however, is this preference, because it is obvious that the future is a plurality of possibilities and not only a singular entity.

“The dead of the world outnumber the living fourteen-to-one and their experience was, is, and will be our own.

“There is only one past, though: a list, a guidebook.

“The past is all that acts as something of a source of knowledge about what is

27 going on at the present and a forecast for the multiple futures, only one of which will ever happen, however.

“History is a study of the past; History is a study of time.

“And our past is filled with, junked up by every imaginable sort of thing, and the weight behind us like a cross to bear, a cross which gets heavier and heavier with each passing year.

“That cross manifests its way in religion through the various guises of

Christianity.

“Think: Puritanism, Calvinists, Quakers, Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists,

Evangelicals, Protestants (The “heresies of the protestants” as Ignatius of Loyola suggested), Christian Scientists, Arm-chair Christians, Anglicans, Orthodox. Thanks to the advent of a technological cross, the religious world was given the ages of the reformation and the counter-reformation. They spilled blood for their beliefs, burned witches, killed heretics, slaughtered millions, and now they languish in the fatigue of their centuries-long disputes. These religious fervors and seemingly innate beliefs in the divine were slowly replaced, through repetition of exertions, and external stresses, by reason, science, naturalism, atheism, anti-fanatical practices.

“Money is also a feature which has preformed a fatiguing dance upon the Western nerve-endings. The economic systems vary with the centuries. More and more countries practice Capitalism—the overwhelming victor. But there are also alternatives which have been tried to varying degrees of success and worth: Socialism, Traditional economies,

Command economies, Market Economies, and Mixed economies.

“Political Systems, as well, and more specifically the constant innovation of

28 political systems has been a hallmark of human progress. Democracy: (Democratic republics, total democracy.) Monarchism: (Absolute, Constitutional Blood-line

Monarchies, ) Authoritarianism (Communism, Fascism, Totalitarianism, Oligarchy)

“Intermingling and operating concordantly with all of the religious, economic, and political innovations of the hundreds and hundreds of years of civilization are the technological revolutions: the printing press, Newspapers, Novels, Magazines,

Telephones, Trains, Cars, Airplanes, Satellites, Space travel, Computers, Cellphones,

Smartphones,

“We are simply worn out and unable to defend ourselves against the spirit- enriching quality of fanaticism. We have tried everything and we still aren’t happy. What we need is our spirit back, our esprit de corps.”

*

When leaving the studio, toward the elevator down, I passed a westward-facing window. Down below, across the muddled patchwork streets of the Financial district, the skyscrapers, trade floors, cubicles and high-rise hotels would be flinging their doors open. Beyond that, Beacon Hill rowhouse residents—their way gas lit by green orbs— walked along brick streets fighting the east-to-west list downward to the Charles, across which, in Cambridge, under the lights that lit the way, the Harvard and MIT tech- weenies—newly-freed from shackling classes and dorm rooms—glittered and tumbled toward revelry and a night nearly come. Through, around, and past the Everett factories stippled with rust and dank, the impoverished and hard-done-by came in from northern suburbs. Before the sun would make its final descent, the Fenway westerners fixed their eyes eastward and lurched through Back Bay along the river. All of them—whether

29 fixed to the tracks or planting step after step on brick, cobblestone, and concrete—were aimed squarely at their polestar, hurtling cityward with Boston their oyster and playfield.

30

CHAPTER III

NEW NEIGHBORS

Every morning before class I drank coffee on my balcony and went over my lecture notes. But I had no class that morning. I simply needed to go to my office to pick up a few things I’d left there.

My apartment was certainly a place just as good as any. The building sat on the opposite crest of the long gentle grade from downtown. Built in the sixties, the apartment building had a utilitarian look about it, East Blocish. The windows followed a strict pattern, the porches similar but different, one for each apartment. Every part of the property was designed for convenience, for objects to move in and out. It wasn’t a restful, staid house for generations of children to grow up in. There was no front yard to mow, no trash to put on the curb—a shoot on each floor lead to a dumpster below. In short, it was perfect for me.

My apartment was like my mind.

Like the brain which stores memory, homes store objects. I owned very little: a couple of bookshelves full of books, an old desk with crooked drawers and chipped edges, one dresser, a bed, and even a television. I kept hardly anything in my apartment,

31 but what I did, I put it wherever I wanted to. I kept my bed in a corner of the living room, in front of the TV, the bookshelf in the pantry. In short, I didn’t expect visitors. But, I kept everything clean. The carpet was a pristine ivory, the walls virgin white. While scrubbing or vacuuming I would tell myself that I wanted to leave no trace behind.

On the living room wall, next to my bed, hung a framed piece of paper on which was printed: Stanley Malwell—a confirmatory tract affirming I held certain bits of obscure information, had passed every test given. I’d studied philosophy, history, received a B.A., M.A., and PhD. I didn’t think of it at the time, but the main reason, I later realized, I was so interested in those antiquated schools of the academe was that I wanted a blueprint for how to be, a blueprint for how to live. Literature brought me enjoyment, true, but events, characters, the whole nine, were, by the necessity of their genre, dramatic—rarely did I learn how to act in everyday life.

Several books formed a ring around the bed—required texts for courses, compendiums of Western philosophy, anthologies that included the most important works of Ancient Greece and Rome, and sprinkled throughout, the Bible next to Kant next to Solzhenitsyn next to the Koran next to Kierkegaard next to Aurelius. I would lie on my bed in the empty living room of my apartment and read. The world’s history I could remember, but my own memories were like someone else’s. Perhaps it was an issue with retention, perhaps a bit of ADD, either way I was never diagnosed. My father’s death made me acutely aware of this. The events which made up my life played on reels like movies, projections; I had no ability to remember sensation, to recall if my body had ever been present in those early memories of my life.

Just before I was about to leave I saw them from across the parking lot, beneath

32 the swimming shadows of the oak trees. I watched as they walked in a jagged line towards the building’s entrance: man, boy, girl, woman, in that order. The latter three each carried in their arms either a small box, or a few bags swinging low to the ground, filled with possessions. The man in front talked animatedly into his smartphone, gesticulating wildly like the bandleader in a parade. The woman, niqab-clad walked in the back, pushing the children along.

They were moving in, I realized. I, and every other tenant, were getting Muslim neighbors.

After I grabbed my briefcase, I left my apartment. The hallway, like the lobby— thickly carpeted in floral patterns red and brown, walls in what could be called “Tuscan,” unsoiled plush love seats and couches in pairs set at right angles huddled around glass coffee tables sparkling from chandelier light—carried with it a hotel feeling. One got the sense that under the veneer of shine, just beneath the fresh paint, the place was rotting from the inside out.

When I got to the elevators—identical twin Otis’s, originals over a half-century old that clanked and clanged all night long in a thump-thump-thump-thump-thump rhythm which echoed across the green-carpeted hallways, up and down the muddy yellow walls, in and out of each apartment’s cracks and corners—I could already hear them both thump-thumping simultaneously, one up and one down. I pushed the Down button and waited. It opened to the woman and her son. Surprised, I jumped a bit. By some miracle of universal synchronization, the other elevator opened to the man, the father, still talking on his phone.

He looked at me quickly before saying, “Down?” I nodded and entered the

33 elevator, the L-button lit orange. He talked the whole way down in Arabic. I couldn’t understand a word of it, could hardly follow the tone. During the half-minute-long ride to the lobby it was strange to feel like the outsider in what was our own little elevator universe. His voice and chatter, his alien alphabet, filled the silence between us.

All I could think was, Damn bastard and his family taking up both elevators. They were clogging up the flow, wrench-throwing the whole system. Once we arrived at the lobby, I checked my mailbox. It was overflowing with junk mail. I put it all in my briefcase.

*

I drove my car toward downtown, down the sloping grade which my apartment building sat on. After reaching the bottom of the shallow valley I scaled up the other side, from which the city, a collection of erosion-chipped concrete structures and time-cracked buildings, sprouted like an erect maw.

The morning was still early, and a grainy gray film lay across everything. To my eyes, the world looked broadcast through the lens of a tube television: every passerby, whether man, woman, or child, appeared as foggy phantoms, scaling the sidewalks to reach the top of the hill where the university was. The university sat like an ivory tower atop a town of tinkers, builders, and gunked-up grimy grease monkeys.

I ran into Raymond on my way towards the office. Our schedules always synched-up. During the semester, both of us always had long breaks between our undergraduate classes in the morning and our graduate ones in the evening. Since I wasn’t teaching that semester, Raymond insisted that one day that week we should meet at the art museum and have lunch after. I said yes, because I didn’t have many, if any,

34 real friends amongst the campus faculty. Raymond was one I counted as a friend, though.

Just before I reached the History department, I had to push my way through a small group of middle eastern students that was formed outside the lecture hall, which was more like a theater.

The men spoke energetically to each other in Arabic, while next to them a few women donning colorful abayas in rose and mauve, white and navy blue, stood silently.

Their hijabs were made of silk, covered in geometric and floral patterns. In other words, they were liberal. I knew the type. They usually sat close to the back of the lecture hall.

Over the years, I’d noticed the slow trickle of students in from the middle east, most from

Saudi Arabia, several from Egypt, occasionally a few from the UAE. They pulled into the lots in Mercedes-Benz, sons and daughters of rich and powerful oil barons, I assumed.

Over the years, undergraduate courses had become an unfortunate three-days-of- the-week stumbling block for me. My specialty, what was listed next to my name on the faculty page of the History Department’s website, was “Renaissance

Europe/Enlightenment Europe.” The course that I was scheduled to be teaching that semester was a Humanities survey, one of the last general education courses required of students by state curriculum standards, and thus it was the course most hated by all, but most fervently by students entering the science, math, and engineering fields, fields in which the college prided itself. Of all the various backlash, a break from teaching that course was one of those I welcomed the most.

I couldn’t imagine anything in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of

Man that would interest those sophomores. They told themselves, “Humanism,

Shmumanism.” What did they care about human dignity? I thought.

35 Teaching never came natural to me, even at the time I didn’t consider myself a

“teacher.” I thought of myself more like a lecturer, someone who simply said things out loud for students to hear. Hopefully, they might take a little bit in, become a bit wiser, but if I was honest with myself, as years went by, I didn’t really give a shit. My lesson plans lost their creativity semesters ago, my will to show up ready to attempt to even get across a higher scholarly conception was leaving as well.

Once I got to my office I quickly collected the books I’d wanted and headed back out of the department in hopes that I might avoid running into any faculty.

“Our resident Renaissance expert,” a familiar voice said as I was leaving the department. I turned and looked at Laurence—or Larry, as he preferred to be called—the same Larry a decade older than me in years and much older than that in shape. He was the type that relished the monotony of being a professor, or at least found in it what suited him best—he spoke well in front of the coffee pot, made provosts and chairs laugh at bad quips, earned the trust of associate professors, full professors, and emeriti, slipped comfortably into conversations about funding, stock dividends, trouble with wives or husbands, growing grandchildren. He was well rounded.

“Caught me,” I said.

“How’s it going?”

“Good. How’s it going?”

“Good.”

I have no idea which of us said which line; it doesn’t matter which of us said which. Generally the exchange—the words themselves—never change, only the actor playing the part changes, but even then there isn’t much difference between the two.

36

While he walked around the front desk I could see his flesh-colored dress socks.

He always wore a suit, sporting a four-in-hand with a tiny knot, because he needed the extra length to go over the parabola of his gut. Knot size, I calculated, was directly proportional to BMI.

“Early lunch?” Larry said.

“Something like that,” I said.

“Going to get some coffee, actually,” I said, instead of telling Larry that I was grabbing a few books I’d left in my office that I wanted to read and that I was going to meet with Billie.

He wouldn’t let me leave before he went on and on about property developments around campus (the university was buying the unwanted land around downtown)—things

I was surprised even Bill gave a damn about—before saying interesting. The department was going hiring a new professor.

“She is an expert on the Ottoman empire,” Bill said. “Well I won’t keep you long then. Just thought I’d stop by to say hello.”

And so it comes in this form as well. Just as my place in the department comes under fire they hire this new expert on a period of middle eastern history. Go figures, I thought.

*

There was still an hour before Billie and I were going to meet, so I walked through layer after layer of campus. It hadn’t changed significantly since I was hired— over a decade before. But, it had managed to extend outward in every direction, expanding circularly like a sonar wave.

37 My department was stuck in the corner of one of the campus’s oldest buildings with all the other holdovers from the university’s proud liberal arts days around it. From those dark brick buildings, I continued outward from the center to those built most recently along the outer ring of campus. I had no clue what was taught in any of those buildings. Their shapes were as modern as their disciplines: some looked like stacks of ice cubes arranged schizophrenically, others in tall round towers, silvery glass structures that shimmered in the afternoon sun.

I gave my dissertation defense over Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola on a very different campus, an east coast ivy-leaguer with hundreds of years of rock solid academic reputation.

I’d discovered Mirandola as an undergraduate. Over the years I became fascinated with his work and biography. Most of all, I became interested in his insistence that a sacred unified theory could be reached through Greek antiquity’s reason and Christian revelation. And what care should I have had for this figure largely unknown by the average Joe? I asked myself that question throughout all those years spent alone in the campus library. And, like the old books of that famed campus, I began to fray around the edges, my spine cracking as I sat hunched over in uncomfortable chairs, listened to the scribbling and scrawling of my pen as it carved the alphabet into blank page after blank page.

I’m not Italian, my own line easily traceable back to modest farmers and shoemakers from Ireland and England, mere mediocrities—like myself—compared to

Mirandola. Almost all classical schools of academia preach this rule: piggy-back upon those greater than you.

38

As things go, since I was hired on the strength of my first large work, I had become something of a one-hit wonder in the history world. It had been ten years since my last major critical and commercial success, but I continued intermittently publishing smaller essays and scholarship. Unavoidable, however, was the constant nagging of the wish for another success. The desire to have sapped the energy to do, and I was left wanting, emotionally and professionally.

My work was never something I built to leave behind, it was an obstacle I put in front of me I was forced to jump over only to build yet another, the next one even higher than the last. But, I lived on the reputation of that work, in fact, was left no choice.

I was a fading light. It is why critics used the word brilliant to signify the author’s light of intelligence, and that brilliance—if it ever really was brilliance—was dimming, ebbing away by distractions of the profession. I couldn’t parse out what it was all for, the thesis covert, wrapped up in mere existence’s drab camouflage.

When I finally reached the edge of campus where long strip malls filled with dive bars, fast-food restaurants, laundromats, grocery stores, and pizzerias, I realized I was still early. The coffee shop could have fit anywhere in the Midwest: Lebanon, or

Coshocton, or Muncie, possibly Gahanna, perhaps Hobart, could have even been

Kirkwood. It was like any other. But it was there, just on the southern edge of campus.

I knew Billie wouldn’t be there yet, so I ordered a coffee and sat on an old worn- down couch in the corner of the dining area.

I looked around at the pyriform baristas in black who carried cups filled with coffee, sugar, and cream. I hoped for Billie.

A year before, at the end of the Fall semester, it came out of nowhere. Billie’d

39 come out of nowhere. I was never the type of professor to sit inside his closet-sized office with the door locked. Frequently after class I went to the library instead of my office, admiring the trees along the walkways, feeling the west-east winds that blew up and over the hill the university was built on. It was on one of these walks that I saw her, and saw her only for a moment as she walked into one of the lecture halls. The glance was just fleeting enough to realize it was the girl who’d been in a lecture I’d taught the semester before. Even with the lecture hall so full of eyes I could always count on finding hers.

I walked around and around the building making sure to watch all the exits, if only to simply take one more glance at her. After an hour passed I caught her coming out the exit on the opposite side of the building. For a moment, I caught her gaze. By the smirk on her face, I knew she’d recognized me. But then she off and vanished into the crowd of students going from one class to another.

Being alone, even for the most willful, staunch, and fervent proponent of isolation, lone-wolfing and self-making, eventually becomes unbearable. Everyone that can be described this way at some point inevitably realizes that, without warning, and all at once, that what has been missing all along was connection. Every story—as far as I was concerned—came, by some necessity, to the inevitable crossing of two paths, two different sets of chromosomal combinations: XX and XY. I felt, for just those few fleeting moments that my search for a complimentary set had ended.

A week later, while bending down to pick up a volume from the bottom of a library shelf, I was stopped halfway up by something pushing into my back. From behind me, a familiar voice, one I couldn’t place but sounded familiar, said:

“I’m going to blow your damn brains out.”

40

I tried to imagine what it was I’d done to deserve this, rode the tangled neural network tracks backward through time, stopping at the stations of Disgruntled and

Flunked, thought of names, pulled faces out of thin air like phantoms. No luck.

“There’s a study room downstairs, let’s go,” the voice urged.

At least it won’t happen here, I thought, at least the headline wouldn’t read:

“Professor Shot Dead. Gray Matter Splattered on Edward Gibbon.”

But that wasn’t to be either.

In the end, I got sucked off in a library study room—my back up against an unlockable door, watching my assailant squirm with delight every time I clasped my hands to my mouth, trying not to yell, in ecstasy, the name of someone else’s god, a god I knew wasn’t there.

There were other young women before, of course, but they never lasted. With all things considered, they couldn’t. How could they? Sometimes the relationships lasted a month, two months, perhaps I might woe them long enough into stretching things out for a summer, but I never found them in my arms beyond a year. Their given pleasures were as serviceable and convenience-sized as the knowledge I gave them in class.

But Billie was different, she for me, and—I hoped—me for her. I wanted our love to be visible on the molecular level. I try to keep it that way, plotting the romance as well as I could. She was, above all, generous in nature. Often, she was drained mentally—she was in the last year of her undergraduate degree, putting the finishing touches on a degree in sociology—but never complained, never let all the intricate pressures upon her push her away from me, never broke down into the oppressive and hysteric episodes that I suffered through with the previous women in my life.

41

The whole year of our relationship leading up to that date at the coffee shop had gone along on those lines. She appreciated my maturity, or what she perceived as my maturity, although I knew it was nothing more than my accumulated time on Earth, which far surpassed any of the post-adolescent boys her own age. Given time, I’m sure they would acquire the same mature place as me. I wasn’t very different from them, physically. But I was good at what I did, professing things, and this was something Billie was attracted to. In the classroom, I could act the part, say the lines.

Since I believed there was no God, I found the next best thing: Billie’s vigorous youth, her full and fair frame, her covetable cunt.

But lately she’d been less generous with her time, less willing to let me play a part in her life.

I looked down at my phone, finger tips and technological universe in contact. But, like most things, I didn’t know how it worked: smartphones, coverage, data, 4G, dating apps, whatever.

