University of Southern Maine USM Digital Commons

Words and Images College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

2008

Words & Images 2008

University of Southern Maine

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/words-and-images

Part of the Art and Design Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons

Recommended Citation University of Southern Maine, "Words & Images 2008" (2008). Words and Images. 2. https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/words-and-images/2

This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at USM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Words and Images by an authorized administrator of USM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected].

WORDS

AND IMAGES

A LITERARY JOURNAL Staff

Publishing Director Ryan Gato

Assistant Publishing Director Grace Mueller

Managing Editor Benjamin Rybeck

Editors Danica Koenig Leeann Lucero Sarah Skelding [i] UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE m

Words and Images is a publication of the University of Southern Maine, We welcome submissions of art, poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. Please address correspondences to: Words and Images, University ofSouthern Maine, P.O. Box 9300, Portland, ME 04104. Copyright 2008 by Words ami Images. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission by the publisher.

- Table of Contents

"Clear Smoke" by Bill Rasmovicz The fo llowing individuals and organizations made the production of this publication 7 possible by offering financial support and/or by donating resources to our organization. We would like to recognize them fo r supporting this publication and the creative com­ "Underneath Us" by Dan Domench munities of Maine and those across the nation. The views expressed by the work in this 9 publication are not necessarily those of the fo llowing organizations and individuals.

"The Goldberg Variations" by Louie Skipper 13

"An Interview with Richard Russo" by Benjamin Rybeck Special Thanks To Contributors 17

Dianne Benedict The 36th Student Senate "To Play a Grass Reed" by Steve Gibbon Student Body President A.J. Chalifour Bruce Day 29 Barbara Kelley Liz Marcoux "An Interview with Todd Field" by Benj amin Rybeck Chris O'Connor 31 Judie O'Malley Rosanna McCoy "The Black Pill of Childhood" by Bill Rasmovicz Sherry Phillips 37 Doug Bruce Pratt "Rain Shine" by Steve Gibbon Willard Rusch 39 Betsy Sholl Wo rds and Images 2008 was pub­ Laurel Snyder lished through the generosity of the "An Interview with Matt Berninger, of the National" by Benj amin Rybeck Nigel Stevens 36th Student Senate and the Office 45 Justin Tussing of the President at the University of Shelton Waldrep Southern Maine. "We Were the Manifestation of a Splayed Rainbow" by Bill Rasmovicz 49

Cover Design: "Winter Drifters" by Chris Nielsen "Contributor Biographies" 51 Clear Smoke

Bill Rasmovicz

1 believe in the conquest of the ants, the metal-tearing claw-end of a hammer, anything discerned with your teeth; a pear, a screw, that afterwards the angel eats its trumpet, that in the artifice of the body we are small, so small,

1 believe in painting the fire escape the color ofwater, that the center of a crow is a single rusty nail, afternoons clear smoke, in the exhaustion of pastured cows to cement this whole scene down, the confusion of cop cars around the missing appendage washed ashore, that if you ask a quivering leaf its address it will reply with a more amplifiedquiver, the river will not forget your name; it never knew it, we are conceived in the fo rest softly as ferns.

7 Underneath Us

Dan Domench

You on the back porch, move away from the steps, stand where I can see you.

I'm coming up. I guess you think it's okay to be on someone's back porch, you don't know the owner. Even if the roof is falling in and the windows broken, you gotta know it's private property. You don't have permission. I'm just wondering how you think. You look like one of those Appalachian Trail guys. Don't have a job. Go hiking in nature. Got your backpack and your camera. You want nature, there's nature in the house. I saw a milk snake in there fo ur fe et long going down the hallway, looked like a timber rattler, same diamond markings. Got my attention. Deer mice run out of the walls across your fe et. Orange and white with pink ears, like a prize you'd win at the fair. Couple nights ago, a fat raccoon was looking out the front window watching me drive by. I thought she might wave, invite me in fo r pie. You're not a nature hiker. Hiker wouldn't drive a rusted truck. Tool boxes on the back fenders. They drive little cars and trucks. I fo rget how nice the view is from up here. The gap in the hills. Sun trying to burn through the rain. You get a good sunrise back here. You can hardly see the quarry. They leave enough trees to block it. That's their beauty strip, that line of trees, that's what they call it. A beauty strip. You couldn't sleep in your truck so you came up here and stretched out on the porch. I can understand that. The rain pounding on the metal roof of your truck. They put on a new metal roof where I work. I'm an engineer at Coast Rope. I told them not to use metal, but they did anyway. You were there now, you couldn't hear yourself think. Rain sounds like machine guns. 1 should let the County bulldoze the house. Get it over with. My wife inherited it fr om her mother. My wife was killed. That's how I got it. Used to be fields back there but the quarry took them. They love quarries round here. People like to dig up their land. Sell the gravel off. lt took tenmi llion years to get six inches of top soil on this grit. You walk straight back and there's a fo rty fo ot drop. All the houses around the quarry arc like that. They take the gravel to your property line. They took the land behind the Traskcr graveyard, left six fe et between the hole and the coffins. Sooner or later, after a rain like this, coffin s are gonna stick out. They won't be able to fixit. You probably think l 'm a loser for letting a good house go to hell. I'm doing it on purpose. I grew up around here, but I went off to school in New York. I wanted to come back and do something, maybe start a business. They were watching me, waiting fo r me to screw up and I did. You know what I did? 1 stood up at a town meeting and said the town should

9 pay fo r an asphalt sidewalk down Rudolph Road. So kids could get to the lake without year. Things got bad between us. walking in the road, get hit by a gravel truck. She was in a truck with a guy coming back from the lake late at night. He hit a Park Street and Pine Street have sidewalks to the lake, but there's ditches on husband deer. Your is out of town for work, you don't go riding in another man's truck both sides of Rudolph Road. People didn't like my idea. Their fe eling is, dubs live on around the lake late at night. Everyone knows what that means. Rudolph Road. People on welfare. Farm workers who came fo r a season and never left . The guy got hurt pretty bad, but he lived. I heard he wanted to go to the funeral, Foreigners. Drunks living in trailer houses. But kids Jive down there and have to walk in ut someone stopped him. The way b he walks now, he has trouble setting his fe et, like the the road to get to the lake. ound is moving under him. gr You can tell by looking at him he'll never be right again. asked for a tar path and people got mad. There's a hatred round here that's 1 When my brother called me in Boston and told me Joyce was dead, I got a cab practical, keeps certain people running things and other people protecting them. They the airport. The same streets, to the same cutting in and out of the morning traffic, but say the same thing over and over. They want to see you agree. Yeah, those people are wasn Joyce 't sitting next to me. That ride took longer than ten minutes. lazy. Yeah, those people drive around at night stealing things, drinking coffe e brandy and I got on the plane somehow, but when it landed I couldn't get out of my seat. taking government money. They make sex jokes about them and wait to see if you laugh. My muscles wouldn't work. Lucky fo r me, my brother was at the airport to meet me. The young boys laugh. Why not? What else have they heard? Nothing else. They let him come on the plane and he pulled me out of the seat, walked me to his car. I'm telling you this because you're not fr om here. l don't talk to anyone, really. He drove me to his house and he made me stay there, watching me. My mom went to my People say hi to me in the store, some at work, but no one talks to me. They walk by me house and got rid of Joyce's stuf f. Cleaned that place out like you wouldn't believe. Left like I don't exist. no trace of Joyce. I went to my mother. I asked her, what can I do about the way people around My mother took care of everything. No one said a word to me at the funeral. here treat me? She said she's seen it before. She said I should move away. Joyce's coffin was in fr ont of the altar, but I couldn't believe she was in it. I kept thinking My brother says I should put on a public supper for someone that got burned out she had driven away with that guy, gone somewhere to live out her life in another town. of their house or needs money for medicine. Do something so people can see I'm a good The wake was at my mother 's house. I was standing outside, leaning against the guy. But that doesn't make any sense. Someone gets sick or needs help, you give them side of her barn. Her house is on a hill, you can see the whole town below. Six women money. You don't eat beans and hotdogs in the firehouse to raise a couple hundred dol­ were coming up the walk looking at me. All wearing black, carrying casserole dishes and lars. It's a ritual, lets people feel like they're giving something when they're not giving pots, their fa ces wrinkled up, feeling sorry fo r me. They headed towards me. I could sec much at all. they were gonna say something. You'd think I'd be grateful for their sympathy. I'd move away, but my mother's here and my brother. l have a house on the lake But instead, behind them, J saw the town on fire. Red flames in the sky. The that I built myself. l love the lake, but I hate living here. houses and churches burning up into smoke. Then there was nothing left but a sand pit. Maybe it's my fault. My mother says I always had a hard time being happy. I No trees or streets. Just rocks and sand. I yelled at the women, this is what you brought was happy once in life. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it happens to be true. It lasted on, you made this happen. about ten minutes. They thought I was talking about Joyce, but I was talking about the town. I said, My wife that died, Joyce, grew up in this house. Used to be a photograph of her go home to your children, get ready fo r destruction. Find a new place to live before it's playing back here, running cross the yard in a hand made dress. You could tell the little too late. girl was her. The dark eyes. I came off high and mighty. I didn't mean to, J fe lt I had to warn them. I didn't know her going to high school, she was younger. met her after I moved I I leave the house like this to antagonize them, to remind them of Joyce. I like back. She was working in the town offi ce. I saw her and l said to myself, I could never that they have to drive by and see it rotting away. I'm worse than they ever were. have a wife that pretty and smart. I finally got up the courage to ask her out. l expected Take your stuff, time fo r you to leave. I'm gonna sit here awhile. J need to think her to say no. l really did. this out. I solve problems, that's what l do fo r work, but I can't seem to get my mind We dated fo r awhile and I couldn't stand it any more, l had to ask her to marry around this one. If l pay the taxes and fix up the house, I can't afford to keep it, I'll have me. 1 took her to Boston and asked her in Durgin Park restaurant sitting with strangers to sell. I'll drive by and see cars and stuff out fr ont. Someone else will live here and it'll at a long table. I tried to do it quietly, but she got red in the face and said, no you don't, be them running around the back yard, not the little girl that was Joyce. That fe els wrong, Mister Man, you get down on your knees. I did and people went crazy. Clapping their feels like everyone will fo rget her. hands and buying us beers. It was fu nny, but that's not the ten minutes I'm talking about. Jfi let the County tear down the house, the quarry digs it up and there's nothing It was later, in the morning. We were in a taxi cab and the driver was cutting in left of her. Some ashes I spread in the lake, a hole in the ground, that's it. and out of the downtown traffic to get us to the airport and she was next to me, looking I have to make a decision, but there doesn't seem to be a decision to make. I'm straight ahead but leaning her body into mine, her hands on my leg, her body as close as stuck, like I'm stuck in this town, living with these people. There must be an answer. possible. I thought, my God, she does love me. Sounds stupid, doesn 't it? Something I'm missing. You're not fr om here, so you don't know what happened. We got married and she got killed in a car accident. This was after I asked for the path down Rudolph Road. People told her I was different. People in the town office said things. This went on fo r a

10 11 The Goldberg Va riations

Louie Skipper

to the memory o{Glenn Gould

The rain turns on its side and throws the day to the wind in a rage, and so it is out of relief when the rain stops and a cardinal I cannot find returns to his delivery of the morning news. In the grass the rain, and ahead of me with her nest hidden in the green oval leaves of the camellia, a mockingbird opens her wings. The white eye on each wing fans and blinks and blin ks, tipping downward as she waves like a man off camera gesturing fo r the audience to applaud, fo r this is the way a mockingbird has of begging before the fe et of the oblivious stranger.

Ill

I remember standing at the small window to the right of the fireplace, two hundred and ten years after the death of Bach, looking down Edgewood Drive in a soft rain, seeing my cousin Roger sputter by on his black scooter. For the first time I understood I was fo r all time bound to this instant, while silently the oath was administered and fo r all the days of my life I shall not fo rget so help me God.

13 Ill Ill

I have no memory, only a composition of struck silences, To find him, twenty-five years after his death, shade work, and hard strokes of long, unbroken pauses, it is necessary to begin with solitude, only amnesia interspersed that need which positions each other need, like the wrinkled voice of my dead grandmother singing, until even love is inward and not fa r fr om the soul,

or my dad, cross-legged in his boxers, and if his flame burns, suddenly staring over his open newspaper at me none will hover his figure slumped to the keys humming while I draw with a blue crayon on the pine floor, until the slender long bones of his fingers are done lost in my own company. with their darting, the flame waving over the silence of the thousands upon thousands before him.

He too will die in my world without end, Ill the boy I continue to feed my memory, this man I garden, who wonders who I will become, So too did Bach fo reordain what glory he could. who I became when I first stepped apart fr om myself It is said Bach's harpsichord was gravitational, like the pull of the sea. into my own silence and found in Bach The Variations arrived and the story goes that Goldberg's patron,

a proof of God at the hands of Glenn Gould. who will die soon enough in bedcovers soaked in sweat his fever rising' ' asked Goldberg to strike The Variations one room over Ill in Leipzig until the Count could sleep in his deathbed and his soul and the souls of all the dead rest I stood at the window watching the rain, my earliest grief in the mercy of no longer hearing the sawing of their coffins. the longing to remain outside in summer, and I lay in bed at night listening a thousand times maybe Ill to The Variations, that slow love where each silence had no end, I think of the deaths of better men than I, only beginning. or friends more faithful than me, and I have no idea why my soul has stuck around fo r as long as she has, Where I had not yet walked I suddenly saw myself shouting back fed up with neglect, with my desire to be all others, what I could not understand from so far ahead. this muttering my only fortune when at last I will be free of life, Ill free to tend my body, the planting, waiting, breaking its bread. In the dark I listened to The Variations, Already at the end, Gould's slow fingers sifting the fo rlom confidence that nmst be quick, those who remember me will be shoved together with me under my flat stone. and then of course there are the years, 1 cannot say which of me will remain, all of human love the boy becoming a man or the man becoming a child again, contained in one life here in his hands, like memories without a figure pulsing in silent darkness, the piano cut to fit his fa ther's chair he sits in before the keys in his buttoned for it is from here already I can feel jacket, my own eyes meeting me like rushing sky. sweater, watch cap, green scarf hanging behind him and he hums, wooing the creation into committing that final reach toward heaven that only he hears.

14 15 An Interview with

Richard Russo

Like most things that turn out well, my interview with Richard Russo hegins in a very unpromising way. Th e traffic in Camden, Maine, where Russo lives and writes, is usual�y light and quiet, but now that I'm on the wrong side of t he ro ad and Russo is standing on the opposite side and waiting fo r me, the traffic is heavy. I wait, and Russo waits. Wh en Ifinal�ymake it to the other side, we head to a place where Russo tells me he usually works, and I almost walk him ofj 'the narrow sidewalk. Whenever my best.fi'iend does this to me, I punch him in the arm. For a moment there I am very glad that Richard Russo is not me. : We sit in the very hack of the cafe, where there 1· a lovely view of trees and small boats and water and other things that are app ropriately Maine-ish. Sitting down and !ty­ ing to make myselfcomfortahle, I knock the table a little hit, which is naturally wobbly, given that we 're in a cafe and wohhly tahles are an essential part of their design. Lucld�y, nothing spills ... hut what !lit had? What does it fe el/ike to accidentally .1pill coffee on a major and Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer'!I' m happy that this is not the day l find out. I guess I'll have to wait to accidental�y sp ill coffee on Michael Chahon. I ask him how his tour promoting his excellent new novel Bridge of Sighs has been, and he tells me it :� been good but that he .feels he :s leaking brain cells. I make an emp(Y comment about how I imagine it must be tedious doing interview after interview, and he nods. I then try to exonerate myse(fby selrconsciously noting the fact that I do : indeed know I am contributing to the tedium. He nod1· and tells me that it 1· okay. !feel better having detached myselffrom the situation a little, but he wisely doesn 't let me com­ plete�y offthe hook. I tell him I'm nervous because I've never done an interview bej(Jre. He says that we 'll get through it. lfeel honored when at the end of it he doesn't rush right off' but instead sits with me to finishhis coffee. lfeel unsettled when I realize that a woman has come into the C(dfee shop during our conversation and seated herself directly behind me, despite the fa ct that every other tahle in the place is free.

* * *

Wh at :1· a question you get asked a lot that you 're absolute�y tired of answering'!

Russo: Well, fo r this book - and increasingly, because the arc of my career has made certai n strains, certain themes, apparent throughout my books - ['m being asked a lot of sociological questions. I'm being asked, for instance, things like, "Is there any future for small towns in America? What do you think is going to happen next in small towns?" I'm being asked, because I write about class a lot, "What's going to happen to the middle

17 P""

class in America?" Those are interesting questions, and they drive a lot of my fiction, happy to hang out with those people. In the past, I've been lumped with writers as diffe r­ but the problem is I'm not a sociologist and I don't know how to answer them. I write ent as Ann Tyler and Larry McMurtry, and I consider that a compliment. J consider all of about them so that I can answer them fo r the characters in the books, but I find myself those a compliment. Good people to hang out with. when I'm on the road and asked those questions prefacing everyth ing I say with, "Look: ifyou want sociological answers, I first haveto tell you that I'm just a storyteller." So I YLondon of his ate degree, I was reading books. And that was mostly true of my M.A. work as well, but day, and if you write realistic fiction and you seem to have something to say about social somewhere along the line - as you have to - you hone in on a particular area of Ameri­ issues, then I guess you're going to get asked those questions. And I'm prefacing that all can or British literature and you stop reading books and you start reading books about the time by saying, "I'm not really a historian. I'm not really a sociologist. I just play one books. There were still Willa Cather books I hadn't read, but suddenly I was reading the on TV. (L aughs) But here are some conclusions that I've come to." biography of Willa Cather, and I was reading critical works about Willa Cather. And I was starting to write criticism, which fo rced me to write that kind of scholarly prose you I wanted to ask you something about contemporary literature, but just to ask you what write when you write criticism in graduate school in America. But I was very near the you're reading seems useless and too broad. So instead, just fo r jim, I went on Amazon. end of that, working on my dissertation, when there was just a moment where I had to com, to see what other books I might enjoy if I enjoyedBrid ge of Sighs. !learned that fa ce the fa ct that I wasn't having fun anymore. I'd stopped reading in order to do my dis­ I might enjoy Ann Patchett s Run. Philip Roth :1· Exit Ghost, Denis Johnson s Tree of sertation and in order to do my Ph.D. I'd fo cused to the point where I'd stopped reading Smoke, John Grisham s Playing for Pizza, and To m Perrotta :� The Abstinence Teacher. literature. I'd read a lot of American literature and British literature, but I certainly hadn't Do you fe el comfhrtable with the j(JCt that Amazon. com has set you up on a blind date read it all. There were certainly great books that I hadn't read. I hadn't read Middlemarch, with these other writers? or really anything of Eliot other than The Mill on the Floss. There was still a lot of 19th century British fiction that I hadn't read, and almost all the poetry outside of the Roman­ Russo: Well, I like the fact that we're all selling books. I mean, that's the reason we're tics. I wanted to go and read German literature in translation, and Russian literature, and all there: we've all had books come out at about the same time and they're all selling. So 1 hadn't done any of that. It seemed like there were just major authors. I'd read Crime what's happening is that people who are going down the bestseller list or looking at big and Punishment and started The Brothers Karamazov but got distracted, so J had almost fall books or whatever the categories are - they're clicking not so much on the basis of all of Dostoevsky. And almost all of Tolstoy: I'd read Anna Karenina and nothing else! any search that they themselves have started. They're being directed by Amazon into this, I'd never read Wa r and Peace and here I was about to get a Ph.D. in literature from an as you say, blind date. I'm happy with the fact that those are all good writers. My first American university, and I was reading secondary works when there were still major pri­ novel [Mohawk] was a paperback original, and it was published by Vintage Contempo­ mary works I hadn't read. It just seemed like fo lly. And I wasn't having any fun. I mean, raries, and those are kind of now standard issue - they publish great fiction and they seem all my fr iends in creative writing were having fu n. They were fo cused on literature in a like they've been around forever - but actually I was published in the first batch of those. diffe rent way. They were reading contemporary fiction and getting all turned on by that, A lot of them were paperback originals: Jay Mcinerney's Bright Lights, Big City and and here I was reading secondary fiction and lots of biographies, and I was getting very Richard Ford's The Sp ortswriter, think, and Raymond Carver's Cathedral. They were a I close to finishing my Ph.D., and I just didn't want to do it. I did not want to be a scholar bunch of really important books and they were all published in that first year of Vintage for the rest of my life. I just didn't want to write that kind of prose, and I didn't want to Contemporaries, and that was a kind of literary blind date. And I don't think a lot of read criticism. And once you start, that's what you read for the rest of your life. You read ' people would have read Richard Russo's Mohawk if I hadn t been coasting along on the criticism, fo rever. I just couldn't do it. coattails of that group of really good writers. Denis Johnson was in that group, too. His At book Fiskadoro, I think. His early book was in that group. So those kinds of publishing or this point in yourlife, what made you want to address in this sortofp anoramic and swe promotional blind dates happen all the time, and I'd rather be hanging out with that group ep ing sense the whole of a huma11 lzfe with Lucy Lynch, placing an especially - and p of writers than the Danielle Steele group or whoever else is in that group. I'm perfectly erhaps even surprisingly - strong emphasis on childhood and adolescence'!

