This American Bizarre by Adam Sword a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty

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This American Bizarre

Adam Sword

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

May 2019

ii This American Bizarre

Adam Sword This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Professor Papatya Bucak, Department of English, and has been approved by all members of the supervisory committee. It was submitted to the facultyof the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

P��FA� Thesis Advisor

Eric Berlatsky, Ph.D. Chair, English Department

/2Michael Horsw¢h.D. #;_.-i� Dean, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

111

Acknowledgments The author would like to sincerely thank all of the members of his thesis committee, for their guidance over the past three years, in and out of writing workshops.

To Andrew Furman, your interdisciplinary workshop and in-class focuses have helped diversify my writing extensively. To Becka Mckay, your support and guidance as a teacher, and as the overseer of the writing program, have benefitted me and allowed me to grow as a student under your tutelage. Finally, to Papatya Bucak to whom I owe a great deal: thank you for countless moments of guidance, insight, and encouragement which have proved invaluable to me as a writer and teacher.

Abstract

Author: Adam Sword

Title: This American Bizarre

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Ayşe Papatya Bucak, MFA

Degree: Master of Fine Arts

Year: 2019

This is a collection of fiction that draws on the author’s own experiences as a western foreigner in America, while also taking inspiration from many different art forms and their depictions of American life, as experienced by outsiders.

The themes of this collection center around the discord and disparity prevalent between British and American life. The other key theme in this collection is how violence seems to be simmering, always near at hand, in a country like America. In this way, many of the stories allude to a kind of violence taken to be something unique to American society, which often goes unrealized or unacted upon, or sometimes unravels accordingly.

The thesis project itself considers how these stories could only take place in

America today, and how the aforementioned cultural discord, or disharmony, connects the narratives with a shared feeling of cultural commentary about the country as a whole.

This American Bizarre

I-44 Remains Shut Outside of Joplin ...... 1

Suburban Nonsensical ...... 15

Nothing Here Can Hurt You ...... 34

Giant Eyeball ...... 46

By Carousel 5 ...... 57

The Contrarian ...... 62

Jones County Lowlands ...... 78

U.S Tour ...... 90

Backboard Confessions ...... 102

Ligature ...... 107

Hallamite ...... 110

I-44 Remains Shut Outside of Joplin

If America has a beating heart, it might well be Joplin, Missouri (depending on who you ask in Joplin, Missouri).

To Lana, there seemed a layer of comprehension—call it an inherent, hard-coded access to Americana, lifeblood—that she couldn’t fathom, only partly harvest.

Joplin sprang to life after the discovery of lead sometime around 1870 before the

Civil War, whereas Lana had sprung to life sometime during her Mother’s trip to Florida, circa Spring Break, 1989.

Snow was falling in ribbons and rage, beautiful in the way you know will stymie you shortly.

In the gift shop, center of town, Lana browsed aimlessly while taking refuge from the weather. At the rear of the store was a café serving hot drinks. To move further from the store front was to move deeper into the heat from a furnace.

“Where you from honey?” asked the middle-aged woman behind the counter. Was it the look on her face, her appearance, the life spent outside of Missouri? Was she that obviously foreign? Yet it seemed welcoming, this lady’s tone, as she stood there holding a pot of water and grinning in spite of the blizzard outside.

“Hi – I’m from England, the north of England,” Lana said.

The woman looked confused, as if a foreign language were being spoken to her – must have been the Geordie accent. Lana slowed her diction in order to be comprehended.

Joplin was close enough to the Oklahoma state line to not seem as isolated as the middle of the state might. But the fact remained that the major ways in and out of town were barred so that Lana could have been anywhere sequestered. This woman, despite her confusion, seemed warm. Lana’s first experience of the people of Joplin, where she was until further notice, could therefore be called friendly.

“Welcome honey – stranded here? Can’t help but think there’s something more going on than a radioactive spill myself. Coffee?”

Lana didn’t know how radioactive materials were transported across America, or transported in any country really, but it seemed consequential somehow, as if some deadly harbinger that she and nuclear waste would encroach upon small-town Missouri from differing directions at the same time. Not usually one to overburden herself with such thoughts, it terrified her to have to be here.

“Yeah, it’s bizarre – I was trying to make it to Arizona by way of Amarillo.”

“Took the scenic route, huh? Where were you coming from?”

“Good question, kind of from everywhere. I’ve been touring the country at random, hitting people up on the internet and going from there. Couchsurfing, mostly. Started in

Atlanta.”

The woman seemed to only be understanding parts of the conversation. Lana felt herself blushing, conscious of how foreign she must seem.