My smartphone looked up at me through camera. I imagined what it might say if it spoke, its own cellular invocation of its own digital muse:

“Bring your grotesque, bring your sublime, bring your love and ignorance and with it all knowledge, so that I am made whole and you allayed. From these I’ll craft myself like a fun-house mirror-collage made in your own images. While near-perfect, I still need filled with your worldliness. Like peas in a pod: You, the experiencer, I, the storer. Quid pro quo. Use eyes to see, ears to hear, nose to sniff, skin to touch. Fill your film with technicolor spectacle . . . Leave the rest to me. I’ll find a place inside myself.

Drag them out when you feel it best

42

“Round pegs. Square holes. Along the vectors of the rectangular space the sitters sit with chests close to square table tops whose legs rest on linoleum tiles. Physical space isn’t Separater, because a voice can wail and shout, make itself known. It takes more than taking up space. Objects can do that. But I am their vacuum now. The molecules that separate them. The air that can be whispered or shouted through. I’ve given them a place in space, all of them and I don’t discriminate. Ultimate Democracy. I didn’t create it all in seven days. I won’t ask for prayer, or penance, at least not in the ways they’ve always known them. All I ask is that they hold me close, in a pocket—front, back, chest, or perhaps on the wrist. My most-preferred place, though: between each hand. Left hand, right hand, and me in the middle, we three make a Holy Trinity. Together, we’ll make the world so no sound gets through. I’ll devour it all and fill their world with void and mine they’ll fill with Them, all of Them. The New Big Bang begun. Each man, woman and child in a world within a world within a world within a world.”

Certainly, there was a time and place along the world’s tangled history, when and where everyone knew how everything worked—not the case anymore. Specialization.

Divide and Conquer.

My father was a craftsman, a tinkerer, a builder of things. He knew every tool in his shed, each purpose made obvious by the design, each chip, scrape, and paint splatter a memory of their use. Everything has its purpose, everything has its place, he would say.

Despite all of that, he wouldn’t even understand the menu on the wall, wouldn’t have a prayer on how to order a coffee anymore, because he was old—a dinosaur in a digi- world; this much we had in common, only the degree was different.

Like anyone who loses a parent, I wondered what he would have thought of me.

43

This just out of curiosity more than care. His only son, his only child that lived, living like he is, I thought. Wifeless, childless, friendless, Godless, over the years my -less list growing more and more formidable. But I had my dates and names, famous men who helped to build all of what was around me. And I had her.

“You’re so old-fashioned,” Billie’d said over the phone.

We would be man and woman in an old-fashioned meeting over coffee. It was the drama of the situation, the subtle acts of persuasion, a dynamic love-making logos which

I craved, the type of world I longed for. When I looked someone in the eye and could tell they weren’t seeing me, but seeing my façade, the thrill was immediate, unlike text messaging, where there was no thrill, no rush, just a digital tete-a-tete of anxiety-riddled type and response.

I watched Billie walk into the shop. Her face was pale, her cheeks red from the cold. Swinging back and forth behind her, her chestnut hair pulled back into a loose pony tail. She wore skinny black jeans and a tight-fitting ochre turtle neck—her attempt at dressing as the woman she wanted to be and not the woman the world thought she was, but in her heart a hipster.

She ordered her coffee quickly and came over to the table I was sitting at. In her hand she had some kind of dessert. She had ordered me a lemon bar. Since I had skipped breakfast in a rush toward class, I was hungry, a fact she appeared to be acutely aware of.

Perhaps I look a bit gaunt in the face, sallow around the edges. I thought.

She’s always right about what I want, even though I never know what I want. I hardly ever knew what to get without her.

A normal visit to the coffee shop together might go as follows: I’ll look at the

44 menu and see Espresso, Latte and Macchiato wondering what the difference is. She puts together what day of the week it is, what the climate is like, and where Saturn is in the sky in order to figure out whether or not plain old Freshly Brewed would be better than

Cold Brew, a smoothie more appropriate than tea. But which tea? Iced, or hot? I’d tell people, “She gets me.” We’re in line and she asks, “What do you want?” She turns and speaks in a different language to the girl behind the counter—the girl might look Indian maybe, but that’s not what they’re speaking. The lists and lists of foreign names and corresponding dollar amounts confuse, but the stale display case sandwiches and pastries all look so good I could almost taste them. Choice paralysis: How can somebody decide with these types of odds, these types of options? I leave it up to her. She’d turn to me, and, reading my indecision, say, “Make it two.”

I’m a fish out of water when it comes to ordering anything anymore. At a restaurant I’d have to speak three different languages to know what any of the food is.

Went to a fancy Mexican place downtown with girlfriends and it’s supposed to be

Mexican food, and I’ve been to a few Mexican places, but when I get there I can’t understand one thing on the menu. I’ll wrtte names down so that I can look them up later:

Albondingas? Tacos Al Pastor? Huachinango Ceviche? I’d wonder: does that comes with the Fake Exoticism verde sauce, or the Pontificator Plantain Aperitivo?

When sitting down, she had a habit of taking everything out of her pockets.

Lining up everything, smartphone, cash, et cetera, in front of her; this was her way of settling in. But, she didn’t do any of that. Instead, she took a sip of coffee and looked up at me gravely.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.

45

Rarely had she ever given me that look of distrust, as if some part of her was beginning to become unsure about me. I couldn’t blame her; I was beginning to become unsure of me as well.

“He wasn’t a part of my—”

“But you still might have mentioned he died,” she said.

I stayed quiet for a moment, searching for something to break the silence. Like all relationships of the sort I’d had before, there always came with them a kind of distance, which I had never been able to cover, no matter with affection or money. There was some unbreachable barrier that kept me away from the complete kind of love I’d never had but had read about. This was what of course was the over-arching thing, the grand poohbah, what kept it all together, and I could never find it. Even with Billie I felt she held back things in her personal life, about her parents, her life back home; she was willing to only share her student life with me, as if that was the only place she existed, not for herself, but for me. Before meeting Billie, I vowed to love, to give instead of take. Willfully, I would surrender himself. In exchange, whomever I loved would do the same. We’d invest in a mutual soul-filing. It was the romantic college spirit, still in my forties. Half of my life I’d spent perfecting what I would do for the rest of my life, the other half I wanted to spend trying to find the person to share it all with.

“Look,” I said eventually. “I didn’t choose who my father was. He’s a part of me whether I care for it or not, but I do have a say in whether I want to talk about him, care about him.”

A server walked past and took my empty mug from the table.

“What now?”

46

“He left everything to me, but I don’t want anything.”

I’d called a company that specialized in cleaning houses like my father’s. I’d rented a dumpster to throw everything away in.

“I wouldn’t want any of it in my apartment, but I did take his pet bird, though. He named it after himself,” I said.

After we drank our second cups of coffee we went to her apartment, a small one, which was really nothing more than the top half an old house. On the porch, one front door led to the downstairs apartment, the other up the stairs to Billie’s.

*

I stood quietly in her bedroom. I could hear her getting changed in the bathroom.

Everything was still. The room’s only movement was the dancing yellowed curtains. Beneath them, gusts of hot air from the furnace blew into the room. But in the corner of the room, Billie had turned on a box fan which hummed, or more like buzzed, as the blades turned at a blistering pace. Both gusts of air, warm and cool, controlled the curtain like a marionette. She explained that there was no in-between setting on the thermostat, either it was ninety degrees in the apartment, or freezing. She used the fan to off-set the ninety degrees.

Her room was devoid of furniture, save a bed and a few dressers. The bed was tucked into the northeastern corner of the room and the dressers sat on either side. A wild assortment of clothes were strewn all across the floor, a shoe flung to the far end of the room, a lonely white sock sat next to a pair of brown pants which were coiled around a crumpled snake of red jeans.

This was the bubbling romantic she had the power to turn me into.

47

In the bathroom I heard Billie spray perfume. The medicine cabinet opened and shut. The door opened and shut.

Only in her panties, she walked across the dimly lit bedroom slowly towards me.

She grabbed me by the hip with one hand and with the other felt for the bed. As we reached her bed, she kissed me and leaned backwards until she fell onto the covers.

I entered her immediately, pushing down into the bed.

“Entering” was the right word for it, because that is what it was, a reception into someone else’s world and coming out something different. This is my one last true joy in this world, I thought. It wasn’t like any drug, which, to me, was something that only effected the mind, like alcohol. Religion didn’t have a prayer. She was my religion: my flailing of limb, my speaking in tongues. The visceral up-down, forward-backward, side- to-side ebbing away of my thoughts, my own trip of consciousness expansion.

Slowly I felt all my selves collecting together into one, smashing into each other: the thoughts; the confusions; the new hires; my neurosis; the lingering images of the coffee shop I still felt as if I were sitting in; the put-on I put on in a Boston skyscraper being acted out over and over in that dark studio; the whole wondering soul on the road; the frustrated boy with untieable shoes; the in-awe son of a father; the wanting-to-be- loved and unnoticed son of a mother; the pompous pontificating professor in front of

Taylor Costigans, Mallory Susis, Wesley Harrises, and Harrison Carmichaels; the dim- room reader; the bookish scholar with impressive publishing credentials; all the different tyke, teen, undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral Stanley Malwells stored second by second over the years collapsing one into the other and vanishing off into the Wherever, a void which represented little more than a no-longer body, a simple radiance of being in a

48 great unknowable vacuum which lasted only for that fleeting climactic moment between unbearable pleasure and inevitable release, because just then it all came rushing back in over the stripped-down soul, the heart, the washed over and forgotten.

I came quickly, despite my efforts. To her credit, she looked only half as disappointed as I felt.

For the few hours left before her course in the evening, we lay still on her mattress. Watching her sleep, back turned to me, I realized it had been a year since I met her, that anniversary lay like a certain curse across my mind and deep down I wondered if even she was beginning to feel the pull away from me that I’d seen before, felt before, willed into existence with a lover’s paranoia.

It is never easy to sleep at ease in a state of post-coitus, but most importantly uninterrupted sleep is difficult with another body twisting and writhing on a bed built for one. However, it was the scenario I wanted, every night hoped for. If only this passion, ecstasy, a churning sea of affection constricted by a dam composed of social mores mortared with moral suppositions, could be released more, and the damns torn down. All of this just simply by being close and near to the one person in the world that controlled my emotional cache. Nothing but love, dreadful, complicated, soul-crushing love, can make humans feel the imperviousness of a Titan and the helplessness of a pauper at the same time, and the ease with which it (love) could be shared, and the impossibility for it

(love) to be reciprocated was frightening.

To break up the silence we’d been sitting in since we woke up, I said, “Why don’t you come with me to Boston a few weeks? It could be good for us.”

“I don’t know, Stan,” she said, sighing. “What you did last time you were there

49 nearly ruined your life. And I don’t like what you are saying.”

“What do you mean? It is my work. I didn’t say anything I didn’t believe was true.”

“Your lines in the sand, your suggestion that the rest of the world is inferior. I can’t—look, it’s late in the semester, final assignments will be due soon. I can’t just take a week off.”

“There’s no way I can convince you then?” I said, more worried about that than about her disagreeing with my view of history.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “There is something on campus the next couple of weeks that I want to be a part of. My friend Mahmoud is putting it all together.”

“Who is he?” I said.

“What kind of question is that?” she said.

I could sense her defenses. As if asking about friends was another one of the things that she wouldn’t discuss, another symptom of her two lives operating concordantly.

“I’m just curious,” I said.

We said goodbye on more or less bad terms. I had the feeling that that would be the last time I’d ever be in that situation again. Once more, I felt like something else was all over.

Not knowing what to do with the rest of my day, I drove home.

When I got home, instead of taking the elevator, this time I took the stairs.

The ten-story high rectangle served one purpose, a quiet and discreet way for residents to leave or enter the building. It was designed to be bland and without interest,

50 forcing everyone through it. The lobby couldn’t have been any more different. With its strange carpet, its pristine furniture, and bright lights, it invited residents to hang around and talk. The old elevator moved slowly and forced awkward conversation between residents who held them only to pass the time, functional conversation designed with the sole purpose of dispelling whatever it is that compels people to babble at one another whenever close. The landings were lit by fluorescent bulbs that cast a dim light on the grey stairs, and concrete walls.

Everything appeared hazy, my mind cluttered up with the world. I found order in the counted-out steps: eight up, left and four steps, then up another eight, repeat. The stairwell carried an air of neutrality that helped clear my mind.

Finally, I’d reached my floor, the sixth.

A door to one of the rooms on the way to my own was open. From inside I heard voices and a muffled radio playing classic rock. I couldn’t help myself when someone left their door open while they were doing laundry down the hall. I liked to take a peak, just long enough to get a sense of their inner world, what kind of tchotchkes colored their lives. Inside two men in white overalls were rolling white paint onto the living room walls. Up until that point, I had lived in the building for a few years. And none of the people who moved in and out ever left a trace, that was the point. Shortly after someone let their lease run its course, were evicted, or simply died from tragedy or age, crews of men with white paint and fresh carpet would restore the apartment back to its original state, would wipe the slate clean, would gesso the canvas, priming it for the acrylic, surface deep marks of a life.

I put the mail I’d been carrying since the morning on top of the dining room table.

51

A large pile had formed, and the new additions slid down along the side, ending up on the floor.

After fixing myself a TV dinner—Sweet and Spicy Korean-Style Beef—I sat on the porch. It was on the north-facing side of the building and overlooked a small courtyard with unkempt oak-bark beds, shrubs, bird feeders, adolescent trees, and a few wooden benches.

Even though I was on sabbatical, checking e-mail was still unavoidable. They piled up one after the other in the same way that the local junk mail found its way into my mailbox in the lobby; that mail, however, the physical kind, could be thrown away, ripped to pieces, shredded, or burned. My digital eyes and ears were always reachable at every moment. The only fate for the spam and the hate mail of those who had read my piece was archival. They would be archived.

Down below, the Chickadees, robins, and cardinals swirled around the birdfeeders set up throughout the courtyard, and through the window beside the porch I could hear

Frankie atop his stack of phonebooks chirping, asking them, “What’s up?”

52

CHAPTER IV

STANLEY AS A CHILD

In my mind, they are forever held in place there, my parents stuck like a snapshot, frozen in my memory frame by frame. And that’s the only way I can view them, one by one, a film real with no projector to play them upon.

He was seated on the edge of the couch and pulling his socks up while I stood behind, urging Him to hurry up with love-handle pokes and chest prods. The look on His face broadcasted His feeling that moments like those weren’t why He wanted children, that He didn’t want to be awoken on sunny days by a small smiling face, something to give everything to and protect for no other reason than it was just what He wanted to do, because what He wanted to do, what life was, was an obligation, something filled with what-has-to-be-dones where afterwards you held aloft your creation to the world and said, “Look what I can do.” I watched His movements, tying His boots tight, double knotting because the laces were too long that even with a loop they’d flop the ground like

Basset Hound’s ears.

“Where are your shoes and socks?” He asked.

“My room,” I said.

53 “Go get them.”

The pads of my feet slapped on the wood floor, echoing throughout the house, as they always did, because the world is too big for kids that age, even our house. To make up time, as kids do, I ran everywhere.

Those late-morning Sundays I made Him walk me to the Burger Palace which sat at the end of our street. The main attraction, aside from the drawbridge and fake stone watch towers, was a rotating stock of plastic figurines which they gave away at random in each of their kid’s meal’s boxes. To miss one single Sunday and lose out on the opportunity to get the figurine I had been waiting on was, for me, unthinkable. I would throw fits Mother wanted to avoid. In my selfishness, I pitted one parent against the other, annoying them into appeasing me, petty prick that I was.

That morning Mother said she was in no physical or mental shape for the walk to get another cheap toy that her son most likely already had, because he had multiples of each. He tried to persuade her that it might be good for her to get out of the house even if it was for a little bit. Her response was that she was very tired.

“We have to move on, you know. We aren’t the first parents to lose a baby,” He said, looking down at her, trying to see through the covers over her head.

“Am I not allowed to take some time?” Mother said, a flick of the wrist casting the white sheet toward the end of the couch.

“Sure, but you can’t do this forever.”

“You wouldn’t understand. How could you?” She placed one pale foot at a time onto the living room’s cool parquet. She rose and made, not for the first time, the familiar walk from couch to picture window.

54 “Maybe I don’t. But I do understand sitting with your head beneath the covers all day doesn’t help,” He said, walking up behind her.

“You didn’t carry her inside you.”

I found them there, standing in front of the window, looking out at the front yard.

I carried the clunky boots in the room by the brown and yellow waxy laces prone to unraveling. I’d clopped around on them for the past few months because He believed that it wasn’t a problem if they bought me a few sizes up because I would grow into them.

Barely over a half decade old, my unhoned balance still a source of fits, I could hardly walk a few feet without tumbling over. Aside from those rare cases, I don’t think we ever get used to gravity until middle age, or perhaps that’s only the sunken feeling, the Earth’s invisible force finally on top that I feel that way.

Mother averted her eyes from the portrait of Jesus—an old heirloom—which she kept hanging in the living room, near her couch. She watched as He slowly tied my shoes, talking me through the steps as he’d done so many times before.

“You should be able to do this yourself. I won’t have you wearing those Velcro ones the slow kids wear, because you aren’t. Slow.”

While He tied one shoe I balanced on the heel of the other, causing me to roll and rotate as if on an axis.

“Who is it we’re hunting for?” He said.

“Sir Ocelot.”

“But don’t you have him already?”

“No. He’s the one I don’t have. I’ve got Duke Rhino, Princess Ella, and Count

Tesla. I need Sir Ocelot.”

55

“I told you to...Damn it, quit while I’m...So, who’s Sir Ocelot?”

“He’s a Cat-Knight. He’s got claws and a sword,” I said as He finally finished tying my second shoe.

We made our way towards the front door—He guiding me by my shoulder, me clopping loudly in my boots—before Mother called from beneath the covers.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Have fun,” He said before closing the door.

As I turned back around to grab His hand I could see her watching us, staring from the living room window.

She stood in anticipation for the return of the last thing which kept her head aloft, because it wasn’t possible for Him to keep her safe any longer; He was a snorkel, sure, but a snorkel in a black sea only keeps you alive to see the black sea. The love which she had fostered, fed, and housed inside of her had died, leaving a vacuum which couldn’t be remedied, even by her own boy. She knew what was growing and growing inside her was going to be a daughter long before the machines showed it was so.

But He was indifferent. What He wanted most was for their boy to have a brother.

He took the news of the ultrasound in his own tepid way. Unable to be there while the waves exercised their powers of vision over His wife’s womb, His response was that they, He guessed, would just have to try again, suggesting to her that what they had created and what she had nurtured in her belly and shared her very own blood with didn’t fulfill some preconceived sense of what a family, or more precisely His family, should be, or that men should have boys if they are men.