18 19 Noonnn gets that obituary of Jerzy Quinn: did this kid ever really have a chance? Was he Russo: Well, Lucy and Noonan and Sarah: the thing they all have in common is that destined to cross that center line into the oncoming headlights? Did we know that, really, they've just turned sixty when the novel opens. I'm not sixty yet-I'm fifty-eight, but fi·om the time he was six years old? Was he able to just postpone that for sixty years? But pushing sixty pretty hard- bul l th ink it's the point in your life - and it can occur earlier was it inevitable anyway? Did he do it at fifty-eight or fifly-n ine instead of at nineteen -when you realize you're probably over halfway. And at that point, most people who get _y ou'd think he would have done it earlier - because he put off thc inevitable? Did he just to be sixty or close to sixty start to think, "How in the world did I end up here?'' Cause put otf his fa te? Was there any freewill in his life? Did his daughter represent a choice there arc all those thi ngs in your life that you planned to do. And despite your plans, that he made and was she the reason that .lcrzy tells Noonan when he comes into the bar you do other things. When I spoke to the graduates at Colby College a few years ago that time on his birthday, "The big shit you have no control over. The little stuff maybe when my daughter was graduating, one of the things I told them - because I believed it you can control, but the big stuff, really, you've got no real say in." That's .lcrzy talking to be true-was that their lives were not going to go as planned. And probably if they about Jcrzy, but Noonan, years later, thinks, "What about that daughter Jerzy seemed lo were lucky, as I 'vc been, things that they hadn't anticipated or planned for were go ing lcJVc? Was that a choice? Did that alter his destiny?" And part of the reason that I think

to happen, and they'd be /Jetter, for the most part, than anything you were planning. So this book feels more about fate is because I think of this book as examining the three get ready for that. Get ready for your plans not to work out. And even for the people who strands of destiny: fa te, that which you have no control over, which, fo r Jcrzy, seems to were not as lucky as l 've been, you get to your tiflies and realize you're on the downside be just about everything; fr eewill, which may or may not be an illusion - seems to me not of the slope. I'm not a promising young writer anymore. I'm the writer that I am, for to be; and dumb luck, the spinning of the wheel. What's it mean when Sarah walks into better or fo r worse; this is who I am. You start looking at the things you planned to do I key Lubin's? Either of those boys could have been in the backroom, but the moment and the things you never planned. I didn't go to Arizona to meet my wife of thirty-six she walks in Noonan's in the backroom and Lucy's there to take her embrace. That just years. But I did. And we didn't plan to have two daughters, but we did. Like everybody seems to me to be pure luck. So I think this book is about destiny and about how these else at this age, you just start to look and think, "How in the world did these things hap­ fo rces in our I ivcs- how those three strands of destiny-j ust weave a fabric a little differ­ pen? And what does it amount to?" You start to look at what one of these characters calls ently in every life. And Empire Falls really has some of that, but it's not up front in the "the figurein the carpet," and you begin to look at things and you try to brush aside the structure, as you say, like in this book. distractions and you look for the true plot of your own life. You see that figure, and you ask yourself what it means. And fo r me, that ties into adolescence, because the older I It just occurred to me thai in The Icc Harvest John Cusack has that monologue ahout his get, the more convinced I am that a lot of what we become in life-a lot of what we 're ji1ther and his uncle. stuck with -gets hardwired at a very early age, before we'd like to admit it. Like Lucy being stuck with that nickname fr om kindergarten on: the poor kid never stood a chance. Russo: Yeah, yeah. It's futile to regret, two guys as different as could be die on the same So the book's three people at sixty looking at the kind of sweep of their life and sensing day a haif a country apart. Yeah, and interestingly too, if you were to read Scott Phillips' that most of their destiny is fulfilled. But all three of them arc beginning to think, "What novel, that's not in there, that scene where Cusack says that. That was my invention, if?" Sarah chose Lucy, and she doesn't regret it, but Jesus, what if'? What if that kiss on and it was probably, now that I think about it- and I didn't think about it either until you the stairwell had lasted longer? What if instead of falling in love with Lucy and the whole brought it up -a contribution that I made because it was helpful to the story, but also Lynch family and lkey Lubin's, she had done a terribly rash thing, you know? What if because I was th inking about it in terms of this book as I wrote the script. I was thinking she'd chased after Noonan or run off with him and chosen him instead of Lucy, and that about destiny, and that's probably why that turned up there. And in a way, it's kind of a moment when Noonan comes out and finds her in Lucy's arms - what if she'd been in coda for that character, you know? "What the fuck? Why should I try?" You know? Noonan's arms instead? She senses a whole other destiny out there than the one she lived, and what in the world do you do with that? So l think people at sixty are asking them­ It :1· often noted that you write about small towns and blue-collar types, hutjust as often selves those questions: not only, "How the hell did I get here?'' but also, "What does it ahout that you write about academia and academic characters: Straight Man, and mean that l chose what I chose? And did I really choose at all? Or was the choice just an "Buoyancy, "and "Horseman," and even a little hit in Bridge of Sighs. What is it that illusion? Did I choose that or is that just life toying with me and making me think I had app�:al.1· to you about this world? What sort o(connections do you feel hetween the small a choice when really I was just going to Lucy all the time?'' You get to be sixty and you towns and academics? start thinking about that shit. (Laugh.1) Russo: I think if David Lodge were sitting here, he would simply point out the title of It did strike me reading Bridge of Sighs that the structure of' the hook makes it more into one of his great academic novels, which is Small Wo rld. (Laughs) These are small worlds. a st01y about - and I hate using this word -jc1te, looking hack to see how a li{e is built, And I think l 've stayed interested in academics -in academic people- because I've whereas Empire Falls seems to have a more existential outlook, since Miles Roby is stuck always been fascinated by the fact that academics-especially academics in literature and in that town and he needs to get himsel/out. philosophy and the arts-spend much of their lives thinking and doing very introspective things. This is the life of the mind. Th is is what you sign on for. And what fascinates me Russo: Bridge o(Sighs is about, ifnot fa te, certainly destiny, but not only is it about about academics is they can read book after book after book about the human condition, that in the sense l'm talking about, but the characters themselves are talking about it too. and you'd think it'd make them smatter about themselves. And yet you find academics

20 21 p

Noonan gets that obituary of Jerzy Quinn: did this kid ever really have a chance? Was he Russo: Well, Lucy and Noonan and Sarah : the thing they all have in common is that destined to cross that center line into the oncoming headlights? Did we know that, really, they' ve just turned sixty when the novel opens. I'm not sixty yet - I'm fifty-eight, but from the time he was six years old? Was he able to just postpone that fo r sixty years? But pushing sixty pretty hard - but I think it's the point in your life - and it can occur earlier was it inevitable anyway? Did he do it at fifty-eight or fifty-nine instead of at nineteen - when you realize you're probably over halfway. And at that point, most people who get _ you'd think he would have done il earl ier - because he put off the inevitable? Did he just to be sixty or close to sixty start to think, "How in the world did I end up here?" Cause put off his fa te? Was there any f_recwill in his life? Did his daughter repr sent a h ice there are all those things in your life that you planned to do. And despite your plans, that he made and wns she tl1e reason llml Jcrzy tells Noonan when he come into lhe bar you do other things. When I spoke to the graduates at Colby College a few years ago that time on his birthday, "The big shit you have no control over. The litllc stuff maybe

when my daughter was graduating, one of the things I told them - because I believed it you can control, but the big stuff, really, you've got no real say in." That's Jerzy talking to be true - was that their lives were not going to go as planned. And probably if they about Jerzy, but Noonan, years later, thinks, "What about that daughter Jerzy seemed to were lucky, as I've been, things that they hadn't anticipated or planned fo r were going Jove? Was that a choice? Did that alter his destiny?" And part of the reason that I think to happen, and they'd be better, fo r the most part, than anything you were planning. So th is book feels more about fate is because I think of this book as examining the three get ready fo r that. Get ready fo r your plans not to work out. And even fo r the people who strands of destiny: fa te, that which you have no control over, which, for Jerzy, seems to were not as lucky as I've been, you get to your fifties and realize you're on the downside be just about everything; fr eewill, which may or may not be an illusion - seems to me not of the slope. I'm not a promising young writer anymore. I'm the writer that I am, fo r to be; and dumb luck, the spinning of the wheel. What's it mean when Sarah walks into better or fo r worse; this is who I am. You start looking at the things you planned to do Jkey Lubin's? Either of those boys could have been in the backroom, but the moment and the things you never planned. I didn't go to Arizona to meet my wife of thirty-six she walks in Noonan's in the backroom and Lucy's there to take her embrace. That just years. But I did. And we didn't plan to have two daughters, but we did. Like everybody seems to me to be pure luck. So I think this book is about destiny and about how these else at this age, you just start to look and think, "How in the world did these things hap­ fo rces in our lives - how those three strands of destiny -just weave a fabric a little diffe r­ pen? And what does it amount to?" You start to look at what one of these characters calls ently in every life. And Empire Falls really has some of that, but it's not up front in the "the figure in the carpet," and you begin to look at things and you try to brush aside the structure, as you say, like in this book. distractions and you look for the true plot of your own life. You see that figure, and you ask yourself what it means. And fo r me, that ties into adolescence, because the older I It just occurred to me that in The Ice Harvest John Cusack has that monologue about his get, the more convinced I am that a lot of what we become in life - a lot of what we're fa ther and his uncle. stuck with - gets hardwired at a very early age, before we'd like to admit it. Like Lucy being stuck with that nickname fr om kindergarten on: the poor kid never stood a chance. Russo: Yeah, yeah. It's fu tile to regret, two guys as diffe rent as could be die on the same So the book's three people at sixty looking at the kind of sweep of their life and sensing day a half a country apart. Yeah, and interestingly too, if you were to read Scott Ph ill ips' that most of their destiny is fulfilled. But all three of them are beginning to think, "What novel, that's not in there, that scene where Cusack says that. That was my invention, if?" Sarah chose Lucy, and she doesn't regret it, but Jesus, what if? What if that kiss on and it was probably, now that I think about it - and I didn't think about it either until you the stairwell had lasted longer? What if instead of fa lling in love with Lucy and the whole brought it up - a contribution that I made because it was helpful to the story, but also Lynch family and Ikey Lubin's, she had done a terribly rash thing, you know? What if because I was thinking about it in terms of this book as I wrote the script. I was thinking she'd chased after Noonan or run off with him and chosen him instead of Lucy, and that about destiny, and that's probably why that turned up there. And in a way, it's kind of a moment when Noonan comes out and finds her in Lucy's arms - what if she'd been in coda fo r that character, you know? "What the fu ck? Why should I try?" You know? Noonan's arms instead? She senses a whole other destiny out there than the one she lived, and what in the world do you do with that? So I think people at sixty are asking them­ Its of ten noted that you write about small towns and blue-collar typ es, but just as ojien selves those questions: not only, "How the hell did I get here?'' but also, "What does it ahout that you write about academia and academic characters: Straight Man, and mean that I chose what I chose? And did I really choose at all? Or was the choice just an "Buoyane-y, "and "Horseman, " and even a little bit in Bridge of Sighs. What is it that illusion? Did I choose that or is that just life toying with me and making me think l had appeals to you about this world? What sort of connections do you fe el between the small a choice when really I was just going to Lucy all the time?" You get to be sixty and you towns and academics? start thinking about that shit. (L aughs) Russo: l think if David Lodge were sitting here, he would simply point out the title of It did strike me reading Bridge of Sighs that the structure ofthebook makes it more into one of his great academic novels, which is Small Wo rld. (Laughs) These are small worlds. a story about - and I hate using this word -fate, looking back to see how a life is huilt, And I think I've stayed interested in academics - in academic people - because I've whereas Empire Falls seems to have a more existential outlook, since Miles Roby is stuck always been fa scinated by the fact that academics - especially academics in literature and in that town and he needs to get himsel{out. philosophy and the arts - spend much of their lives thinking and doing very introspective things. This is the life of the mind. This is what you sign on fo r. And what fa scinates me Russo: Bridge (?(Sighs is about, if not fate, certainly destiny, but not only is it about about academics is they can read book after book after book about the human condition, that in the sense I'm talking about, but the characters themselves are talking about it too. and you'd think it'd make them smarter about themselves. And yet you find academics

20 21 like Janel Moore [the main character in "Horseman"], who's managed to spend the better stance, where we're being told - those of us who are writing novels-that literature has part of an academic career becoming divorced hom her own I ifc. She sli II reads books kind of become a subset or criticism: that criticism is the larger entity and that we 're just and continues to write criticism, but she's divorced fro m the emotional sterility ol' hcr kind or in one corner of it. The tables have gotten completely turned, at least in the minds own life and her own child and her relationship with her husband, until this horseman ol' critics. And we're being told that if, fo r instance, l write a novel and l connect with rides in and fo rces her - when she confronts this fhwdulenl, plagiarized paper - to consid­ people, it's a mistake, because we al l know that what we say and what we intend to say er the possibility that she herself is l'raudulent in some way. I think Noonan in Bridge of' arc two diffe rent th ings. So if! connect with you as a reader, that's probably just blind So it doesn't make me angry; ! just got out. But at an earlier stage, Sighs has much the same dilemma. Here he is at sixty, he's famous, and his life has gone, lucie (Laughs) back 90's, when l 'd have to listen to this in department meetings every week, it wou ld if not as expected, certainly pretty wel l. He's done what he wanted to do. He 's had a in the great life as a painter, a great artistic lil'e, until one day at sixty he discovers his own eyes drive me crazy. Now that I don't have to listen to it anymore, !just fi nd it hilarious. looking out of a portrait of his ntth cr and he's thrown fo r a loop. He doesn't understand people who think of themselves as leftist, whether fe m inist or Marxist or whatever, talk his night terrors, or why he's having these crying jags and ducking into churches to just about such things as the tyranny of pronouns, you know? These arc feminists who want cry his eyes out when he doesn't seem particularly sad about anything. What in the world to talk about the tyranny of pronouns, but they don't seem to be on the battle lines with is that about? It's about the painti ng he started without knowing the meaning of. The rage real women 's issues. That's what they've fo cused in on ! And Marxist theorists driving and the grief are clearly, it seems to me, traceable back to that fi nal explosion with his fa­ around in Porschcs - I just fi nd it hilarious! But agai n, I've been away from it fo r a while, ther, and the life that he's lived. He's just sublimated an awful lot of that, and maybe he's so I have some distance. sold his fa ther short, maybe his fa ther was trying to change, and he's managed to put all of that in his rcm·view mirror, and yet here it is; he's buried it and it's digging itself up in }'(m mentioned the idea of'connecting with an audience, hut these days the trend seems his psyche. And you 'd think that people who arc smart and educated and who are living to he moving more toward ir01zic detachment in literature, this veil that :1· put up all the the life of the mind in some way would have some inside track into self-knowledge. But rime, this over-stylization to create distance. Even a somewhat recent novel /ike Jo nathan they don't. Those of us who are educated and who think about these things all the time Fra nzen :s· The Corrections, which i love, is a little guil�v of'that. Th is is a trend you can seem no closer, and in some cases fu rther off. That's Janet Moore's problem: she's used trace fi'0/11 Ja mes Joyce to Th omas Pynchon. her education as a kind of defense against self-awareness. I findthat 's true about academ­ ics a lot, and it's why l remain interested in them Russo: David Foster Wallace? in "Buoyancy, " Professor Snow is upset at one point hecause when he lefi the university Ex ac:tly. People like that. Ho weve1; you tend to write in a more -.f(Jrgive the word - classi­ he was replaced hy a cultural studies prof'essot: in Straight Man, there :1· Orshee, who re­ cal sense. Do you feel this ever hindered yourfinding an audience! jilses to read literature hut instead wants to watch television. Do you take sonu' issue with contemporarv cultural studies, or is there no agenda there! Do youjustjind itjimny! Russo: No, because there's a lot of that seemingly in the air and in the water - the tri­ umph of irony, the triumph of a kind of writing detachment. The beauty of language can

Russo: I find thenew er, younger cultural studies scholars just hilarious. And 1 'm not be used in defense, or in support, of distance too. l can be seduced by beautiful language, alone in that. You know, it's fu nny: when I was in graduate school, or at least in the early ! love beautiful language. 1 think Isak Dinesen, fo r instance - her Seven Gothic Ta les - just years as an undergraduate, the most liberal professors, and the most seeming(v liberal pro­ writes the most beautiful language. But beautiful language can also be used to distance fe ssors, were all in creative writing, and the works of contemporary fiction back then that writers from readers. I mean, ifyou 're looking at how beautiful a sentence is, obviously were preeminent in the seventies were all lell of center. Vonncgut is the one that comes you're not too deep in the story. So all of those things, I think, have been mainstays in immediately to mind. So creative writing programs back then were centers of seeming contemporary fiction, but if you do as I have done and swim against that current, I think leftists. I mean, those who were the most lcftwing people in college campuses were in you're likely to carve out a niche where you're probably going to end up with more creative writing programs. And the literature they were touting was rebellious even if it readers than you would have had you just played along and been ironic with the rest of wasn't necessarily anti-Vietnam, which was the political headline of the day. They were your ironic compatriots out there. I think actually striking into different territories in the rebellious in the artistic sense; they wanted to throw out the more conservative aspects of way that I've done has probably, in the long run, gotten me more readers than l would storytelling. For instance, they wanted to throw out plot, they wanted to throw out char­ have had if l'djust played the game that everybody else was playing. And probably more acter. They wanted to throw out all the mainstays, so it was a very culturally lcftwing part important than that, I would have never found a voice that was my own ifl' d just tried of the university at that time. Fast fo rward to now, almost everybody agrees that leftwing doing that. Because as much as I love irony - and you can read my novels and certainly cultural studies people look upon creative writing as the last bastion of conservatism in find ironyin them - 1 don't think I ever could have fo und my voice, because it's not Da­ the English department. If there's a culture war going on within the English department, vid Foster Wallace's voice - as much as I admire David Fosler Wallace and his voice, and it's between new cultural leftists and a lot of people my age who are kind of old-line left­ as much as 1 admired Th e Corrections. I thought it was a tour-de-f orce, and David Foster ies-politically, certainly, if not culturally. Old-line lefties, who fi nd ourselves thrust into Wallace's style is brilliant. I'm not in some sort of cultural or stylistic battle with people an atmosphere where we don't recognize ourselves as liberals anymore because we're who do what they do. l 'm assuming they've fo und the voice that's most truly theirs. It's being branded conservatives by the intellectual cultural leftists. It's a bizarre circum- just not mine.

22 23 e It :1· int resting that you write Bridge of' Sighs no11� hecause it :,· easilv your most experi­ the ways that actors like Paul Newman, Ed arris, and Susan Saran­ /las watching f-l men ta I book. rs don era(i characte influenced the way you create characters as a novelist? Likewise, working with a director like Robert Benton, who has always made .films that are deep�Ji Russo: Yeah, yeah. The structure's most important. ''character-driven. "

Also, it indudes this literary device that wincl1· up not real(v being one. l" w.:y is writing It's something I've watched with amazement. I'm not sure to what extent it's Russo: this memoir and at times you feel the memoir is the hook you 're reading, hut then you get tl1Y influenced me in my novel writing. I think watching actors work has infl uenced me in pulled out of' that when Lucv speaks ahout the things he \· leaving out of ' his memoi1� Then, scrccnwriting. I'll just tell you one quick story about that. When we were shooting No­ n you move into diff'erent points of' view, with the Noonan sections and also whe the hook hot�v :v Fool, there's that whole back story of Sully, Newman's character, and his relation­ " i kind of ahandons Lucy.fin· a wh le at the end tojiJ!Iow Sarah. It surprised me a little that ship with his fa ther. And l had written a lot of that back story into the text. I had given the hook was so stylized. him more lines about his relationship with his father, who was a brutal guy. And Benton al one po int had thought about actually shooting that scene as a flashback where Sully's Russo: Yeah, it surprised me as much as it surprised you. But with that unrel iable narra­ Mhcr chases a couple of kids out ofthe park and they climb a fe nce and one of them - in tor, th ink of Lucy as if he's try ing to tell the truth but there's some of it he just doesn 't I the novel - slips and fa lls and the spike of the fe nce goes right up through his chin and out have access too. And I still think even Lucy's memoir and all of that is deeply rooted in the top of his head. Benton thought about shooting that, and I was all in fa vor of shoot­ I character in the same way those great 19th century novels are rooted in character. think ing tlwt. J thought it would be a scene that would be so powerful it would stick in the that the style or the structure of the book may seem the most metaphysical of my books, viewer's minds, and Benton said, "Yeah, it will, and nobody will ever laugh at another and it may seem to be genuflecting in the direction ofmetafiction because none ofmy thing in th is movie." It would have been so horrific that the kind of comic vision of both other books have done that, but I think one of the things that mctaftction does is try to the book and the move would have been lost. Then Paul came on board and he wanted to distance in the same way we were talking about earlier. It's another distancing mecha­ get riel of almost all the dialogue T had written about his relationship with his father, and nism. And even though th is book does have some struclural mctafictional paraphernal ia, he said, "Tfwc reveal that in the story, you've stolen it fl·om me as a memory. Because it never tries to distance any ofthc stories from the reader. I think that this book - and it's I want to play that as a memory, but if the information is already out there, that steals it strange, because it docs have some of that metafictional apparatus - is actually my most from me. I can't do it. I can't have the memory ifwhat I'm remembering is already kind I emotional book. think that the last sixty or seventy pages, where all three stories get of outthere and the other characters know about it." So r didn't understand that at all wrapped up - Noonan on the platform watching Sarah's train go; the ending of Sarah's when he explained it to me, but then l saw it in the way he played it, that scene where he story where, in a sense, her mother reaches out to her from beyond the grave in that sits in the car with Peter, and he says, "Your mother, she was just a little woman. And painting in the other old white woman's room; and Lucy's determination to do that thing boy, he could make her fly."You know, I had about six or seven sentences on the page, that his wife wants most, when he says at the end, "We will go" - operate almost as pure which he reduced to, "Boy, he could make her fly." And the look on his fa ce as he said emotion. What I think has been going on is the flips ide of the coin we were talking about those simple words made it haunting. He was a haunted man in that scene, and you didn't earlier, in regards to irony, which distances. I think that every generation of writers has need any more than that. So now when I write a scene fo r the movies, l remember his to deal with, in some sense, the great literary sin. I mean, there arc literary sins and we saying, "Don't rob an actor of his memory. Tell him what the memory is that he's going all recognize what they arc, but each generation needs to decide which literary sin is the to be thinking about as he plays the scene, but don't give him a lot of dialogue about it. worst. And I think over the last thirty years, everybody has kind of agreed that of all the Just allow him to live in the moment himself. And it'll be fi ne." lt taught me an awful lot literary sins you can make, the worst is sentimentality - that stepping over the line from about what you can do without in a movie. Now, it doesn't influence my novel writing, emotion into maudlin sentiment. There arc other literary sins, too. Didacticism is also a because the back story is still important. It's the diffe rence between novels and screen­ literary sin. J'cl say that putting irony above all else to have a kind of detachment is a lit­ plays. Susan Saranclon did the same thing with a couple scenes in Tw ilight. She said, crary sin. It is fo r me, anyway. There's all kinds of literary sins, but J think that somehow "Less wo uld be more here. I don't need to say that much. Just let me play it and they'll the thing that's in the air, in the water, fo r young writers today, is that of all the literary learn it. Trust me, they will." So working with actors, working with directors, has really sins you can commit, the one you don't want to commit is sentimentality, which means had an effect on my screcnwriting. I know now that Jess is more. the ironists always stay well back of that line. They don't want to step over, and because YrJill' they're scared of committing that worst of literary sins, they don 't get as close to the line novels always can fall roughlv into that category of" "literllly fiction. " Howeve1; as I th ink they should. think that want - in terms of sentiment - honest sentiment. your I I I screen writing sometimes moves into genre work - particularly the crime genre . Do want to gel as close to that line as I can without taking that fa tal step. T want to walk right youjeel this is something hetter left to cinematic expression as opposed to taking. the . j(mn up to the edge of the cliff and then take that one step back instead of fo rward that throws of the written word? me over into the precipice. That's dangerous, of course, as the closer you get to the edge the more likely you are to fa ll over, but I don't worry about that. To me sentimentality is Russo: When l was in graduate school fi nishing my dissertation and learningto write fiction, just one of the literary sins you have to worry about. that 's the kind of novelist I thought l'clbe. I thought I would be a thriller writer.

24 25 All of my secret pleasures back then were novelists like James M. Cain, Raymond Chan­ write now. l 'vc �ot deadlines and I've got this other stuff going on. So allow me to be an dler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross McDonald. Those were my secret guilty pleasures. I was hole f0 1_ a whlle. (L aughs) ass Allow me to do this thing that [ do." reading all of those when I could have been reading Wa r and Peace. (L augh.1) And then I discovered of course when I tried to write some of those things that it's an urban genre. I didn't know anything about cities or that kind of woman; all of that stuff I didn't know. But when it came to writing Tw ilight with Benton, and later on Th e Ice Harvest - which I could adapt from somebody else's novel - it was kind of like I was going to go back and do that thing that I discovered fairly early on in my own writing career that I couldn't do. Lt was a guilty pleasure, and with The Ice Ha rvest I had a wonderful novel that l could start fr om. I could write my thriller, but I didn't have to worry about plotting it because somebody else had already done it. It was wonderful. I could go back to it and do the thing that I'd wanted to do back when I was thirty, and here I am at fifty-something actu­ ally being able to do the thing I'd wanted to do when I was thirty and just didn't have the tools fo r. It was just thrilling to do that.

I read interviews with certain writers where they reji1se to answer questions because they don 1/ike them, orfo r whatever other reason. Th ere :1· this myth of the writer as this tena­ cious loner who doesn 't care about his readers. What do you fe el about this ever popular myth?

Russo: You know, when I'm doing this, Ben - when I'm doing this - if people do me the courtesy of reading my books and asking intelligent questions about them, I just don't sec any basis fo r being standoffish. Because they've paid me a very high compliment, so when someone pays you a compliment, it seems to me the way I was brought up that you return the compliment. If they 're going to take you seriously, you take them seriously. It just seems like a simple matter of courtesy. That said, once book tour is over, I will prob­ ably go to ground, and I probably won't give interviews until the paperback comes out and I start doing it again. I just need to protect myself and J need to get back into the writ­ ing again, because the number of people - especially when you get a little more famous - who want to talk to you just grows exponentially. l could become a talker at this point instead of a writer. So there's a period of about five or six weeks with each new book where I just say to myself, "Alright. For this time, I'm not going to get much work done. People are going to ask me questions and I'm going to try to answer them." I try to be open, and I try to answer questions as openly as I can, but I also try to protect my daugh­ ters. I generally don't answer questions about them, or try to pull them into any kind of fo cus. They have their own lives to live and it's been difficult enough for them to have a fa mous father, and my wife doesn't like to be in the spotlight, and my mother didn't like to be in the spotlight, so I protect them. If people want to talk to my wife, I discourage that sort of thing, because people can be intrusive. People will come up to Camden - they know where I live - and they'll do an hour interview, and then I'll discover the next day that because I made reference to this place, they've remained in town and gone there and talked to the people there. I don't really mind that, except these people have businesses to run, and they come down and they're kind of doing background on the interview: What's Richard Russo really like? And I have mixed fe elings about that because these people are busy and they're my fr iends and they have other things to do, and so I set up certain kinds of boundaries. But for the most part, as l say, this is just six weeks of my life where I do this, and where I try to take people seriously if they've done me the courtesy of taking me seriously, and then after six weeks I just say, "Thank you fo r your interest, but I need to

26 27 To Play a Grass Reed Steve Gibbon

I. She taught me how to hold the strands between my fingers and the amount of pressure to apply in just the right places. Tonight, the cold, quiet plains, a rippling well of golden life attempt to remind me that it, too, moves fo rward and soon thi s ground will harden and the season's snows wi ll hide it. 1 am too late to serenade the autumn sky despite my haste, the grass has lost its emerald luster and fo olish I was to think perhaps my breath could save the dead from death.

H. The grass reed crumbles, confirmsthat it will progress to winter, to burying itself and shunning the bright sun fo r a number of frozen months and tries consoling me thusly. I can almost see her lips pressed against a sun-dried reed, a smile behind her tiny fingers and a light in her green eyes; though long since past its day the blade of grass would sing and carry in its solemn notes the secrets of the changing winds. She told me how the sun would steal away, inch by inch, unti I the fields on which we slept sunk back into the earth and lamented fo r three long months their own hibernation.