“Over the holidays too? Have you no family here, honey? You’re a long way from

England if you’re in Joplin, that’s for sure.”

“My father is in Amarillo,” she said softly, for the first time aloud. It freaked her out to say it.

“Aw honey, let’s hope you make it outta here before Christmas then. Milk?”

Bonnie and Clyde had once engaged in a police shootout in Joplin before fleeing once more into outlaw life. But now they were as long gone as the lead deposits that had birthed the town. Lana thought of her mother now, dreaming of her faded splendor, her youthful dalliances in America; a hard thing to fathom when you spent your subsequent adulthood in hand-to-mouth existence in a north-east England council house. Were you ever further from paradise than when you’d had just a minute taste of it?

Back in the traffic jam on the edge of town, the heater in her rental car had ceased working. As if all of the bad luck were congealing together like wet sand in a jug, she had sworn loudly even as the Caution! signs came into view: “I-44 Shut W’Bound Beyond

Joplin.” She’d tuned the radio, shivering. A smarmy American voice could be heard over the first local station she tuned to.

“That’s right ladies, gentleman, good listeners of the tri-county area – all travel has come to a halt as I-44 is shut in both directions in and out of Joplin, some callers are saying for a rumored oil or nuclear waste spillage, but we will have more as soon as we hear it.

Storm warning still in effect for Ottawa County, Oklahoma, essentially grounding you in

Joplin if you happen to be anywhere within city limits. Stay with us here on TCR for traffic updates as and when then they arise. Traffic at a near standstill going north also. We recommend holing up out of the cold wherever you can in Joplin, good listeners!”

The gridlocked section of the road, between standstill and U-turn back to Joplin, had allowed for Lana to research where she was likely to be for the foreseeable future.

First, she’d found a local office of the budget rental car company she’d booked with, and so had aimed herself there, a short walk down Main Street from the center of town. She’d

learnt some basic knowledge of Joplin, Missouri from internet searches alone, before her phone signal had cut out altogether.

‘The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.’ That was the Missouri motto, and she saw it on a large sticker on the side of the large coffee machine that the woman now steamed milk at. It was odd to Lana, despite her familiarity with America, that each state seemed to swear by their own sovereign mottos (stranger, even, than adhering to their own laws).

The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law. It seemed a little less rousing than New Hampshire’s ‘Live Free or Die’ – but wasn’t freedom relative? It was the season of goodwill and she was loggerheaded somewhere in the central-southern United States.

Whatever had happened out on the edge of town was seemingly affecting the cellphone towers too, so she was entrenched in every way, with a debilitating snowfall expected within the vicinity. Not for the first time she pondered the existence of signs: maybe she should abandon the notion of meeting her father. Maybe she should forever hold him in her mind the same way her mother did: the one grainy photo taken on a Fort Lauderdale beach, his rippling muscles, his youthful face. Or the one Facebook profile photo of him, years older, haggard now. Oscillating between two cultures had always been a habit of

Lana’s, and her mother could not let the man go because he’d signed the necessary paperwork to allow his accidental daughter dual-citizenship. That alone was his sole bequeathing to Lana; his only ever admission that he had indeed impregnated the slender young English woman that March day back in ’89. He’d given his daughter the gift of

America. The gift of relative freedom.

“One coffee with hot milk,” said the woman, breaking Lana from her reverie.

4 “Thank you,” said Lana, sliding over the cash.

“Amarillo, huh?” the woman said once more.

“Yep,” said Lana taking her change. She took a seat as the woman went back to cleaning something in the sink by the counter.

“IT’S THE END OF DAYS. YAHWEH CANNOT STOP THIS IMPENDING

EVIL,” shouted a man from the doorway.

“Oh, get outta here Stanley,” said the woman without even looking up from the sink. “We all know you’re not religious.”

Stanley turned and left, his clothes scruffy and his enthusiastic shouts echoing back from the cold street as he took off down Main.

“He’s a screwy one, honey, sorry about all that. He walks up and down Main come rain or shine,” the woman said over to Lana.

The light was dwindling now out there. The sky was turning sepia, tinted cold.

Looking through the glass at the line of cars coming into town, nowhere else to go, Lana shivered. It was impossible to be truly stuck anywhere, right?

She wondered what her father would do when she arrived on his doorstep in the days post-Christmas. It was a time to reset, approaching the dawn of another year. He had not responded to her messages on Facebook, but had friend requested her about a year previously, and this, coupled with his decision all those years ago to bestow upon her the legality of American citizenship, had caused her to seek him out. She had been to America maybe a dozen times in her life, always someplace new, a city or a state that offered variety on Sunderland, or differed from her last trip. She didn’t have a set career, but bounced around from one job to another long enough after her degree to fund her North American

excursions, and while she had long been curious about her father—and long thankful for the ease of her entry through U.S customs—she had never tried to seek him out until now.