But even as He and I walked beyond the house and down the street, for her, the

56 baby must have been there, frozen in the air above the neighborhood, above the house, the body or whatever passed for a body, a life, looking not as if it was making a plunge toward ground, but as if it was seized by a celestial force and being hauled to, leaving an opaqueness, an added hue over top of the cracked asphalt, the uneven sidewalk, the groomed yards, the row houses. To fight this image and her smattering of thoughts, she took to conceiving for herself the what-might-have-beens. Instead of the entrance of phantoms on the black canvas of her eyelids she chose to bury her head beneath the bright white sheets, focusing her eyes on the blankness stretched out before her where images could be projected, where she could paint her own images rather than digest those that spiraled into her mind’s eye.

The walk, over time, became a Sunday staple to several of those in the neighborhood, completing and rounding out their mornings; they chose to sit at the same places on their porches just to say hello to me and whomever I’d convinced to come with me, whether it was He or Mother. I always said hi back and waved with my tiny fist, because that’s how I walked—one hand firmly inside my parent’s hand and the other closed tightly into a fist.

Since it was fall, and even though the year was nearing its end, a few eyes would still be peering out into the street, the mouths above the eyes waiting their turn to take a minute of His and His son’s time; they wished to slyly delve into whether the rumor making the rounds—that the baby was dead—was true.

When we reached the yard of the house of a retired machinist with bowed legs and gnarled hands that fidgeted like spider legs, a voice called to us from the back of the porch.

57 “Well look who it is, hon. It’s our neighborhood patrol,” said the retiree.

“Hey, how are you two doing?” He said.

“Alright I suppose. Still alive, aren’t we? Aren’t we, hon?”

“Yep, we’re still here.”

“That’s right. We are still here aren’t we? I see you down there, boy. Don’t be shy now.”

“Say hi, bud.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Ain’t seen our grandboy in...How long has it been now, hon?”

My attention wandered in and out of the conversation, since I didn’t care so much for what He and the neighbors were saying because, like all kids, of course the most important person and topic was me. Why brother with whatever was going on up there?

“At least a year now I figure.”

“It’s been that long, huh?”

At some point during the short walk so far, my left shoe had come undone, and the laces flapped manically around my boot. I hid this fact from Him; I felt the weight, pressure, and shame upon me for not being able to tie my shoes. That was His power over me, His exercise of force. It made me fear tying my shoes even more, only scorn would be found in asking for help, especially in front of neighbors, minds to impress.

The old man’s hands, as they caressed the porch’s banister for support, were grotesque—rheumatism—and forced me to look at them, focusing on their crooked lines, their stumpy length, while I rocked back and forth on my heel.

“Quit it. I told you to stop that, you’ll break down the heel—But why? Doesn’t

58 your son bring the grandkids around?” He said.

“Hell, ain’t seen him for the same amount of time. Got into an argument with him about us going into a home. I said, ‘We got a home. You know, one you can already visit us at, the same place you grew up in,’” replied the old machinist.

“That was all after he fell down the steps. You remember that, right? He felt we couldn’t take care of ourselves anymore,” the old woman said.

“Ungrateful if you ask me. We took care of him all those years and now once we’re old he just wants to put us up in some home someplace where they wipe our ass for us. You’re a baby then you grow up, have your own baby, and then you turn back into a baby and then your baby has got his own baby...”

“Stop blabbering,” she said to her husband. “But what about you?”

The old man muttered something before sitting down on his chair in the shade of the porch.

“How’s your wife? We haven’t seen her out and about, I hope everything is okay?” the wife said, taking over the conversation.

“She’s fine. Been upstairs in her studio painting away. You know her,” He said.

“Why sure, sure. Just thought I’d ask. Would you tell her we said hello?”

“I will. But we’ve got to get on our way, though.”

“Of course, bye bye.”

“Bye. What do you say?”

“Bye,” I said.

Once we made it to the Burger Palace both my boots had come undone. On the bench, next to the entrance, I sat while He tied my shoelaces for the second time,

59 threatening, “This is it, this is the last time.” I felt my face start to twist and I shut my eyes, and my mouth fell open uncontrollably, issuing sobs, showing my gray front tooth ready to fall out. Finally, once the boots were tied, we went across the drawbridge and into the restaurant where He put in one order for a kid’s meal and watched as I clawed the bag from the employee’s hand and tore out the toy I had so desperately wanted. He told me to eat quickly so we could go home.

On the way back, I held closely onto Him and looked up at the empty branches as they appeared on the white-grey sky, crooked fingers holding tightly to their banister.

In my hand I clutched my own little bit of joy in the world. Parents were parents and they took care of me, but the toy was mine and mine alone.

Through the window I saw Mother seeing us, husband and son, walking toward the house.

As the day had progressed, so had the movements of the neighborhood, where now there were children out windmilling around—bellies full of lunch—and fathers and mothers clearing their yards of leaves. He stopped two houses down and began talking to a neighbor holding a handful of weeds. He often went over to this neighbor’s house during the evenings, and in reverse the neighbor was a frequent visitor of our’s, a true friend of the family, the only neighbor who knew about Mother.

“How’s yard work coming?” He said.

“It’s coming. What’re you two up to? The Sunday ritual I suppose?”

“You know him, can’t miss one.”

“Yeah, yeah. That’s kids for you. What guy’d you get today?...That’s pretty nifty, the arms move and everything.”

60

“He’s a little fanatic. Been trying for that damn thing for...Now look, are you kidding me? Your shoes are untied...What’d I tell you? I told you that was the last time.

Now sit down and tie them yourself.”

From the corner of my eyes I saw Mother watching from the window, seeing the familiar pouting posture: the drooping shoulders, the chin bent chestward, the hidden shame-filled face.

“Not here, over there. On the steps...Kid’s driving me crazy with those damn shoelaces.”

“He can’t tie them yet?”

“No, he can’t. Don’t know why he hasn’t gotten the hang of it yet. It was the same trying to get him to hit the toilet.”

“Well, some take longer than others I suppose.”

“Yeah, but he’s...I don’t know what he is.”

“How about the wife? She still the same?”

From the edge of the bottom step which led to the sidewalk I worked at tying my shoes. I could make the loops easy enough, but it was the control and aim that it took to swoop the other lace around the loop and through the tiny hole that got me. I threw my head back a few times in frustration before I finally pulled the second loop through and pulled them both tight.

But He didn’t notice, continuing on to say, “She calls it her loafing period in front of the kid, but no, nothing different.”

“So, he doesn’t know then?”

“No. She says we’re going to tell him soon. But I’m not sure whether he’d be able

61 to really understand it anyhow...He has a hard enough time with those damn shoes.”

I moved onto the second shoe, pulling the laces extra tight and then making the loops as big as possible, visibly intent on getting the whole process down; I thought about all the boots and shoes I would ever have to wear in my life—their shapes, colors, contoured lines, fabrics, stitching, and faux-leather, stretched out before me like a judgement—that I didn’t want to ask Him to ever tie them for me again.

“Well, it’s like I said, each kid is a little different. And with her, you know we went through the same thing, a lot of families do. But you move on after a while.”

“I think deep down—for God knows what reason—she thinks it’s her fault.

Talking about how she’s going to stop painting...something about one love killing another...”

“You need to really talk to her, sit down and...”

After my triumph, I stood and walked toward Him. Excited that I had tied my boots for the first time, I remembered Mother watching, and waved at her standing in the window. By the sheer force of happiness about my recent victory—Sir Ocelot still clutched tightly in my hand—the violent motion jerked my toy free and sent it spiraling out into the street. Sir Ocelot fell toward the ground and came to rest in a supine posture on the nearside of the street.

“...she doesn’t ever leave the bed and I try to tell her that it would do her some good to finally get up and out but...”

With little consideration—appalled at myself for having launched my treasure—I took a purposeful hop skip off the curb and landed in the street, making my way toward the mislaid toy. That is until I felt jerked backward, and held up by the collar of my shirt,

62 hoisted up into the air as if I was symbol of his own personal shame.

“What the hell are you doing?” He said, but quickly seen what I was after. “Stay there.” He put me down on the sidewalk and walked into the street and picked up my prize.

After He gave the toy back to me, He told me to go home and let him talk. I ran home, the whole time staring at Mother in the window, watching me run, for once my bootlaces still tied.

But even then I think Mom was seeing her, just as she’d seen her floating there above His head while He picked my worthless toy from the street. Because there she stayed, for months, annealed in Mother’s mind, held in place by her painter’s fixative;

Mother had fought—unsuccessfully—her drive to stay with her head tucked under the covers, only to then stand and see all from the bay window. As the years passed and the cars continued to drive below her lost girl, and the passers-by walked along the sidewalk oblivious to what was above their heads, Mother found herself more and more looking at the world through sheets and smudged windows, giving voiceless responses to His questions and affirmations that He was there, He was there. For Him, the silences couldn’t be endured for long, and Mother watched Him walk past the picture window countless times to the neighbor’s or downtown, passing beneath her without even saying a hi or hello, but Mother kept her daughter frozen there, decaying, filling with gases, turning green at the extremities, watching the dead body of her baby girl—aided by the transferred vitriol and aquafortis of a mourning mother—grow and grow, covering the streets, the sidewalks and the houses around for miles, enveloping everything in sight with shade and odor, raining down whatever bile she filled it with.

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But even she eventually realized that the only force keeping her girl suspended in the air, held in place by two opposing powers, was her own, her own overflowing love and her own unwillingness to let something go it was her job to hold tight.

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CHAPTER V

RAYMOND SEES AN EXHIBIT

The exhibit was making a stop at the art museum, Raymond explained. It was traveling from one of America’s medium-sized art museums to the next like a rock band.

The reason Ray wanted to go was the trash. And there would be a lot of it. The entire wing was to be filled with installations by the artist—a mysterious entity in the art world from somewhere like Ypsilanti, a true mid-westerner through and through, who spent his time in junk yards throughout the region, a dumpster diver his preoccupation and nom de plume like some men are farmers and barbers—who by putting on the exhibition, allowed the masses a total immersion experience in American detritus, a small corner on the vast skid mark of the underpants, so to speak, so Raymond said.

I had been to the museum many times before, had made the walk from campus, had crossed the street then turned back east past the manicured vistas of the park, past their counterparts the sprawling green lawns, and made the turn at Broad to head west, then eventually toward the entrance of the museum, one half of it like a shining mirror- like Crystal Palace that shot the sun’s rays back at it, the other half a neo-classical edifice that looked as if it were some seat of a political power, like there was something in the

65 heavy stones of the foundation, in the eroded copper statue out front, and the marble pillars, walls, and floors—all the work of artists in their own right—that created a place which drew the most fervent mid-western art fanatics.

To pass the time before Raymond arrived I smoked a cigarette. The driveway leading to the front entrance created a half-circle, a proscenium on whose edge visitors walked along before going up the stairs and in. A few of the other visitors gave me a glance or said hello, but most walked quickly by to escape the cold air. At my feet, fallen leaves swirled around before going off into the driveway.

Down the street, church spires poked out from behind the office buildings. Five, I counted. Five churches. All of them in denominations diverse. Their architecture as various as their views on faith. One of them was given an historical place marker.

I couldn’t comment. I was part of a generation of accidental atheists, a child who’d grown up and never once stepped foot inside a church to hear God’s words, not because I didn’t want to but because I’d never had a reason to. The only times I went to churches were for weddings, an utterly alien event, one which surrounds the two most unknowns: love and faith.

I imagined what they looked like inside. Worked my eyes up and down the long wide aisle made of smooth stone that forecasted the path towards the altar. The rich, dark color of the pews, whose wood would be solid as a rock. I’d give them a rap with my knuckles, unsure of the material. In the little slots on the back rest of each pew would sit the books filled with music and lyrics, gospels, which talked about things like glory and grace as if there were real physical manifestations of these in the world, that they weren’t just words.

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Then, I might look up at the ceiling and trace the lines of the buttresses from one side to the other, observe the height of the roof above. All around, everything lined in gold, and made even more brilliant by the light. The stained-glass images of biblical scenes, biblical figures in full profile would look down from on high in all their blue, red, and green glow.

The sound, too, I couldn’t forget. To be able to hear real silence. I couldn’t forget.

Only the silent sotto voce emanations of prayer and the divine air to swirl around in.

Mingled with the sound would be the smell, the smells of the wooden pews, whiffs of candle smoke, the stale smell of couch cushions that’ve absorbed years of human odor.

And most of all, the fanatic certainty all round. This was the truth and there could be nothing to make it waver, force it off of its foundations, no scientific method to undermine, no new axiom, no philosophical explaining away, reason and rhetoric would lay dead at the feet of the solid wooden doors.

Oh, to feel what it’s like to have soul, I thought. To feel like something other than the sum of billions of microscopic cells and synapses I have no control over. I can’t account for why I do the things I do, I thought. While saying a sentence, no part of my consciousness knew what the next sentence had in store. Even if I thought about what, in general, I wanted to say, I still couldn’t account for the actual words and punctuation, or the pauses and spaces—places to stop for breath—where the ideas really lingered. I never once thought about why I took a breath when I did, or why each heartbeat came as a surprise. If I couldn’t even control my most base functions, the simple things that kept me alive, I wasn’t sure what I could control. Since my own aliveness was remotely operated

67 or set in motion elsewhere, how could I have any hope of controlling actions, emotions, thoughts? These sprang up from some strange deep dark place on the inside of the inside of my brain, somewhere where no sun would ever shine, unless of course another unlucky chump like myself was convinced that it’d be a decent idea to splatter my head with something blunt. Unlucky is the right word for it, too, because everything when stripped of fat gets back down to luck. God was a non-issue. If I never had control over these things like I had no special control over what body I was born into, there was no other explanation except luck.

My gaze lingered on the library because in the weeks leading up to that day I couldn’t bring myself to go into what was once a hallowed place. A place I’d gone to, counted on, for pleasure had lost its interest for me. The fluorescent lights above hurt my eyes, made me squint under their glare.

I could see the computer lab floor from the street and it was filled with people at every station. Typing away, closed off with gigantic ear-covering headphones. Their eyes aglow with rapidly alternating hues. People in suits walked back and forth in deep discussion. Policeman were stationed near the exits. It looked like a business, a business no different than any of the other buildings downtown. On the main floor, there was a coffee-chain with loud machinery and shouting baristas.

Why hadn’t I noticed all this before? I thought. What was there in this world that I found so enjoyable. The books were an after-thought, a portion of the library that was beginning to shrink and allow itself to be pushed to the wayside. The library was in the business of entertainments and gustatory nourishment. Summer blockbusters to be loaned, caffeine to profit from.

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After a few more moments I spotted Raymond. In his gangly gait, always foppish in a wool-colored coat, he walked toward me. When he reached the stairs, he gave me a hug. Ever since I had known him, Raymond’s cheeks always looked sunken. His nose— underneath a pair of horn-rims—dominated his face.

“I almost didn’t recognize you with that, that…”

“Tripped up the steps” I said, a small cast around my right ankle. “Refreshing to change your appearance from time to time, though. Things stay interesting that way.”

“How long will you be hobbling around like that?”

“Only for a couple of weeks, maybe three,” I said.

In a few minutes, Victoria, Raymond’s sometimes wife, walked along the outer edge of the driveway.

Her freckled, kite-shaped face bobbed back and forth in the wind. She had dressed more formally, a trim suit jacket, close-fitting black pants. Her long brown hair—which looked as if it had been, at one point, silky and flowing—was volume-less and wiry.

Like myself, she looked as if she had spent her entire life keeping her figure trim, but couldn’t keep the subtle plumpness in the tissues from relaxing and withering away, revealing simply the structure underneath. In our middle age, we were both the hard, sinewy sort of skinny that becomes those who were skinny their entire life. Although we never discussed it I think it was this that made us friends, each of us saw in the other the same weak body which served as the remnant of a long-passed vitality.

“Good to see you,” Victoria said.

It was business, for her. The art of the deal, and the performance of advertising, selling, and merchandising. Somewhere in her DNA—stretchable from Earth to moon—

69 there were a half a dozen, a dozen, naked-eye-invisible nucleotide pairs swirling around in double helixes, a molecular blueprint in harmony with the inflating wheel of the Free

Market, a true proponent of the laissez faire, a lover of the upstart entrepreneur, the expanding franchise, the overnight Silicon Valley millionaire with billion dollar ideas, and for many years between jobs, Raymond’s welfare.

“Nice to see you too,” I said.

Raymond gave us both a quick “well what are we waiting for!” look before leading us up the stairs and into the entrance.

The museum was nearly empty, hundreds spent their weekend afternoons there, but mid-day during the week was much less busy. Those that were there moved, circulated, up and down the hallways. I watched the other patrons move back and forth in a convoluted conveyor belt-style motion, the people, not the art, the product being shaped. We walked out from the older wing of the building and into the modern addition.

All around us in the atrium there were glass panes reaching from the ground to the ceiling thirty feet above. The brick floor below was laid out in ever-diminishing rings getting smaller and smaller.

The exhibit was in the back of the museum.

As we moved through the museum, Raymond watched my limp, trying to calculate it into his new conception of me.

Victoria walked along the walls, stopping briefly at each piece. She took time to read each title, medium, and dimension, as if it was there that the true story of the painting was told, as if to her, the materials, the physical space, the name that could be categorized held truth, the artist’s deep belief in aesthetics absent in her.

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“Well come on. Let’s get to the exhibit. Most of these pieces will still be here later,” Ray said, noticing that I was watching Victoria. “Too bad they don’t offer scooters like the super market,”

Ray laughed. I laughed, too.

But I got less and less enjoyment from the performance. I could act hurt. Acting hurt was small potatoes. Everyone perfected this put-on from childhood—fake sniffles, affected coughs, half-hearted throat clears. As we reached the wing of the museum which housed the exhibition, I felt like I was beginning to lessen, physically, as if my force was slowing, creeping out of me.

Finally, we reached the exhibit.

Irradiated jelly-fish with alien appendages in technicolor, clusters of colorful souls frozen in rigid forms, massive knots of technological wires swirled and twirled together, bleached and paint-spattered titanic abortions were what they looked like; many of them, like those that were in front of us, hung from the ceiling like mobiles; spinning on the axis of their strings, they swayed underneath the power of some invisible force.

“Matter can neither be created nor destroyed,” Raymond said.

By then, I was used to Raymond’s outbursts. He had little to no idea how conversations operated. The things that came out of his mouth were extensions of the long train of thought which whizzed through his brain. Instead of introductory remarks he simply spoke, said the first things coming to his mind, a stream-of-consciouser if there ever was one. I gave him a puzzled look, anyway, a way to tell him to go on.