Ill. A heavy sigh heaves the plains in waves along the horizon and just as in an ocean, crash against a shore somewhere, sure to tow belongings not entrenched out to the sea. l am wise to the idea my autumn plains attempt to present; they say to lay with them and allow the snows to come, to hide until the sun returns to vitalize the yellow pasture; she will bloom again, return to me with painted cheeks and spring-time curls, and buried within a claret blossom. l tunnel into cold hard soil and allow the fe eble golden reeds to embrace my shape, preparing fo r the bold and grueling chill.

29 IV. c and re quests attention, An anci nl tree hun hes fo rward a z and whisper An In terview with stretching towards me wi ened finger i untold vii fo lklore of a place from wh h no-onc re turns, Todd Field fa ll the spring can't bring them home, where if ne fades in ' ·ins hiss in protest, ward the w rds away. bul lhe fa ithful pla returns lumber, The crooked giant bows his head and lo U1e l ies h 'd said leaving us lo settle ·in and contemplate by the win , and even wh n his fiction fa des carried d the fe eling of ·onviction from his yes. I can't dismiss To dd Field makes the sort oj .films you need to spend some time with. His work is concerned with silences and things unsaid. He tells his stories with v. ce, patience, and precision. His jilmsproceed with a measured sort r�j'pacing not often wh i h I make my bed, gra Music glides between the r e ds in c weeds, jimnd in contempormy American movies. And yet, the work never comes close to being that spread like plagues and grow like igniting dreams it is fa r too olservantj(Jr that. f t imes when here was warrn, boring; insinuating memo·ries One might think that a director so calm and steady would get lost in a cinema hat kept lhe old at bay. of her that made the pastures glow, t ingfaster and louder every yew: Andyet, his two greatfeature jilms - In the Bed­ listen fo r the melody grmv The soothing fields encourage me to room and Little Children - have together heeri nominatedj(Jr eight Academy Awards to tell this evening; and take to heart the story that it tries spring," (including a best picture nomination fo r In the Bedroom), and he himse(j'h�ls been nomi­ the song proclaims, "she'll bloom in "she'll bloom in spring," nated.fhr three. He is also an actor who has worked with directors as diverse as Wo ody crescendos and the call is at its peak, and when the sound Allen, Vi ctor Nunez, and Stanley Kubrick; and he was nice enough to stare down the let the whiteness fall. the gray skies open wide its arms and camera at the end of' a short .film made hy Jamie Stuartj(Jr the Ne w York Film Festival. Most excellently, he is afitll-time Ma ine resident, having shot In the Bedroom VI. Owls Head, Belj'ast, Rockland, Rockport, Tre vette, Camden and Old Orchard Beach . I satisfaction; in I could never play the grass reed to my to piece , say this is most excellent because it:� probahlv why, when we set out to do this interview, gently and I made them ]·a ll you lent your wisdoms we did not hearfi-om his agent: "I don 't see why you 'd contact us, " 're a literarv fa iled to understand them, "}(m . tried to share your secrets and I journalji-om, oj 'all places, Ma ine? " and "Go away, " though not necessarily· in that carol'ully extended. thumbed clumsily at strands of gras ·· you as c eye fixed, order. ll fo r as long I ou ld keep my I fo llow the snow's fa and trees. Wo rds and Images is pleased to publish this interview with To dd Field, who is, one final breath that shakes the earth the plains inhale as Jamie Stuart says in his afiwementioned short fi lm, "the real motherjucking deal. " if to make a speech. Movement ceases and the sky expands as a sound at all, says to me, or if it makes • l don't know what it lakes land upon the ground, and waiting fo r its verdict, the snowf has misinformed me. settle in, and suggest that mother earth Wh en l.first saw In the Bedroom, it excited me vety much that somehody had made a film tn Maine and avoided most of' the standard images and iconography thus associated: the rocky shorelines, the lighthouses, etc. As a resident of' the state, did you make a conscious decision to avoid most oj'these images? Because often, it seems to me that ij 'part of'afilm or a television.show is set anywhere in New England other than Boston, it :1· being used primarily as a counte1point to something else, with the sp otlight jillly pointed at all the scenic qualities, high-lighting some kind <�l "small town " mentali�y.

Field: I understand what you mean. I suppose when people come to New England to make a film there is often the danger of that desire fo r quaint. But In the Bedroom is really a straight up Western, that happens to be set in New England. Because this is where I live. The two settings in Andre Dubus' short story, "Killings," were Dover and Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. I visited both before I ever met Andre. There are clear diffe rences between the two towns - Dover, is a typical small New England town, and

31 30 Hampton Beach, a kind of dense, transient tourist trap that empties out after Labor Day. vi w ilh musi , but i l is very, very difii cull to ·neak in 1110 and 1hen sneak out aguin when The kind of town that is easier to get lost in, and where he has Strout working when Matt scor - is o li!tlc you mu l be d li ·ate. m was proud his lhel' ' T very of work, and sai 1 Fowler seeks him out. The firsttime 1 met Andre I asked him about whyhe had set the one of the mo. t c al en ng h l i he had ' er undert , it was g exercises aken. Naturally wh ·n it story in Dover and he said, "Was it Dover?" He wasn't interested in that. He asked me Limt.: l make Lilli" U1cr was no uc l came Chi/dr•n 1 s ion ab ul who l ask about ·cor­ why I was drawn to his story, and told me I should set it wherever I liked. At the time m. This t m ing the fll i Tom and I began working o er early, a t geth very nd a •aln, h ·re the my family was living in Owls Head, and so it was much easier to write the script using is on ly ab ul J5 minutes long i11 a 134-m score inulc movie. I think people sometimes familiar locations. This in turn informed everything - people's vocations, the relationship known composers fo r "big" blame scores. But, in Tom's case at least, this is the furthest between Matt Fowler and his part-time fishingson, the wife fr om "away" educated at an from his creative instinct. What thing a composer wants to write, and what a composer is Ivy league school, and comfortable living in a place like Camden - all of it. commissioned to write, are often two very diffe rent things.

Yo u use music that isver y quiet, o.fien seeming to rest below the scene, always comple­ to me it :� jili111Y how seldom characters in movies ever seem to he aware of ' any world menting the action and yet never being used as the sole signaler o,j'whateveremotion the but the ch outside, aracters in Little Children seem constantly, hut quietly, conscious of ' audience is supposed to fe el. What sort o,j'role do you see Thomas Newman :� scores - or arah is acute�y this. S aware of ' literature, and Kathy makes documentwyfilms, which is a music in general - as playing in yourfilms'! outward looking pn�j'es ve1y sion. There is, a( course, the Flaubert scene - but then there :\· something as small also as Sarah briefiy mentioning Michael Moore to Brad. (There :� The first filmsI made had no music whatsoever. This was a conscious choice, as I of' this in Field: a little In the Bedroom too, with Ruth watching late night talk shows, the use wanted to see if they could hold up on their own. By the time I'd completed my third film e:\· poetry, of' Blak and Matt listening to his baseball games.) It also seems that in such I became comfortable working this way. The point of departure fr om this approach was c; decision simple of' casting Ja ne Adams, you 've created an interconnected cinematic No nnie Alex written by my wife, Serena Rathbun. And perhaps because it was really verse, as I can 'thel & uni p but think of her character in Little Children as being the same Serena's film,and I was simply directing, that we began experimenting with small pieces omanfiYim Happiness. w What is the aim in using culture in this way in yourjilms'!Is it of classical music, and just the tiniest amount of score. I was very happy with result, as simple as recognizing the jact that real people in their real lives discuss aspects ofpop and so a few years later when we were cutting In the Bedroom,I decided to try a small culture every day '! amount of music against picture - about 20 minutes in all. I chose a single piece from the

Estonian composer Arvo Part. We had ten diffe rent recordings of the arrangement, fr om Field: J don't know about "pop culture" references. Most of the time I fe el like the a solo instrument, to a small chamber orchestra playing the composition. At that time Part cranky next-door neighbor screaming at the teenagers to turn down their music. Ask my had never allowed anyone to license his music fo r film.However, after many letters, and children; l really know nothing about it at all. The Little Children cultural examples you impassioned pleas, he agreed to speak with me. He told me that he would allow us to use site, pop culture or otherwise, come straight from Perrotta's novel. In fa ct, fo r the longest his music, and was kind enough to offer it to me fo r very little. Still, the price was more time when Sarah mentioned Michael Moore in early drafts of the script, she also spoke money than I could pay. Around this time I was trying to talk Chris Jenkins into mixing about Frederick Wiseman. This was mine. I had added it, as I thought it would be telling the film.I knew Chris from Nonnie & Alex. He had generously helped me by having one that she'd be fam iliar with Wiseman 's work. But ultimately, l got tired of explaining to of his team do the mix - gratis. But this time I wanted Chris himself. At the time he was everyone - the actors, etc. - who Wiseman is, and decided to drop it. Wiseman is my idea re-mastering Kubrick's 2001: A Sp ace Odyssey with Leon Vitali, and Leon invited me of "pop culture." The casting of Jane Adams was actually a mistake. l had some rules to sit in on the mix. Chris said he would like to help me, and that I should have a "proper when we were casting, and one of them was that there were to be no actors from any of composer ...like Thomas Newman." This was all very easy fo r Chris to say, as he was ac­ Todd Solondz' films. I love his movies. I just didn 't want any reductive comparisons customed to working with the likes of Newman, but how was I going to get someone like with the people who wrote about the fi lm. Somehow though, Jane came in to read fo r the Tom? My wife reminded me that her fa ther, Bo Goldman, had written two films that Tom part, and of course she was br illiant, so brilliant in fa ct that I offe red her the role in the had scored, and said that I should call Bo. Well, Bo got Tom to come and watch the film, room . When she left my Casting Director, Todd Thaler, said, "What happened to your and after the lights came up Tom turned to me and said, "Fuck you." I was a little taken Todd Solondz rule?" and I thought, "Oh, shit." But I'm glad 1 had a mental lapse because aback, and then he said, "l came here as a favor to Bo, and had no intention of scoring ultimately, Jane was the one meant for the part. The radio broadcasts of the Red Sox this film. I'm completely booked, and have no time. But I want to do it." I was thrilled games in In the Bedroom you mention began as a simple tip-of-the-hat to Andre Dubus, naturally, and then he asked, "How much money do you have for the score." I told him who loved that team with a religious passion. But at Serena Rathbun 's suggestion, the we had nothing, and he said, "Okay, this will be interesting." We worked together every­ broadcasts became something else altogether, and would come to play an essential part in day fo r three weeks over the Christmas holidays. It was a real education to collaborate �he end of the film- an important distraction fr om the awfulness of spending time alone rn a with someone like Tom. So much of what he does in his work is invisible, and purely vehicle with someone you are planning to kill. As for the poetry references, the use sonic. We had a half-day recording with a fu ll orchestra, which was a tremendous luxury. of Blake and Longfellow by Carl at the two poker games sprung fr om the simple impulse Altogether, there are only 25 minutes of music in the film, which runs 130 minutes. This of"who would I put at this table if l could have anybody?" For me the answer was the was the design fr om the beginning, not because of budgetary concerns, but because Tom Southern Historian, Shelby Foote. From there it was a question of what would be a likely pre and I were very concerned about leaving a noticeable fo otprint. It is easy to wallpaper a occupation for someone like Foote?

32 33 hi nk Lhe pr blem lies in the term, s £field: J t ' ·ex ·cncs." This is h w m vie going Th ere seems to he a great tradition of' the "expansive " secondfi lm, which takes key as­ are taughl lo think about . Americans scenes i nvol vi ng c x ual i ty The scene mw;t b about pects oj'fhe.first and then introduces them to a story that reaches outjitrtha I'm thinking ething in th context • n beside. sex . som flh situoti The . ame would be true if you set a Solondz goingfromWelcome to the Dollhouse to Happiness, or Ta rantino goingji·om car. What is the scene scene i nn about be ·ides the fa ·t tbal someone i operating a motor Reservoir Dogs to Pulp Fiction, or Paul Th omas Anderson goingji·om Hard Eight to you take r� vohi Ie'! If the npproach that somethi g else besides lhe physical i occurring, Boogie Nights. Do you .feel that there \· a similarfimdamental connection hetween In the it less uncomfortable · and to photograph. For Uttl• thCil is ln p rlo1m 'h. ildr'n Kate Win­ Bedroom and Little Children ? What sort of' a relationship to youjeel to this generation ick Wilson, my soundm n slet., P

Wh en people sp eak of'influences on your work, they usually name Kubrick and then stop Field: Yes, most certainly. Little Children is a satirical melodrama about acutely self­ there. I understand the ohvious reasons.fbr this connection, hut it seems to me that there aware media-age people in their thirties who arc overly familiar with "real ity" televi sion. might be more of' an imprint of60 :�· European cinema on your work. Stretches of'ln the The tempo and execution fo llow from these circumstances. Bedroom seem it�fluenced hy Rohme1; and I think that Bergman is apparent too, particu­ . lar�y during the second part of that.film Little Children seems to echo, at times, Antonio­ I'd like to askjust hri�fly about digitalfilm, because it:� · a topic beaten to death these ni, and yet you seem to have learned a good deal about how to handle tone.fi·om Truffcwt. days , but one which somehow still warrants.fitrther discussion. in an interview I read And more specifically, the scenes of ajternoon sensuali(v seem reminiscent of' how sex ji'om around the time of' the release of ' In the Bedroom, you .�poke r!j'your dislike/(Jr digi­ used to he handled as something somewhat elegant in French films, from Godard work :v tal.filmmaking, saying, "It always looks like crap. Always. "Since then, have you changed to Ma lle \· film At one point, American .filmmakers learned quite a lot.fi·om The Lovers. your mind at all in regards to digital technology? Is there a right way to use it? these Eun�pean giants, hut these lessons seem to be increasingly lost with each new hatch o(filmmakers. What lessons fr om those European.filmmakers are still felt today ? Do you Field: Of course there isn't. There have been noteworthy advances in digital capture .feel any direct connections in your own work to this cinematic past? since 1 gave the interview from which you quote. Film won't be around very much longer. 1t will completely disappear in our lifetime. For this reason alone, I 'II continue to Field: Well, I certainly have enj oyed all of the filmmakers' work that you mention. As fa r shoot film, and filmonly. For all the talk of the magnificence of 4K capture, it is noth- as influences are concerned, it is not something I want to think about very much. There is ing compared to the information available in a single frame of properly exposed 35mm a real danger to go from homage to parody. There's one film I remember seeing when I emulsion. The comparison is not an argument, simply a choice. I will miss film. My heart was young that affected me in a meaningful way, and began a life-long relationship with breaks just thinking about it. But the fa ct is we now have the ability to use digital media European cinema - that was Louis Malle's Le Souffle au Coeur (Murmur (}/'theHeart). I that is available off the shelf to tell our own stories, and this is a giant and radical step think probably because of the way he presented unusual and permissive social mores in a fo rward, and as relevant as any other media that works with the moving image. domestic framework, and specificallythe way the filmdealt with sexuality. You seem to me one of the few fi lmmakers who actually adapt literary works instead of' Something J 'm always curious about as a film viewer is how people shoot sex scenes, simply displacing them into another medium. Can you speak a bit ahout what your inten­ because it seems such afimdamentafly bizarre thing to ever put on film. For what reasons tions are when diving into somebodv else :s· work to put it on the screen ? 1 see that your did pou choose a more picturesque aesthetic in shooting the sex scenes in Little Children? next .film is jhJtn an original screenplay of'yours. Is there a diffe rence jiJr you he tween Do you have any .feelings on more recent re volutions in filming sexualcon tent, where sex how you work with source material as opposed to original material? seems to always need to look as real as possible, even if' that means shooting it with a handheld, documentary look, or having it unsimulated? Field: The most exciting thing as a reader is to come across someone's material -a short story, or novel that you cannot stop thinking about. You are haunted by an impres-

34 35 sion, and it is this fe eling that compels you fo rward to spend a couple of years devoted to adapting th is person 's work. In writing "original" screenplays you must be driven by something equal ly potent. The fu ndamental difTcrcncc is in the way you shape the script. With a literary adaptation there is something to push up against so that you

1 want to ask you ahout Stan lev Kuhridc, hut ! 'm not so mueh interested in what you leamed workfn� on Eyes Wid� Shut, heeause I've alrea(�)l read aiJI!llt that in other in ter­

views. was it learned as � f ' s films h jiwe ever working So what vou a viewer � hi e with him'! 1 cased the place. I mean, it ten years filr the critical community to fi nally Is going to take an1;th er acknov.>ledge 1 cased the place. I paced to where my heels is'! Eyes Wide Shut as the masterp iece it bludgeoned the road like the butts of rifles.

Field: Well, the critics all condemned his films upon their initial release. Read the first 1 hollered for anyone's attention. Nope. reviews fo r 200 !. Talk about the "ultimate trip." J-1is treatments of genre fi lms were often Looking both ways - twice, so far ahead of their time that they made people who wrote about 11 1m very uncomfort­ 1 pitched my assault and smashed every window able. Often, as was the case with the same people would rc-rcvicw his fi lms years 201)/, of that attorney 's vacation house, later with a completely diffe rent prospective. As a viewer the first thing that happened to me wat ching his ll lms was that they fe lt deliberate. There was no doubt, and no way they the art and the facts could be anything other than what they were. The vision was uniquely singular. left fo r someone else to piece together later. 1 knelt down, drew my blade, and eviscerated the evening. Justjiwji1n, is there any /iterwy work that you would ahsolute�F lo ve to adaptjiJr the or not it :\' alreac{v heen made into film, and screen, regardless oj'whether a regardless The clouds, conjugated tire smoke. any problems wi difficulties come up in of' th gelling the righ ts, or whatever other the The limp hillside with its lung brushes fo r trees. pmcess '!

I knew then l would stir my coffe e with an icc-pick Field: Yes, but l'm not ready to tell you just yet. when I grew up, that I would find a way to sell th is goddamn pantomiming sunset if I could.

311 37 - Rain Shine

Steve Gibbon

USM Excellence in Expression Award- Wi nner

Not much use fo r a three-legged dog they told me, but I wasn 't gonna' shoot lhm1gh it wobbled slightly, it was plenty capable of corne ng ccoo or it. l)csides ri a ra n ran wl. obert the three-legged dog hunted his fa ir hare r wls of just a fl x. 01 every variety, I reckon, and omctimes wh o the mo n was j ust right, we 'd take ab ut wn to the beach and he'd go swimming, and children would ometime · compare hirn d his paddling to when they pedaled around th ir living rooms with little pia tic tricycles. But he'd sh w Lhem a thing or two by pulling a shark out of the water gripped fi rmly between hi · i mpre sive whit. canine , and he'd drag it a good twenty thirty fe et ash r and lct lhe man- ized fi h wallow helples ly, burn ing to and (ro, making what cou ld be in shark-land considered "sand-angels." "That's all nonsense" the Missus would say when we got home, "where's the shark now?" Gobert and I always worked to put him back in the sea, ond anyone who wit­ nessed the event (though I know not from whence they came or to where they retired) can attest to the two brave souls - an old man and a three-legged dog - who triplc-hand­ cdly rescued the shark from no uncertain and certainly unpleasant demise, neglecting to contemplate that it was us who threatened its well-being in the first place. Now, the Miss us has a habit of getting kind of angry, and when she docs her fa ce twists up like one of those fr uit snack commercials on the t.v., but it doesn 't turn into a fr uit. It just twists up. It docs get red, though, so I reckon it could be argued that her fa ce turnsinto a twisted up cherry. Well me an ' Gobert got home real late one night and her fa ce was something of a twisted up cherry like it is a lot of the times we get home real late, an ' she said to us, "Norman Edward Barker," (that's me), 'just what in the hell arc you doing coming home at two o'clock in the morning covered in mud and dirt and who knows what?" Sometimes when she gets mad, it's like the whole room starts to fi ll with an electric current that sends uncanny surges up and down the walls, and at every corner, the currents meet and become fa intly visible as little blue sparks that dance around in my peripheral. That's what was happening at that moment, and poor ol' Gobert could sense them too, and he backed out of the front door where we had entered so triumphantly, whimpering and afraid. "l ought to skin your hide, making a ruckus in the middle of the night, waking me up and then meaning to come in here with that-," she made a funny little hand-ges­ ture in my direction, "-that stuff all over you." The truth of the matter, and not some fabricated nonsensery like mud, is that lhc substance covering me and Gobert was a peculiar type of film that tends to coat the surrounding area where a meteor strikes the earth. As it just so happens, I'd been walking

39 through the fo rest that night and L:amc upon a smoldering d1 Lm k of rock the size of maybe 1< ind that seems to persist as a pleasant mi. the st even in the bright sun, and not until 1 two moose, put directly next to each other. Side by side though, and not the long way, fo r ached down to SL:ratch Gobert's car had noticed re I just how saturated we had reckon if' it was a meteor the size or two moose next to each other the become 1 long way I would �1flcr several hours. have been toodau nted by the size of it to stick around and inspect. I could �me\ I that earthy rain smell that always occurred when the . rain stirred up As it were, however, it wus of significant enough magnitude to attract my at­ e vanous con iferous trees (the hungncst of th all fo restry), and mixed in with the earth's tention, but not so much that I was afraid that some a! icn I ifc fo rms would crawl fr om and fe rtile soil. Tiny ra indr son ops coaled everyth ing in a glistening veneer that made beneath it, unless they were very small alien life fo rms, in which case I reckon I could both me an' Gobert speechless fo r the better part of the morning. probably hold my own were it to come to any sort of hand-to-hand combat, being of It was just lik e this when I fi rst met Gobert, so many years ago in my more fo rmidable stature. But instead me an' Gobert just got a little messy fr om all the asteroid bunctious fifties on a hu r8m nting trip with a fe w old companions. Donning our fa shion- dust and what-h

40 41 fl·icnds real fa st. Though, I never mentioned who put the trar there in the first place. "I've been wa iting hlr you, Mr. Bnrkcr," she said. These arc the things on my mind, but who's to say what ()obcrt himscl l" w�ls thinking

42 4) wouldn't make no more floods." . . . , .·mg and the little blue sparks bcfotc mustct We examined the fr uit snack likeness up the courage to respond...... , . , . , , . But t flood. Maybe It s t l�e t ,u n shme. Interview with ybe the Good Lord isn l mak ng the An "Ma ' _ scd. � tnc ts thc h,llld, ld hear nothing of it, and 1 wasn't surpn it was in vain. She wou , _ Matt Berninger and intended to do 1!. It SJUSt ltke that lOSCn " 1 told her. 1 had a .jo b to do, c . by tile elders'' . ' ' . ,1 . . ' lt!VC to b� so o fthc National the badger fa m tly why the� dtdn t I time I made up my mind to explain to 1 ncdt" ly then, and can make a dtficrcncc now. mean and 1 think 1 made a difference I then we that happened, 1 remember telling Gobert, lost n�y fi nger to the badgers, but had could have been like twins. . hcadmg up the week, it was just me and ol' Gobert, Come the end of the _ of the elders A /low me to he 1lirec.:t and unprofessional: Th e National arejust a/)(m/ one o(lhe bright as ever. I rccko�1 it's the will mountain, the rain shine sti ll glowing and all, but I /Jest hands in the world right now. Yrnt want da rk'? Th e do dark. Yrut want emotional'? cl imbing to safety, bcmg the chosen y that none but me an ' Gobcrl'd end up av song with a chorus goes, "I 'm eve1ything " wan/ to tear to come along. Th ey h e a that so ,\"OtTyjin- Yrnt reckon 1 still fe el bad that nobody meant . shit up '? Just gel in a car and drive t roug a city all the the cabin where the Mtssus sal and most some night h h with neon lights dy ­ From the top we could see the town and the you an up "A hel" to jit!L volume and to scream your lungs bert a bit of spare nb ,I snu�k ����ty at ���t ing around d crank Uy out .fin· watched her programs. 1 gave ol' Go likely , ern mto the culmai y di ts, and we sdt the whole song. (You won 't he able to. Matt B inger \· voice trumps your l)(li1SV hel!ovt'­ . evci· .sec , since wercn t much reaI (I. mn ct 1 'd \)t·ob·t' bly 1 ing). And more than this, the songs contain stark, creepy, and mythical images oj "desolate and waited. urhan /wulscape.1· - yet they stilL manage to give you hope, even if"it \· in something as simple as a uy of; "I won l.fitck us ova " A fl o/"the lyrics and songs mentioned so j(w are jiwn their 2005 album All iga­ tor, which got the rarest jimn o/pmise: a re versal of" an initial opinion jimn the usually t infi llible (m they think) Pitchfork when Stephen M. Deusner wrote that it is "an excellent a/hum we initially underrated " Th at reversal is.fi-om their 2007 review o{the Nationa/ .'1- jiJUrth alhum Boxer, which Pitchfork called one of"the best a/hums o/the yea1: Boxer was also named the best album of " the year hv Paste, so see? I'm not the only who likes them. Th e National are Mall Bern inge1; Aaron Des.1·ne1; Brvce Dessne1; Bryan Deven­ dolf," and Scott Devendolj; and they are one o(the mre hcuu/1· who manage to he sound both deep�v musical and astonishingly literary. I am honored that Matt Berninge1; the lead singer and �yricist, consented to answer a jew o/my questions, and there :1· nohoc�v hetter to he showcased as the.firsl musician interviewed in Wo rds and Images.