Sure, she’d thought about doing so, but now that Aunt Grace had remarried, and her mother was approaching what would surely be her last few years alive, it seemed prescient to do so: to seek out her father and see what other family she might have. Even the notion of inching her way westward to discover who her kin were seemed American Dreamish, and though she had the passport, she still felt like that were a particular notion she could only yearn for, never quite realizing fully. What was more American than yearning for an identity? It was the voicing it aloud in her Geordie-North East accent that stripped the notion of its Americanness.

It was cold outside certainly, but Lana had her coffee and her winter clothes, so she followed Stanley out of the store, keeping back from him as he made his way along the street screaming his screed. The day’s last edges were being folded over by winter dark, and she stopped to take in her surroundings, as the snowfall stuttered around her.

Across from her, a large mural on a white background bore in large print “I am

Joplin”. Lana got her phone from her pocket, and took a photograph, noting that her phone still lacked any signal. At the very least, when it came back again, she could post this photo online, a memento of her brief stopover in this odd town she would have otherwise passed right by.

“Maybe we are all Joplin,” said Stanley, stopping next to her. Lana once again felt herself unable to tap into that identity, the one that would drive a Joplinite to look at those painted red letters and feel an upwelling of pride. She looked at him and saw this man, who

moments ago was screaming end-of-days-nonsense in the store. His features seemed friendly, the look on his face more one of mischief than lunacy.

Cars were stuttering along behind one another, coughing out fumes in the shrill late afternoon. It was teeth chattering weather, and the periodic honking of car horns suggested that she was not the only displaced person here. But her car was being repaired by the rental company, who had said they would contact her in due time to pick up a replacement.

“It could be worse,” Stanley said with a shrug. “At least it isn’t tornado season.”

He chuckled and went on his way again.

The Christmas lights flickered on all around her, framing the vehicles whose drivers responded accordingly to turn on their lights as if in tandem. They were stranded people all linked by their circumstances, their setting, the festive displays around them. The season of goodwill had bestowed upon them their own desert island fantasy, the reality of which was this small-town America, where even now, in mounting symphonic frustration they began to lean on their horns even more, damning the urban planning of the place where they now felt isolated. They were less alone than they’d ever be, bunched together in tornado alley, USA. Lana thought to herself: hundreds if not thousands all packed into the city limits of Joplin, MO, sharing an experience that was not about anything other than dumb luck and timing. The cold, the frisson of a potential nuclear threat, seemingly-mad

Stanley, her yearning for a father figure, her yearning for a better mother figure – consequential and circumstantial. What would a tornado look like from ground level, from right inside its twirling yaw?

Disorientation was nothing new. At the basic etymological level, she had been disoriented all her life, lacking a sense of direction, and now here she was quite physically

bereft of one. Her father’s gift had been an advantage for her, one of the legal loopholes of

American citizenry, yet it had deemed her disorientated from the time she’d first learned of her background, when she’d filled out the forms with help from her Auntie Grace, when she’d received the U.S passport in return. In finding out about who she was she’d lost the tethering to England, to Sunderland, that had marked her youth. A tornado could pick her up and spin her for miles, deposit her just across the Oklahoma state line (“Labor conquers all things”) or as near afield as Kansas (“To the stars through difficulty”) but it wouldn’t make her any less lost, no more found.

The cold was not the kind her body could get used to, and she found herself shivering as she turned away from the red lettering. The cars weren’t moving and their horn ornamentals continued with aplomb as she began the walk-up Main Street once more. She hadn’t gone far when a large Route 66 mural caught her attention. This seemed another marker of Joplin’s Americana. She loved the feeling of symbolism, the mural a smaller one beneath a larger one of a vintage green car driving the highway, passing roadside cacti. She could make out Stanley’s voice back a way, and the chorus of cars, some soft Christmas music playing from a nearby establishment. A woman approached around the corner of the intersecting street and stopped before the mural, casting her glance at Lana. She wore a puffy Parka jacket, her fur-lined hood around her head, but her face was discernible still, a vibrancy in it despite the age-lines and wrinkles. Kind eyes.

“Stranded here too?” she asked.

“Yup, Historic Route 66 eh?” she responded, motioning to the large murals.

“Oh yeah, the real American experience,” the woman said, in what seemed an acknowledgment of Lana’s foreignness without desire to delve further.