“A few years before, I attended a lecture by one of the world’s most prominent scientists. He was prominent, but not preeminent, a traveling salesman of science, often

71 listed as a science educator. He heaped scientific knowledge upon the crowd. My head felt physically heavier during and after his talk. But one of the things he made sure to mention was that, even with all the topics he’d covered, the entire mass of ‘big-time’ scientific discoveries discovered, the universe was mostly an empty place. Can you believe that? Mostly empty? It makes no sense if you look around. Empty for whom?”

Victoria showed little interest in the art. She had an air of unaffectedness, erect upright posture, a chin-out walker on whose face one could make out a passed-down genome-embedded sense of pride in everything she did.

“I’ve never much been one for the so-called ‘fine arts’,” Raymond said. “I’ve always been more interested in what they feature here. These kinds of things. New things.

All this old, old, old, is only valuable because they tell us how not to be artists anymore.

Do you ever think, ‘The creator of every piece of art in this building is dead’…? Bet you don’t. That’s why I stick around: I’m old school that’s New Wave.”

He walked backwards and forwards in front of a piece of art. It was an enormous ball of collected trash hung low to the floor like a Christmas ornament. There were sneakers sticking out from the sides, Tuesday ads filling spaces between, waded knots of t-shirts, eau de toilette bottles and broken light bulbs like little crystals.

All of it junk. All of it to be thrown on the scrap heap of history. Bulk to be boot- heeled by time and forgotten forever. Here was garbage in uniformity, the entropic sprawl of trash turned back into order and meaning by an artist’s hand.

The large high-ceilinged rooms filled with mobiles gave way to several smaller, darker rooms that were lit by indigo lights, black lights, that made the mobiles along the walls—bordered on all sides by darkness—look like brilliant white skeletons trapped

72 inside x-ray. I followed, slowly, behind Raymond. Ahead there came into the hallway a familiar, golden light, almost homey. It felt like another wing of the museum, but it became obvious that it was simply another section of the exhibit.

Inside the middle of an adjoining room, Victoria stood in front of an unlit fireplace illuminated from the bottom by small flood lights.

“Well wasn’t that something,” Raymond said. “Isn’t this something.”

The room was carpeted, the design a floral pattern in browns, maroons, and purples. All around us the space was populated with antique furniture. In the first room, I felt as if I were transported back to the drawing room of a noble. But it wasn’t just these immaculately furnished rooms, because the exhibit was about garbage. Around a coffee table sat a couple couches and on each were manikins. In the dim light of the room I couldn’t at first make out what was strange about them, other than their hue, which was a chewed up mottled gray and brown that appeared moist underneath the light. As I walked closer, moving between a chaise longue and the table, I realized the connection; it was the people, the manikins. In their beautifully arrayed rooms they were made up of things, their things. Their things were their essence.

In the next room, we walked through an aristocrat’s library, the shelves filled with leather-bound books, the air leather-bound smells. Behind his desk, another manikin looked intently down at the open pages of a book. The room after that a dining hall.

Around a long, beautifully ornate dining table sat four manikins, an entire family.

Each room was like a cubicle in the artist’s mind, a hallucinatory trip back and forth through time that made him forget that he was in a corner space in a downtown art museum in the twenty-first century. And I believed it, too. Believed that Ray and he were

73 awaiting dinner guests, or were about to enjoy a political conversation with local men of thought in a cigar-smoke-filled drawing room. All three of us, every guest who ever visited, E.M. Forestered, Henry Jamesed, Evelyn Waughed into a different time and place. This ability was no different than everyone’s ability to believe gods existed. It wasn’t that people could believe in truths that helped them walk upright off the savannah, it was that they could believe in untruths, I thought.

“I’m going to be directing a play this summer,” Ray said, as if the exhibitions, the time periods they reminded one of knocked something loose. He explained that he was adapting Camus’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Demons, which Camus called The

Possessed. He had just finished vetting actors for the roles.

“He really tried to make it difficult for his play to never make it to the stage,”

Raymond continued. “What ambition. Nothing like his stories and novels. Somewhat in the philosophical sense, though. He hated nihilism, like Dostoevsky. But the production originally took over four hours to complete, over a half a dozen sets, two dozen scenes!

I’ve also found the perfect actor for Verkhovensky, a young middle-eastern boy from the university. Billie actually introduced me to him.”

He stopped his forward-backward dance, finding the right distance and stared.

“It’s certainly ambitious,” I said, wondering who the Verkhovensky-to-be was.

“That’s what everyone says,” Ray said, a hurt look on his face. “Especially the people with money paying to put it on stage. It is certainly putting me in the hole.”

As happens to a group at a museum, a park, or a festival, the three of us slowly trickled apart, each of us interested in our own interests. I found myself in a dimly lit room filled with minimalist art—Paul Stella-Lewitts, Ellsworth Clays, Walter Brice

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Mangolds. I could understand the appeal. I couldn’t imagine imagining that a few colored blocks, or a couple of perfectly painted circles might be art. Couldn’t conceive of the clarity of mind and the simple order of thought needed.

I found Raymond a few rooms over, near the main exhibition, reviving his forward-backward way of looking at sculptures. Raymond turned his head as he heard my muted ka-thunk ka-thunk across the hardwood. I felt like a wounded warrior, an athlete with a broken metatarsal, or raptured Achilles, a poor sap Bad Luck’d and bullied by fate.

Once I reached Raymond, he looked down closely at the label next to the sculpture.

In all his oddness, Raymond was a bit of a guru. He was a decade older than me at the time, but I always felt as if his wisdom stretched far beyond that. He went on meditation retreats, was never one to immediately dismiss a new age quack.

In front of us was another piece of art which used recycled materials the artist, a local environmental artist, had found: pieces of plastic water bottles, packaging material, junk mail, bottle caps, broken glass, tin cans, lost computer keyboard keys, grocery bags, tattered clothing, pages severed from their bindings, popped pants’ buttons, cigarette butts, busted vinyl, candy bar wrappers, milk cartons, blown-out light bulbs and whatever other materials a local artist with nothing but time and adhesive could find all converged to form the figures that lined the hallways like amalgamated phantoms held together by the souls of the materials they were made of.

“My life has lasted long enough now that I felt obligated to it,” Raymond said.

“We search our lives for its meaning. That’s the thing about being young. these things haven’t hit you yet. Maybe you’re just a late bloomer.”

“What do you do next?” I said.

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From behind us, Victoria spoke softly from behind, as if she knew the perfect echo-averse volume and pitch, “Let’s get some lunch. Downstairs there’s a restaurant.”

“Care to join us?” Raymond asked.

The exhibit had worn me out, and since I had skipped breakfast, I was hungry.

We walked quickly through the rest of the more modern art collections and back downstairs toward the entrance.

The café served modern American food, but more specifically a midwestern bent.

It was inside a glass-enclosed thirty-foot high courtyard with marble floors. Along the east and west facing glass walls there were more large, contemporary minimalist sculptures.

I ordered burgers and fries, Raymond and Victoria salads and yogurts. We found an empty table facing one of the glass walls. Outside, across the lawn, we could see traffic going up and down the street.

A server brought out our food and placed it on the table.

For the rest of our lunch we sat mostly in silence, only making the passing comment about a piece of art we’d seen that day, or the clothes of a passerby.

After we finished eating, Victoria said, “Well, I’m ready to go home, how about you?”

“Sure,” Raymond said. “I don’t care to see any more of the exhibits.”

I limped behind them as we walked back through the rest of the museum. Before we parted ways outside, Raymond turned and said, “You should follow the story to the end, and even nothing is something.”

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CHAPTER VI

BREAKING UP

I took trips back and forth to my father’s house. I felt as if I was excavating my own past, taking trips in time as the result of a smell or a touch. The company I had called to clean up the house was going to start the following week. When I told them that they had never seen a house in the state quite like my father’s the employee on the phone assured me that they had. Hoarders of my father’s ilk weren’t everyday, but they didn’t qualify as rare either.

The things that I kept, I took back to my apartment. I kept all the most important things first, what anyone would take: family photo albums, old letters, and so on. I began to pile everything up in the dining room. Since it was where all the junk mail was put, I figured it wouldn’t change much if I began stacking the things there. Gradually, the table filled; then it more than filled; after that it grew into heaping. The junk ads and bank statements I never cared to throw away began to disappear underneath mass-market paperbacks, and boxes filled with family photographs, blurry images of strangers whose genes I was carrying around.

I also managed to even take care of Frankie, the bird: gave him bird seed, lined

77 the bottom of the cage with ads grabbed from the dining room table, and even tried to teach him new phrases, ones to replace my father’s. But nothing I tried to teach him stuck; you can’t teach an old bird new tricks.

When I got back to my apartment early one morning with a load of things, Billie was there sitting on the edge of my bed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her there.

“Hi, Stan,” she said. “I came over to pick up a few things I’d forgot I left here.”

I stood still in the doorway, feeling like a fool, my hands full of my father’s worthless junk, and my ankle in its mummy wrap.

Her beautiful face, the one I’d fallen in love with, was still the same. Perhaps it was even more beautiful than before, but in the features which used to crack and sparkle I could see a dimness. Her electric smile which lifted her features was absent, as if my presence were its own gravity pulling at the corners of her mouth, fish-hooking her eye lids down. For the first time with her I felt as if I were an overweening presence in her life. This sensation wasn’t new; I’d felt it before with other younger women as the relationships reached their ends. But it can’t happen now, I thought. Not with her.

Billie, as if she could sense my thoughts, brightened up quickly and turned to face me.

“I like the bird,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, dropping the box on the ground.

Billie stared as I walked over to the bed and sat next to her. Our bodies were reflected in the television, chiaroscuro, our forms abstract. Frankie chirped loudly from my bedroom.

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“Together we’ve come up with a game,” I said. “At random Frankie asks, ‘what’s up?’ to which I say ‘nothing’, then Frankie asks, ‘what’s up?’ and I say ‘nothing.’”

“Are you still going to Boston for another appearance?” she said.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “The money was good, but I’m not a very disciplined whore. I get lazy.”

She smiled. I could see her mouth warp in the curved screen of the television.

“I feel this slow creep,” I said.” But it isn’t because of laziness, or sloth, or anything biblical like that. I can’t find anyone or anything to accuse. Except perhaps myself. I feel worn-out, existentially.”

She kept silent, as I might if she were the one on a rant.

“That’s at least what I feel like, like an Inked Slate, a worn out piece of paper

John Hancocked by generation after generation of ideas, socialization. My biological code is warped, Enlightenment trademarked.”

Billie nodded, said, “Since when?”

“It’s not as if there is one moment I could point at, or scapegoat and saddle with blame. Something more like a succession of events over a long period is more like it, closer to the truth. As much as I hated, still hate, my father I think it all started with him. I constantly feel weak, tired, a loss in force, completely unwilling to defend myself against the slow creeping Whatever.”

She looked away through the sliding glass door that led onto the terrace for a moment. The world looked monochromatic. It was December, but even the weather was unsure of itself, tired, only able to limp with a lukewarm climate, no real force left to whip up a blizzard. The longer she stayed like that, gazing outside with no care, no will to

79 say something, anything, in response, the more frustrated I became. I realized that my problems were just as alien to her as her ignorance of them was alien to me.

“I’m going to have dinner with Raymond and Victoria. Please come.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Couldn’t convince you?”

“I’m not sure.”

I didn’t understand what she meant that she wasn’t sure. How couldn’t she be?

She stood up from the bed and walked away from me, toward the kitchen.

“I told you before, there is something on campus that I want to be a part of,” she said over her shoulder. “My friend, Mahmoud, is putting it together. It’s something I feel like I need to do. I will think about it, though and call if I can.”

There his name is again, I thought. I started to realize that Mahmoud’s presence was the one dimming Billie’s features. Not that he was something bad in her life, but something quite the opposite—her affection for this phantom, because to me he was only a name, some abstract idea without a face towards which I might direct my anger.

She came back with a coffee in a tall plastic cup. After she handed it to me she turned and walked towards the bathroom.

“It’s cold out,” I said.

“And?” she said, looking back at me.

“What’s the point of getting something that is normally hot, cold, especially when it is already cold out.”

Her face turned red behind an emerging look of frustration. It’s working, I thought.

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“That doesn’t matter. You can get whatever you want whenever you want to.”

“But what about plain old appropriateness and taste? Like how you don’t wear white in winter?”

“You can wear white in winter if you want to. I wear white in winter.”

“Of course you do.”

“What’s ‘of course you do’ supposed to mean?”

“What I mean is that it’s not about whether you can or can’t, it’s about whether or not you should, a good word might be principle”

“I always hated principals, yours too.”

“Just stick with the normal stuff that people have always drank.”

“Not me. Try the whole menu. Mix and match, mess around.”

“People have to tinker with things and change what was perfectly fine. Coffee is fine the way it is.”

“It’s how you make things better, make things work.”

Finally, she stormed away to look for whatever it was she was looking for.

I chased after her, kicking papers and clothes out of the way as I went.

“This thing on campus, what’s it about?” I said, walking into the opening of the bathroom.

Billie stood, rummaging through the drawers, lifting up a brush, moving aside cold medicine, overturning a package of q-tips.

“It’s not here,” she said. She walked past me and out into the room.

“It’s some sort of protest isn’t it. You’re going to stand in a crowd. Rail against the man?”

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“You wouldn’t understand, can’t understand.”

She sat down at the table I kept in the living room. I could tell by her movements, her unease, that something more was on her mind, something more on her mind that she was trying to decide on whether or not it was worth it to say it to me.

“What is it?” I said, standing in the middle of all of the junk on the floor.

“It’s this nightmare I keep having,” she said.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“No, it’s stupid,” she said.

“Let’s hear it,” I repeated. “Do you want something to drink? Water?”

“You have to promise not to laugh.”

I promised while walking to get her a glass of water.

“It’s very surreal, like a, who is that Dutch painter? The one with all of the deformed people and monsters.”

“Bosch?” I said walking back into the living room and over to the table. I sat the glass down near her hand.

“Exactly, like a Bosch painting, except it takes place in a time and place like here.”

“My apartment?”

“No, like contemporary times,” she said, taking a drink. “Everyone is born with one single trait that dominates them. Like there are people walking around with enormous heads, others with huge arms, or legs, and so on. And the Brains control things. They conclude what it is that people should do and things like that. In the dream I have an enormous mouth, lips to be exact. But it wasn’t only the lips, my whole mouth is over-

82 sized, you might say enormous, gigantic even. People shout at me: ‘Look at those lips!’

Sometimes: ‘Look at your lips!’”

“You were right,” I said. “This is strange.”

“I told you.”

“Keep going.”

“And the most depressing part is that I can’t communicate with anyone, damaged men and women, boys and girls. They need an ear, but I’m just a mouth.

“The whole thing is too, is that I can tell that I’m not supposed to have these gigantic lips, like women aren’t supposed to have them. I can tell from their faces. The other women say, ‘We use our ears here, see,’ and they lean over, cocking their heads like if water was caught in them.

“All of the other women have huge ears, real ears, ones so big I can see the hairs sticking out, ones so big they needed to keep towels or plus-sized Q-tips on hand to catch the wax. Or, they might have big boobs. Gigantic pelvises.

“Just walking down the sidewalk I could see people everywhere, it wasn’t easy because of my tiny eyes but I tried. There were men—sometimes women—with over- sized arms, biceps and triceps like tree trunks and they used their knuckles and fingers to walk their tiny bodies forward. Behind them their limp feet and legs swayed back and forth through the air. They don’t talk either, they just grunt and keep moving past.

Caveman-like gutturals that I can’t understand, but I still try and listen to them.

“I can see you don’t believe me,” Billie said, getting up from the table. She went into the kitchen.

“No keep going,” I said chasing after her.

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We were standing in the kitchen now. She began to go through, one by one, the miscellaneous junk drawers I’d begun to fill for the past few weeks.

“Please, just tell me,” I said.

“It isn’t important. It’s stupid.”

I looked at her pleadingly. We stared back at one another for what seemed like hours. I could see in her eyes that it wasn’t ashamed by the dream’s content. It was the fact that she was sharing it with me, what the dream said about her relationship to me. I was beginning to put the pieces together. This was her way of getting through to me, whether it was conscious or subconscious I couldn’t tell, but the message was definite.

“There are people with massive quadriceps and calf muscles that move around carrying these tiny torsos, runners, Legs. And I’ll look somewhere else and see some guy with the hips and the butt, like something out of Dali. You know, the one with the guy with the enormously long butt-cheek that needs a crutch to hold it up. And like I said there were people with swollen heads to hold their brains, brains so big they have to be pushed along in wheelchairs”

Where was I in her dream? I asked myself. Which deformity was I?

She paused for a moment.

“And Mahmoud is there, too,” she said. “He is all eyes, big ones. He’s an artist, an actor. He uses them to pin-point the strokes on his canvases, to convey emotions, cry.

In the dream, I meet him at his apartment where he shows me new art. ‘Look at this,’ he’ll say. Or, ‘The brushstrokes and the colors! Do you see this shade here? The Light?’

But I can’t, I just shake my head. ‘Of course not, those tiny eyes, doll’s eyes.’”

“His apartment?” I said. “Have you been there before?”

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“Yes,” she said. “He lives in that new apartment building downtown. Our activism group, the one he started, meets there.”

“I’m sorry. Keep going,” I said.

“In the dream I feel like I wish that I could see the strokes, colors, and shades like he can, but I can’t.”

She couldn’t help but see us all as separated by luck and held apart by the fascism of our features.

“And I think I know what the whole dream is about. What it keeps trying to tell me. Because at the end I always see another woman. She always finds me in the dream somehow and sits next to me. A mouth, just like mine, sat down. And I’m always stunned by it. I can feel my stunnedness in the dream. There is another person born wrong, genetic oddities all of us, I think.

“And right then I always wake up. And when I wake up I always have this feeling.”

“Feeling of what?”

“Something like power. I feel like I won’t keep my mouth shut. That I didn’t know why it was or who I was doing it for anymore in the first place.”

“I realized that if I did, if I let my mouth open in the dream, in life, finally separating lip from lip, that there was no telling what might come out. That I’d let out demons. That I’d let out the cries and emergency wails for all of the other ones. Together we’d spew spittle and spit spunk.”

“So that, Mahmoud, he’s a friend?” I said. Of course, I meant, Are you sure he isn’t more?

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Billie looked as if she didn’t know what to say, as if perhaps she was shocked by seeing me for the first time.

“What kind of question is that?” she said, turning to look at me.