Ho w aware are you of" influences on the work you do '? Th e National have 1nanaged to cre­ ate a 11ety distinct sound over the course of"a/1 these years and I'm wondering what sort oj'ohjectivity is availa/Jie to you in your assessment of" where this sound might have come jiwu in terms o(hoth m usical and personal influences'?

Berninger: Influences arc. hard fo r us to trace from the inside. I can identify some of thc people I learned and stole fi·om (Tom Waits, Morrissey, Nick Cave, Pavement) but I can't really speak fo r the other guys. There arc so many different th ings that we've all listened to and arc probably subconsciously channeling that it's hard to map out the connections. Outside listeners arc probably better at the kind of detective work than we arc. We didn't get together as a band because of common tastes in music. We got together because we were fr i ends. Those guys played instruments so they started writing music and I would just try to sing along. We never had any conversations about what kind of music we wanted to make. W c were just excited to make somcth i ng that sounded I i kc a song.

Th e attention paid on albums like Alligator and 13oxcr to urban settings and the dis-

45 44 conneclion j(mnd therein .1·oundl' as though if couldn �he ahout any place other than a 11 's thrilling and cathartic but never easy. I do. 1 don't know what I want people to get modem /1 mericun city like New Yo rk. llow attuned are you fo culture a11.d does o f our pcrf(mmmccs. I hope !l merin111 0ut people enjoy themselves but mostly I just want them to if jJiay into how you OJJproach making music in any particular way !' Ho w do you .feel rcrncmbcr it. popular music can address American issues!' 've heen around to see )'rJ/.1 hoth hejill'e and ajier this odd sort o(riff'which occurred in ative rock Berninger: Oddly, we've been described as sounding distinctly European as many times altum around 2004, where a hand like Modest Mouse g;Jt inexplicahiJ! po1mtar as we've been described as sounding American . With respect to the lyrics I would agree a show /ike The O.C. and suddenlv hrought stufj'like Death Cah jiJr Cutie to a huge audi­ that we have an urbnn American thing going on. We all grew up in the suburbs of Cincin­ eilC£'. Th e key thing ahout this shift, I think, is that suddenly "in die " slopped descrihing a nati but I 'vc been obsessed with New York long bcf()rc moved here. Probably fi-om hod and hecame I met this weird kind oj'genre where a hand like the Killers are supposedly watching too mnny Woody Allen and Scorscsc movies. New York has always been a "indie, " though certainly not in the way the National were hack in, sav, 2003. Wh at sori mythical place fo r me. Even after living here fo r almost twelve years it still seems surrea impact do you think l of the popularitp oj'a hand like Modest Mouse ha�l' on a band like the which is probably why I write about it so much. A lot of the lyrics deal with characters in National, and do you think it :1· a positive or negative impact? environments that arc part fa ntasy and part reality and not fe e ling quite at home in either place. I'm sure that has something to do with having come from conventional suburbia I 'vc used the term Berninger: "indic" fo r years but never fu lly understood what it meant. but living in New York. I 've never connected it to a method a or band's label status. T assume it's intended to refer something that is to "independent of mainstream taste" which is a nice way of saying I'm not sure how popular music can address American issues. I usunl ly try to nvoid writ­ very popular." Every "not band wnnts as many people as possible to hearthei r music. The ing about issues when writing songs. That comes with too much responsibility. The songs ccess of Modest Mo su use is an inspiration. Those guys put out great records fo r seven fo r me arc more often an escape from that sort of heavy thinking. years before they broke thr ough. The term "indic" just seems to be a newer way or say­ g "alternative" or "colle in ge rock." REM and U2 were referred to as "nltcrnativc" even Like so many people, !Jirst heard Alligator when it come out and enjoyed it ve1y much, after they had become the most popular bands in the world. It's abstract packnging lingo. hut there were other things I was listening to moreji·equenfly around that time. Ye t Radiohcad just re if leased a blockbuster record without a label or trad itional distribution so stayed with me in a real�v sneaky way, and now, three years /ate1; I serious�v think would seem I it that they arc the most "independent" band that has ever existed. listen to that alhum (a nd Boxer too) at least once a week while other things that seemed, ji·anklv, hetler hack in /no longer care ahout half'as much as I care ahout Allign- Moments on Boxer have a particul . 2005 arly visual quality to them, in that many of't/w imaJ;CS C rtainly there is no end to the praise heing thrown your way these days, hut how did play with light and tor. � darkness and the emptiness in wavs norma Ill' associated with im- it. feel in the past to he referred to as an excellent hand that "grows " on you!' I imagine in fi lm or other visual arts, n particular ages i the c/u;rus of' "Mfstaken .Jiw Strangers. " that more satisfying than heing a './lash in the pan. " addition to this .'1· In you seem to use the sort o(surrealist images more associated with school cafain s (d j){)etry than with music (except.Jiw mayhe Dy lan), and vvhen vou create Berninger: We would rather be referred to as "instantly lovnblc" but we'll take a chamcler like M1: Novemher on Alligator, one can � help hut think that he :1· i;nother lost "grower." When we're working on an album we usually have nbout thirty songs lloat­ child in a great literwy line which includes, most notuhlv, .J. A/fin! Prujivck. Wh at sort of' inf ing around. There nrc always n fe w that we get excited about in the beginning and arc luence over the years have other artji1rms had on the way write you your ly rics, tf· anv· convinced will make it on the ilnal record but more ofien thnn not those songs don't hold at a//'? our interest. Inevitably it's the weirder, less direct songs that we keep going back to. The catchy accessible songs often get put aside and never fi nished. It's the ones that grow on Berninger: I'm not a big reader. Aller a fe w pages I get sleepy and my mind wanders. 1 us and that we can listen to over and over fo r months without getting sick of that make it. watch a lot of movies and I probably work more like a screenwriter than a poet. My better So it makes sense thai istencrs seem to go through a simi Jar experience with our records. lyrics come when I stop I trying to tell a story and just get inside a fantasy and not worry Maybe we'll go back to those neglected hits someday and win n Grammy. about where it's going. lot A of the lyrics arc scraps of awkward dialogue or in the case November, intern of Mr. al monologue. I usc frngmcnts of environments and bits of con­ Live perjimnance is alwaysj(Jscinating to me. /-low much attention is paid to the aesthet­ versations to let the scene just exist as opposed to describing it. It's more fu n than trying ics of'perjin·mance ? Wh at do you want an audience to get out of'seeing the National live? to write a song "about" something.

flow does Berninger: ror a short time we brought along a shiny gold curtain as a backdrop. That's the process of'writing the music workjiJI· you guys !' It alwavs.fe/t :1· to me as 1f. everv memher o(the hand pretty much been the extent of our attention to aesthetics. We just try as hmd as we can is involved ot everp step, but I could he wrong ahout that. to get inside the songs and play them well. We get pretty "intense" on stage but that's usually n combination of nnxicty and wine. None of us arc comfortable showmen. I usu­ Ber We don't ninger: have a leader. Nobody comes to the group and says "I have a song that goes like ally try to keep my eyes closed and pretend I'm at home by myself. Otherwise I'd get this." We pass around loose sketches and snippets of ideas nnd everybody distracted and fo rget the lyrics. That's not to say don't enjoy performing live because tnes d1ffc rcnt thi ngs. The I good th ing about this process is that nobody fe els any personal

46 47 ownership so we can lear songs aparl and re invent them without anyone getting upset. The hard part is that we rarely agree on which direction a song should go so we ol'tcn get into long tug o' war battles over insigni lic

Bill Rasmovicz I pradical!yjumped jiJrjoy when !saw the truilcr.fin· /Juvid Gordon Green :v new.film Snow Angels and heard "Slo w Sh ow " in the hackground Ho w does it.Jeel to 11 lllie one of' your songs us the soundtrack to the sort of'dramolic montage that a/way.1· takes place at the end of'any good movie trailer'!

Berninger: It's odd to hear one of your songs used in a way you never imaged. It sounds much more dramatic in that trailer than it actually is. That's not a bad thing. It's just inter­ Grandfather coughed h is l ungs into the yard. esting to sec how a song can mutate depending on its context. Apparently John Edwards pears swallowed the yell ow-jackets. was playing "Secret Meeting" to the crowd just bef'orc he announced he was dropping out We were our own trophies fo r having survived. or the presidential race. We were fl attered but it seemed an odd choice.

Pigs' feet lay suspended in jelly, unaware Wh at sort of'gmwing is there lejifhr the Nationul lo do musiml(v'! Are we going to see their weight tore the cupboards fr om the wall, the massive "storv " a/hum anytime soon, where you create characters named afier adjec­ while the electrical tower loomed over us, tives or t}()liticalmovements and write ly rics in u mude-u11 language'! a mute dictator. Evenings , we l istened fo r

Berninger: That sounds like a lot of work. I'd r

from its hole beneath the porch. Crows knew your name. Memory thinned to erasure under acetone stars. Ashes settled on your sleep.

4H 49 Contributor Biographies

Domench ("Underneath Us") is presently writing and directing a series of six oan fiction col lections created exclusively fo r the audio experience. "HOLD ME FAST', the widely praised first book of The Speedway Six series, fe atures actors performing I 0 original stories. f-1is newest audio collection, "WAYSIDE CROSS", fe atures 14 new linked stories and will be released in June, 2008. He is now writing the third book of thc series, "PROFANITY", which is scheduled fo r released in 2009. For more info visit: dando mcnch.com.

Steve Gibbon ("Rain Shine" and "To Play a Grass Reed") currently resides in Top­ sham, Maine, with his beautiful fiancee, Emma. Raised in Litchfield, Maine, he devel­ oped an affi nity for the wild outdoors and derives most of his writing inspiration ti·om them. He is finishing up his BA in English with a Creative Writing minor at the Univer­ sity of Southern Maine in Portland, and hopes to publish novels and further poetry and short stories in the fu ture.

Chris Nielsen ("Winter Drifters") i�; a self-taught artist, who, like an apprentice, has studied his craft through research and observation of both American and European master painters. His work is in many private and corporate collections. Chris has been in scvcntl juried shows including the USM's All Maine Biennial and the Maine Art Gal lery

in Wiscasset. You can access Chris' website at www.americanmonct.com.

Louie Skipper's ("The Goldberg Variations") It Wu s The Orange Persimmon Of 'The Sun will be published in January 2009 by Settlement House. This is his fo urth major col­ lection. An Episcopal priest, he is a Vicar and college Chaplain, and lives in Montgom­ ery, Alabama.

Bill Rasmovicz ("Clear Smoke", "The Black Pill of Childhood," and "We Were the Manifestation of a Splayed Rainbow") is a graduate of the Vermont College MFA

in Writing Program and Temple University School of Pharmacy. He has served as a workshop co-leader and literary excursion leader through ut Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany ngland and Wales. His poems hav appeared in Hotel Ameriku, Nim rod, Mid­ Am l'ican f�evi w, Th ird Coast, and other publications and his book, Th e Wo rld in Place of ttse([, was recently published by Alice James Book. in 2007.

51 h r The Dog Ear Press and Tilbury House, Publishers. His essay on his long-time pub­ lishing and performing partner, the late Bern Porter, can be found at: http: I 1 ubuweb.com/ historical/ porter / porter_5books _html.

Zachary Mosher ("The Despondency of Notes") recently received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Southern Maine. He can be reached at con­ [email protected].

74 Names of and Information Regarding the Writers and Artists Of Wh om We Made the Published

Kevin Brockmeier ("The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story") is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Tr uth About Celia, the story collections Th ings That Fa ll from the Sky and Th e Vi ew from the Seventh Layer, and the children 's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. His stories have appeared in such magazines as Th e New Yo rker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, Zoe­ trope, and Th e Oxford American, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and the 0. Henry: Prize Stories anthology. Recently he was awarded a Gug­ genheim Fellowship and named one of Granta magazine's Best Yo ung American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised. lan Ganassi 's ("Right as Rain") poetry, prose and translations have appeared most recently in Caesura, Skidrow Penthouse, Octopus, Salamander, Boulevard and New England Review. He is also a working percussionist and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Michael Kimball (Excerpt from Book by Michael Kimball) is the author of the novels Firewater Pond, Undone, Mouth to Mouth, and Green Girls, and several recent plays, including Ghosts of Ocean House, nominated for a 2007 Edgar Award. Michael's play, The Secret of Comedy, staged in Portsmouth during September 2007, was recently performed as a staged reading in Somerset, NJ. Another of his 2007 premieres, Best Enemies, will be produced in Grand Junc­ tion, CO, in March '09, and given a staged reading this May by the Freeport Community Players, in Freeport, Maine. Michael's 10-minute play Say No More! is part of a show that won first prize in the Kentucky Theatre Association's 2007-2008 Annual Conference. His new play Hideaway is being rehearsed for a September production in Portsmouth, NH. Michael has taught at the Stonecoast Summer Conference and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program.

"Book By Michael Kimball is my attempt to sabotage the career of another Writer named Michael Kimball. It's a strategy that may need more thought."

Mark Melnicove ("and not buried in a mass of irrelevant information") is the author of ADVANCED MEMORIES (word art). He teaches creative writing, humanities, and filmstudies at Falmouth High School. f:lis previous jobs include executive director, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and publisher/editor

73 Sonnet 4. 5. Sonnet

The ticks of a clock divide seizure into missing breakfast I want again and having extra time to lay work on the cement and bash it the night I see all day. with a petulant mallet into errors. Other still carried by wheels of roses to muses in rusted destiny, rubbing sparks that turn my headaches into wings. Lack of architecture when I come to Yo u say, "imagine if the laws of physics could travel in time" rains something and point to a position the desk had taken, in synopsis and out - just far enough out of reach that I must move in all the way down the street with a living relative. a breath let go by hand. Dichotomies love being nude before being our perception. • If you knew me, you'd wish for a reason to keep knowing me but everything I say goes out the window and wrongfully accuses A child finally born, feeding on the your ear of eavesdropping. The sphere drinking blue moon comes carcass of ash, without the ability once every ten layers of tears to see comets pinning me to anguish. to look back. I have the thought alone. The illusion looking back at me. Run across my surface of debuts. Lightning greases the air.

You contact the cathedral, night interrupted between silent moons.

I need my exclusion, to be a part.

70 71 2. 3.

Each evening when the horizon swishes the sun's blood around its mouth he Though if when we touch wefeel space eliminated first, it is because the stands at water's edge. Exhaustion in the air from the time in his lungs. Attract­ senses take a moment to get out of theroad when the heart comes barreling ing the intentions skimming over the water's surface, he removes his clothes past. It seems that trees wait for our minds to blow away, so I've been s �ashing _ from them, and leaves his bare foot resting just inside. Able to relinquish the leaves in my closet trying not to fall back into agreement over the pnnclples eclipse of being a shell of his former self he casts two shadows. Perhaps he was gh gravity to on which the sky will finally cave. In the end, no thing has enou born in the water and he is the reflection. Perhaps dreams I'm talking to my­ escape me. Meeting at the shifting fault of admittance, I cannot feel the length self. She finds his tongue like cardiac arrest, everything is what it seems until of a meridian without someone claiming description is a saying that has all it becomes a situation. The germs of desire dance on mangled words, the voice been said before. 1 have never wanted to be alone except with you. A televi­ �ravels at a s tationary speed . She feel the sweat divide and his mystery sleep­ sion sits in a room by itself. Flickering away. Wind over water: the rush of an _ mg late on h1s breath. Emotionally, he cannot heat who he is. He returns to the order to be lit. Although some decisions take more experience than you have, I shore. The water so dreams swim for the shore. can assure you some, like the streets of London, will never taste the rain that washes them down.

68 69 Th e Despondency of Notes Zachary Mosher

$ 20-- • 1n 1. Va lency To day your touch fi lls the river with skin pocket Yo u control kites with the strings of your fingers

Fresh young pigeons from the Standing in the little garden The physics of stillness born on the moon's ride nesT I hug myself by clenching my fists stuff my pi llow with his feathers A white god could mean anything in my words The humility it takes to wait fire up my gri ll I tried instead to rule the snowman

2 dru msticks But the root now darker than any sleeplessness As it flares upon the hearth when I mix with fire 2 1 Out beyond roads you lead me W B Never looking so promising as when you lie I R It was the clean laundry of your chest Bleached iris ng s east Now the pantheon of the first impressions gashed And rising, suicide grows like a mountain

Away blows The wind forms

Soon every object will split down the middle And so it doesn't matter what you hold onto

66 67 • * • tion with an animal." "And I'm a chipmunk," she reminded me. "And I'm a squirrel," 1 echoed. "Clearly, Webster was a human, and . I am Squirrel. find main I character and sit beside him and watch cars meant it would only be sodomy for him to copulate with a chipmunk. Or squir- fall in hole, but can't enjoy it. Haunted by visions of Mary and day we slept rel." together making sweet love. Never know when it's goi ng to hit me, but always "Oh. Now 1 understand," she said. "But what about," she inquired , the same. Those eyes. Those eyes. "oral?" (AUTHOR'S NOTE: CORR ECTION FROM BEFORE: Ants life expectancy: "Webster only said it was sodomy, " I offered . "He didn't say it was 45 - 60 DAYS, not years. ("So why the tunnels?" one might ask. "Why store up wrong," I explained. sugar and grease is they're going to die before they can use them?" ANSWER: She looked at me with excited breasts. "Yes, John, yes ! OH YES!" she Because they don't know. ) gasped and suddenly did something to my manhood which I've only seen dogs do to their own and humans also on the inter net. "Oh John!" she chattered, "John! John! You 're driving me mad ! MAD! Positively MAD!!" "Please don't talk," pleaded, and so she stopped talking and we 7:44 AM. 1 Squirrel sits beside me, lost in thought. Also joining us are: 1) writhed in sweet ecstacy and then pain when we rolled off the bench and hot chipmunk, 2) mouse 3) cat. gravity pulled us down to the hard concrete (that was the sidewalk), and she 7:44+ AM. Hole Research resumes. said, "Ooff!" and started to run, but I caught her tail and pulled her back.

* * "Oh, yes! Ye s! Ye s! Yes! Ye s! Ye s !" she agreed as I pulle.d her u�derneath me and delved into the depths of her animal desire with machmegunl1ke mo­ tions of my hips, and other rapid movements. Ye s, it is I, squirrel. Earlier in park I shared pellets with 1) female chip­ "Oh, John, do it!" she cried. "Do it! DO IT!" munk, 2) male mouse, 3) cat of indeterminate sex, and they came for more, "I am!" I assured her. which we shared and then sat together on the bench to watch the cars fall in "Harder!" she cried and slapped my face. the hole, but the cat ate the mouse then went away, leaving only the female "This much harder?" inquired 1, slapping her back (in the face twice) chipmunk, which is not squirrel food so she must have felt safe, but that could 1 have been from anti-anxiety medication and because of me haunted by Mary, which wasn't abuse but innocent sexplay. And then she started beating me on the head and shoulders as if she was trying to kill me, but if this was dying, when Chipmunk looked at me all I can see is Mary, and when she brushes her then we were on a one-way jet-propelled rocket-to-heaven and ba�k. �arder­ hot fur against mine, all I can feel is Mary. Mary. In the present tense. So while and-harder she hit me, POW-POW-POW, each blow of her fists landmg l1ke a the cars were crashing into the hole, and the main character was conducting rol his research, I brush her back. Not her actual back with an actual brush. I rub led up New Yo rk Post. And then ...... my furry leg against her furry leg, and a very unusual sensation overtakes my 1 heard her gasp. I felt her stiffen. soul. . . "AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" she cried, like someone fallmg off a very h1gh What care I what specy she is? Hot animaldesire has invaded n, my bria cliff, her brain spinning in sensational ecstacy. "AHHH�H�HHHHHH!." she and so I take her roughly in my arms and kiss her with my lips while her hot screamed aloud, for she was having her climax! And th1s t1me she h1t me so breath from her nostrils rang like jackhammers in my ears. Then our moist hard I ran up a tree. tongues touch, and fier y hot electricity jolts through my compact body straight to my throbbing manhood * which shot up like a real man's penis, but not as .. * large, especially when I felt her furry breast with my throbbing fingers and op­ posable thumbs. Then I pull her tail, and she gasps hotly, "Yes! Ye s!," wiggling her brown 1 am main character. Actually, it was the wealthy stock broker who hit and tan body beneath me like a small excited woman . "Do it now, them and it was with a rolled up Wall Street Journal. Then he got on the bus, John! Oh God. Do it now! A!S!A!P!" and � Special Agent told me to move on, so I took my pre-owned auto parts to How she wanted me. And how I wanted her , but I could tell she was th inexperienced e used place and sold them for $20. One hour. $20. Whose crazy n�w? . and needed to be educated in the lusty lessons ou of love. "Do y Then pick up fresh squab from my courtyard and go up to wnte th1s trust me?" I queried. Poem. (Please turn the page for the poem I wrote.) "Oh YES!" she cried . "Do it, John! Do it. Even though it would be sod- amy!" "Excuse me," I disagreed . "But Webster's Dictionary defi nes SODOMY as anal or oral copulation with a member of the same or opposite sex; OR copula-

64 65 BLEACH BLONDE #1 BLEACH BLONDE #2 DYED BRUNETTE So I wouldn't have to listen anymore, I opened a pkg of swimmers ear­ plugs and put them in. Then there was trouble with the greedy store mgr and Chip is so mean to Listen, did you see Wait! Yo u 're not go­ when it was over 1 went home and threw my pills, three different kinds, out that girl. He acts as if he Law and Order last-- ing to BELIEVE this! Jack the window again. Just to see. expects her to do all the Oh, just like my and the vacuum cleaner? Then go down to One Hundred and One Street to my hole with tape re­ housework and go to her Robbie. Just like him. They should do a corder and trash bag. It is 19 and % inches at the deep end (now I am describ­ job besides, and if she Vac? I swear to God, if Law and Order about-- ing the hole) and on sunny days, people, in cars, don't use air conditioners, doesn't have his supper he ever stumbled over Or Jack-- they open their windows, so you can hear what they have to say, when they on the table when he a vacuum cleaner, I 1 know-- fa ll in, (the hole), and, their true characters emerge, which is during a crisis. comes home from the don't know what. Of 1 know, but-- 1 have seven hours and fifteen minutes of excellent tapes, which is but one of video store, well, he course, he's teaching Ta lk about vacuum the many studies I will be getting funded, even though I have never gone to acts like she's public en­ at the university, but cleaners, you're not SCHOOL FOR FUND WRITING. OVer-rated. (NOTE: WRITE CHAPTER ON EDUCA­ emy number one. I tell it's the same thing, going to believe-- TION). 1 POSITION myself 23 feet past the hole, allowing for hubcap roll. 23 Ralph about it and, you with the housework. Oh, not that he'd feet is also where the bus bench is. know Ralph, he says, And the rudeness. Jim ever lift a finger-- "Oh, it's nothing." It's is the exact same way! It's never anything Quiet now. The research is about to begin. nothing? Oh, well, it's Yeah, sure it's nothing. to them, they just do 7:44 AM. Ta pe recorder set. Te mperature on this late November morn­ nothing to him, because I know. I know. 'Cause anything they damn ing is a warm sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Latex gloves on. Trash bag at the he does the same thing. they've never been on well please, as long as it ready. And. Begin. Like father like son. the receiving end. Like pleases them-- The apple doesn't fall father, like son, you're Like Jack, for WF55: "Watch the hole." far from the tree. And damn right. But Law instance, and that effing WM60: "I see the DAMN HO--" anyway, I don't know and order, let me tell vac-- WF55: "I told you get over. " what she has to effing you-- Who'd listen any­ WM60: "I COULDN'T get over!" complain about anyway. We ll, they're all such way? Complain till your WF55: (with sorrow) "You never listen to me." It's not as if she keeps slobs nowadays, they face turns blue. But COLLECTION: 2 LEFT HUBCAP REAR a spotless house, if you don't have the same Jack-- I know. But-- know what I mean. None cleaning values. TV and 1 love Law and CHW85: "BUMP!" of them do nowadays. I movies. TV and movies. Order. I know. I know. I CHM100: "No bump. Deep dark hole." know. TV. She myswell Most of what they watch know. But-- COLLECTION: HUBCAP, LICENSE PLAT E of married that TV. All is such crap- Cartoons! 1 know. effing day. I could see MTV! And that rap. They should make WTM18: "Dude, hole. " if it was, you know, Hippity Hop- Okay, Law a movie about Jack. WTM19: "Oh, man." Law and Order. What and Order. Yup. Yu p. What he did with the WTM18: "Go for it. " happened to cooking Okay, not all-- Yu p. But vac? No, but listen-- WTM19: "Awesome." supper? Can you believe the movie theaters, are Jack and the COLLECTION: WINDSHIELD WIPER, BUMPER, BUNGEE CORD all we used to do? The you kidding? Such crap. vacuum cleaner? cooking, the cleaning, Listen, no, but did you WCM30: "Lookit the size of that hole." don't even talk about see that new one with WCF25: "OhMyGodBobbySquirrel!" sewing. Sewing, shop­ what's-his-face there? WCM30: (angrily) "Jesus, Linda! Don't EVER grab the wheel! You could ping, trying to stretch No, but, yeah, I remem­ of gotten us killed instantly and there's no purgatory!" ten dollars to twenty. ber. How could I forget. 1 HUBCAP, 1 MUFFLER Are you kidding me? But that new movie? Squirrel interruption. 7:44 AM ...sti ll. Apparent Wristwatch malfunc- tion.