“People go mad as soon as their usual channels of travel are shut to them, they’ll be looting before long.”

“All the hotels will be full I bet,” Lana said, not really sure what else to say.

“All the hotels yeah, all the flights in and out of the regional airport that haven’t been cancelled. A clusterfuck that’s for sure.”

“You’re from here?” asked Lana.

“Kind of, I’ve been here long enough to be familiar with it.”

“Anything like this ever happen before?”

“Not on this scale, we get tornado warnings and car crashes sure, but seldom all at once like this and not enough to barricade everybody inside.”

“Yeah, clusterfuck seems a good term.”

“The mystery creates the panic. Buzzwords like nuclear waste and severe weather, road closures. Especially in the buildup to the holidays. People love order so much that they’ll make order out of their disorder, call it by other names.”

Lana wasn’t sure how else to continue. She felt liminal, having woken up in one time zone and now rooted in another, even technology having ceased functional operation.

If technology wasn’t working, it created the connotation that the country wasn’t working.

That was the twenty-first century of today: order, disorder, disordered order. I’m all out of order, here in nuclear Joplin, Lana thought.

Lana felt a part of America in a way she hadn’t yet, looking at the Route 66 sign and hearing the noise around, comfortable there with this woman despite the chill in the air, the uncertainty of how long she would be stranded. It seemed cinematic to her somehow: EXT: Small-Town America in Winter.

The procession of cars seemed to stretch down streets in erratic patterns: parallel lines intersecting adjacent lines, the backdrop of Christmas lights and the soft echoing of festive music, the darkening day and the incessant honking. Dissonant sound in downtown

Joplin. Lana thought to herself, does it sound like this everywhere? Up and down the country, the different time zones and the different geographical makeups of America, does it sound like congestion and Christmas, like the death of the year and the birth of something new, ends and beginnings and lives colliding concentrically – circles with America at their center.

The woman kept talking now, about the strangeness of the so-called nuclear spillage, how lack of confirmation had people frustrated, a little scared. The people of

Joplin could put up with any natural act of devastation it seemed, but they were numb to the idea that nuclear material be that close – that toxic waste be one edge of the box that confined them within city limits, what had them all spooked. Lana appreciated the smooth quality of the woman’s voice, her commentary on the citizens’ trains of thought. Lana responded, in kind, at the times that seemed opportune, and most of why she liked this woman was because she seemed to clearly understand both Lana’s accent, and her disposition towards being interrogated about the oddities of her enunciation. It was a quality lacking in a lot of inquisitive Americans. Not quite what she’d call tact, because people had a right to be curious, but a human understanding based, most likely, off of a character trait that Lana wordlessly exhibited.

The woman pulled a wireless radio from inside her coat. Snow started getting heavy again, no longer fluffy but now of substance, the type that crunched underfoot before long.

Yet another cause, if it kept up, of bombardment within Joplin, within Missouri.

10 “Let’s see what those dopes over at TCR have to say about things, hopefully there’s

some kind of update,” Parka Woman said, turning up the sound and extending the antenna

outwards. It was old tech by Lana’s standards, but it made sense given the cell towers, and

this thing looked rugged enough to survive an excursion up Everest. The end of days in

Joplin were more than manageable, it seemed, given that the same annoying voice from earlier soon blared out to them.

“Our headline news this hour - I-44 Remains Shut Outside of Joplin, Missouri.

Good listeners, this road closure extends in all directions immediately outside of city limits,

meaning only Exit 6, is open, forcing vehicles into Joplin itself. We do have conformation

now, of an oil and nuclear spillage, near the Oklahoma border on I-44. Government officials assure us here at the station that all is under control and any threat to public health has been eradicated. Workers are rushing to have the road reopened as soon as possible, but at present must adhere to regulated safety controls to ensure the continued safety of citizens. Please stay posted for updates as and when they arise, from the team here at TCR.”

“Well there you have it,” the woman finally turned to face Lana fully. “How would you like to come in out of the cold honey? I own a restaurant over there, about a block away.” She motioned back in the direction she had come from, and Lana, lacking a better option, obliged her offer. She was still holding her coffee cup, though by now it was nearly depleted, cold to the touch of her lips.

They crunched through the fast settling snow for only a few minutes before they arrived at a dimly lit sign which was hard to make out from the snow flurry that had gathered atop. Parka Woman held the door for her, and together they went inside.

Nobody was in there, but the warm was welcoming again after the shrill temperature of Joplin’s streets.

“Take a seat anywhere, honey, I’ll put some tea on,” said her new host.