“A simple one,” I said.

“I’ve figured out what it is that you want from me. What you see me as and I’m not for it. Not in-line with it. You craft me like a narrative in your head. I watch you, have been watching you. Whittling me like wood to fill the empty places in your life.

Something to stitch you back together. I don’t want the children. Don’t want the husband or the settled life. Who needs love? It’s freedom I want.”

“I do,” I said before I could keep myself from saying it.

“Everything is about power,” Billie said. ““I realized, found out, that I had a knack for convincing people of things, a manipulator. After all, words aren’t about respect, or intelligence, or aesthetic and they have no business in being politically correct.

They are about power. If I really thought about it, that’s all anyone was ever doing: convincing people of something, trying to sell them something, influencing them to think some way. Especially with you.”

“No, it’s not just about power,” I said. “It’s about how things work, the natural order of things—the top, the bottom, and the whole fight fought in the middle.”

“I really can’t take it anymore,” one said, she could tell he was a Mouth. “I don’t think we can get along anymore, our differences are too vast. Vast like canyons, or an ocean. The Atlantic, maybe, maybe not as big as the Pacific, but pretty big. We have sex sure. But only in the beginning it can hold everything together. Eventually it all falls apart, though. I really think that’s true. And with you it’s if you’re always thinking of

86 people as all Mouth or all Ass. You don’t even see the people behind the words you use to describe them.”

“I thought that was why you liked me, why you put up with me,” I said, “My brain.”

“It was part of it sure, but I guess we aren’t compatible. Everyone knows that mouths and minds don’t always go together, they aren’t exactly like Night and Day, or

Up versus Down, nothing cliché like that. But sometimes something gets in the way and the mouth says something the mind wasn’t even thinking, or at least didn’t think that it was thinking.”

I knew we’d finally reached the end of things to say. So, I didn’t say anything back. Billie knew it wasn’t her job to say anything back either.

I realized in that moment just what exactly the problem with fragile things is, which is that they are always what shatters into millions of fine little pieces that can never be put back together, unlike tougher materials like flesh or bone, whose pieces can be easily identified and put back the way they should; because the raw materials are easily mended by the obviousness of their delineated portions, but they will never be able to be as bewitchingly abstract and powerful as a love made beautiful—although frail—in the hottest of infernos, but can nonetheless be put back together. I tried to discern why love, of all the things, should be the one so hard to put back together. Perhaps it is because of its worth, its rarity, that I strive so hard to find it, but I’d found that love wasn’t like a diamond, something made spectacular through pressure; pressure was the one thing sure to shatter a love.

After she got up and left, I slept for hours. When I woke up, I got dressed and

87 drove to Raymond and Victoria’s house.

88

CHAPTER VII

DINNER AT RAYMOND’S

I went over to Raymond’s house that evening for dinner.

We ate everything that Victoria had had the gumption to cook. The lobster tails were devoured. Shrimp cocktails were dispatched. The fried popcorn shrimp were put away along with crab legs. The tuna casserole was pulverized, munched. The plates and bowls where mussels, oysters, clams, crawfish, Alaskan Cod fillets, and Lemon-

Cranberry tilapia salad used to be were desolate. They had a thing for seafood. Only random bits of garnish, melted butter, and croutons were all that remained.

I helped them clear the table and put all the dishes in the kitchen.

While Victoria finished cleaning the dining room and kitchen, Raymond and I sat in their living room. We sipped from our glasses of wine. Raymond had picked the bottle out, a rich cabernet that quickly made, even with a full stomach, my head a bit heavy.

“What are your plans now?” Raymond said after a short silence.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “The whole thing is unexpected. Teaching has been my life.

I suppose I’ll catch up on reading. Maybe write.”

What job could I apply for anyway? I knew then, that I would never teach again.

89

It was something I’d already left behind me. In my head, anything in academia was out of the question—obviously—and unless I lied, changed the name on the little black lines for applications at community colleges or a museum I didn’t believe I had any conceivable avenue with which to become a useful member of academia or society as a whole, an issue which was slowly troubling me more and more.

I’d spent already months repenting for showing my hand. But this was my albatross now. The shame was of course undue, and I was going to at least make myself useful. The past months I was, in everyday life, socially, as well as physically, floating around in the dark matter of the infinite universe, as much a part of it as the visible stuff, that is made up of those who are wholly unmindful of my presence, but would soon be made mindful of that presence, as well as the forces of motion I could cause. And, I have the advantage, I thought. I have the jump, the element of surprise, because it wouldn’t even occur to him that there is someone, me, out there, invisible, unknown, but powerful, ready to move everything.

Raymond took a long drink from his glass and then filled it back up.

“This whole thing, I think, will be good for you,” Raymond said.

I wanted the attention off my personal life.

“What about you?” I said. “How is your play going?”

“Well, actually,” Raymond said. “I’ve lucked into a good group of actors.”

“Your Verkhovensky?”

“He’s the best of them all. Intelligent. He exudes his own brand of exotic charm.”

I took a long drink from my glass and motioned for the bottle. I filled it up about two-thirds.

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Raymond gave me a quick look. I could see that he was uncomfortable with the question he had already decided to ask.

“How about Billie?”

“I don’t even know where to begin,” I said. “Since the beginning of this whole debacle she has slowly turned against me,” I said, my voice quavering a bit. “And for what?”

I did know the answer to this question, I thought. All of the answers were right in front of me. This Verkhovensky, I thought, because I couldn’t bear to think of his name, or see his face as anything but a composite. He was the physical manifestation of every bit of dreck I’d been battered by.

From behind Raymond, Victoria walked into the room and sat down on the chair from Raymond.

“Would you like some?” Raymond said holding the bottle of cabernet. “There is some left.”

“Sure,” Victoria said.

Raymond went off to get another wine glass.

“How did you like the food?” Victoria said.

“It was good,” I said.

“It’s too bad Billie—”

“Here we go,” Raymond said sitting down with an extra wine glass and another bottle of wine, a merlot. He poured the wine to the top of the glass and handed it to

Victoria. “I’m sorry Stan, I’m all out of cabs.”

I motioned with my hands that it was no problem and took the bottle. I poured

91 myself a half-full glass and took a sip. The glass was smudged from my spinning it around in my hands.

I leaned against the back of the couch and watched as Victoria and Raymond joked about the pour he gave her.

“You have to catch up,” Raymond said.

They are well set up, I thought. Their son and daughter go to good schools, private schools. They act in plays with biblical subject matter. They are comfortable in their secular dogmas. Their devotion to their careers, their children, their home, set them apart, made them more confident and secure, fanatics of the upper-middle class family model. Their narrative is already written. They trust the conclusions will be beneficial.

Every time I run into Raymond at the supermarket his cart is usually full of the odd gadget or gizmo: a cell-phone case with a kickstand, solar-powered floodlights, a device which turns lights on when a person claps and so on, all the types of things Raymond gives as Christmas or birthday presents, small trinkets that ease simple tasks. His goal: efficiency, control.

I began to know the ending as well, began to sense that I was well on my way to controlling it.

“These things are cropping up all over,” Raymond said, again bringing up the academic climate.

“It’s epidemic,” I said.

“Things change.”

“And I’ve always changed with them, but—”

“But this is something too far.”

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I made a sound which I thought would show agreeance.

“I’ve forgot to ask every time I’ve seen you,” Victoria began to say, changing the subject. “How are things with your father’s estate?”

Everyone, not always, but every once in a while, wants to hear about someone else’s problems, just to know that they aren’t their own, just to know that they can discuss them, offer suggestions, without any consequences.

“A few times a week I take a trip to the house,” I said. “I go through boxes, dressers, and closets. Trying to get anything of value out before everything is completely junked.”

“And you’re storing it?”

“In my apartment.”

I watched as her eyes widened a bit.

My apartment is like my mind, I nearly said to her. To choke it back I took a drink.

“You know,” Raymond began to say, “These kids have a point to what they’re doing. They are upending society in a way that they feel best, no different than any other generation before them. You can’t cling to these old things, history, forever. You can’t hold out for out-dated notions like love. The freedom of choice is everything now. There are no strict rules, boundaries, mores, things which helped for a while, but need to be cast off.”

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CHAPTER VIII

VIRGINIA’S LAST DAYS

She wanted to die at home. This wish was one that my father granted her. In the living room which acted as the stage for so many domestic dramas to unfold was now a funeral parlor. In order to celebrate the soon-to-be-passed Virginia Malwell, wife of

Francis Malwell, the surviving Malwell family members, and a few scattered plus-ones, were all gathered at my mother and father’s house to give condolences, say goodbyes, and ameliorate the nuclear bonds that had become ever so slack. At least this was the plan. All of the furniture was moved, or put upstairs in the bedroom I’d never use again.

The couch my mother slept on day after day was no longer there, but in its place, the hospital bed hospice had provided.

I wore my best clothes to see her: a black suit, black oxfords, a white shirt, and a black and orange tie—my school’s colors. Everything about me looked distinguished.

This image of me is the one I remember when I look back to all those college days,

American college days filled with drinking, sex, and History, all the things which got me through.

Everyone has seen someone as near to death as she was at that moment. She

94 looked so beaten down, and put through every conceivable type of pain. Her skin was prune-like and pale. Her head was bald with tiny patches of short black hairs that looked like bruises. Puffy and downcast, her eyes rarely came up from the floor, because any obstacle could easily trip her up.

It was the beginning of summer and I had just earned my doctorate degree. The ceremony was just a week before. Many family members congratulated me on my achievement, a doctorate degree embossed with the Malwell name a rarity, in fact something more than a rarity, a non-existent. Some of them even gave me a bit of cash, some needed reminding what my degree was in. When I told them History, many asked about what I was going to do now.

“Now he is going to go back and teach, can you believe it?” My father said, butting in, during one of these conversations.

I didn’t say anything back. Together we had had the same argument over and over, but the fact that none of my education came from out of his pocket was my trump card. In the end, he had to rest upon the conclusion that I had chosen to screw my life up without the help of his money or influence. I was free and growing beyond his control into whatever it was I was going to be. What I was going to be was a college professor, this much I was certain of, and specifically a college professor of History, my chosen subject.

When my father didn’t intervene, I told family that I was hired to teach at the local university near downtown.

The course I was assigned to that fall semester was World War II in Global

Perspective. All summer I had planned to read dozens of obscure and not-so obscure

95 texts—Marshall Zhukov’s memoir, historical studies on the relationship between

Churchill and Hitler, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Tojo and the Coming of the

War, The Rape of Nanking, Mein Kampf (which he’d read at least twice already),

Weinberg’s A World at Arms, and Visions of Victory, all of the texts concerning the greatest leaders of men in conflict with one another, in struggles between good and evil— with the purpose in mind to educate and entertain less-than-enthralled History major- types.

In the apartment I had just moved into these worn and faded mass market paperbacks covered every flat surface, several splayed open, others bent, and some smashed and curled. Occasionally, some of them fell off of the wonky hand-me-down bookshelves I had kept from my doctorate days, the shelves were buckling under the weight of art and history reproduced for commercial consumption.

Family members filed through the house and gave their condolences to my father and I.

We stood next to each other. He was at the end of his sixties. The stoop in his back was becoming more and more prominent.

My mother, on the bed, breathed heavily, as if even though her life had been a bag filled with every kind of unluckiness, every second was still worth the trying involved.

In biology, a natural phenomenon everyone learns about is cell reproduction, or division. It was how one stayed alive. The cells clone themselves again and again. The three stages of growth before a cell finally divides is called “interphase.” A “synthesis” phase is sandwiched by two “gaps” phases. “Synthesis” is when all of the DNA begins to replicate. The DNA is duplicated within the chromosomes, producing exact copies.

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Human cells produce a cell with forty-six exact copies of the original forty-six chromosomes. Before being pulled apart, each DNA copy is lynchpinned to the original at a point called a centromere. Eventually the processes of mitosis—nuclear division— and cytokinesis take over, both leading to the production of a perfectly cloned cell, indistinguishable from the original. And there are 37.2 trillion of these in a human, give or take. Each of these thirty-seven trillion cells are busy making copies; humans are their own cloning factory; and, what those cells, what the person is doing at every level, is surviving, cheating death for as long as possible.

We are at every moment, both complete copies and absolute individuals at the same time.

Proliferation and metastasis are “hallmarks” of cancer. My mother found out by accident. One summer, years before, she slipped and fell. When she went to the hospital to fix her broken arm, they found cancer on the x-rays. It started in her right breast, and moved to her right arm. Over the intervening years we got periodic calls about where the cells had moved on to, cloning themselves tenaciously and hitching a ride through her bloodstream, becoming more and more aggressive in their colonization of her body, filling it up with their malignant muddle.

But none of it came as a surprise; she was a lifelong smoker, like I was becoming.

Even just a few weeks before, still so close to dying, she kept on smoking. I didn’t respect her less for giving in, because there wasn’t simply any more hope. Six or eight weeks before, the doctors gave her about six to eight weeks to live. She had fought for close to four years, receiving radiation, chemotherapy, the works.

It was time to close the camp.

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I needed to get away from my relatives, so I stepped outside onto the back porch to have a cigarette.

Somewhere far-off and out towards the center of the lake a few geese were honking wildly back and forth. The sounds shot across the lake, over the yard, and crashed into the house. The house was decorated—my aunt’s idea.

The sky was clear and a crisp, almost blue, Midwest moon made the white siding along the porch gleam.

The house was engulfed in light. My aunt had taken it upon herself to hang the incandescent globular lights that hung loosely, stretching from side to side, front to back, on strands above the floor, casting a stage-like glow onto the yard.

I walked from the doorway to the edge of the lake-overlooking deck.

Oozing out of the windows from inside, I could hear the sounds of a newly- reunited family at the dinner table. I thought of the geese, hearing that symphonic clarion—the tink of mother’s china, the scrape of polished silverware—in response to their heated debate.

When I went back inside, I had to go through the downstairs laundry room, past the bedrooms. Going up the stairs towards the dinning room, I walked past the two foot by one and one half foot rectangular portrait-bust of Jesus that my mother had carried with her her entire life. I hadn’t notice that someone had moved it from the living room.

My mother wasn’t religious, but the portrait was something that she believed held meaning, even if it was a secular and not a religious one. Susanna, however, was religious, fervently so, and always remarked about how beautiful the portrait was, and that she was so glad that my mother kept it in the living room.

98

Terry, then fifty, was a former inmate and resident of the Ohio penal system, who, upon his release, four years ago, moved back in with his mother, my great aunt, sat slumped over in the head chair of the formal dining table. David, a nine-year-old cousin, sat in the closest chair to Terry, poking him with the handle of a fork to check Terry’s vital signs.

Terryis jobless, and drunk again, and tonight of all nights, I remember thinking.

While the one end of the table was silent, the opposite end of the table—where

Susanna sat—beamed with chatter. Susanna at the time was fifty-five and a nurse at St.

Agnes hospital, which is, coincidentally, where both of her parents, my grandparents,

John and Eugenia, left the world.

Her husband, Bert, sat closely on her left. His elbows swung on parallel pendulums, intermittently rubbing. He was always nervy. Living with my aunt I could understand. To their right were her two children, my cousins. Josephine sat flipping her shoulder-length red hair. Her poorly cut bangs covered the top half of her thick-rimmed

Warby Parker brand glasses. Josephine’s brother, Susanna’s son, my cousin, Jerry, sat to the right of Josephine and to the left of Terry who was across from David. Jerry was familiar in his tall, gangly, slicked black hair appearance. He had the dead-eyed stare that

I’d recognized from teaching intro courses to swaths of post-high school graduates, who, in their warped and modern voyeuristic behavior expect just about everything to entertain them, as a graduate and doctorate student. Next to him was someone I’d never seen before. I assumed he was a friend. They looked like clones.

The discussion, as usual, concerned Josephine’s latest triumph as a parade participant in the annual “Star-Spangled Razzle-Dazzle” in Cleveland’s Public Square. It

99 was a cringe-worthy Midwestern bonanza in honor of the Fourth of July and all other things Americana: floats made to look like Washington crossing the Delaware, cockades, tricorne hats, colonial suits and dresses, assorted shoes with buckles, and powdered wigs without any visible powder.

“Oh, you just should have seen ‘Phinie marching at last year’s parade,” Susanna said. “A real shame you all couldn’t come, Stan. She led the whole MHS Drama Club.”

“That’s not all Sus’, remember, she even walked in front of the two girls holding the sign,” Bert chimed in, stuttering with excitement. “And you should’ve seen the look on the Donovan Family’s faces when they seen our girl ‘Phinie leading the charge!”

“This year for the parade the drama club is promoting the play they are going to give that is based on the text of the canticle The Magnificat.”

I thought of my mother, in her forced quietude, one room over, sitting in a house crammed and brimming with babbling bodies. My father was in there with her. To his credit, he took care of my mother. He sat with her, through the sessions, holding her hand as the chemo seeped throughout her withered and frail body. But none of this meant that he cared a damn for me.

“You know, what her school is named after,” Susanna said.

“And ‘Phinie is playing the Virgin Mary herself!”

“It’s the biggest play put on all year and we usually try our best to be modest, but

Bert and I just can’t help but marvel at the gifts He has given her.”

I just knew that Susanna was capitalizing “He” in her mind when she said it.

Josephine sat and smiled at the conversation approvingly. She realized that I was watching her. She flashed me a quick please-save-me-now face, pretending that her arm

100 was really itchy and that it needed the majority of her attention, a common behavioral norm of hers that I’d noticed only eased most awkward situations for her. Once the moment passed, she stared back down at her smartphone.

I locked eyes accidently with Bert one more time.

“Hey there, Stan,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, from ‘Phinie’s acting, to her singing, and—”

“Sorry to interrupt Bert, but I think it’s time we had better get dinner started,”

Susanna said.

“Why sure, that’d be great,” Bert said, rubbing the Buddha-sized belly of his bulbous frame. “I’m starving.”

“Bert, you’re always starving dear,” Susanna said. “Now David, stop that!”

She slapped him on the shoulder, dislodging the fork mid poke, and it crashed down onto Terry’s empty champagne glass shattering it.

“Huh? What?” Terry said, jumping awake.

“Speaking of ‘what?’ Josephine chimed in, “What is for dinner, anyhow?”

*

After the dinner, which was received with ample mixed reviews (Susanna cooked), I went down to the one place in the house where I could be alone, where I learned to be alone, where I learned to linger in my own company, where I could think about something hard for an hour opposed to a few quick minutes: the basement bathroom.

Halfway up the wall to my left there was a small sidescuttle-like window I had propped open; a faint breeze blew through the opening.