62 63 * * * the ant put away sugar and grease and built tunnels under the earth (ants life expectancy: 45 - 60 years!), the grasshopper starved and froze to death while I am truck. I like truck stops. My driver makes me work very hard. I like to he fiddled (violin). smell the other trucks' exhaust. So do they. * *

1 am Main Character, driving the novel. Because the squirrel took my CHAPTER FOUR pills, 1 had to go to the pharmacy for more (remember mine fell i� the river), 50 1 waited my turn in the corner with the reading glasses and sw1mmers ear­ plugs and listened to three women talk, which they did all at once and SOUND­ HOLE WATCHING ED ...LIKE ...THIS! (Turn the page for how they sounded.):

by Main Character

Somehow the squirrel got back home, I don't know how. Let him tell it. All I know is: One night after hole-digging I came home to find him waiting on my window ledge, like a faithful cat, but out of breath.

.. * ..

How many cats do you know that can climb 12 stories? How I got up there: climbed up the side. I am squirrel.

*

Once again I am man, and this is what I have to say: I knew he was no ordinary squirrel. So I let him in, and he raced past me on the walls into the bathroom, where he opened the medicine cabinet (squirrels have opposable thumbs***), confiscated my pills and raced out the window again. ***(FOOTNOTE) One might ask: If squirrels have opposable thumbs, why haven't they BUILT anything-houses, highways, or factories. Answer: life expectancy: 3.6 years. How many 3.6-year-old men can build a house? Not even a thousand. No organization skills. Ta ke a lesson from squirrels. Be prepared, i.e. , acorn burying. Squirrels are Albert Einstein compared to most humans, who wouldn't bury acorns to dig up next year even if they were 5 (Already spoiled!), and would die of starvation and freeze to death. This is how squirrels die: 1) old age, 2) no food, and 3) hawks. A few intresting facts.

.. .

I am squirrel. I ran down the side of the building with the bottle of pel­ lets in my mouth and ran to the park where a mysterious old woman came up to me and said, "You will go on a journey, and then make a fatal mistake," but I just went on a journey so I buried the pills under an acorn tree, which was my fatal mistake. For I was so intrested in DRUGS THAT i FORGOT TO BURY acorns for the winter. And like the famous Grasshopper who fiddled to death while

60 61 STILL CHAPTER THREE

Then a girl squirrel came over and said, "What are you-all writing?" A "A beautiful poem," I said even though I wasn't really writing, just say- Tree, in g. And it was love at first sight, so she showed me her nest and I shared Christmas © my pellet with her, which I also forgot to say I only took half before to save the rest for later, but now I gave half to her and we kissed in a very passion­ Yo u don't need snow ate way* (*FOOTNOTE: squirrels do have lips, not just humans), and we slept To be aglow at Christmas together in the truck driver's truck because he left his door open, and the seat was soft and warm, then we found HIS pellets which were to keep him from (and Hanukkah & Kwanzaa) sleeping while hurtling down our !lation's highways at speeds in excess of 100, Pigeons sing in the coconut trees so I chased the girl squirrel, a lady now, around the coconut trees and when I caught her, we accidentally fell into the air to our certain deaths. But she was Squirrels hang by our gray furry tails a flying squirrel! So she saved me at the last possible minute, and I held onto her back and she flew around in slow motion while music played on violins, etc. Like gray furry (and feathery) ornaments "OH NO!" All of a sudden I exclaimed: "There goes the Christmas Tree Sing the birth of God's boy, Mr. Jesus Christ truck which is now loaded with coconut trees which are hollow and lighter, so now the truck is faster! I must hurry!" But did you ever stop to think: Where do "No! John! No!!" Christmas "I must!" "Please, don't you-all leave me!" Trees go "Then come with me, Mary!" "I can't how could I leave all this, the only world I know?!" When "I don't know. Okay. Goodbye." They I tried to leave her, but all of a sudden we kissed again on the lips, even more passionate than before. Die? Then she said, "You must go. You can't stay. It's not your world." And where do "Okay then. I'll never forget you Mary. " "I'll never forget you John!"* (*FOOTNOTE: Which weren't our real We go too? names, they cannot be pronounced in human.) Then I ran so fast after the truck because of eating the truck driver's The End pellets (too many) that I knocked over a crow on the side of the highway eating a dog.

• * *

I am crow. That's no lie. He about broke my damn leg .

• • *

So I caught up with the Tree Truck at a truck stop, where trucks stop so their masters can drink coffee and large portions of food. But I wasn't hungry because of the pills so I ran back to Brooklyn.

58 59 rapidly but no car coming, which is what you call the rebound effect, when the pill wears off and you get more like what you were trying to be not like in the CHAPTER TWO first place, so I tossed him another pill.* (*FOOTNOTE: i FOR GOT TO SAY THat I didn't throw them all out the window in Chapter One (seE CHAPTER ONE) AND STi ll had two left.) THE PLOT CHAPTER THREE

I am man, the main character. I went down to the sidewalk to take the pigeon off the fence but a plainclothes was watching, so I went for a walk, and A VERY THRILLING NEAR-DEATH EPISODE WHICH LEADS TO LOvE a squirrel walked with me. After a-while I got tired and sat on a bench to plan my day, and the squirrel climbed up on my lap, so I patted him and gave him a stick of Juicy Fruit, which is chewing gum, which he chewed. I am squirrel ! was very relieved to see that pellet but I kicked it by A minute passed, maybe more, in which I transferred a small white mistake and it rolled down the sewer so the man tossed me another one and globule from my eye to my finger. I did not want to rub it on the bench for fear when I went to eat it OH MY GOD here comes a HUGE TRAILER TRUCK! l! I that it might get caught on somebody else's sweatshirt which would be unjust, jumped in between the tires so I wouldn't get squashed but the wheels went so I rubbed it on the squirrel while I pretended to pat him. Then 1 didn't want right over the pellet imagine my surprise to see it (the pellet) lodged in one of to be with him anymore because I felt a strong sense of guilt, which is my char· the treads so I chased the trailer truck and then I was gone. acter fl aw, so I pushed him off my lap and kept walking. Then I couldn't sleep because of my character flaw, this was even • * * later at night, so I got dressed and went out to look for him with some carpet cleaner and a small hand vac, and found him waiting outside the door like a It was a load of Christmas trees on the truck which I caught up to when loyal dog. it stopped for a red light which I didn't know was red because squirrels are ••• color blind but I hopped on the tire to get the pellet but then the truck started up again so to keep from getting squashed this is what I did: hop from one tire to the other back and forth back and forth as TWO HUNDRED TO NS OF HOT I am squirrel. I was only waiting because I found another one of those STEEL hurtled down the highway all the way to South Virginia where it is warm pellets on the sidewalk and ate it, and I felt strong sense of well being. But 1 a in the winter and palm trees grow while the truck driver unloaded his Christ­ didn't know about the eye globule from the man who gave me the Juicy Fruit, mas trees. so I trusted him, which is my character flaw, trust, along with nervousness, and I was very very tired from hopping from tire to tire all that way but so I waited for him to come out because I am character-driven. And when he because I am squirrel and very determined for example the way we keep raid­ did he sprayed carpet cleaner on me, then waited five minutes for it to dry, ing bird feeders to get the bird seed (which are actually plant seeds, not bird) and then turned on small vacuum cleaner which I thought it was his mouth, a no matter what the humans do to stop us even shoot at us and put up feeders so I got down and walked away. that are so-called squirrel-proof (don't make me laugh!) so I dug the pellet ••* out of the tread with my index finger (Squirrels do have fingers. Stop and look sometime.) and ate it then I sat down and gazed at the Christmas Trees (being carried away by big fat men in red checkerboard jackets with southern drawls I am main character again. So after the squirrel walked away 1 went such as "You-all") so on the next page I wrote the following poem (copywritten back to bed. Before I fell asleep thought about being a famous writer so 1 got I ' 2006 by Michael Kimball) about a Christmas Tree (Please go to the next page.): up and started writing a book, which this is it. I can't spell to save my life, but, they have spell checkers on computers, so I thought about buying one if 1 had any money, at th� used place, then went back to writing my book on paper, but suddenly I had wnters block! So much to say! ! Maybe too much!!! Life. Death. The future. God. Is there life on other planets? Perhaops. (NOTE TO MYSELF: RE­ SEARCH.) In the morning, after I slept, I woke up, then I went outside to begin my research, only to fi nd the squirrel racing back and forth in the road quite

56 57 Excerpt from Book by Michael Kimball Michael Ki mball

CHAPTER ONE

I WATCHED A PIGEON

I watched a pigeon on my ledge staring down at the city of Brooklyn, thinking that it was a symbol of the freedom I felt after throwing all my pills out the window, but when the pigeon went to fly his wings wouldn't flap so he crashed to earth but didn't get squashed on the sidewalk because he landed on a black iron fencepost like some cruel movie villain because he forgot to flapor didn't care, so he fell, which was not the kind of freedom I felt but now I won­ dered: Would I fall like that, and not fl ap my symbolic wings? I did not know, because I did not know what was going to happen next.

* * *

I am pigeon. I was flying. I was free. Then a human writer left a white pellet on the ledge and I ate it. And now I try to fly but my wings won't budge, so I plummet like a malfunctioning space shuttle to the sidewalk. But wait. That's not the sidewalk. From my perspective it looks like several black points, but- OH MY GO-

* * *

I am dog. I don't know what the fuck is going on. I seen a damn pigeon fall off the window ledge and get stuck on a fencepost. If I liked pigeons I would have ate it, but I don't so I kept walkin' with my master, a wealthy stock broker.

* * *

I am squirrel. found some pellets on the sidewalk and ate them. I feel strangely r e 1 a x

55 memory, imagination, and extrapolation. My only problem with real archeol­ ogy was that I had to limit myself to a square meter of earth and use a scalpel; I wanted to use a shovel. This way, I get to use one.And I don't even need sunscreen. Giving Ground Do you ever get mistaken for the Jennifer Egan of Project Runway? She almost Zachary Mosher seems like she could be a character in one of your books.

Egan: I wasn't aware that there was a Jennifer Egan on that show, so I guess the answer is no! Although I love the thought that she might be my doppelgang­ er, lunging headlong into all the aspects of American cultural life that make me uneasy. A demon sniffs a flower heaves sand upon his eyes wire fiendsvibrate in his storm implosive seclusions quiver the soul we dove into the street, in front of cars bulging the nascent, banging heads . on a beaded shimmer he enters the f\u1d glass slashes mirrors with eyelashes 1 forgetting means two places of being become one, the ersatz, the idle, the glare the embalmed portend of withering

Dust shadows things that settle shapes of wine undo at the infinite throat my hands held by the time of our dark farewell the body is a lake far enough from the dead that 1 can just barely see the heart of its price.

52 53 the NYT - "Love in the Time of No Time," which you mentioned, about internet ple, one of the big inspirations for Th e Keep was a video piece by Bill Viola that . dating and how it's changed the mores and rituals of courtship, and another 1 saw at the Whitney some years ago that showed a mossy-lookmg outdoor pool one about the secret "out" online lives of closeted gay teens - and those really with spectral figures moving around it. Another source for The Keep was the TV shaped my ideas about how the internet is working its way deep into people's show Dark Shadows, which I used to watch after school in the seventies. I often lives. I think those two stories were instrumental to The Keep. So there's a have certain albums of pieces of music in my mind as I work; for example, nice symbiosis between the fiction and nonfiction, though I rarely seem to feel when I think of Look at Me, particularly Moose, I think of Alpha's album, Come that in the moment. At the time I tend to resent the journalism, deplore the from Heaven. A story I've been working on recently was partly inspired by a amount of time it takes, and bemoan the fact that I'm not getting as much fic­ poem I read in Th e New Yo rker by Michael Dickma� called "Seeing Whales." .1 tion written as I'd like. love movies generally, but I'm not sure that watchmg the process of The Invis­ ible Circus become one - fun and instructive though it was - was particularly I know that people who operate under assumptions like these tend to be igno­ influential. 1 love having a work of mine resonate in some way beyond its initial rant readers, but I still am always surprised for a second when I finda female genre, but that resonation feels like an epiphenomenon, rather than something writer writing a first person narrative from the point of view of a man, and that touches me, or the work, in a deep way. I don't seem to think much like a vice versa. Do you findtha t you approach writing from a man's point of view filmmaker; 1 don't mentally "cast" my books. I don't enjoy reading scre�nplays. (as with Ray in The Keep) any differently than you approach writing from a I'm terrible at guessing which books would, or wouldn't make good mov1es. And woman 's point of view? Or is it absolutely no different than writing from the 1 have no interest in getting into the movie business myself - at least not as a point of view of somebody with, say, a job you 've never had? writer. I do occasionally fantasize about directing movies, because that seems the role closest to being the writer of a piece of fiction. Egan: Because there is rarely much crossover between my own life and the people and events I write about, writing as a man doesn't feel like a particu­ We 've now started to see the first wave of novels that have come out that lar stretch. In fact, I guess I'd have to go further and say that because 1 tend have tried to deal, in some way, with the tragedy of September 11. Yo ur fic­ to be pretty lousy at writing about myself (I'm a disastrous personal essayist), tion has not addressed this in a direct way, of course, but certainly people or anything having to do with people like me or my life, I actually feel most commented after Look at Me came out that it was frighteningly relevant in comfortable when the parameters of the voice I'm working in - being male, many ways. Yo u've written nonfiction works on the September 11 attacks, of for example - create a natural divide between that voice and myself. Where course, but as a novelist, how do you feel that writing fiction about a tragedy I have the hardest time is with the stuff you'd think would be the easiest for like this helps to get to the bottom of what happened? Do you feel that fic­ me. For example, the part of Th e Keep that I struggled with the most was the tionalized stories based in the horrendous truth of such a national tragedy can t fi nal section, narrated by Holly, "the writer. " It took me a long time to arrive a help people understand it better? a voice I could tolerate, because I'd grown used to Ray (and Ray as Danny), in his awkward, non-lyrical mode, and Holly's writing voice was more like my own Egan: Personally, I haven't really wanted to read work about that tragedy - somewhat lyrical, with metaphors, and a consciousness of making the prose yet, much less write it. It's just felt too soon, and too easy, in some way. I do lovely, at least to some degree. I was astonished by how much harder that was at least allude to the attack in the book I'm working on now, but I don't deal for me, and how much less I enjoyed it. With it in any direct way. It's an interesting question: do books about this stuff help us deal with it, and understand it? Looking backward, say, to the Vietnam Now that I'm working on short stories, I'm struck by how often I'm still drawn War and some of the works that came out of that: Micheal Herr's Dispatches; to writing as a man; it's as if that's become my path of least resistance. Lately, Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Tim O'Brien's The Th ings They Carried, for exam­ of I have to tell myself: No. This time you're going to write from the girl's point ple, I'd have to say yes. But I say that as someone who was a little girl during view. Now get going! the Vietnam War, with no immediate impressions of it - or family members I lost to it. Whether books or movies about 9 I 11 are going to "help" a person One thing I'm always curious about is a novelist wa tching a novel of theirs Who lived in New Yo rk at that time and was there on that day, I'm not sure. It'll transferred into the medium of film. How involved were you in the film be interesting to see. adaptation of The Invisible Circus? How much do you feel there is for a fic­ r tion writer to learn about construction of characters and scenes from film - o Is there any way, no matter how convoluted, that your original interest in watching actors and directors construct character for a film?Over the years, archeology has played into your career as a writer? how much do you feel you've gleaned from sources other than those that are "literary?" Egan: 1 think my writing career basically is the career I fantasized about having as an archeologist: I go to far away places, dig around for traces of people, and Egan: I feel the infl uence of a lot of nonliterary sources in my work. For exam- Use those traces to build up whole lives those people might have had, using

50 51 do its novelistic work while also playing with conventions - or maybe I should Egan: 1 think 1 was aware that I was writing one of those books (though Th e say a novel whose story and characters and girding of ideas call for playful­ corrections came out at exactly the same time as Look at Me, so I wasn't ness and experimentation. Why not try to do both, if possible? But I very much aware of that one in advance). I began working on Look at Me with an idea doubt that all of my future work will be like Th e Keep in this way - in fact what about exploring a number of pressures I saw bearing on American culture, I'm doing right now seems to call for a more "conventional" narrative in some mostly having to do with image-based mass media. My question going in was: to ways, and I'm rolling with that - even rather enjoying the change. what degree has the need to construct ourselves from the outside in affected our identities? Are we qualitatively the same as people hundreds of years ago There was a point in working on Th e Keep when things swung too far out of who had never even looked in a mirror? How have we been altered, internally, by our own awareness of ourselves as images? My inter�st in terrorism (w�ich is control, structurally. It happened in Chapter 11, when Danny is running wildly . around the castle grounds in a state of total confusion about what's real and longstanding; 1 dealt with it even more directly in my first novel, The InVISible what isn't. At one point in the writing, the narrative itself was confused and Circus) derived from its dependence on mass media to work. choppy to the point of incoherence. That was no good; it lost readers. I think I was trying to do at one time that when you begin to rearrange and invert conventions, you have to be At times 1 felt almost oppressed by how much book, in part because I doubly careful about maintaining control, and keeping a firm hand on things so in Look at Me. It was often torture to work on that off. I was working beyond the reader doesn't get lost. I'm pretty mindful of the reader's experience - not just didn't have the confidencethat I could pull it I knew it. But I think it made me a better necessarily as I work, because then I'm just trying to entertain myself · but my abilities much of the time, and later, when I get to the point of needing feedback. writer, so I'm grateful for that.

similar to those explored in I think it's interesting that you 've said you can 't understand why anybody Many of your nonfictionspieces explore aspects research based, but that would read the very end of a novel first, because to you the process of writing your fiction. Yo u once said that your fiction is very research the way that the and reading is one of discovery. How did this process work for The Keep? 1 ask the research is somewhat informal. Is informal lity gives way to the more because it seems like a novel in which the structure is so very important that nonfiction pieces begin as well, before that informa the case, how do you know it might have been hard to discover those three interlocking narratives as you journalistic research that must happen? If this is a nonfiction piece like went along. (look at Me has a little bit of this too, of course, but not to the the difference between what will eventually become e" and what will eventually extent of The Keep.) How much of that structure did you have in your head "James is a Girl" or "Love in the Time of No Tim like Look at Me? I'm just from the beginning? become a short story like "The Stylist" or a nove/ the work at the very wondering how you know which is which as you approach Egan: I had very little at the beginning; just sense of the Gothic atmosphere beginning. I wanted to sink into, and a hunch about a hyper-connected male protagonist know is that I don't tend to choose �y NYT visiting a castle. I knew a murder would take place, but I had no idea who Egan: We ll, one thing you should . , suggested, and 1t s up to would kill whom. My first guess about that was wrong. The interlocking plot assignments; they're mostly given to me - or rather note that there is a lot of cross­ happened very organically, with almost no planning on my part. I know that me to say yes or no. So while yo u're right to not quite as simple as my seems unbelievable, reading it, but it really is true. I write completely from over between the two realms in terms of content, it's iction?" I guess I t�nd, at the gut, with no clear sense of where I'm going until I'm practically there. The saying, "Hmmm, should 1 write this as fiction or nonf and often those mterests writing itself (which I do by hand, and rather blindly) seems to generate many particular moments, to have certain sets of interests, e. My �onfiction w�it- of the ideas and turning points for me. The whole third movement of the novel, end up getting explored in both realms before I'm don the NYT Magazme about domg a in which a different speaker emerges, only began to occur to me as 1 got close ing actually began when 1 was approached by I had already written to that point. cover story on young models. They thought of me because example. I initially said about models in my short stories - in "The Stylist," for much work and I had no idea how to do such Look at Me came out at a time where there were a number of pretty major no, because it seemed like too Look at Me, that I was and huge books which in a very unconventional sort of way seemed to directly a thing, but then 1 found, when beginning to research world in New Yo rk try and take on America at the turn of the century and whatever the hell was having a lot of trouble getting any access to the modeling young novelist underst�nd happening exactly. I'm thinking of books like David Foster Wa llace's Infinite - m odeling agents simply didn't care about helping a yes, figuring that, even 1f Jest and Jonathan Franzen 's The Corrections. To what extent were you aware their industry. So 1 rethought the NYT offer and said getting research done for of that book as being one of those dense and long tomes of American culture? the story itself didn't work out, it would be a way of Did you think of it in that way as you wrote it? How conscious were your inter­ my book. ests in exploring aspects of image culture? other pieces I did for So that's one way it can happen. Then there were two

48 49 favorite question - or the one I'm most tired of answering - is at the opposite cheesy) literary landscape. There may have been something self-serving in this; end of the spectrum: "Where do you get your ideas?" It's a question that could I'd just had my first child when I began thinking about The Keep, and it wasn't easily be asked (and doubtless is at times) by someone who had never read a a moment in my life when I could do a lot of research. But I loved working in word I'd written. I think one reason I'm asked that so often is that people have an atmosphere whose point of origin was imaginary, and not real. It felt dif­ a hard time connecting my books to "me," and they have a strong desire to ferent from anything I had ever done. It turned out that this technique worked bridge that gap with an account of how I bridged it. When answering questions fine for the castle parts, but not for the prison parts. Though I did have some I try, always, to finda new way to say whatever it is that I'm saying - if nothing experience at a woman's prison in New Jersey as research for a New Yo rk else, just to keep myself feeling alive and interested in the process. But that Times Magazine [NYT] story that never worked out, and though I bought and question just drops a curtain over my brain. Still, you're right to point out that read books about prison life, prison architecture, prison problems, rules and I'm also a journalist, and so I'm always fairly sympathetic to the questioner, regulations, and interviewed a number of people who had worked in prisons as who of course has no idea how many times someone has been asked something, teachers or corrections officers, none of that was enough to animate the prison and is more likely to think something like, "I'll bet she's asked all the time sections with the textures and grit of real life. I ended up spending some time about technology... I'm going to back up to the big picture and ask her how she in a prison in Ohio, and only after that did things really fall into place in the gets her ideas." I know from experience that there is nothing worse than some­ prison sections. So, not surprisingly, my "texts only" approach only worked for one who reacts with exhaustion and boredom to one's questions. So I try to be the parts that have no corollary in contemporary life. a good sport. As to the past/ present question, I think I initially envisioned Th e Keep as a way The Keep is probably your most structurally complex novel, in that it uses a out of having to deal with contemporary life, which was so much my subject number of modernist and postmodernist techniques of narrative. Many these in Look at Me (a much harder novel to write, technically, for many reasons). I effects (like embedded narratives, shifting points of view, different narrators) knew that technology would play a part in the novel, but I imagined that part seem to have been unearthed from previous eras of literature (like the 19th consisting of modern "connectedness" being trumped and snuffed by Gothic century Gothic, for example) and reused by contemporary writers. How aware remoteness. That's usually how it goes in a Gothic novel ... think of The Tu rn of are you of the history of these techniques when you 're using them? Do you feel the Screw, where the governess can't so much as write to her employer after as though their usage connects you more to the past or to the present? Or do she gets to the old house where she is to work. Here I was surprised, though, feel there's much of a difference between the two? because 1 found that present-day connectedness, in which life is imbued with the possibility of disembodied communication, actually mirrors the gothic Egan: I was keenly aware of using Gothic techniques when writing Th e Keep; sensibility in many ways - the gothic experience is all about the omnipresent in fact some of the reading I enjoyed most for that book was the really early possibility of disembodied communication. So it ended up being a more con­ stuff: Me/moth the Wa nderer by Charles Maturin; Th e Monk by Matthew Lewis; temporary novel than I was expecting. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe. I even read a bit of theory about the Gothic and its tropes and their possible meanings, psychological or oth­ In the writing of this book, what sort of efforts did you make to ensure that erwise (is the old structure - castle, house, monastery - that is almost invari­ the characters and the emotion would not get swallowed by a novel in which ably at the center of a Gothic work symbolic of the body? the mind? history?). there is something of a slight-of-hand in terms of how close we are allowed to At one point early in the process, mostly for kicks, I went to a class in Gothic get to one character before the reader is whisked away to a different narra­ literature at NYU and read aloud what was then my first chapter (it bore some tive? Is keeping the emotional thread through a novel like this something that resemblance to the present Chapter 1 ), and just let them go at "interpreting" is hard to do? Is it a struggle, or is it just one of those fun challenges of writ­ it through the lens of all the Gothic theory and literature they'd been reading ing? for a semester. I also read a fair amount about the history of castle-building, castle life, European feudalism, and chivalric texts like Spenser and Mallory's Egan: Fun more than struggle. To me, the structural complexity and narra­ Le Marte D'Arthur, so I guess in that sense I did feel connected to the "real" tive-puncturing devices are really just a product of the story I happen to be past as well, albeit a distant one. telling in The Keep, and the questions I'm trying to raise about the nature of "reality" in our communications-saturated era. I'm not really interested in In fact, while my first deep impulse toward writing Th e Keep came from a kind meta-narrative per se (which, as Tr istram Shandy readers know, is as old as the of sensory desire to live in a gothic atmosphere for a while, one of the things novel itself), except to the degree that it can illuminate or enliven a particular that interested me about working on this book was the idea of working in a situation. So I guess what I'm saying is that characters and story always come tradition that was purely literary (and I include filmand TV, here) - in other first for me. And "experimentation" is of interest only to the degree that it can words, a book that was mostly in conversation with other texts, rather than enhance the story and characters, and of no interest when it begins to obscure the external world. A book that partook of a readymade (and at times rather them. All of that being said, I'm inherently more interested in a novel that can

46 47 An Interview with Jennifer Egan

Like most people who care about books, I often like to wax nostalgic about the good old days of literature. Yo u know, the 19th century and a couple (early) decades of the 20th. Before our current age of irony set in. Before experimentation for its own sake took over. I remember fondly the days of Dreiser and Austen. The days before these lunatics like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wa llace took over the asylum. (Of course, I'm only twenty- two, but so what?) But then I read the work of Jennifer Egan, and I remember that maybe things aren't so bad after all. Egan is a writer who combines the best of what is old with what is new. She mixes the restless experimentation of the last couple decades with the attention to plot and character of Charles Dickens. Her short story collection Emerald City and Other Stories is full of mystery and dread and playfulness - sometimes in the same sentence. Her novels The Invis­ ible Circus, Look at Me, and The Keep manage to be slyly contemporary and inventive without ever shirking the writer's constant duty to the people in the book and to the emotions they possess. Madison Smartt Bell has called Egan "a refreshingly unclassifiable nov­ elist. " I have no idea what her next novel will be or when it will come out, but let me the first to praise it anyway by saying, "This is the best book I've read in ages! " I know it will be good. I just know it! Words and Images is pleased to present this interview with National Book Award-finalist Jennifer Egan, who is my personal hero because she answered with gusto every single one (and every single part) of my long and rambling questions.

* * *

Are there any questions you absolutely hate answering? How often are you asked by readers to comment upon aspects of technology and image-culture as a critic as opposed to a writer of fiction?(I ask this knowing full well that you also do a fair amount of nonfiction work on these subjects, so you probably often think about these things as a critic anyway. )

Egan: Actually, I don't mind questions about technology; in fact, I'm often surprised by how often questioners don 't actually ask me very much about the content - or the ideas - in my work. I'm not sure why that is, but when it does happen it's always kind of exhilarating. So I guess I'd have to say that my least

45 Right As Rain lan Ganassi

Further to your memo of yesterday, night fell suddenly. One of these days a raven will proclaim An end to business and life will go on

As though it had been planned beforehand. I would prefer not to. The copper shining brightly On the sheets. One in which there could easily be

A story about old hot water bottles bound By the neck to your rheumatic knees. But there's no lining to this inner tube,

We 're all gonna drown . With this money we can get Balloon tires for the truck. And why, precisely, A Venus flytrap? The whalesucker, Remilegia Australis,

Is usually found attached to whales. Sincerely, The constabulary. The Legionnaire's lost nose was perpetually Out of joint. Economies of scale are all the headlines

Think about anymore, and then make fun of them on the news. Whose lipstick is redder whose house is on fire Like a bull in a flea circus. Remnants of ancient Minoan

Bull culture can still be seen in remote regions Of the Caucasus. Something less canny turned out to be More canny in the end. In the waste places

The truth flickered brilliant lightning against The backdrop of empty sky, like a meaningless drawing Of a man in a necktie leaning against a vending machine.

43 Yo u are three quarters of the way through a novel called The Baron in "I'm sure somebody has," you say. "There are just too many of us walk­ the Tr ees. It tells the story of an eighteenth-century Italian nobleman-Cosimo ing around." Piovasco di Rondo-who spends the whole of his adult life in the trees surround­ Outside the man who strolls up and down the plaza selling yo-yos stops ing his village, never once setting foot on the ground. From the branches of at a bench to tighten his shoes. He is your city's version of the dandy in the the oaks, elms, and Hexes, he is able to hunt and travel, conduct love affairs double-breasted suit who roots through the garbage scavenging for recyclables, and educate himself, as well as engage in a series of duels with a creedbound or the old couple with sombreros and ukeleles who sit in the park singing songs Spanish Jesuit. Your favorite passages are the ones that detail Cosima's encoun­ about their sex life-recognized by everybody, the object of a thousand jokes, ters with the outlaw Gian dei Brughi, whose book addiction he first initiates but so lasting a feature of the landscape that they inspire as much affection as and later feeds, but you also find yourself lingering over the paragraphs that anyone you could mention. You watch as he finishes tying his shoes, loops a pair describe his long romance with his childhood neighbor Violante. of yo-yos around each of his index fingers and another pair around each of his Yo u settle into the couch and continue reading the novel, holding the ring fi ngers, then sets them spinning in an elaborate Gordian whirl. pages up to a patch of sunlight. A fire truck begins whirring its siren some­ "There," you say, pointing to the man. "He has. There's a man who's where, but you barely notice it. What most amazes you about the book is how been happy his whole life." rich it is, how sensitive to the constitution of its characters' souls, how beauti­ David gives you a yeah-well-about-that grimace. "I hate to break it to ful and moving without being anguished or hopeless. It is certainly not blind you, but the guy comes in here for a steamer sometimes, and he sounds pretty to human suffering, featuring poverty, loss, aging, and death, but its mood is miserable. He's always complaining about his wrists. He's worried he might overwhelmingly one of celebration. There is a tenderness and a brio to the have carpal tunnel. Uh-oh, she's about to unleash one of her whistles on me." story. The writer extends his sympathies so widely that even the trees and the This swerve in his comments perplexes you until you spot his manager hills seem to sing with the joy of existence. eyeballing him from behind the dessert counter. You bought a copy of the novel after you heard an interview with a Pu­ "Believe me," he says, "you don 't want her to whistle. Yo u could be litzer Prize winner who described its author, ltalo Calvina, as the finest writer dead twenty years and that thing would wake you up. I'd better get back to of the twentieth century and this book, in particular, as the best one he had work. Ta ke it easy. " ever read. Yo u were skeptical of such a lavish claim-who wouldn't be?-but David glides away balancing a tray of empty plates on his palm, sheer­ damned if it might not be the best book you have ever read: a short, crystalline ing around the banister of the staircase and using his free hand to bump the novel with all the grace and poetry of The Great Gatsby, but fantastic rather kitchen door open. You collect the last sip of chai on your spoon. You hear a than realistic, and joyful in its elegies rather than plaintive. At one point, you few chirps of noise, followed by a seesawlike ululating sound, and look up to are so touched and delighted by something you read that you actually laugh see an ambulance racing away from the corner. It vanishes behind a cluster and kiss the page-a completely unself-conscious gesture that you don't even of red gums, but for a long minute the siren continues to cut through the air, notice yourself performing at first, and which, when you do, strikes you as both howling like some great beast fleeing a terrible calamity. Yo u listen as the ridiculous and somehow wonderful. sound gradually fades away, then you get up and pay your check. It does not take you long to read the last few chapters. Yo u finish the The pleasant weather has brought a surprising number of people out novel, above all else, with an impression of a robust and loving comic energy. this morning, and by the time you reach the cash register, your chair has al­ You feel as if you have been immersed in life-both your own life and the par­ ready been taken. After the cashier runs your credit card, you have to weave ticular lives of the book's characters-and that life, for all its misfortunes, is a your way through a clutch of power walkers in nylon tracksuits to get to the pretty good place to be . door. Outside, the sunlight is sending shards of glass off the bike racks and parking meters. The chestnut leaves are ticking against one another like finger­ If you find a place for the novel on your bookcase, go on to page 12. nails. Yo u feel a touch of heartburn coming on. Yo u give your chest a thump. It If you leave it sitting on the arm of the couch for now, turn to page 25. would do you good, you imagine, to take a little walk.

If you decide to go left, turn to page 21. If you decide to go right, turn to page 35.

40 41 30. 31. One of the bathrooms at SufficientGr ounds was damaged by vandals a Yo u spray the glass with Windex, then wipe it dry, taking special care few weeks ago-the mirror shattered, the paper towel dispenser ripped off the with the white dots of toothpaste foam above the sink, the dust beneath the wall, and the toilet fractured into two large pieces as oddly and neatly divided light fi xtures, and the fingerprints on the handle to the medicine cabinet. The as the halves of a peanut-and for the time being, the other bathroom has been overlapping circles of the washcloth leave moisture trails that look like the fos­ converted into a unisex. sils of trilobites for the few seconds until they evaporate. The scent of ammo- There is an emblem on the door of a straight-lined man holding hands nia blasts your sinuses clear. with a triangular woman. The lock is broken, so you knock and call out hello, Yo u have always disliked meeting your gaze in the mirror. You av01d. then slowly open the door to make sure the room is empty. More than once you it as a cat will, and probably for the same reason: you are too proud, or too have been only half finished with what you were doing when someone came that the creature inside it is you. meek ' to accept . . bulling into the bathroom and you had to arrest the door with your foot, offer­ This morning is no different. Yo u manage to clean the ent1re mir- ing a disconcerted, "I'm in here," and waiting for whoever it was to go away. ror without once looking into your eyes. The process takes no more than ten The light fl ickers on automatically. Yo u go to the sink to wash your minutes, but when you are fi nished and set out to return the Windex to the hands. The soap spurts out of a silver nozzle on the counter. It is a pale red kitchen, you find that you have to sit down at the top of the stairs and catch foam that smells like cherries, or at least that is meant to remind you of the your breath. . smell of cherries, that smells like some chemist in a design lab must suppose You should get more exercise than you do-you know that. St1ll, you cherries smell. On the lip of the sink is a hardened white powder that looks like can't believe that such little exertion has left you so winded. the crust you findevery so often in the battery well of a fl ashlight when it has A picture surfaces in your mind of a tattered coat draped over the back been left running too long. Yo u avoid touching it. of a chair. Although it seems familiar to you, you do not know where 1t. comes Yo ur image is kinked in the mirror, and you put your hand to it to probe from. A painting, maybe, or a photograph. Yo u hold on to it for a moment and for a fl aw. The sight of your fingers approaching themselves from the other side then let it go. of the glass makes you feel dizzy again, and you reach out to steady yourself Yo u become a little dizzy when you stand up, and, bracing your hand against the wall. For just a moment, you imagine that the mirror is a gate to against the wall to keep yourself from stumbling, you accidentally bite the in­ some other world, that the kink in the glass is a keyhole and, were the tum­ side of your cheek. Yo u probe it to see if you have punctured the skin. A small, blers to turn, your reflection would wheel open in a spray of silver light. ragged flap meets the tip of your tongue. For the past few years, you have had This was one of your favorite fantasies when you were growing up: you to endure a series of mouth ulcers, some of them as large around as a thumb­ would enter some small, ordinary-looking room-a closet or an attic, a coat tack, and often as piercing, and you have learned how opportunistic they can room or a pantry-and inside you would find a door to a place where your life be . Any time you aggravate your gums or your cheeks, your tongue or the roof would be utterly transformed, like Alice in Th rough the Looking-Glass or the of your mouth, wounding the flesh in any way, you know that the tissue will Pevensie children in Th e Lion, the Witch, and the Wa rdrobe. ulcerate and for a week or more you will feel as if you are holding a hornet You close your eyes and try to catch your breath. Yo ur head is spinning. inside y�ur mouth. Yo u will find it painful to eat, sing, talk, or even smile. The Yo ur left arm has gone numb. Yo u hear someone knocking on the door. "I'll be hornet will sting you if you twitch so much as a muscle. done in just a minute," you mean to say, but you can't find your voice to an­ As a child, you could never have anticipated how careful you would swer. one day have to become with yourself. Yo u are like a climber scaling the broad The taste of copper fillsyour mouth. face of a rock, testing every mole and furrow to see if it will hold your weight. Yo ur heart stops short. There are times when your whole life seems to bend itself to the worst in­ The door opens. stincts of your imagination. Yo u imagine your stomach is burning, and you clutch your abdomen, Tu rn to page 27. dropping the Windex bottle onto the stairs. Yo u imagine your legs have lost . feeling, and you sink to the floor. Yo u imagine your blood has stopped pumpmg, and your heart turns to concrete.

Tu rn to page 27.

38 39 "Oh, I'm wasting my life all right," you answer. "I'm just not wasting it that way. " McDonald's is nearly empty. The early-morning coffee drinkers have al­ What is it about ready come and gone, and the late-morning breakfast crowd has yet to �rrive. her voice that allows you to hear that she is smiling? There is a tightness to it, There is only an old man standing at the condiment �hel�, a -:voma� feed�ng a pleasing elasticity, not the same kind of tightness you can hear when she is cookies to a small boy in a booster seat, and a man m a Joggmg su1t talkmg angry, but not entirely dissimilar. "And how are you wasting it?" she asks. loudly to himself by the trash bins-or so you think unti� you see the head- set curled around his ear like the shell of a mollusk. It 1s a testament to the "You know. The usual. Mooning and nostalg ia." restaurant's indomitable spirit of mechanism that you can feel such anonym1ty. "Mooning? Yo u 're wasting your life mooning?" "Not that kind of mooning. in so sparse a gathering. Mooning as in 'mooning away. ' 'I'm mooning . away for the hills of You order a Coke and sink it at the counter, then order a refill and take old Virginia.' Yo u know what I meant. Pervert." The two of you fill it to a booth in the back corner. The bubbles seem to spark and leap against the next ten minutes talking about nothing of any real your tongue, leaving a pins-and-needles feeling behind them. The cold travels importance-a song with lyrics you can only hal f-remember, the movies you through you in isolated pulses. have both been waiting to see, whether she should buy a new computer, and . if so, whether it should be After you have drained the cup, you slip a chunk of crushed Ke be- a laptop or a desktop. It is the best, most intimate kind of conversation, its true tween your lips, holding it against the roof of your mouth whil� it melts, as subject nothing more than how proficient the two . . of you are in your friendship, your mother used to do. She used to be young, wearing her ha1r m a long, llmp but it's interrupted when a call comes in on her other line. curtain that fell halfway down her back. She used to clip UPC symbols from "Can you give me a second?" . . . "Of course." cereal boxes and send them in to sweepstakes contests. She used to smg OllVla Newton-John songs in the car and watch Dallas on Friday nights. It all seems Yo u hear your clock ticking and then your wristwatch, slightly out of like such a long time ago now. time with each other. Yo u hear the keening of a fire engine. Unconsciously, you have been scratching out Yo u remember visiting the McDonald 's down the street from your a drawing on the back cover of a magazine, and you hold house with her when you were growing up: the burgers that came in Styro- it up to the sunlight to examine it. . foam clamshells and the fries that came in white paper sleeves. The walls m the restaurant were decorated with representations of all the McDonaldland characters-Ronald, Captain Crook, the Fry Guys-but you were a peculiar child, overanxious about the littlest things, and for some reason you were never truly happy unless you got to sit beneath the picture of the Grimace. . Yo u think about the drinking straw dispensers that used to fascmate you when you were that age, the way the straws fell so nea�ly into the stainless­ steel rack, like coins dropping into a piggy bank. Yo u thmk about the fat sound It looks like a flying saucer, you think, or maybe a chandelier-an um­ of raindrops smacking against a canvas tarp. brella of lines branching out from the tip, flaring wider and wider, then con­ . verging suddenly at a common point, Yo u cannot name the feeling that passes through you. It 1s a pale, with a little window to nowhere fl oati in the ng nimble thing that floats out of the corner of your mind and disappears into the center. . again, fading away like a wisp of fog, but it leaves you weak � t e Susannah clicks back darkness � � over. "Hey, I'm going to need to take this call. We 'll talk later, okay?" knees as if you have taken a fast-rising elevator to the top of a tall bu1ldmg "Okay. Later. " wher� the door opens directly onto the starlight. Yo u wipe the moisture from your hands with a napkin. Yo u swallow a mouthful of ice. The phone settles neatly into its cradle. You pivot your head around in a long, low-swinging circle, trying to work a tight spot out ofyour neck, and D when you yawn, there is a rush o you throw your cup away and leave? If so, turn to page 10. of wind in your ear. It happens just as unexpect­ edly as it always does: some Do you stop to buy another Coke? If so, turn to page 23. membrane of fl uid breaks open, and everything is twice as loud.

If you would like to go out and test the air, turn to page 15.

36 37 It takes you only a few minutes to walk from the plaza to your front Yo u head toward the church at the open edge of the plaza. It was built nearly door. As you stride down the street, your neighbor passes you in his car. He fifty years ago, long before the local church boom, and its family of parishioners waves and taps his horn, the guitar strains of Boston's "More Than a Feeling" is small but dedicated. The buil�i�g is a modest structur� of oak trailing in the wind behind him. A dog feints toward you on the sidewalk but and limestone, only a single square steeple nsmg above the trees to 1mpale a corner swings back around when her owner shouts, "Zelda! Hyah!" as if he wer� urging of the sky. Because it is Saturday, the parking lot is essentially deserted, with only a pair of empty white church vans waiting in the drive. Yo u are in the on a horse. The air carries a slight scent of burned matches, a smell you have habit of hosting little interior debates with the declarations posted on the il­ always associated with the first days of fall: how the leaves will soon turn crisp luminated marquee, arguing the finer points of theology, but today the message and come loose from the trees, how the evenings will begin to bite into the is afternoons. Something about the smell makes you lighthearted. On your way to the door, you flick the stiff red flagof your mailbox, and it springs back into WHATS MISSING FROM OUR CH CH? UR! place with a birchy thwack. Yo u go to your kitchen and pour yourself a glass of water. There is a long message waiting for you on your answering machine. It commences with and you suppose you can't argue with that. and willows, clustered together a sigh: "I can't believe you're not home. Listen, call me back as soon as you The yard is dotted with dozens of elms and their branches interlace. The get this message. David is in recovery. There was a complication, but you don't so that their trunks lean against one another want to rest there for a while. need to worry about that, everything is going to be fine, it's just.. .." The man bird-haunted stillness of the place makes you and sit down. You begin to feel on the machine takes a ragged breath. Yo u wonder if he is crying. "Never mind. Yo u finda bench beneath one of the willows off the end, staring up into the cano­ It doesn 't matter. The important thing is that David is going to be okay. I'll fill tired and lie back with your feet dangling ing and expanding The openings between the leaves keep shrink you in on the details when you call-me-back. Oh, and tell Frances that he was PY of branches. . in the wind, lending a beating quality to the sunlight asking about the two of you before they put him under. All right. 1 guess that's as the trees dance slowly it. All right." that you findalmost hypnotic. . . with your fam1ly when the electnc­ It is not until the last few sentences that you realize the man must Once, you were staying in a cabin and afraid of the dark, and have dialed the wrong number. Yo u do in fact know several Davids-there is ity went out. Yo u were four years old at the time, you a camper's flashlight, the your uncle David, the David who rode the bus with you in high school the when you started to cry, your parents brought big around as a lantern. Yo u stood David who waits tables at Sufficient Grounds-but as far as you can r�member, kin d with a broad, flat base and a lens as at the ceiling, and it was not lo�g �ou h�ve never known a Frances in your life. Yo u play the message once more, it upright on your chest, pointing the beam back and forth between a pa1r of l1stenmg for a call-back number, but you fail to hear one. The caller ID display before you noticed the light shifting its center . that what you were seemg was on your phone shows only an "out of area" notice, and since the man did not wooden rafters. Gradually you came to realize flashlight, throbbing above you even leave his name, there is no way for you to track him down and explain his your heartbeat, its pulse transmitted by the the leaves of the willow. mistake. just as the sunlight is now throbbing between incident occurred to you, though the Yo u wander into the living room, where you absentmindedly scan the Yo u can't recall the last time this . moments come to your mind every t1tles on your bookcase. Yo u lean back against the arm of your couch. Yo u are memory is a good one. Why is it that certain It is a mystery to you. Then your still nurturing an inexplicable cheer, and you wonder if you ought to feel worse few days and other moments almost never? does not concern you anymore. for the man than you do. heart opens up in your breast, and the mystery :here is something wrong with your equilibrium suddenly, something wrong With your legs. Yo u forget the question you were asking yourself. Yo u do Tu rn to page 27. not even realize you have fallen until you feel the carpet scratching the back of your neck.

Tu rn to page 27.

35 34 The grocery store is swarming with young parents and college students, "I have," you say. "And I think you have, too. In fact, I'm sure you mght. . sh1ft workers and middle-aged businessmen, all trying to get their shop­ have. Don't you remember that time with the kid and his stun glove?" ping done on a sunlit autumn Saturday. Yo u are talking about the night a high school boy came into the coffee­ Yo u make your way slowly down each of the aisles, stopping to wait house with his science fair project-a glove he had wired to a model airplane for a little girl to root through the coloring books and for an elderly man to battery so that it would deliver a mild electric shock through the index fi nger. pick out his birdseed. Yo u are hanging back from a tangle of carts by the baked "Now, this is just a prototype, " he kept saying as he fiddled with the current. goods counter when an image comes to you of Susannah thinking of you with "The real version will have a lot more juice to it. " But a few minutes later, exasperation. A flush of embarrassment makes you tingle from head to toe. Yo u when he reached for the calzone he had ordered, the battery discharged itself can feel your fi ngers buzzing and prickling against the handle of the shopping all at once, and the calzone popped open in a geyser of ricotta and marinara cart. Even when you shake them, drawing a look from the stock-boy unloading sauce. the crouton boxes, the sensation does not go away. "Don't tell me you weren't happy then. I was here when the smoke Yo u work your way through the grocery list you keep posted on your cleared. I saw the look on your face." refrigerator, scratching your purchases off one by one. David nods, laughs, nods again. "Good times." Broccoli-check. An ambulance is coasting to a stop at the corner when suddenly its Sweet potatoes-check. lights begin to flash and it pulls away in a burst of noise. "I've always won­ English muffins, ginger ale, milk, eggs, laundry detergent-check, dered-do you think they just drive around the streets waiting for something to check, check, check, and check. go wrong?" he asks. "Seems like a waste of gasoline to me. " Yo ur shopping cart has a trick wheel that keeps popping around on its The manager gives him a two-fingered whistle, and he says, "Uh-oh, axle, causing the frame to lurch to the left with an indignant rattling noise. that's me. Catch you later, " rushing off to the counter with a tray of empty The store's intercom system is malfunctioning, but no one has bothered to turn plates in his hands. off the music. Yo u recognize a poor translation of the Five Stairsteps' "0-o-h Yo u have already finished your chai, but you upend the mug and tap the Child" in the rasps and hisses trickling down from the ceiling. last few drops into your mouth. The maneuver does something strange to your Yo u stop at the greeting card rack to finda card for your brother's inner ear, and you become light-headed. Yo u close your eyes and rest your fore­ birthday. When you were ten or eleven, too young to have much of your own head in your hands. The room is crowded. The conversations around you seem s�ending money, you saw a particular birthday card at a gift store in the shop­ to rise to a moment of crystalline poise and then dash against the wall, again �mg �all. It featured a lineup of animals on the front, standing side-by-side as and again, like waves breaking over one another as they come into shore. You 1f posmg for a school picture: "Hippo birdie two ewe. Hippo birdie two ewe. feel as if you could wade into the sound and float out to sea . It takes a minute Hippo birdie deer ewe. Hippo birdie two ewe." Yo u have been searching for for the sensation to fade away, and by the time it does, someone has collected another copy ever since. It is unfailingly strange to you, the way some random your mug and your water glass and left the check for you to pay. object that went sailing through your childhood for no more than two minutes Yo u watch as the morning sunlight, so bright inside the room when you can still mean something to you so many years later. first came in, travels a few last inches across the polished cedar and passes Yo u do not findthe card, of course, so you pick out a different one and through the window. A coffee grinder screams out with a guttural wail. A piece take it to the register. Yo u pay for your groceries and wheel your cart into the of silverware drops to the floor, springing end over end. Yo u would like to say parking lot. The sun is shining down on the asphalt. The prickle in your fingers goodbye to David, but he has either disappeared into the kitchen or gone up­ has s?read like a rash through the rest of your body. Yo u feel a grasping sensa­ stairs, and it looks as if you will have to catch him the next time. Yo u leave a t10n_ m your chest. Yo u're fi nding it hard to keep walking. Yo u think perhaps you five-dollar bill on the table and stand up. should take a nap. If you head out into the plaza again, turn to page 19. Tu rn to page 27. If you stop off at the bathroom to wash your hands, go on to page 38.