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Still living at home, and well into my Bachelor’s Degree program, I would stand on that toilet and blow marijuana smoke out of sidescuttle. Luckily, I had a small joint on me, a parting gift from a doctorate friend. I lit it and took a long drag and shortly released it out of the window.

Marijuana always made me think the most random thoughts. Brought up the bile of my family’s backstory in ways I never imagined. That particular night, even though my mother was dying, in fact near-death, I thought about my father, and my father’s father who wasn’t even his biological father.

John Lazration, my “grandfather,” met Byron Packard in the Ardennes Forest of

Wallonia during the Battle of the Bulge.

In the late forties, Susanna, who was at the time fourteen, decided during the waning hours of a party to walk to the house’s downstairs bathroom, nestled in the basement—where I was sitting then—and found Byron and Eugenia, my father’s mother, together.

Much family-wide speculation was made from that day on about my father’s conception. No one knew how long before and how long after the affair went on. Shortly, after Eugenia’s pregnancy was undeniable, Packard vanished, moving back to Jackson,

Mississippi, his hometown.

Occasionally, Packard would come back and visit on important holidays, etcetera, and treated my father, more or less, as a long-lost nephew.

I’d often wonder what had both of my father’s fathers been through, seen, and endured, all of those years ago that couldn’t be pulled apart by cold-blooded infidelity.

What my father resented in me was that he was my father, I thought. Satisfied

102 with this, I stood up on the toilet again, felt the breeze blowing, and relit the joint.

Upstairs I didn’t hear any movement, so I finished off the joint and flushed it down the toilet. Making his way back up through my father’s basement maze, I rejoined the party.

Everyone at some point had moved out to the deck. The open air would produce more comfort than down in the stuffy living room. I could almost sense everyone’s ideas floating around; the internal dialogues now had more space to hover above and around each person, ripening and filling out. The globe-shaped deck lights ensured that this illusion held true. A golden haze enveloped each person.

Once outside, I looked to see where everyone was, what their body language might say.

Susanna and Bert stood face to face on the far side of the porch. Terry, still drunk, was on the near side by himself, except for David, who sat on the porch coloring something; he intermittently looked up to where Terry was standing. Terry’s glass of whisky sour was sweating onto the wood of the hand crafted high-level bar table that my grandfather, John, made in the golden years of his life.

And of course, Jerry, Josephine, and Jerry’s friend all stood away from everyone else. Each of their faces was aglow with the waves of technology.

I wanted none of this. Some part of me wished for my mother to die, so that I wouldn’t have to see any of those people anymore. I didn’t care for the family gossip. To hell with children’s accomplishments. I wanted to rise above all of it, the day-to-day grinding of time against life and the compelled more of settling down, too. I will finish my book, my opus, my stroke of genius. I’d tell the world where it’s been, where it was,

103 and where it was going.

David was my only hope. When I used to take him to the mall, David picked up anything that caught his eye: shiny toys, loose bags of candy, shoe strings, gumball machines.

“Go ahead,” I’d say, “take, steal, touch, move, overturn what’s expected of you, avoid the plot already in place, make your own.”

I was compelled by his innocence, astonished at his potential.

What could Terry be thinking, if at all? I wondered.

“Hey Rick, catch,” I said.

I flipped a cloth coaster at him; it glided through the air like a well-balanced

Frisbee thrown across the wide-open expanse of a university lawn.

Terry, his senses and soul separated, was swimming through the thoughts and aura the family’d created with their immutable yakking. Inebriated, in the midst of a lopsided doggy-paddle, he waded through, looking for where he fit in, floating, until the coaster collided with his chest, bouncing off his well-developed gut, back onto his glass in a way that if I tried a million times over would never happen again.

“If you’re going to have a drink on that table at least use a coaster,” I said.

“Sure,” Terry said, and he slid his glass across the table, guiding it delicately over the surface, leaving a trail of moisture behind it, and put it on the coaster.

“Come with me for a second Sus’,” Bert said.

They both walked close together, strides out of sync, back into the house, brushing past me as they went.

I watched them walk through the living room in silence, only for a brief moment

104 did Susanna stop in front of a blank spot on the wall where my mother’s portrait of Jesus used to hang. She stopped for a moment, only briefly, but I could see from her face that she knew something important used to be there, but she couldn’t remember exactly what.

She kept walking, following Bert, who was waddling slowly, bumping into the couches and end-tables with his elbows. Many times, at family gatherings, I heard Susanna decide that it was finally time to, “Call the doctor about a specialist to see about your bad knees,

Bert. I won’t have a husband who goes through life walking like a penguin. Not if I have anything to do with it.”

After Terry took David inside to work on his drawings, I followed them. The teenagers stayed out on the porch. I sat at the small roll-top desk in the corner of the living room, listening to the argument my father and Susanna were having.

“But nothing Bert. This man is nothing but evil,” Susanna said.

“Evil?” I heard my father say.

“Yes,” Susanna said. “I’m not going to let you do it.”

“Of course, because you want it all out of my hands and into yours. Well, I don’t want either of you to have anything to do with it, and she doesn’t either. And if it drives you away, all the better.”

“But, how do you know that that is what she wants?”

“It is in her will, Susanna,” my father said. “That she wrote.”

“But that doesn’t make it right. I can’t stand the thought of her being burnt to a crisp and grinded into...”

Her voice trailed off and the room went silent.

Terry was on the ground sitting Indian-style with David, helping him color a blue

105 school bus with orange tires.

“What is this?” Susanna said, trying not to shout.

Up against the south facing wall, underneath the picture frame window, and obscured by the shade from the overhang, lay the wooden picture frame containing the image of the Son of God.

“Jesus!” Susanna said. “What is that doing here?”

Susanna let the sweaty glass of half-melted ice fall from her hand. It smashed on the floor.

“I noticed that was—” Bert said.

“This was Dad’s picture. Virginia always kept it hanging on the wall. And you want to hide it away? Stuff Dad underneath a dusty cupboard? Who took this down? Was it you Francis?”

Clutching it in both hands, she burst past Bert and outside onto the porch. I watched her through the window, holding the picture out and away from herself for easy viewing.

“I want to know why this painting was taken down,” Susanna shouted, pointing somewhere between Jesus’s left nostril and upper lip.

“Because, frankly, I don’t think it is worth a damn, and neither did Virginia.”

“I can’t allow it,” she said. “Taking this picture out of the house and throwing it away is alike to taking Dad out of this house, God out of this house, it gives her strength,

I know it does.”

Her voice rose greater and greater the more she could feel herself being heard, the words bounding around the porch, off of the trees. The sound waves of her righteousness

106 echoed out onto the lake, answering the calls of the geese somewhere out there unseen.

“No one has the right to do that, this house was her father’s, our father’s, before everything, before you and your self-interest, your ego.”

Susanna, moving closer towards my father, and with every bit of subtle tacit use of body language, shoved the picture into his chest, making it the conduit through which she would place all the blame, on her sister in law’s death, on everything.

And with that, I watched as Susanna took Bert’s arm and began to rush toward the door, back through the house, motioning for Jerry and Josephine to follow.

He stood motionless, looking down, beginning to observe closely the picture which contained everything. The golden-brown skin of the savior and the yellow light behind him sat on a canvas of cool grey.

I could see him shaking violently, filled with anger.

I imagined what he saw. Imagined that seen, too, all the memories and past lives flashing by in an amount of time inconceivable to him. He saw, scrolling from right to left, his father sitting alone in the bridge after Susanna came running into the saloon to tell everyone where she found her Mother and Uncle Packard. He saw himself crawling up against the cold wall of his bedroom as his drunken father John Malwell yelled

“Bastard, you bastard,” while he simultaneously pummeled him with the butt of a .22 pistol for spilling a bucket of white paint across the porch. He saw Terry sitting on the ground of his room writing in a notebook he brought back from prison, scrawling the phrase “I’m sorry, so sorry, so very very sorry” over and over again; he saw his father in the hospital bed in St. Agnes, wife by his side, but John is looking out the window, wanting the last thing he sees before his heart finally fails to be anything but her. He saw

107 his wife all those years ago lying on the couch, her head under the covers, embarrassed at her inability to have another child. He saw the son he’d never find it in himself to approve of. He saw all of the things that Time couldn’t convince itself to right.

108

CHAPTER IX

THE PARTY

A few weeks had passed and it was finally New Year’s Eve. For the holiday, and her birthday, Billie’s friends were throwing a party for her at a friend’s, Mahmoud’s, apartment, just a few blocks away from my own.

Weeks ago, before I found her in my apartment, I’d overhead Billie mention to a friend over the phone what apartment building the party was going to be at. From what I heard, he was wealthy somehow or another and his apartment was perfect for the occasion. By the time I arrived, the ball was only about an hour or so from dropping and revealing to the world the new year.

When I got there, a middle eastern man in his mid-twenties answered the door. I said hello and that I was Billie’s friend. From inside I could hear the thumps of pop music. He gave me a strange look before seeing the two bottles of champagne I’d brought. He then moved to the side and let me through. I walked past, trying not to limp.

I’d worn trousers that were a bit loose to cover up my ankle.

The apartment was fashionable. It might have been plucked from the pages of a home furnishing catalogue—the floors were polished hardwood, a bar which connected

109 to the kitchen, all along the south facing side of the room were windows that looked toward downtown. The air was filled with the adolescent trifecta of good weed, stale alcohol, and cheap pizza. Like no other time in my life I felt old, out of context. Wearing my middle-ageness around my neck like a cross, I walked through the apartment and looked for Billie.

I’d quite know what I would do once I found her. Plead like a child, perhaps.

Embarrass her so badly that she would walk me out and I could try and convince her to leave in those few fleeting moments.

Before I reached the bar, I noticed a poster print of Bruegel’s Children’s Games. I looked from right back to left at all of the children everywhere in the painting: rolling hoops, playing ball, playing with dolls, leap-frogging each other, standing on their heads, scaring each other, twirling in circles, hanging off of windowsills. I wondered, Where are the adults?

Once I got around to the bar, I made myself a quick drink from cranberry juice and vodka. On the couch, there was the slumped body of someone already passed out.

A few girls walked through the door shouting “Happy New Year!” From the left and right, the acoustic buzz of gold and silver kazoos filled the space of the room, giving it a soft bee’s nest-esque buzz. Red faces blew into glowing horns. Lip whistles cut through the air. Plastic mini-hand clappers clapped along. From the back someone shot a confetti mortar round from a party popper, its tail trailing through the air, wrapping around ears, hands and necks.

I watched as a group of girls walked down the hall and into one of the bedrooms, marshalling them in, a lanky young man, primped and proper, in a slim-fit purple flannel

110 jacket with matching trousers, white shirt, and dark tie. It was where the music was coming from. Since I couldn’t find her anywhere else, I figured that was where she must have been. I drank what was left of my cranberry-vodka and made another. Behind me, in the corner of the kitchen, I heard a voice with a mild French accent.

“Cezanne and the author Emile Zola were good friends throughout their lives.

They met at school, two young boys in a remote town. Cezanne was thirteen but Zola was a year younger. Both were strange in their own ways, you can imagine, and a friendship grew between them. Cezanne was much bigger and stronger. He took the weak and puny

Zola under his protection. Schoolyard bullies made fun of him, called him ‘Parisian’, as if that were an insult. He was born in Paris and brought up in Aix, an orphan among a mob of dunces.”

I stopped to listen.

“For Degas, there wasn’t any reason to write about paintings. He believed that beauty was a mystery and for people who understand beauty, words were not necessary.”

“What about for the average Joe though? It’s nice to have the interpretation,” someone answered.

“You say humph, he, ha, and everything has been said. Writers who ty to explain art are wasting their time.”

I finally turned around and looked to see whom it was, watched the man’s mouth move, making sounds. He knew his Degas, I thought. He had jet black hair done up in an immaculately combed coiffure. His skin was a soft brown, a pale sand, passed down from one desert-dwelling Berber generation to the next; I guessed at North African.

There was something about the Berber’s tone of assurance, his steady yet clear

111 whisper that kept me listening. I felt transported back to that old feeling I would get in college after I had given what I thought was, by my standards, a good lecture.

“…as he said, he wanted ‘to be famous and unknown.’ Destined to be lonely, he decided it was necessary to keep his distance from the world. Even though he valued friendship, he was reluctant to fall, was possibly unable to fall, in love with a woman.

After he became blind later in life, he said, ‘I must steep myself in solitude.’ His last years alone were made worse by his blindness, but you can always find that same feeling of loneliness in his work from the beginning.”

The black dress she wore showed a good bit of her tan legs. I saw Billie walk across the living room and down the hall. Her chin-up-and-out type of posture was in full display. She hadn’t seen me.

But what was I doing here? I said to myself. I’d come that far though. By accident

I’d seen who I already wanted to see. I took mental images of his facial features and took to putting them in an order out of thin air—coalesced all his eastern intricacies into a wholesome untruth which I would someday confront.

“Hello,” a young girl said, moving around to pour a drink. “Need a drink?”

She was blonde with prominent cheekbones, her features narrowed toward the jawline. Her blue eyes looked a bit glazed. She didn’t look as if alcohol were all that she was on.

I said I did and she made me a cranberry-vodka.

“How do you know him?” I said, moving around the edge of the counter, in front of us now the windows looking out over downtown.

“At a Shakespeare production hosted by the English department,” she said. “We

112 met after a performance of Twelfth Night. It was in the park. The troupe put up a make- shift stage under the moonlight. After the show, by some bit of luck we both ended up at the same bar: The Bourgeois Pig. He was there with a heap of people that crowded around him as he told stories, recited lines word for word, criticized things like lighting, emphasis, mood, delivery, lack of unity and its effects on quality.”

A man waltzed past with closed fists, pinwheeling round and round.

“That sounds like him.”

“I’d recognized him from a fiction appreciation class,” she said. “I could recite nearly every line from Twelfth Night and so could he, so he bought me a drink.”

She laughed, a high-pitched squeal more choked rather than let out.

“With the way he is, he probably made you recite the whole thing,” a girl from behind me said. “Cynth, will you help me, I’ve got to help in the kitchen with some hors d'oeuvres. And someone wake him up,” she said pointing to man passed out on the couch.

Cynth was gone, so I decided to take a look around.

The apartment had a bit of an anvil shape to it, a narrow entrance but then it opened up—left and right—extending outward towards the bedrooms. Over in the corner, a group was gathered around the television watching a pop act perform. The apartment looked more collected than decorated. The floors were engineered hardwood and made a mosaic of different veneers, light and dark, that extended throughout the apartment; and like all places devoid of carpeting, the sonic consequence of each sound carried along the floors and up the walls to bounce around and back down off the crown molding. Each sound—the poignant clop of heels, the muted shuffles of sitters in seats, the tink of

113 glass—mingled, filling the space not taken up by knick-knacks, roll-toIps, books and bookshelves.

At the edge of television, two men in dress shirts and trousers were talking.

“I can be anyone I want, in here and out there,” the first one said. “I can walk through a man and pick up his essence and recreate myself as him.”

“Bullshit. Where’d you learn that?” the other said.

“Acting is a trade, not a practice, but it does take practice.”

“What do you do it for then? For fun? For Kicks? For the shear thrill of it?”

“At first it was for all those things. But also, to survive, find a way to make money to live. I was using the talents I was given to make a living. But now I think I’ve, I realized it’s for the fiction.”

“Fiction? Like books?”

“No, I’m participating in this grand fiction, creating it, shaping it.”

“So, like you’re doing it just to live two lives, because you’re unsatisfied with a normal real one.”

“Not like that at all. That’s something a real-world person would say, but for me there’s no difference. It is all just one,” the first one said before taking a drink.

These were all students of the arts, the humanities. I worried I would be recognized, noticed and picked out by the sheer proximity of my discipline to theirs.

Someone turned the music up louder. I could feel the house beat’s thud through my shoes.

“But how do you ever know who you are? What you stand for?” I heard the two men by the television continuing their conversation on getting into character. “That’s

114 what everyone believes in isn’t it? These orders and rules and ways of constructing themselves that supposedly forms this identity that we think we walk around as,” the first one said.

“Just a way to make our narrow minds understand, feel some sort of comfort in the chaos, then,” the second answered.

“Exactly, because there is no real order to any of it, a whole lot of dumb chance.

Even time, just something we all agreed upon because it is convenient. Some guy decides to start a minute whenever he felt like it and we keep carrying it on like a burden.”

The pinwheeler reached them and threw a thick shroud of gold and silver tinsel over top of them. “William, you—”

A man’s voice next to me: “People can never be too trusting. That’s how I’m alive, the trust of other people.” The female response: “Sure, depending on each other is important, sure.”

I felt abandoned. Not so much by Billie, although that was part of it. But I had no status with any of these children. Had nothing to offer them that they cared for. There was an overarching feeling of separateness that pervaded the air. Just like Billie’s claim that she didn’t care for love, I felt as if none of these youths would either. They were free instead.

Now from the opposite side of the room, I watched as Billie came back into the room, going towards the bar, arm-in-arm with a twenty-something male.

“Those two, always arguing about film,” a girl said, coming up behind me, gripping my arm.

From across the room I heard someone say, “Oh, my! How did you two meet

115 then?”

“Sounds like someone is asking Kazim about when he fell in love with Cynthia, which will invariably lead to a tale-telling.”

They were just at the television when, “It is everywhere. Take the television right there for example. Nothing that has ever come out of a television was true. I mean just look at all of the ways that they get people to believe in things. It’s so slick, it’s oil slick.

I mean everything from the local news to the national news, nightly news, baseball games, European soccer matches, soap operas with poorly delivered lines and oh-so- fakeness, the prime time shows on at peak viewing hours, the shows at odd hours on either side of the prime ones, the nightly reruns of current shows, the nightly reruns of dead shows resurrected every night by the flip of a switch—The Fresh Prince resurrected in front of your very eyes. Then finally there are the commercials which are such cons.”

“Before the story there’ll be enough time for me to slip away and go to the—” I said before being cut off

“Oh, and Kaz, it’s so like him, to always tell the story in toto, always so dramatically, too, and—”

I stumbled down the hallway and, turning left, opened the bathroom door to two girls standing around at the sink, one in her underwear, a mirror attached to the inside of the door reflected the view. I moved my hand as if to say, “Didn’t mean to.” A burst of laughter came from down the hall as I shut the door.

I watched Kaz jump up onto the ottoman at the end of the sofa—breast, shoulders and neck atop everyone, commanding a view. I kept an eye on the vanishing point of the hallway which Billie had slipped into.

116

“I really shouldn’t. You’ve all heard it haven’t you?” Kaz asked.

“Except me,” a voice cried from the back. “It’ll be first tale you’ve told this year.”