32 33 Yo ur vertigo expends itself in a surge of incandescence. You hear the At this hour, and at this time of year, the window in the roof above your blood beating in your ears-an oceanic rumble with a strange electricity be­ stairwell is directly illuminated by the sun, and as you walk downstairs, it hov­ hind it. Everything around you seems to go crooked and tilt to one side. Yo u ers over you like the opening to some other, brighter world, a dazzling square brace your hands against the window and wait for the sensation to go away. By of white. On your way through the kitchen, you hear the refrigerator humming. the time you can see straight again, the boy and his father have passed out of You nudge it with your shoulder to stifle the noise. Something about the action sight, though the skateboarder is still making runs at the bike rack, his arms reminds you of a bull bringing its mass to bear on a wooden gate, though as outstretched in a posture of flying. far as you can remember you have never seen such a thing in your life. Where Someone knocks against the inside of the window. Yo u turn around to would the image have come from, you wonder, if not your own experience? see the old Greek immigrant whose storefront you have been leaning upon The house seems too still now without the hum of the refrigerator fill­ gesturing at the glass. Loudly enough for you to hear, he says, "You're leaving ing the air. Yo u open the living room window to let in the sounds of the street. smears, you. Go be tired somewhere else," and makes a shooing motion with Yo ur neighbor is cleaning his car, dunking his washcloth into a plastic bucket his hands. and slowly wringing it out. The big drops fall into the water like silver coins. A Yo u mouth the word sorry, wave an apology, and set off across the pair of birds are exchanging notes with each other in gorgeous flurries. plaza. The Greek's business is a second-hand clothing store called-charmingly, Yo u are just about to sit down on the couch when the phone rings. Yo u you have always thought-The Tired Old Man. The sign above the door depicts do not recognize the number on the display, but you decide to take the call a tattered coat draped over the back of a chair. Yo u have always meant to set anyway. The voice on the other end of the line is quiet and obliging, plainly an hour aside someday to look through his merchandise. Now, though, that he masculine, and it asks for you by name. "Speaking," you answer. is destined to remember you as yet another inconsiderate American, a sort of "Thank God you didn't go anywhere." bush-league window vandal, and you will probably be too embarrassed to walk The man lunges ahead without stopping to say who he is. There fol­ through the door. lows a short, fogbound conversation in which he tells you with great emotion How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by about someone named David. David has made it through the surgery. David is in such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied-or, for recovery. There was a complication having to do with the anesthesia, but you that matter, awarded-because someone failed to see you properly? How many don't need to worry, because everything is just finenow , and David is going to friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some be all right. Yo u have an uncle David, and you knew a David Summers when you element of your personality that shone through you for only an instant, and in were in high school; one of the waiters at the coffeehouse down the street is circumstances you could never reproduce: an illusion of water shimmering at named David, and there are a number of other Davids in the middle pages of the far bend of a highway? your address book. But it is not until the man says, "Is Frances there? Put Fran­ Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for ces on the phone" that the truth fi nally dawns on you: he believes he is speak­ you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you ing to a different person altogether, one who just happens to share your name. would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you This is too much for the man. Yo u hear a sound like puffs of steam think there was no other way forward-that you were always bound to end up sputtering from a teapot, a sound of heat and pressure, and you realize he is exactly where you have. weeping. It is as if some invisible giant has taken control of your existence, "I'm sorry, " he says. "This is embarrassing. Oh God, I didn't mean to setting his hands down like walls on either side of you. He has changed your trouble you." course with each bend of his fingers. He has urged you along with gusts of his He makes a thready little noise of wounded feeling and hangs up. breath. He has stripped you of each of your choices until there is only one Yo u sit there thinking over the conversation. Yo u barely said a word, path for you to take, one turn for you to follow. And at that moment, as you so how could you have said something wrong? But irrationally you feel a pang swing past a mailbox, he tips your head back and fi lls your heart with lead. The of guilt. It is the kind of story you usually share with your friend Susannah. Yo u weight is like an anchor inside you. It pulls you to the ground. Wonder whether she is home.

Tu rn to pa�e 27. Do you call Susannah on the phone? If so, turn to pa�e 11. Do you send her an e-mail instead? If so, turn to pa�e 28.

30 31 Yo ur computer is running slow this morning, and you have to switch it Yo u circle the perimeter of the room inspecting the new releases: frat­ off and allow it to reboot a few times before it begins working properly. Why boy comedies and superhero blockbusters that surge across the shelves in wave this should have any effect at all, you couldn't say-after all, no matter how after swollen wave, with a slender thread of foreign and independent films many times you put a bent fork back in a drawer, it won't be any straighter cutting through the center. Nothing looks very promising to you, and eventu­ when you take it out again-but it does work, somehow, and you log onto your ally you end up at the staff recommendations rack, always the most intriguing internet account and read the day's headlines before tapping out a message to display in the store, with its perfect capsule versions of all the employees' per­ Susannah. sonalities. Yo u have the film purist, the deliberate eccentric, the baggy senti­ We ll, as usual, strange things are happening here on the island, you mentalist. Yo u have the child at heart. Yo u have the stranger so far from home. begin, and you end with, So what do you think? Should I have said something "Have you seen this one?" a clerk hovering nearby asks you . He taps his other than what I said? Done something other than what I did? Please send help finger against a movie called Ponette, with a little girl lost in pensive rumina­ or I will perish when the wa ters rise. tion on the cover. "It's the best movie in here. Most of the characters are just This is a long-standing joke between the two of you-treating every children. The lead is a four-year-old girl whose mother dies in a car accident. letter as though you were marooned on a desert island tossing a message out She spends the movie trying to figure out what that means, whether her mother in a bottle. Yo u suppose the joke has endured for so long because you find it can come back to life, whether God will listen to her if she prays to Him-that satisfying to imagine yourselves as castaways, sitting by the ocean with knotted sort of thing." hair and tattered shorts, enduring the isolation of your own lives as you would "It sounds sad." a little hump of sand with a coconut tree standing in the middle. "Well, it is. But it's charming and funny, too. And beautifully shot. And Yo u wait a few minutes for Susannah to respond, but she must be away filled with life and color. And just kind of miraculously authentic all around. from the computer, and you log off and slide your chair back under the desk. The only question is whether your heart is strong enough to take it." Yo u hear something outside. When you go to the window, you see a couple of The clerk at the front register calls out, "You should rent Breaking the boys bouncing a soccer ball off the asphalt to each other as they stroll down Wa ves instead." the middle of the street. The noise echoes off the broad side of the house with The first clerk indulges a sigh, which leaves you with the impression a hammerlike crack that seems to break open as soon as it hits the air. that you have blundered into the middle of a long-standing feud . "Breaking In a shoe box in your bureau, there is a photograph of you at the age the Wa ves is a good movie-no doubt about it. Courageous. Harrowing even. of eleven or twelve-the same age these boys appear to be-trying to throw a But you get the sense that Emily Watson is suffering because the director is a boomerang with your brother. Yo ur tongue is in the corner of your lips. Yo ur sadist, whereas Ponette is suffering because life is painful. Look, " he contin­ brother is visoring his eyes against the sun. Yo u have an impulse to go upstairs ues, "it depends on what you want from a movie. If you want art, rent Po nette. and look at the picture. By the time you reach the bedroom, though, you have If you want sophomoric nonsense masquerading as art"-he scans the shelf forgotten what you came there for. Yo u stand in the doorway staring at your marked "Ethan's Picks" and selects a movie called Dogma- "rent this." walls, your bed, your ceiling fan. Yo u think about the entertainer who used to The other clerk, the one behind the counter, gives an indignant "Hey!" perform in the shopping plaza down the street, juggling knives with long, flat What you truly want from a movie, though you almost never get it, is blades. Yo u think about a wilderness of red sand, soft winds blowing across it in to have your life changed by it. Yo u want the story to become a part of you , thousands of overlapping ripples. folding itself into your skin and growing like a shoot grafted onto an orange Yo u walk back downstairs and hear the boys with their soccer ball tree. "All right. I'll give it a try, " you say. again. For some reason that triggers the memory of the photograph you wanted "Excellent. Yo u'll have to let me know what you think." to find, but by then the impulse to look at it has abandoned you. Yo u pause Yo u are following the clerk to the register when you feel a sharp pain in there in the hallway for a moment with your hand resting on the wall. your chest. Yo ur breath surges out of you. Yo ur legs grow weak. And it turns out that your heart was not so strong after all-a pane of glass that shatters when If you decide to put some music on, turn to page 22. the window opens, a walnut that crumbles when the shell is cracked. If you would rather sit down with a book, turn to page 40. Tu rn to page 27.

28 29 It is curious: the sounds of the neighborhood seem heavy on the air There you are, lying flat on yourback, staring into the air as if through now, but really they are no more distinct than they were before, since the a sheet of glass. The pain is not the worst you have ever endured, but it is whole aura of ambient noises has become louder right along with them. intense and steady enough that you quickly cease to recognize it as pain at all. Birds and wind currents. It becomes just another background component of your awareness, like the Clocks and ventilation systems. scratching of the insects in the trees, like the gradual churning of sensations on Yo u hear a helicopter beating at the air, or maybe it is a lawnmower. your skin, a simple field upon which to observe your reactions to the world. Yo u hear a set of tires pressing the asphalt. Perhaps the mail truck has come Yo u are having trouble sitting up. Yo u feel a pressure against the back with its morning delivery, you think, but when you look outside, you see only of your head. Yo u close your eyes, then open them, and by the time you do, your neighbor backing out of his driveway, his window melting down into its you have lost track of how long you have been lying there. From some infinite carriage like a sheet of ice. He pulls into the street in a nimbus of hard rock. distance, ten thousand twists of light are suddenly projected into your eyes. Yo u recognize the song just as it fades away-Boston's "More Than a Feeling." Yo u watch as they shimmer and tighten together like the hooks of metal in a It is a song you will forever associate with rec-room basements thick tangle of barbed wire. More and more of them appear, fillingthe gaps one by with speaker fuzz and cigarette smoke, just as "Bad Moon Rising" is your broth­ one, and soon you are conscious of nothing else. er's car parked with its wheels on the curb, and "Crazy" is a nightclub with a What would the sky be like if there was nothing to see but stars? black marble counter and one small mirror on the wall, and "Come On, Eileen" Yo u know that you will never experience anything so beautiful again. is the arcade room of the state fair when you were still young enough to find It will be several thousand years before the human race develops a pro­ the crowds and the din there exciting. Yo ur memory is so packed with the cedure to retrieve the memories of the dead from their bodies. By then the age last few decades' worth of pop music that there is barely a phrase in common in which you lived will be recollected as a time of barbarism and brute physi­ conversation that can't summon a lyric to your mind. There are times when you cal destruction, of interest only to historians of cultural degradation. But in think you could fill an entire day simply following their traces from one tune to the name of scientific research, a few sample bodies from your century will be another. exhumed for memory reclamation, and among those selected will be your own. The sunlight is coming in through the window at a high slant, picking The technicians will lift you carefully into the sunlight, unwinding your out the ribs of the end table, and you notice they are fleeced with dust. Yo ur memories like a long, thin thread. The process will not be perfect. Because you housekeeping can be haphazard sometimes. Yo u take a paper towel and wipe died so long ago, only the last few hours of your life will be recoverable-from the wood clean, catching the spillover in your palm, then dumping it in the the moment you returned the milk to the refrigerator to the moment the barbs trash. Before you have finished, you begin to sneeze. of light finally flickered fromyour eyes. It is probably the dust, you think, but it could also be your seasonal al­ As usual, after the technicians have examined and recorded your mem­ lergies setting in. Yo u have never understood why your sinuses would cause you ories, they will provide them to the museums for public display. To the surprise such trouble at this time of year. In the spring, when everything is blossoming of everyone involved, you will prove to be a very popular exhibit. People will and drifts of pollen ride the breeze, chalking all the windshields with a fineye l­ wait for hours to get a glimpse of you, some of them returning many times. Yo u low powder-yes, okay, in the spring it makes sense to you. But why now, in the will come to be regarded as a sort of cult phenomenon. There are days when fall, when everything is drying up and dying? the line to your gallery will reach all the way through the entrance hall and Yo u sneeze two more times, then a third in quick succession. Yo u across the courtyard, fading like a plume of smoke into the broken red skies of decide it would be best to close the window. The sash tends to stick in temper­ the city. ate weather, so you brace your palms against the lip and lean into it. When it doesn't move, you lower your full weight onto your hands. The End A noise of strain escapes from you, surprisingly high and mouselike. Yo u feel a sudden flush of heat. The window is just beginning to fall when some­ thing in your heart goes still, wringing the breath out of your body.

Go on to page 27.

26 27 Yo ur medicine cabinet is choked to the corners with expired prescrip­ Yo u make a small lunch for yourself, toasting a bagel and topping it tions and over-the-counter pain relievers: aspirin, Ty lenol, Advil, Bufferin, with cream cheese and a slice of tomato. As you return the unused portion Motrin, Aleve. It looks like the inside of a sewing box might look after tumbling of the tomato to the produce drawer, you wonder for what must be the thou­ down a flight of stairs-a chaos of spools and thimbles. sandth time whether a tomato is properly considered a fruit or a vegetable. Yo u take two Advil gelcaps, downing them with a glass of tap water. When you were growing up, you were taught that it was a vegetable-or was it There is a hair clinging to the wall of the sink, and you turn the faucet on and a fruit?-but later you learned that it was actually a fruit-or was it a vegeta­ watch it give a tremor as the outer current splashes against it, then lift free ble? Yo u can never remember. and snake into the drain. After you have finished eating, you go to the computer to check your You lie back on your bed and spend a few minutes staring into space. e-mail. Susannah has not written back yet , and you find only one message The fan has been adjusted to the lowest possible setting, and the motion of the waiting for you: a shipping confirmation for a DVD you ordered. It is buttoned blades is nearly hypnotic-an endless procession of shadows drifting languidly together with a list of other movies you are told you might enjoy but which you over the ceiling. know from experience you probably won't. Yo u think about the phone call you received this morning, how quickly Yo u spend a few minutes reading the headlines, then a few more min­ the man spoke, then how soft his voice became when he understood that you utes fiddlingaround with a search engine, using it as you so often do to hunt weren't the person he thought you were. "Oh God, I'm so embarrassed," he for various people you let slip out of your life when you were too young to un­ said. It sounded as if he didn't even realize you were listening anymore, as if derstand how much they would one day mean to you. Yo u wonder what it says he were merely talking to himself in some seizure of private humiliation. about you that you never go probing after your own name online, or the names Yo u know the feeling well. Yo u can't count the number of times you of people you see all the time, but only those people who have disappeared have remembered one long-gone mortifying act or another and begun firingoff into the world as thoroughly as a drop of water into a lake. To make matters a quiet rebuke to yourself, saying it over and over again like a penitent thrash­ worse, most of the names you find yourself looking for are relatively com­ ing his back with a switch: so embarrassing, so embarrassing, so embarrassing, mon-Ann Williams, Tim Carter, John Yo ung. Is the John Yo ung you knew when so embarrassing. you were in high school the same John Yo ung who placed 17th in the Hospital There was the time you hopped up to sit on someone's counter at a Hill Half Marathon? He could be. But then he could also be the John Yo ung who dinner party and cracked the picture frame that had been left lying there. produces handmade knives out of sheep's horn and snake wood, or the John The time your mother caught you rewrapping the presents you had Yo ung who sells real estate in Palm Springs, or the John Yo ung whose grandfa­ opened the week before Christmas. ther passed away last year at the age of 84. Yo u have no way of knowing. The time you phoned a friend one night as you were getting ready to go Ordinarily, you might fi nd it saddening, the fact that so many of the to bed and instead of leaving the message you had intended to leave said what figures from your past have been covered over by the anonymity of their lives, you were actually thinking, which was, "I'm in love with you." but Th e Baron in the Tr ees has left you with a lingering feeling of contentment. Yo u have learned that it's best not to get yourself started. You can hardly imagine what it would take to discourage you right now. Yo u stretch out your limbs and stand up. The blood rushes to your head Yo u log off the internet, then go to the door and open it to look at the for a moment. The carpet seems as hard as a board. Yo u are walking down the breeze combing through the grass. Yo u hear a ticking coming from somewhere­ stairs when your heart clenches tight inside you. either the cistern in the closet warming up, you think, or a tree limb tapping A fi st. That's what it feels like-a fist. against a drainage pipe. There is just enough time for you to think of something you once read It is a perfect early-fall day, with a wonderful parched quality to the in a popular science book before the pain overwhelms you: that if you form air. It is almost as if it had never rained at all, not once in the entire history of your hand into a fist, you'll have an object roughly the size of your heart, and the world. It is only a small pain, at first, the pinch you feel in the hollow of if you wrap your other hand around it, you'll have an object roughly the size of Your chest. your brain. Tu rn to page 27. Tu rn to page 27.

24 25 Yo u select a mix CD a friend sent you and put it into the stereo, listen­ "Damn, someone's thirsty today, " the boy working the cash register ing as the first song strikes up with an artificial needle hiss. Sometimes, during says when you ask him for another refill. He winces as if a firecracker has ex­ the slow-lit, lingering afternoons of high school, you would sit down and close ploded, lets a glance fly past his shoulder. "Lucky my manager didn't overhear your eyes for an entire album, just letting the music wash through you. Every that. He said one more time cursing in front of a customer and he'll serve my so often back then you might catch yourself swayi ng your neck or whisking the ass to me on a silver platter. Look, don't say anything to anybody, all right? air with your hands during one of the more expressive passages, but mostly you Here, I'll let you have this one for free." would lose track of your body altogether, until the last note of the last track "You don't have to do that." faded away and you returned to the four walls of your bedroom as if awakening "Please. The syrup costs us, like, nine cents. Come on, hand it over. " from a dream. He fillsyour cup and fastens a new lid on top. Outside a fire engine is work- These days you need something to occupy your other senses while you ing its siren. The sound spreads open in three distinct phases, dipping slightly, listen. As the CD plays, you let your eyes travel over your bookcase, following pausing, and then increasing, as if some giant mechanical beast were struggling a stepladder of colors from the top shelf to the bottom. This is the test: to see to release a yawn. Yo u listen as it vanishes down the road. if you can make the entire climb using solely the books with red bindings, say, "We cool?" the boy asks as he gives you back your Coke. or solely the books with blue. It is a pointless exercise, but you are secretly "We're cool." pleased when the only color that gives you any trouble is brown. Yo u carry the drink outside and across the street into the plaza. A Midway through the disc is a scratchy recording of Hoagy Carmichael breeze makes the leaves chatter. The sun presses against the crown of your singing "Stardust." Every time you hear the piece, it makes you think of your head. One of your shoelaces has come loose, and you prop your foot on a bench grandparents dancing to songs like "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?, " to tighten it. holding each other close to songs like "The Little White Cloud That Cried," A street performer parades past you, a pair of yo-yos spinning from falling in love to songs like "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life." How such simple tunes each of his hands. He sends them looping around the world in matched sets, could have stirred such emotion in them will forever bewilder you, though no the symmetry so perfect you might almost imagine you were viewing the scene doubt your own grandchildren will someday think of you dipping your shoulders through a kaleidoscope. to "This Charming Man" or feeling your heart screw tight to "Hallelujah" with A girl strides out of the bead store on the other side of the square in a the same feeling of affectionate mystification. t-shirt the color of spicy mustard. There is a message printed across her back in Outside a siren goes racing toward somebody's tragedy. There is a white block letters, but she is too far away for you to make out the words. ten-second gap in the music as the noise drowns the instruments out. Then the It takes you another five minutes to finish your Coke. By the time you drums knock through the blare, making room for the guitars, and gradually the have thrown the cup away, you can feel the pressure beginning to mount in song reclaims the room. your bladder. Maybe three cups was too much. Yo u were so thirsty, though, The CD ends with Van Morrison singing "Sweet Thing," a track you and you found it next to impossible to stop yourself. Clearly the soda has gone never tire of listening to. Yo u love the way it loops and rises and loops around pouring right through you. You duck into a restroom and relieve yourself, then on itself, again and again and again, like a hundred circles stacked one on top wash up at the sink and step back into the sunlight. Yo u have a touch of heart­ of another, and the way Va n Morrison's voice seems to carry so much sorrow burn, and you press your hand to your chest, digging the hinge of your knuckles and so much exultation at one and the same time. It is as if he were calling out into your ribs and massaging the spot in a tiny circle. It is an old remedy you to himself from the cusp of some precipitous decline, just young enough and picked up from some casual gesture you saw a character make on a television just wise enough to celebrate in the face of all his suffering. commercial. You are not sure whether it really works or whether you simply "And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain," he sings, "and I like the illusion of control it offe rs. will never, ever, ever grow so old again." Yo u intend to start for home, but then you spot the movie rental store There is a part of you that would like to adopt those words as your on the corner. It might be nice, you think, to pick up a DVD for the afternoon. manifesto. If you go inside to rent a movie, tum to page 29. If you feel a bit hungry, tum to page 18. If you continue walking home, tum to page 34. If you feel a headache coming on, tum to page 24.

22 23 Though the coffeehouse is busy, you find an empty armchair in the well Yo u head toward the redbrick warehouse that used to house the brew­ beneath the staircase. The seat gives you a good view of the plaza, a low table ery. Only a few years ago the bottling carousel operated seven days a week, of chocolate brick paving interrupted by trash barrels and brackets of wrought­ even on major holidays, like a hospital or a fire station, but now the only hu­ iron benches. Yo u order a large chai tea, drinking a glass of wateras you wait man activity at the building is a small To yota running in cautious circles through for it to arrive and crunching the ice between your teeth as your father used to the parking lot, halting every so often and then starting back up again. do. A teenage girl sweeps past the window, angling her body forward as if she is Yo u can still smell the wheat soap in the air as you pass the loading trying to pierce a heavy gale. A man in a business suit walks by wheeling a ten­ dock. speed bicycle, a leather briefcase jammed into its basket. At the far end of the A paper bag drifts down the alley. The wind steals through the windows plaza, a father swings his son around by the arms, tracing low-dipping circles in in a low sigh. the air. Someti mes, watching people through the flat silence of a window you It has been a while since you took this particular sidestreet, and a feel that you are on the verge of understanding a human mystery that has man­ homeless encampment has taken hold beneath the bridge: a gas-powered aged to evade you your whole life, but that is where you always remain: on the generator, some shopping carts, and a dozen pup tents strung together out of verge. bedsheets and fishingwire. Yo u see a group of men sitting together on a sprung Yo u spot the barista coming with your order. She must be a new hire, mattress, engrossed in conversation. because you don 't recognize her. On the wall beside your chair is an M. C. Is it possible, you wonder, to expend the last of your luck? Once, you Escher illustration of a grid of triangles evolving gradually into a flock of black were driving along a narrow stretch of highway when you got trapped behind and white birds. As you sip your chai, you catch yourself staring right through a string of trailers. Yo u tacked into the facing lane to pass them, but the line it, slipping into a mindless reverie of shapes and colors. Yo u think about a black was longer than you had expected it to be, and before you were able to clear leaf you once saw pasted to a window during a rainstorm. Yo u think about the it, you saw a pick-up truck barreling toward you. You did the only thing you shifting brown tones of a Southern creek. could think to do-swerved onto the shoulder, threading the needle between "See, first you 've got your triangles and then you've got your birds," a the truck and the curb at sixty miles an hour and hoping the other driver would voice says. Yo u look up to see David, your favorite waiter at Sufficient Grounds, stay in his lane. The rumble strips made your car vibrate with a terrific chat­ his eyes hooded in a mystic burnout routine. "What it is is a map of the devel­ tering noise. Yo ur legs turned to liquid. Yo u drifted to a stop and watched the opment of being, man. If you keep following the pattern, you'll fi nd airplanes, trailers disappear. then space ships, then angels, then God, and then triangles again. Triangles are Yo u can still see the image in your windshield: a single lane of sun­ always at the top. No one knows why. " beaten concrete curving past white frame houses and billboards with pictures Yo u give his arm an amiable nudge, and he abandons the performance. of Jesus on them. The sky was bruised with rain in the distance. The driveways "How are you doing, David?" of the houses looked like black pudding poured directly onto the grass. And you "Not bad, not bad." He strokes his mustache. "Rhonda ditched me, remember thinking that whatever luck had been allotted to you at your birth though. Moved out and everything." was now used up, spent, and that the rest of your life would pass in misfor­ "I'm sorry to hear that." tune. "Yeah , well, me too. But I think we both saw it coming. I'm just re­ It did not turn out that way for you, but maybe it did for the men lieved I've got the whole thing in the rearview now. Waiting for it was worse beneath the bridge. Maybe they made one foolish mistake and had just enough than living thr ough it." fortune to carry them through to the other side, but not enough to take them "Then you're happy with the way things turned out?" any further. Maybe some truck nicked them at the corner and sent them spin­ "Happ y?" he says. "Well-no. " ning off the edge of the road . Lives fall apart in all sorts of ways. He sh rugs and laughs, lets off a wilting smile. Yo u duck between the legs of a street sign. There is a convenience "But who' s ever really been happy?" store standing on the corner, the light above its door flickering on and off. You taste the tang of gasoline in your mouth from the leaking pump out front. If you have ever realty been happy, turn to page 33. Something seems to grip your chest. You lose your breath and fall to your If you haven't, turn to page 41. knees. There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you sud­ denly and strangely feel perfectly okay.