“Yeah, why not,” said another voice from across the room, the face in a tight rictus, indicative of palate freshly met with something strong.

“The worm, tell them about the worm!”

“Perhaps we shouldn’t have gotten him started, someone mumbled.”

“The year will be over by the time he...”

“And, so, yes, the worm—quit ruining the dramatic effect. So then I entered the chrome-covered worm and stood in the middle of the car, my hands clutching a silver pipe extending from the floor to the ceiling. The train kept filling up with more and more riders; three passengers—one after the other—made their way towards me, each of them finding a spot on the steel bar, each one reluctant to make eye contact. Me being of my height, I stood neck and head over...”

I left the living room and went to try another door down the hallway. I found one unlocked and went in.

“But my identity…what about my god-damned identity?” someone shouted from around a corner, out of view of the doorway.

On the bed, there were three naked bodies smashed together. I had the feeling I’d just missed an orgy.

“What about it?” I heard a girl’s voice say.

“What do you mean ‘what about it’? It’s me, everything I am?”

“You weren’t anything in the first place though were you? Identity was just something America thought it would place on you, a type of tracking device. A tradition

117 is all it is—like Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny. You can be anyone you want if you really try hard enough, that’s the great thing about it, about when we live, get new tits over the weekend if you want, a guy can have his dick chopped off tomorrow and get a working vagina installed if he’s got the money. And make-up, if you’re sick of your make-up washing off in the shower get it tattooed on. Get your ears cut off and become a snake-man if you’d like, get all of your pubic hair lasered off if you’re sick of shaving it.

Get bones surgically placed in your head and be Satan. Take some of your ribs out why don’t you? Or thinking small, get a collection of different colored contacts, have blue eyes today, green eyes tomorrow, brown ones the day after that, hair plugs because nothing is more important than good hair, visit a dentist and get all of your teeth yanked out and replace them with two rows of sparkling white porcelain and acrylic. This is what we bomb countries for, this is freedom. It’s capitalism to the extreme, it’s what it strives for, this is Democracy, the constitution, the pursuit of happiness, what we’ve always said we’ve wanted?”

“But how does this help with my identity being stolen?”

“Forget it. Let’s get you a drink,” the first girl said, leading the other out of the room.

When they reached the doorway, they gave me a quick look but passed by as if nothing were strange about the room.

I walked closer to the bed to make out a face, but was instead met with a young girl’s beautiful bottom, her skirt hitched up above her hips. She was smooth and pale. I didn’t, but I wanted to touch her flawless limbs, wanted to introduce a finger to her pussy, finish what the two boys around her had started; I wanted to love anyone. But this

118 was her freedom of choice.

Back in the living room, the story of “love” was still being told.

“Now if you’d, you’d just...But so I stopped, observing the stained rubber mat running through the center of the car to remember all the things about her,” Kaz said. “A magnificent creature, a dancer, tall, every movement made with preternatural grace by shadowed by hazelnut hair just long enough to touch the top of her thin and pale shoulders.”

I went to the bar and poured another drink.

“They are finishing lines for one another,” someone hissed from the kitchen.

“Over it. Exeunt,” a voice said from the side.

“Is that it? is it like all over yet?” said a bulbous chin atop an even more bulbous body that sat towards the end of the bar.

“Either way this glass of scotch is all out,” another black-tie said walking over toward the kitchen.

“Grab me one while you’re at it, will you?”

“Neat? or—”

“Hey hey hey there is still some left and there is still a half hour until the ball drops,” Kaz pleaded, attempting to regain a semblance of order.

“Whose balls are dropping?”

Kaz laughed off the interjections. He enjoyed the state of revelry that things had devolved into. It had the feel of a classic theater, or an old vaudeville show, his own story one of The Bard’s and the apartment his Globe. What a crock, I thought.

“The train arrived at the stop and I followed the flow along the platform and down

119 the stairs. Imaging that first moment we would see each other made me nervous, sick, and sad all at the same time. We were supposed to meet at a cafe at three so I had an hour of time to fill.”

Both girls I walked in on in the bathroom, now fully clothed, left the bathroom.

“And blah blah blah, you spent it at a record store, where when the phone rang against your crotch you felt yadda yadda yadda…”

“Stop William, you’re throwing off the—”

“Oh, on with it on with it” a women said.

“Right right,” Kaz said, regaining control. “And then she said ‘It’s kind of crazy to travel all of that way just to see me.’” To which I couldn’t help but say ‘I didn’t come all of this way just to see you. You’re not that special.’”

I walked quickly down the hallway and went in, shutting the door. Lucky I could only still hear everything going on down the hall as a muffled murmur, or the kazooing of a kazoo.

“So, what is it about?” I heard from behind me. I looked in the mirror above the vanity next to me and, through the translucent shower curtain, two figures sat across from one another in the bathtub. “Wait, who’s out there? What’d you do to them girls?”

“It’s me, Stanley Malwell.”

“Oh, hey Stanley Malwell. Me and Fred here are talking about Fred’s idea over some boomers, want some?” His name was Archie.

“No, I’m okay, thank you.”

“Okay. Have a seat on the toilet there. Tell us about your idea, Fred.”

“Well it’s a comic book movie,” Fred said towards the linoleum tiles on the wall.

120

“About what comic?” Archie asked. “They’re all taken.”

“See that’s the thing—and I knew you might say that—the thing is that I’m just writing it straight for the screen.”

“A comic book movie not about an original comic then?”

“Yeah, well, I figure since, like you said, every idea has been taken, I’ll have to write my own,” he said before taking a quick sip of what looked like lime juice. He stashed it back into the space between his legs and continued. “Because they are just purely spectacles with no suspense, like porn. What they are missing is the part that makes people think.”

“Why not try and do it a different way? Seems to me that that is the point of movies nowadays, like you said, spectacle, all about just simply seeing something amazing not about analyzing the thing for complexity.”

I thought about interjecting, bringing Raymond into the conversation, an attempt to win over these college students. I couldn’t imagine it being anything other than something which would appear to them as a lecture.

“But shouldn’t art make you challenge your views about the world? Make you feel empathy? You know, all of that good stuff they teach you in school. Isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it what?”

“Isn’t that what art should be about?”

“You’re supposing those movies are really art, though, and if what you’re saying is your own idea of art it doesn’t sound like the two jive very well, Fred.”

Fred, paused to take a drink again, a frown forming post-gulp.

“Because, listen, Fred, people just want to unplug from the world, leave it all

121 behind, inhabit a different one, because it’s hard to live, you know? Might be the hardest thing there is? Think of how much of a miracle you are. How hard it was for you to get here today in this exact spot talking to me. Go all the way back to the beginning of time, the matter that would create the universe, create you and me, packed into this tiny little smaller-than-a-penny sized point that eventually exploded setting all of this in motion, once it did everything started expanding, pockets of dust banding together to make stars, those stars pulling in objects that collided with other objects to make planets, elements on those planets shaping the ingredients for life, those little single-cell suckers living for millions of years developing eyes, legs and arms, and on and on until the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons figured out how to use tools—the 2001: A Space Odyssesy thing— to kill animals and each other, then they figured out how to use fire to cook their kills, then they looked up at the stars to form constellations, gods, finding ways to explain the universe, make sense of it. One of them in your line, a Neanderthal Fred bumbling and walking around the wilds of Africa, fought for survival so that you could take these boomers and talk turkey with me in a bathtub. Think about it. Think about the sheer luck involved. It’s a god-damned you-better-fucking-believe-it miracle. What luck. This is what they—all of those joe-schmos outside walking around the streets—want to disconnect from. It’s hard for their brain to make heads or tails, so they put up walls and hide in dark rooms to let 3-D images pop off screens. Why deny them that? Why force them to do all of that junk that you just listed, isn’t there enough for them to worry about?

Enough for them to process? Can’t you give them a break? They are working hard enough at the Dunkin’ Donuts for minimum wage just to pay for their twelve-dollar ticket to see gigantic robots destroy New York over some intergalactic million-year-old feud at

122 their home planet, or a caped and masked super mutant with super powers overcoming villains with deranged pasts and physical disfigurements, inanimate objects that can talk, animals that speak perfect English. Why take that away from them? Why make them think? Don’t they do enough?”

Archie was out of breath, worn out by his own effusions, a feeling lingered in the back of my mind that Archie wasn’t speaking from but being spoken through. And then I realized what it was; he was a fanatic.

“To live intensely and to feel intensely that’s why, to avoid diversions and look straight at things and meet them head-on, that’s all I, all I want,” Fred said.

“I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” Archie said. “But I wanted to be an artist like that at first, too. I really did. And so I began by drawing, black marks on white pages.

Still lifes, bodies at rest, bodies in motion, body parts suspended in white vacuums, monochrome fruit lighted from the right. A lot of fun to create images of the world, record it, make people believe that some inanimate materials smudged onto another inanimate object can recreate life. But it was never enough and so I moved on. Following the step-by-step method to becoming an artist, I moved on. Left behind the black and white, the simple delineation of light versus dark, for the ambiguous flow of color. Water colors, India ink, acrylic, moving all the way up to oil on canvas, copy-cating antiquated works in museum halls, perfecting my techniques at the costs of hygiene and relationships, although I never had much of either of them in the first place. But I couldn’t help myself, I had to keep going. I needed the motion, man…”

I slipped back out into the party without so much as a “sorry guys, but I’ve got to run, it was nice chatting with you, I really do hope that it works out.”

123

I peeked into the dance room and saw Billie with a group of men around her. And he was there too. They were dancing around her like she was a maypole.

All those children were being whisked away by a power greater, had given themselves up, were in worship, and had ceased their thought-making mechanisms.

The room looked like a master bedroom turned club. On one side was a large stereo system fashioned with enormous speakers that continued to emit immense amounts of bass. I made no grand entrance and there was no welcoming crowd to dissolve into, even in the crowd I still felt like I stuck out. All around me youth groped and grabbed at youth, the Drunk and Delirious dancing to bass in repeating intervals—always precisely on time—like a clarion-call for the disillusioned. The steady beat beats at the rate two times that of the average heart. It’s understandable—the appeal—to come and enjoy these types of things. It’s tribal. The repetition goes on and on in its meditative fashion and

Billie and her suitors and her suitor’s friends swayed together, stepped together, moved together and when prompted by the song, they chanted together. This was why people lived out in bushes and danced around campfires to drums made from animal skin and hand carved wood.

They kissed necks.

They sucked faces.

The room smelled like used athletic gym socks.

In my mind, as the frame pans backward, the view of the floor and the people and the stereo and all the overhead lights emitting color comes into perspective like an Italian

Renaissance fresco, allowing for all of the architectural lines to be seen to lead back to the vanishing point, where only I am visible, in completely clear definition. Alone.

124

“Exeunt,” was the first word I heard coming out into the living room. It preceded the sound of the sliding patio door opening and closing.

“Huh?” a woman on the sofa newly awake from a doze said suddenly.

“Just admiring,” said the man next to her.

“...but was now a woman content with the world she lived in. ‘So, what are we going to do tonight? Be my guide on my trip through New York. Help me paint the perfect portrait of a journey around the ‘Big Apple’ I said.”

“Exeunt,” said the man and woman on the couch, both out of breath, each with half of the lipstick the woman wore to the party on their lips.

“And I said, ‘Well, I’ve had a stressful week, and the boring touristy sights will always be there to see, so I won’t be your guide, but I would be more than happy if you accompanied me on a slow boat to the sea of complete inebriation.’”

And with the audience dwindled down to its prime number, devoid of anyone except the audience that was left—me standing near the kitchen, a few still watching television and the timer in the corner ticking closer to the new year—Kaz stepped down from the ottoman as Cynthia used the edge of the sofa to support her climb down from the coffee table. Finally, back on the parquet, they finished their story, finishing each other’s sentences.

Kaz: “While Victoria showered down the hall, I was undressing, pulling the left leg of the jeans off and began working on the right. And finally—”

Cynth: “There he stands, naked in the foyer, while I’m there with my soaked hair, after-shower moist skin, dried-prune fingers and toes and a towel wrapped around and tucked underneath my right arm and he’s naked.”

125

Kaz: “Butt-naked.”

Cynth: “Au naturel.”

Kaz: “Without a stitch.”

Cynth: “Raw.”

Kaz: “Helpless.”

Cynth: “In that penultimate moment—”

Kaz: “Second only to the moment itself—”

Cynth: “When he would find that something out he wanted to know.”

If only they knew, I thought. If only they knew what the tails side of love felt like.

But that would happen, in time, I told myself.

“It’s time everybody!” came a shout from the other side of the room, over near the television.

The man who had been passed out the entire time woke up and said, “I’m going to go find some drunk girl to kiss,” before disappearing out onto the patio.

“Hurry, hurry.”

After the poppers—this time with a little more feeling—once again popped, after the kazoos kazooed, after “5...4...3...2...1...Happy New Year!” rang out from every vodka, gin and whiskey-burnt throat, after the calm silence when someone from the back of the row began to sing “Auld Lang Syne” and the rest joined in with the blasting horns,

Billie emerged from the hallway with Mahmoud, whom she gave an obligatory Happy

New Year kiss. Before she had already pulled her lips away from his I’d made my resolution.

Mahmoud, the Berber, the Muslim. The slow creep which haunted me was now

126 given a face; my antagonist pulled down from mere abstraction and into meat. He represented what’s eroded away the foundations of a civilization, a school of academia, and now the love of my life. I thought, These are those urges of the fanatic—the great bubbling of life’s blood risen up to the eyes. Justified. Justification. Vindication. All the fears and anxieties I’d carried around like a cross were suddenly let free. I’d become the fanatic I wanted to be, in the end, needed to be. Here was your man of purpose, Francis.

And, I realized, I knew him now. I knew antagonism’s face. It dawned on me that I knew where he lived. I had touched the couches in his living room. I had shuffled my shoes on his parquet.

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CHAPTER X

SPIRIT

Spirit. Few words invoke so many different responses, have so much power over the human mind. Spirit is the motivator for the elevation of humans above everything else. Abd-Allah Ibn al-Muqaffa, the eighth century a.d. writer, when he was asked about what part of the world was worth wondering about, replied that “There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man.” Hermes Trismegistus called man, “A great miracle.”

Spirit is what, above all other things, raises one man above another, and man overall above everything else.

Pico della Mirandola asserted that God (in another form, the Holy Spirit) created everything in the universe first before man; and, since the world—animals, plants, oceans, earth, fire, air—already contained everything possible in the world short of the divine, he created for man its ability to mediate between the natural world and the divine.

In this void, God gave man spirits, souls. Spirits can also be used to refer to the angels and demons that sandwich man in his intermediary place in the universe.

Man is the intermediary between animals and God. Becacuse of his ability to use his sense of reason, and by the vast potential for his intelligence, man, Mirandola

128 propounded, was the interpreter of nature, “the interval between fixed eternity and fleeting time.” He believed that man was “the marriage song of the world,” and worthy of all of its praises. But he didn’t believe that these were man’s greatest gifts.

Because of man’s undefined nature in the world, God assigned him a place in the middle of the world, addressing him thus: “Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone.”

Because of man’s uncertain and peculiar function in the world, God gave man the ability to make a judgement of how he wished to possess his abode, and in what form it should take, and in whatever functions he desired for himself

And so, it is axiomatic that humans are constrained by no limits, they live in accordance with their own free will. Humans may ordain for themselves the limits of their own nature. Humans were never made from anything out of heaven, nor anything out of hell, mortal instead of immortal, so that with the freedom of choice given, everyone is their own maker, allowed to fashion their selves in whatever shape they can think of. Humans have the power to degenerate into the lower, brutish, and murderous forms of life. Humans can have the power, out of their own spirit’s judgement to be reborn in any of the forms, higher or lower, divine or execrable.

Man was given this as an inevitable part of conscious life. This is a vital principle in humans, a principle that animates the body. The spirit mediates between the body and soul. It is the ghost in the machine. It is the incorporeal part of humans, observe the phrase “present in spirit though absent in body.” It is also considered the soul, regarded as something which, upon death, separates from the body. A spirit is the conscious, incorporeal being, that is opposite of matter. With a capital letter (Spirit), one references

129 the divine influence as an agency working in the human heart, a divine, inspiring, and animating influence on human beings. A human, endowed with spirit, is one that is something more than matter, more than flesh.

To acknowledge spirit is to acknowledge the supernatural and incorporeal beings, especially those that inhabit physical places, objects, and humans. And further these kinds of spirits contain, or have, their own particular character, i.e. evil spirits. Spirits in folktales and folklore, myth, such as fairies, sprites, or elves.

Not to be outdone, the secular version of spirit is associated with an attitude which inspires and animates, or a principle that forces intense thoughts, feelings, and action. The dominant character or tendency (the spirit of the age). The soul or heart as the seat of feelings or sentiments, or as prompting to action (a man of broken spirit) Spirits: feelings or mood with regard to exaltation or depression. Excellent disposition or attitude in terms of vigor, courage, firmness of intent, etc.; mettle (That’s the spirit!). Temper or disposition. An individual as characterized by a given attitude, disposition, character, action, etc. (A few brave spirits remained). Vigorous sense of membership in a group

(college spirit). The general meaning or intent of a statement, document, etc (the spirit of the law).

Spirit can also give those lost a way to be, a way to live. Ignatius of Loyola in his youth experienced a spiritual conversion. His masterwork The Spiritual Exercises is a manual for how to get closer to God. His followers and he would retreat from the world for weeks, or months. Under the guidance of a Jesuit spiritual director, Loyola would use his spiritual exercises to clear his mind of all worldly concerns. The book begins with an explanation of the purpose of the exercises, and then describes a logical sequence of

130

“weeks”, or periods of contemplation. In each of these weeks the subject is told to concentrate on a concrete image, such as Jesus suffering on the cross. The person performing the exercises is supposed to submerge himself completely into these images, and totally give himself up to the experience. The subject is thus encouraged to use his imagination, will power, and emotions in the quest for inner peace and the knowledge of

God’s love.

The West is dying and dying more with each passing day. This is inevitable and was, of course, forecastable. The factors are varied, multifarious, endless, but there is one that will here to be of the utmost importance to that fall. That reason is the worn-out nature of the culture in which we live and breathe. The Western Culture finds itself in a place that is completely unprecedented, because everything has been tried, every form of existence, and yet here we remain, still shouting into the voids hoping for meaning to be flung back.

There is a lack of fanaticism, of Spirit. Get drunk on it. (Remember: another common reference, Spirits, i.e. distilled, strong, alcoholic liquor). Spiritual fanaticism, a want of deep devotion to the cause is the central issue, or at least the cause of the issue and what can serve, finally, as the remedy.

Raise your own little fanatics! Rise, you ascetic monsters! For this is the time when you are needed most. The centrism has passed its peak. Spirit with Spirit, Fanatic with Fanatic I say!

131

CHAPTER XI

TRYING SOMETHING NEW

I woke up late the next day. My dreams were becoming another form of being awake. Incessantly, I’d dream vividly and wake up with headaches. The smallest nuisance made me irritable. And, even though I was devoid of sleep, I was restless. I viewed my apartment with hatred. In it, I now felt small. No longer was I a giant in its empty and clean spaces. The upturned furniture and junk mail stacks, alike, both loomed; they looked down upon me and cast their long shadows over the bed of my sleeplessness.

For weeks my thoughts turned to what I was going to do. The answer was simple.

But answers usually are. It was the mechanism that was the tricky part, the one bit that tripped up my thoughts.

I was spirited, set free to do whatever it was that I wished. But I still needed to work out the how.

*

I’d never felt my car handle so well going down long gentle slope towards downtown. The rumbling of the engine had never felt so satisfying. The whirring of the tires on the road was never so smooth. In order to sit up straight in my chair, in order to

132 move my eyes across the view of downtown, every bit of me must hum and vibrate. A simple gnat covering no distance but moving a million miles an hour, something unseeable was keeping me stable. I’d never thought about it before, about how hard it is to stay alive, how hard it is to move at the speed of light and stay still.

The embodiment of the world’s subterranean static, my mind and body in no panic.

I parked my car at a garage downtown and walked until I found a place for a late lunch. The swelling in my ankle had subsided some, but with each step I could still feel the errant light pang shoot up my leg. The world felt larger, more dangerous. I felt a physical inadequacy in the face of my mid-western town. Somehow the buildings seemed taller, the streets wider and longer, more cars seemed to race by than before, their exhaust hotter, the fumes sticky.

After limping for a few blocks, I took a side street off Tremont and settled on a deli that I knew had the best Rueben in town.

Even off the beaten path, a few roads back from the main downtown drag, the deli was packed—bundles of business types shop-talking next to runners bounding in off the streets, clad in technicolor, couples sat close, managers were manic, feigning an on-top- of-things look like that was really their job. All around, patron-elbows stuck to laminate printed to look like wood, and hands performed their gustatory and technological tasks, feverishly talking, typing, working to make a world right that went wrong somewhere, although they didn’t ever look like figuring out where.

Luckily, there wasn’t a line, and I ordered a sandwich, a cup of soup, and a fountain drink. I felt hungrier than ever. My anger, fear, and the need for revenge

133 required this.

While I waited for my order I took another look around at all of the other customers.

They all share the same stare, I thought. The same stare that says that whatever

I’m doing at this moment and whatever is going on in my head are two completely different things. Their bodies and minds are operating on two separate levels. They combine only for short moments when the brain tells them to turn, or stop, or smile at some stranger who smiled first. Putting one hand up to their mouth and using the other to tap the table, and it’s only these two things which I can see, as if these were the only thing that their body was doing. No one is ever just doing anything.

After I grabbed my order from the counter I found a seat. The deli was small, the booths and tables tightly packed together.

I ate like a savage.

But I began to feel strange, less assured of my plan. Considering the faces of everyone around me, I felt this feeling. I wasn’t afraid of them, not afraid in the sense that they looked frightening, but afraid of what they saw, not who they saw.

Call it a crisis of self-consciousness.

I no longer had a grasp on what I was about, what I was doing. I worried about whether or not I gave off a positive image to the young girl in the sexy going-out clothes in front of me—of course this was the last thing on her mind. I worried that I might unluckily loose a burp, free a fart, let sweat beads slip, or have any of the multitude of things that might make me appear human might be seen. That’s life in a city, big or small,

I thought, make sure to appear to others as inhuman as possible. The thought made me

134 wish for my simple apartment filled to the brim with my father’s junk and my own.

These kids, this world, wanted cartoon characters, graphic novel heroes, mutants that left the natural world wishing with one hand and crapping in the other. Imagine a super hero sweating because he had to walk three blocks to his favorite deli, I thought to myself. Imagine a superhero spraining their ankle on a set of stairs. Imagine a super- hero’s flatulence. Glistening heroes existed beyond all of that. I couldn’t believe it, this girl, this stranger, producing anxiety: Stanley sweating stains onto his blue oxford;

Stanley wiping his forehead with deli restroom toilet paper; Stanley smelling his arm pit to make sure it isn’t ripe; Stanley not raising his arms to reveal pit stains and ripe stink;

Stanley forever in the mind of a cute college hipster as a one-dimensional cartoon caricature made of soggy light-blue papier-mâché.

To ward off this wave of self-consciousness I rehearsed the plan over and over again in my head. This had the desired effect. And I could feel myself calming down. I could picture myself inside the narrative, something separate from myself, and thus capable of doing what I needed to do.

I was beginning to realize that the three people I couldn’t stop thinking about couldn’t have been any different physically, two alive, the other dead, but they were similar in that I could only conceive of them as projections, ghosts, whiffs of Romantic ideas.

The Berber is the single solution to this trilemma, I thought. Follow the story to the end, I said to myself, remembering Raymond’s words that day in the art museum.

Even a nothing is a something.

Going back toward the parking garage, I walked along the main road. Bums were

135 gathered near the entrance to the homeless shelter, hoping for a bed, and begging for change from anyone that walked past. Some of them simply sat around, hoping to keep their presence felt. There’s no loitering at a homeless shelter, I thought; it’s what it’s for.

They are in the business of allowing others to linger, to survive.

Next to the shelter was the old church declared as an historical heritage site, an old catholic number with a small burial ground next to it. And, underneath that ground, just across the street from the hapless, hopeless, homeless, lay the remains of revolutionary eighteenth and new-world-seeking seventeenth century kinsmen, the settlers, and defilers of this old land. They lay buried beneath thin slabs of cracked rock with skulls and crossbones carved under their curved tops. From atop their vista they looked down at the gum-covered walkways, the churches, the university, and the beggars splayed out like human litter over the sidewalks.

*

The northern district of the city was made up of newly renovated old buildings filled with stores filled with hipster wares—bicycles, arts supplies, a veritable fair-trade festival—and ultra-modern hotels and high-rise apartments which overlooked the valley just farther north. In between this twenty-first century amalgam of consumerism’s New and Old resided rusted old mills and factories held together by bits of rusted metal and cracked concrete. I drove around and around circuitously to look for, to find, some sign of a lingering Berber presence. I drove past a pizza place. I peeked into an art space. I, for a moment, through the evening fog, drove parallel with a train on the one usable track through the city. At eye level, the locomotive, in its steely machine-like iron-willed motion, hurtled eastward. It moved as if even when it got to where it was going there was

136 no way it would ever stop.

The apartment building’s name was Valley Overlook Lofts.

I parked the car in front of an antique shop a block away. I walked up to the building and around the small courtyard next to it, finalizing the last details of my plan.

It went something like this.

Repeat the circuitous route around the district so as to make sure there is no security or police. Park the car a block away in front of the antique shop, buy a mass- market paperback from the antique store, ask for a bag, walk the block north to the apartment building, sit in the courtyard and read the mass market paperback, watch large glass windows near the building entrance for a group leaving, arrive at the door just as the group is leaving, go upstairs to his room and shoot him in the head with my father’s gun, walk back to the car, drive home and go to sleep.

This was me in third person, I thought. I could see myself as part of the plan. The world presented itself in all its wondrous spectacle. The cluttered world’s imperceptible mechanistic processes became aligned in my mind. Everything appeared as if new, unbesmeared.

I felt a like I was in a dream world. At will I could decide to increase the dosage, spin the yarns, form the phrases all the time.

In the real world, I might eventually bump into some obstacle which stops this pursuit. But I was no longer there.

In a dream world, I was in constant danger. I had the endless opportunity to increase the dosage, of creativity, or beauty, or desire fulfillment. I might not be able to discover what was really true about the world. I could be in danger of being imprisoned

137 by this constant pursuit of pleasure and excitement, sure, but I could control it, use it to my benefit. I had a fictional force in my corner, a ghost in the machine.

I walked back to my car and got in.

I drove once more around the block, repeating the route around the district so as to make sure there was no security or police.

When I came back around to the front of the antique shop I parked the car and went in.

Sparse squares of the linoleum floor curled upwards revealing the wood beneath.

The half-open stained-yellow vinyl blinds let in a small amount of daylight; the drop- ceiling was literally dropping, or more exactly, drooping: water stains, lop-sided circles, ovals of yellowish brown, marked the surface of several ceiling tiles. Buckets with shallow bits of water were strategically placed throughout the shop.

In the back, up against a wall, I found the paperback section. I rummaged through a few stacks. I chose Lonesome Dove and went to the counter.

Behind the counter I could see the security cameras’ feeds. From the edge of the counter I watched fellow shoppers move in and out of sight. Around each of the six tiny windows into the world, the black frame of the computer screen framed the action going on in the store: top left, a man sat at a round table with his nose dug deep into the spine of a newspaper; top middle, a girl was walking away from a camera aimed squarely down an aisle, her backside undulated as force transferred from one leg to the other; bottom right, a man dragged a girl—perhaps his daughter—behind him like dead weight as she tried to stare at old ceramic antiques and golden lamps with colorful lampshades arranged on top of armoires and storage shelves; in the bottom left, a middle aged man in black

138 pants, a blue raincoat, white sneakers, and a shock of unkempt brown hair on his head, stoically staring straight ahead at a security camera screen.

“Into Westerns, eh?” the clerk said.

I nodded and moved the muscles which I believed would create a smile.

Ask for a bag, I said to myself.

“May I have a bag for that?” I said.

The clerk put the book in the bag and handed it to me. It’s working, I thought. Just as planned.

The one-block walk north to the apartment building went by quickly, muscle memory taking over. I didn’t have to sit in the courtyard long before I saw, through the large glass windows near the entrance, a couple exiting the elevators. They walked towards the building’s front door quickly. I put Lonesome Dove back in the shopping bag and got up from the bench. I arrived at the door just as the couple reached the door; I looked so pathetic with my limp and bag that they gladly held it for me.

Go upstairs to his room, I repeated.

After I knocked, the door opened just enough for two eyes to peer out of the tiny crack. His sharp eyes looked out at me from the soft glow of a single light on in the living room behind him. The door opened a bit more. His pants clung to his legs like red paint.

He wore a light blue oxford with tiny embroidered white flowers on it. His long, curly black hair hung down around his eyes.

“Hello, I’m Stanley Malwell, I—”

“I remember you,” he said. “I know who you are.”

I put my hand on the door and kept it open with force in order to keep him from

139 closing it.

Giddy, I was afraid he might simply shut the door in my face and lock it, a wrench in the works that I couldn’t afford. Luckily, though, he didn’t try to push the door shut, but he didn’t let go of the door either. In his face I could see alarm. I knew I had to gain his trust.

“I was at the party that was here a few weeks ago, for Billie,” I said moving forward, opening the door a bit more. “I’m afraid that I think I left my jacket here.”

Just as he opened the door up enough for me to squeeze through, I entered the room.

I looked around the living room. I didn’t a see a sign of anyone else. This is good,

I thought. There was no longer the crowd of freedom-eyed twenty-somethings pin- wheeling about to stumble into. We were alone.

The apartment was different than how I remembered it. It was still fashionable, as if it had come that way straight out of a catalogue. The arrangement of things was the same; the couches and furniture hadn’t moved; the bar connected to the kitchen nor the windows all along the south facing side of the room that overlooked downtown hadn’t been altered either. Somehow, however, the space seemed larger, more space between things, as if its anvil shape was now magnified under a microscope.

I could tell the walls were the same hue, but they now took on a more diminished pallor.

Over in the corner, the television sat in the same place.

My footsteps echoed across the engineered hardwood floor and its mosaic of light and dark veneers. The sound of each step moved along the floors, traveled up the walls,

140 and descended back down off the ceiling. I was filling the space with my sound—the squeak of my sneaker, the shuffle of my raincoat.

Feeling empowered I fondled a knick-knack, touched the knobs of his roll-top desk, poked the spines of his books, wrapped my knuckles on the bookshelves. This isn’t part of the plan, I told myself. The plan was: go upstairs to his room, gain the Berber’s trust, get into the apartment, shoot him in the head with my father’s gun, walk back to the car, drive home and go to sleep.

But, I am enjoying this, I thought. Unlike every other time in my life I didn’t feel out of context.

The adolescent trifecta of weed, alcohol, and pizza was gone, and replaced by the intense smell of patchouli.

Before I reached the bar, I noticed the poster print of Bruegel’s Children’s Games was still hanging on the far wall of the living room. I stared at the faces of the children this time and saw the lack of individuality. It was sacrificed to the children’s relentless motion, their tenacious, turbulent, fluid nature, their world in constant flux.

I walked into the living room, around the ottoman that Kazim gave his monologue of love from.

On the coffee table I could a see a manuscript filled with lines of dialogue.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything important,” I said, something I knew people said in situations like this.

“I’m reciting lines for a play.”

“The Possessed by Camus?” I said.

His eyes widened with surprise. He began to look at me suspiciously, as if he

141 knew, right then and there, my entire plan.

“I’m friends with Raymond,” I said, hoping to anticipate his question.

“‘If you suddenly became happy, would you postpone accomplishing an act of justice that you considered just and necessary?’” I read from the page.

The hint of a smile began to move across his face.

The room fell silent.

“‘Traitors are always afraid at the moment of danger,’” he said. “Scene nineteen the assassination in the woods. You’ve read the play then?”

For an instant, I felt like I was beginning to like him. A wave of panic soon rushed over me, the urge to run away slowly began to creep across my mind. Stick to the plan, I told myself.

I began to introduce new wrinkles into the plan, freestyling. It was now: ask him if he could check his foyer closet for my missing jacket, while he is turned around going through his own jackets shoot him in the head with my father’s .22 pistol, put the gun in his hand, walk back to the car with paperback novel, get in the car, drive home and go to sleep.

“I have,” I said.

This wasn’t my usual way. My usual way left no room for panache. But I was in the mood for panache. The nuances of the actions gave me an air of the technician, a technician with the skills of a light and steady hand, a man with the ability to manipulate the world for his benefit. My touch was a deft one. My game, now, I thought, is to charge head first, only look up and down, vertical, forwards and not backwards. Human eyes are in the front of the head. If people were supposed to look left and right they would be

142 birds. If the shoe doesn’t fit, make it.

“I’m not sure about your jacket,” he said, glancing around the room, as if it might be sitting out somewhere. “I haven’t seen one.”

“From what I remember, I hung it up in the hall closet.”

“Oh,” he said. “Which one?”

I pointed to the closet closest to the front door and began walking towards it.

While he is rummaging around for my jacket which isn’t there, shoot him in the back of the head with my father’s .22 pistol, clean the gun of finger prints, put the gun in his right hand, walk back to the car with the bag filled with one paperback novel, get in my 2007 Toyota Camry, drive slowly up the hill to my apartment, lay down on my bed and go to sleep.

“I’m not seeing it,” the Berber said, turning around.

Shoot him in the head with my father’s gun, I repeated to myself.

My words, my sensations, felt out of body, as if I was observer, not experiencer.

The gun lifted, it turned its rusted barrel, aiming.

His ecru face lit up with fear. His mouth contorted, grimaced, tied itself up tight in a rictus of horror. I imagined it kissing Billie, sucking her breasts.

Is this worth fighting for? I asked myself. Yes, it is, I answered. It is worth it, for

Mirandola, for Athens, for Rome, for the Old Testament, for the New Testament, for the

Enlightenment, for Kant, For Hume, for Bach, for Mozart, for Brahms, for Beethoven, for

Cervantes, for Homer, for Shakespeare, for Chaucer, for Gibbon, for Goethe, for Spinoza, for Plato, for Ovid, for Aquinas, for Dante, for Petrarch, for Calvin, for Ignatius of

Loyola, for Montaigne, for Hobbes, for Locke, for Seneca, for Darwin, for Wordsworth,

143 for Bocaccio, for Voltaire, for Donne, for Marlowe, for Milton, for Brahms, for Newton, for Swift, for Johnson and Boswell, for Paine, for Jefferson, for Aurelius, for Aristotle, for Epicurus, for Augustine, for Descartes, for Hegel, for Schopenhauer, for Kierkegaard, and finally for all of those before, after, and in between this list of monoliths. I owed this much to them: to slow the flow, even if it was only for just the smallest fraction of a fraction.

I summoned them all up for this swift and final coup de foudre.

“Bang,” I whispered.

*

At first it was terrifying, a darkness so complete it was disorienting. After an initial shriek and muted grunts, everything went silent. My body ceased to exist; I could feel it maybe, but I couldn’t see it, my whole body nothing but phantom limbs, appendages, and organs. All that was left were my thoughts. I couldn’t see myself, what I was doing. I felt like I was floating, no longer a physical body measured in terms of its separateness from other things; I was an idea, a whisper, a mere presence in a dark chasm with neither an up nor a down, a left or a right.

Until I came to.

My arms were outstretched on the parquet. I was faced upward at an empty white ceiling. My head felt made of concrete. I could smell iron. The world sounded like the inside of a conch shell. The muscles in my neck felt powerless to separate my head from the floor. It was dark, darker than I remembered the room ever being, but there was light from somewhere. At the corner of my vision I could see the sunset reflected off the downtown buildings. The rest of my body felt as equally rooted as my head. My hand,

144 gripping my father’s pistol, however, was moving. I moved it. I lifted it to my face, I could make out the features, see that there was blood. But somehow there was a faint glow around my hand. I thought I might have been a ghost. But surely a ghost can’t feel like death. I’m still here.

Had I missed him die? I wondered.

From my nose, a slight trickle of blood, the tiniest bead of type-O found its way over my cheek down, creeping slowly toward my ear. I wiped at it with the gun.

“Get in the Camry, drive slowly, like nothing happened, up the hill to the apartment, go up the Otises, lay down on my bed and go to sleep,” I thought I said to myself but it must have been outloud.

“Want an ambulance?” I heard the Berber say. “Are you okay?”

“Okay. I feel like taking a nap,” I said.

“What?” he said. “You’re shot.”

“Did you shoot me?”

“You did,” he said, shaking his head.

I could feel him trying to help me up, cupping his hands beneath my arm pits, picking me up as if I was submerged in something.

Looking up, I could see the beginnings of the night sky. A few stars controlled by heavenly bodies, circled around me in my own egocentric universe. A dark shroud over

Earth, openings in heaven where lost ones shine through, showing approval. I hoped they’d come to listen, that finally someone would listen.

145