Tu rn to page 27.

20 21 You look through the cabinets and the refrigerator, but findonly a few The air is beginning to warm up. Yo u decide to take the oblique route boxes of snack food, a tomato, and half a package of bagels-nothing you feel home, making a loop through the plant nursery at the west end of the plaza. like eating. Obviously it is time for you to do some grocery shopping. For now, Many of the trees there are only a little taller than you are, and you feel like a though, you decide to phone the Chinese restaurant around the corner, New giant lumbering through their ranks, paddling your hands through their spires as Fun Ree, and place your usual takeout order. easily as if you were smacking a row of parking meters. By the time you reach "I'd like item number twenty-four, the mixed vegetables with snow the end of the lane, one of your palms is coated with the scent of magnolia, peas, and a side of egg drop soup." the other with the scent of pine. Your lungs are full, your hairline slick with "Okay. Te n minutes. Bye." sweat. Yo u watch a pair of robins land on the lip of a stone basin, offering This might be what you like best about such inexpensive little pigeon­ faint subliminal muttering noises to each other. Yo u watch a little boy throwing hole restaurants, the way all notions of hospitality are thrown over in favor of pebbles at the trunk of an ash sapling. a simple curt proficiency. The cooks and counter clerks are like the mechanics A song has broken out on your tongue. It takes you a moment to recog­ you have sometimes met at the gas stations between small towns: craftsmen nize it as "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"-not the standard Judy Garland ver­ who would rather finish their work as efficiently as possible than shanghai you sion, but the Israel Kamakawiwo'ole rendition, with the soft, drawn out ooh 's into liking them. at the beginning and the melody that floats effortlessly out over the strum of You put your shoes on, then head for the restaurant. The sun is shining the ukelele. It is a song you love, so simple and pretty that it is hard for you to down from the middle of the sky. The reflectors in the street pop on and off imagine the person who would dislike it, but why are you singing it now? Did like light bulbs as you walk past them. New Fun Ree is nearly empty, just the David say something to you about rainbows, or dreams, or bluebirds? Did you same limp-haired boy who's always standing at the cash register, sketching on a overhear one of the customers in the coffeehouse laying a stress on the word place mat with a blue ballpoint pen. somewhere? Yo u sit down at one of the tables, running your fingers over the bamboo Yo u are puzzling it over when you realize: the meter of the song surface and waiting for him to call your order. After a minute or two, he shouts matches the pace at which you have been walking. Undoubtedly, that's where out, "Mix vegetable snow pea? Egg drop soup?" Yo ur wallet is open by the time it came from. you reach the counter. This has happened to you before: you will findyourself rehearsing a The boy bags your food and hands it to you. "Five-seven-three," he particular run of lyrics for days on end, with no idea why, until eventually you says. will discover that the tempo of the steps you are taking between, say, the "How much?" couch and the refrigerator exactly duplicates the cadence of the song in your "Five-seven-three," he repeats, "five-seven-three," proclaiming the head. Everything has a rhythm, you sometimes think. Everything, given the pos­ numbers with a strange insistency, like a quarterback announcing a change in sibility, would choose to be a song. play. The gate of the nursery, swinging gently about on its hinges, would be a As you walk home, your neighbor passes you in his freshly polished dance hall waltz. car, giving a friendly double tap of his horn. A dog scampers over to you from The squirrel sprinting across the grass would be a ragtime tune played across the street, nudging your wrist with his nose. He stares up at you as on an upright piano. though waiting for you to do something extraordinary, then scampers away at The sprinkler dousing the flowers would be an old gospel hymn. the sound of his owner's whistle. Yo ur left arm has begun to tingle. Yo u give it a Yo u are walking past the dogwoods when a thrill of pain in your chest shake to restore the blood flow. All at once you lose sensation in your fingers. makes you drop to your knees. Yo ur heart, too, has a rhythm, one that catches, You drop the bag of Chinese food. One of the containers splits open, stutters, and comes to a halt. It would be the slowest song in the world if it and a long flare of steamed rice spills out-hundreds of white grains against the were a song at all. yellow-green grass. Yo u ought to clean it up, you think; you really shouldn't leave it there. But before you can bend over, you are lying on the ground be­ Continue to page 27. side it.

Go on to page 27.

18 19 For as long as you can remember, you have been fascinated by Rube "I don't know. I hope I'm not. What I would really say is that the two of Goldberg devices. When you were little, you had a neighbor who owned the us have very different lamp philosophies. I'm pro-same, and you're pro-differ­ board game Mouse Trap, and you used to lie on your stomach as she pieced the ent. Or I'm pro-old, and you 're pro-new. " game together and set it into operation, watching the shining silver marble roll "And pro-new is wrong?" she asks. through its system of slides, buckets, and cages with all the screwy accuracy What is it about her voice that tells you she is irritated? There is a of a circus performance. Sometimes, when you have trouble falling asleep, tightness to it, an edge of eager muscularity, so that in truth it almost sounds you like to pretend that you are designing such a device for yourself. Yo u have as if she is smiling. Yo u try to make a joke out of the argument, pretending to to crack an egg, so you pull a cord, which lifts a curtain from around a carrot, confuse pro-new with pro-gnu, pronouncing the hard g in a deliberate effort to which causes a rabbit to start racing around inside a wheel. The friction from ruin the pun. It is the kind of vapid absurdity she would ordinarily play along the wheel lights a match, and the match lights a candle, and the candle burns with, but instead she just says, "Listen, I really need to take care of this com­ through a string, which causes a weight to drop from the ceiling and land on a puter thing now, so ...." teeter-totter. At the other end of the teeter-totter is a ball. The ball bounces "So." across the floor onto a table, where it knocks over a box of pins, and one of the "So I'll talk to you soon, okay?" And to make certain you know her pins pops a balloon. The noise of the balloon causes a dog to start barking and bad humor is only temporary, she adds, "And you have no reason to feel guilty straining forward on its leash, which is tied to a door, on top of which is a ball­ about that phone call you got. None. I mean it." peen hammer knotted to a small silk parachute. When the door swings open, "I'll try not to." the hammer topples off and parachutes slowly to the kitchen counter, where There are people who hurt themselves by saying too little and people it taps against the egg, and, finally, cracks it into a bowl-though by this time, who hurt themselves by saying too much. Yo u have always thought of yourself if you are lucky, you will have floated out of your own awareness and will no as falling squarely in the former camp-the people who hurt themselves by longer be there to see it. saying too little-but it could be that you are mistaken. Usually, when you find Yo u have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that yourself making some fiery statement or another, it is only because you are life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine playing a role, or, if not playing a role, because you are skimming the thinnest designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul. Yo u layer of what you actually believe off the top of all your doubts and contradic­ imagine yourself tumbling into the world like a marble, rolling with an easy tory hunches. Yo u presume that people will understand your intentions, but momentum over the chutes and ramps of your childhood, falling through traps when they don't, you rarely bother to explain yourself. So is that saying too here and there, sailing over various hills and loop-the-loops, then flying like much or saying too little? a shot from the cannon of your adolescence and landing with an ungoverned After you hang up, you take some time to straighten the magazines on bounce on the other side, where you progress through all the vacuum tubes your coffee table. Yo u hear a fire engine starting its siren up a few blocks away. and trampolines and merry-go-rounds of your adulthood-your job and your Who was it who said that fire engines always sound as if they're running away family, your hobbies and your lovers, the withering of certain friendships, the from a fire rather than toward one, like enormous beasts fleeing through the blossoming of others, the birth of your children and the death of your par- city in a panic? ents, the softening of your body and the hardening of your habits-plummeting Laurie Anderson? sometimes into the sinkholes of accident and disease and at other times thinly Andrei Codrescu? escaping them, and all the while changing, changing at every moment, because Yo u can't remember. But whenever the trucks go howling down the of the decisions you make and those that fate makes for you, until finally, with streets of your neighborhood, the thought passes reliably through your mind. your dying breath, you emerge from the mouth of the machine and roll to a Yo ur last trip to the grocery store was just an early-morning dash to stop, as motionless as you were before you began, but scarred and colored and buy some milk, so there isn't much to eat in your kitchen, but you finda box burnished now with the markings you will carry with you through an eternity. of granola bars and unwrap one. When you have finished the last bite, you pour yourself a glass of water. Yo u upend it, then put the glass in the sink. Suddenly, Continue to page 27. and to your wonder, you feel the need to make something out of your day.

If you decide to do a little grocery shopping, turn to page 32. If you decide to clean the bathroom mirror, turn to page 39.

16 17 The day is beautiful, with only a few horsetails of cloud brushing the The drawing you did has left an ink contusion on your little finger, and sky at the horizon. Tw o sparrows are singing to each other from the gutters before you leave, you go upstairs to wash it off. Some bird or frog is in the tree of the house across the street, a squirrel crawling over the brickwork in fitful outside your bedroom, croaking with a noise like ball bearings rattling in a tin little snatches of motion. Your phone begins to ring as you lock the door, but can. You listen to the fan spinning and the lightbulb humming, to the hot water you decide to let the answering machine take the call. tank replenishing itself. Yo u open your mouth as wide as you can to see if the Yo ur neighbor is washing his car, his ears cushioned behind an old pair sounds will become any clearer, but they are already as loud as thunder in your of headphones, and as you pass him, you catch a few beats of the same music ears. Nothing you do makes any difference. you occasionally hear pouring like a river through the walls of his house: REO The sun has passed from the window above the stairwell. On your way Speedwagon 's "Take It on the Run." back down you watch a squirrel graze up against the opening, perching its Instinctively, you begin walking toward the shopping plaza two blocks front paws on the sill and fastidiously lowering its head to the glass. You could down from you and one block over. At the corner, a couple of boys are playing swear that it is looking inside, but by the time you reach the porch and have soccer in their front yard-or rather, you realize as you get closer, pretending a straight view of the roof, it has gone, leaping onto a tree branch or a tele­ to play soccer, one of them narrating an imaginary game as the other boots the phone wire. Yo u see a crow wheeling in the sky. Yo u smell the match-scent of hard white ball over the grass. "Morganbarron takes it to the goal. He fakes a wood-burning grill. When did the breeze begin to blow? Just an hour ago the to the left, he fakes to the right. He fakes up. He fakes down. He fakes in a weather seemed almost perfectly still, and now the grass by the fence, so long circle. He fakes in a square." and slender, is whipsawing around with every breath of air. When the ball comes bouncing into the street, you block it with your A creek runs behind the houses on the other side of the street, a shin and kick it back to them. The boy doing the play-by-play bows to you and freshet of colorless water no wider than an arm unless it has been raining, and says, "You have done us an act of great kindness, and we thank you." you decide to take a walk along the bank. It is not unusual to findmin nows All this nervy kidding around, half sophisticated and half naive-it swimming in the current. To day there are nearly a dozen of them, quivering in makes you happy just to see it. Yo u remember having friends who used to lam­ and out of the shade of a rock in tight silver curves. poon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting A green leaf floats by, its stem ranging out in front of it like a bowsprit. to pounce on it, and you remember how they changed as they grew older and A car honks its horn, and a door slams somewhere. It is a sad, beautiful, ordi­ the joy of questioning everything slowly became transformed into the pain of nary day. questioning everything, like a star consuming its own core. Every September you resolve to schedule a vacation for this time of Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? year, a whole month or two so that you can just sit back and appreciate the C. S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? Yo u forget. But it has always worried you that what change of the seasons, but you are always too busy. the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn. Next year, you tell yourself. Next year maybe you'll actually do it. Yo u should get more exercise than you do-you know that-but you Yo u sit down on the grass and dangle your legs over the bank, allowing didn't anticipate how winded a simple walk would make you. By the time you your shoes to brush the water. Yo u close your eyes for a few seconds and listen reach the shopping plaza, you are gulping at the air like a fish. You feel as if to the trickling sound, and when you open them again, you are staring directly you could sit down and drink for a solid hour. Yo ur favorite coffee house, Suffi­ into the stream. The sun is scrambled into a mass of loops and wires. It seems cient Grounds, is just on the other side of the wrought-iron benches. The wait­ as if the light is fabricating the water, rather than merely uncovering it. The ers there know you well, but there are days when you enjoy being recognized sight is mesmerizing. Yo u would barely notice you were there at all if not for and days when you don't, when you want nothing more than the simple curt the pain that suddenly overcomes you, a million steel spokes radiating out from reactiveness of a stranger. your heart.

If you decide to stop for a while at the coffee house, go on to page 20. Continue to page 27. If you head for the McDonald's across the street, tum to page 37.

14 15 Yo u have organized your books by genre, with all the science fiction Maybe the boy has nothing more to say to his father, or maybe he is in one area and all the mysteries in another, all the contemporary fictionover just salting his counter-argument away for another time. Whatever the case, here and all the classics over there, with special recesses set aside for poetry the two of them fall silent as they pass in front of you. Yo u wait by the window and plays, criticism and nature writing, memoirs and graphic novels. Here is until there is no danger that you will stumble into them, then take a couple of the problem, though: you are not sure whether The Baron in the Tr ees should swaying steps to the bench by the chestnut sapling and sit down. Yo u lay your be shelved with the literary fi ction or the fantasies-or even with the slender head in your lap, letting the dizziness roll straight through you, a giant wave pocket of historical fiction you haven't quite gotten around to reading yet. that makes your ears ring and your skin grow warm. Yo u let your eyes pass over the titles. Maybe you are tired, because for The fog clears from your mind in a sudden rush of white noise. Yo u look a few seconds all you see is a peacock smear of colors blurring out to either up to see the skateboarder crouching over the deck of his board, the chestnut side of you. Then your vision clears and all the pieces fi t back together again. leaves forming patterns of shadow lace on the bricks, a yellow jacket orbiting Yo u are staring at an old Alfred Bester novel. Recently you have been a trash barrel. The old Greek man who runs the second-hand clothing store is toying with a certain thought about science fiction, a thought you fi nd yourself staring at you from his window, an expression of concern etched on his face. rehearsing again. It seems to you that all the classic science fiction writers-or "I'm all right," you mouth to him. He makes a gesture you do not understand, at least the best and most stirring ones: Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, tapping the glass a few times with the beak shape of his fingers, then shakes his Arthur C. Clarke-practice literature as a form of nostalgia. With all their alien head and turns back into his store. vessels and technological wonders, what they're really doing is running their You gain your feet again and begin walking. These episodes of light­ stories through the gears of a consciousness that no longer quite belongs to headedness have been happening a lot to you lately, and you worry sometimes them, casting their minds back to their own childhood, a time when the future that your health is on the verge of abandoning you, but then you reflectthat seemed limitless and there were a million possible stories to be told. This is it has been this way your whole life. For as long as you can remember, every why their books contain such a strong current of melancholy tangled together toothache and stomach cramp has presented itself to you as the usher of some with such a strong current of enthusiasm: they are gazing into the future as a irreversible decline. Yo u have always gotten better, though, and you are sure way of recapturing the past. you will again. Yo u will wake up one morning flush with health and energy. Yo ur Yo u decide to sandwich the Calvina novel between Bohumil Hrabal's I mind will be sharp, your muscles strong, and you will be able to live as though Served the King of England and Walter Tevis's Mockingbird, on the border sepa­ you have never known the slightest trouble. rating the literary fi ction from the fantasy, so that anybody who looks at your Yo u catch sight of your image in a window, straighten your gig line, bookshelves will be able to make up his own mind which side of the divide it smooth a cowlick back from your temple. Yo u swat at an insect hovering by is meant to lie on. Yo u square the books' edges. You see a speck of dust on the your ear. wood and press it away with the pad of your finger. Yo u have ordered a table lamp from the furniture shop a few doors Yo u think again, with a quality of sudden disclosure, about the wrong­ down, and you stop inside to see if it has arrived. The sales assistant taps a number call you received, the way the man's words came pouring into your ear, couple of keys on his computer. "It's set to ship from our warehouse on the first the fierceemotion in his voice as he said, "Oh God, I didn't mean to trouble of October, " he tells you. "We've already got your phone number in the sys­ you." At first, when the ember flares open in your chest, you imagine it is your tem. Yo u have my word, we'll call you the moment it comes over the transom." conscience bothering you. But what, you wonder, did you do wrong? Is he using the word transom correctly? Yo u're not sure. You repeat the Yo u stagger and throw your arm against the bookcase, taking just word to yourself so that you won't forget to look it up in the dictionary when enough care to keep the books from overturning as your legs buckle beneath you get home. Tr ansom. Tr ansom. Tr ansom. It is at that moment, on the last you. closed m of the third repetition, that you lose your balance. Yo u feel something inside you becoming infinitely fine andsub tle. Yo ur heart seems to drift right Go on to page 27. through you, and it diffuses into the open air.

Tu rn to page 27.

12 13 The bricks covering the plaza are a deep chocolate brown. They seem Susannah answers her phone on the third ring. As always, for the first to absorb every trace of sunlight, magnify every trace of sound, and you play few steps of the conversation, her voice sounds flat and exhausted. It begins the same game you have played a hundred times before, walking so that your to take on vigor, though, as the two of you settle into your familiar rhythm of footsteps fall parallel with them. Yo u make it almost as far as the coffee house jokes and questions, trial anecdotes, split-second pauses. She tells you about before you begin to feel a restlessness in your joints and have to quit. Yo u veer her computer, which has been, as she puts it, backsliding. "It's been-what? off toward the public library. Chestnut saplings have been planted in gaps in Three months? And already I've got another virus. This time what happens is the paving, and you approach one of them from between a pair of benches, the screen will lock up for a minute, and when it comes back on, the cursor ducking beneath a little elastic suspension of its leaves. An ambulance starts will just stick there. Motionless. Like a lump. Of gum. When I try to move it, racing its siren. You step out from under the branches just in time to watch it it only selects everything. I was just getting ready to unplug it and take it into tear away, a big white box that takes the corner with improbable speed. the computer place when the phone rang. Speaking of which, what's up with A cluster of blackbirds goes beating into the air as you approach, you?" scattering across the roofs of the buildings and reconverging in the arms of a "Well, I had an unusual conversation this morning," you say, and you willow. A bicyclist pumps his way slowly up the hill that runs past the Methodist tell her about the wrong-number call and how the man's voice seemed to church, his legs moving in a kind of exultant midair parade march. weaken and grow ragged the moment you told him who you were. "Or told Yo ur left shoe is beginning to float free of your heel, so you prop your him who I wasn 't, I guess I should say. To be honest, I felt kind of bad for him. foot on the ledge of a low window to tighten the laces. Yo u look up to see a girl Guilty, if you can believe it." stepping into the bead store. She is wearing a shirt the color of Dijon mustard. "It sounds to me like he was having a hard day, and the pressure of it Yo u are just close enough to read the message printed across the back: LIFE IS A finally got to him. Maybe you should feel bad for him. That doesn't mean you BEDTIME STORY. did anything wrong." If life is a bedtime story, then what kind of story is death, you want to "I know, I know. But still-" ask her? A horror story? A fairy tale? Or simply a mystery? She has known you for so long that you don't even have to finish the There is a loud crack, and you jerk your head around. A kid whose thought. A muffled noise of understanding escapes from her throat, just loud skateboard has come out from under him stands up from the bricks. It looks as enough for you to hear. Outside a pair of boys are tossing a soccer ball back and if he fell trying to skim along the top of a bike rack, but he does not appear to forth as they walk down the street. One of them hunkers down over the ball, be hurt. He levers the board up with his foot and backs up to try again. dribbling it off to the curb in a diagonal, then swivels around and backboards it You, on the other hand, have suddenly become dizzy. You lean against off the side of the other's head, giving the sign for two points. The second boy the window and wait for your vision to stop spinning. When did you became throws his arm out and says, "You're an asshole, Morganbarron." so fragile that merely twisting your head around could make you feel as if you Yo u think about the poster of Michael Jordan you used to see in the were about to collapse? you wonder. window of every shoe store. A man walks by with his son, a boy no older than seven, who says, "I Yo u think about the fragrance of freshly mown grass, a smell of shock would be awesome at that. I want a skateboard. Can I have a skateboard?" and abundance. "You can have a soccer ball, or you can have an Xbox game, but you Susannah allows the silence to fill its own time. "So I'm wondering if can't have a skateboard." I should replace the lamp in my bedroom. It's got this straight-angled, the-fu­ The boy gives the pavement a scuff of his sneaker. "Soccer is boring. ture-is-now look I'm not so sure I like anymore." Xbox is boring. I never get to do anything awesome." "Does it still give off light? Is it still standing upright? If so, you And his father answers, "When you're older, you can buy yourself all shouldn't replace it. See, I hate this idea that everything needs to be traded in the skateboards you want." for something else. I can't imagine a better way to waste a life." It is a declaration, not a question, what she says next. Yo u can hear Is your adult life anything like you thought it would be? If so, turn to page 13. a hint of half-amused peevishness in her voice. "So you'd say that you're not If not, turn to page 30. wasting your life."

Would you say that you're not wasting your life? If so, turn to page 17. Would you say that you are? If so, turn to page 36.

10 11 Th e Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device : A Choose- Yo ur- Own-Adventure Story Kevin Brockmeier

Yo u are returning the milk to the refrigerator when your head begins to swim. Red shapes like semi-transparent scarves flare open in your vision, brim­ ming over with light before they dwindle away. For a moment you think you are going to collapse. Yo u put your hand on the counter to steady yourself. Yo ur heart ticks down the seconds like a bomb. Then the sensation passes, and it is an ordinary day again. It is the sort of thing that used to happen to you all the time: you would stand up too quickly from a chair, and the whole room would pitch to one side as the blood rushed to your head. The first time you heard this expres­ sion, you were seven years old. Yo u stumbled getting up to take your turn at the chalkboard, and your teacher asked, "What's wrong? Is the blood rushing to your head?" The phrase was confusing to you. Yo u imagined your face turning an exotic, beet-like red, like the picture on the cover of The Ve ry Hungry Cater­ pillar. Mrs. Pritchard-that was your teacher's name. Yo u remember how surprised you were when she moved away with her husband over the summer, the first of whoknows how many people you never imagined you would never see again. It is a clear Saturday in late September, with insects stitching patterns over the grass and an invisible jet etching a narrow trail in the sky. For once you have no work to catch up on, no chores to finish, no errands to run. Yo u head upstairs to the bathroom, where you brush your teeth and comb your hair. There is a tree outside your window swaying slightly as the air filters through its branches, like a dancer who can't keep still no matter how hard she tries. Yo u think about the cool silence of a concert hall before the first note falls over the audience. Yo u think about a woman you once saw lifting her skirt up to her knees as she waded into the green water of a river.

If you decide to put your shoes on and go out for a walk, turn to page 14. If you would ra ther spend a quiet morning at home, turn to page 31.

9 For the Statue ...

Zachary Mosher

Empty of death like truth

They say they can glorify me at the scene with a trash bag dumping the debris of a god into Eidos

I say it was the man in the image doing nothing since I am not I, but an outline he cannot enter.

Air touches fault lines, a sharp prick in my lungs.

Vistas under extreme tension walk me into the sea.

All night the road offered as if a dark hand trembling you see I'm holding this thought for a person yet unborn so I think I'm cracking up already with many chances to steal it I may never get this second body right the devil lies crushed on his rose the sediment of his memory already sinking now time sews up the wound between twelve and one o'clock the moon lit by a tail missing its wick like a ship without a crew

Pizarro emerges from the back lamps of vision wanting to charge his concrete eyes into me

7