“Thanks so much. What was your name by the way?” Lana called after her, but she was in the back somewhere and didn’t give an answer if she had heard the question at all.

“My name is Macy,” said the woman, coming back into the front of house, holding a tray with a teacup and three cups. “I was just rushing to get us both warmer. Here you go, hot tea. Just what you like where you’re from, huh?” She removed her hood now for the first time, pulling off the parka jacket itself in one motion that suggested she wasn’t conscious of her appearance. Lana had seen her mother in all manner of circumstances, all kinds of physical states, so nothing shocked her, and she liked to think she appeared nonplussed when Macy revealed her bald, misshapen head.

“Thanks so much for the tea – I’m Lana,” she said, taking her cup.

Macy looked coy for a moment and then poured them both some tea, leaving the pot next to the empty cup on the table between them.

“Had a tumor the size of Texas on my brain a few years back,” she said, before taking a sip of her tea, “cold doesn’t suit me too much.”

“My mother, she had a bleed on her brain a few years back, debilitated her ever since – too much heroin starved her head of oxygen,” Lana said, stunned at how harsh the description seemed, contrasted against Macy’s soft American accent. Her own Geordie blare.

“Woah, life sucks huh?” said Macy.

“It can do, I’m sorry you went through an ordeal like that,” I can be tender too,

Lana thought.

“You hear the town crier when you were out there?” asked Macy, smiling.

“Stanley, right?”

“Yeah, he’s my brother. He’s a little on the nose, not completely right in the head himself, but he’s harmless. But he gets fidgety, especially when the weather is like this. I imagine he’ll come on in any minute now.”

“Think we’ll be stuck in Joplin for a long time?”

“Hopefully not all the way through Christmas. But hey, tell me about yourself, we might be sheltering here for a while anyway.”

Lana made to clear her throat, to tell about her father, Amarillo, her route so far. It all seemed a bit odd, having just met this woman, but she looked over her teacup now and noted once more the warmth in Macy’s eyes.

The door opened and in came Stanley. He looked in need of thawing, and Macy motioned him over. He sat without a sound, looked at Lana for a moment, and then to his sister.

“World is ending out there. Nuclear apocalypse.”

“Now Stanley,” said Macy, “Don’t go scaring our guest any more than she already is.”

Lana sighed, looked up at this odd duo, and wondered how long she’d be in Joplin for. Were you really stranded if nobody was expecting you, if where you were going and you came from seemed a little disparate? If your own route from A to B, and onward, likely lacked the luster of whatever had befallen these siblings. Was it the life spent inside Joplin?

In Tornado Alley? Middle America? Was it all of the accumulation of a person’s life that lifted them from one experience and onto the next?

“Tell us about yourself,” Macy continued, “We don’t bite honey. With all that’s happening here, it’s out there you have to be afraid of. You’re in America after all.”

It freaked her out to tell anybody her story, but she had as much time as she wanted with the town and its exits at their wintery standstill.

Lana cleared her throat and began to speak.

Suburban Nonsensical

Sandy could just smell it, one of Richard Gerwin’s weekly barbecues, the scent of griddled pork convincing everybody that this was how life was lived. No hustle no bustle, only the dull and daily aspects of outer city living. What else could Sandy detect through those finely tuned senses? The perpetual grumble of a lawnmower, that sound that never quite subsided during the summer, every night you could still hear the blades slicing away in your head even as they re-awoke you by morning. Then there was the incessant variation of children’s joy and despair. Mingled within was the whipping spray of an erratic sprinkler. These were the daytime cacophonies or the odor of evening fall. What came with the night? What did this quaint haven churn out by dark? Well, mainly the secrets and predispositions of sleaze that were perhaps more prevalent out with the city.

For example, Sandy knew that when Gerry Hansen came in and turned on the lamp, that goddamned flickering lamp in the front room, it meant that Mrs. Hansen was headed out to yoga class, just as surely as Sandy’s own mother knew, for it was then that she too declared that she was off to yoga, or spin class, then she would hightail it straight across the road to fuck Gerry in his wife’s absence.

What Sandy frequently wondered, was if anybody else knew of the under layers of suburban society? As depicted on the television, in the soaps his mum watched, it was a free-for-all of extramarital activity, of thinly veiled friendships and constant competition.

Did nobody spot it right under his or her noses? Maybe it was because the people of the cul-de-sac were always turning said noses up at something or other. Sandy knew without

ever having to experience it elsewhere, that this was what it must be like in every similar or near identical neighborhood. There was some grandiosity that people liked to lend themselves for living just on the periphery of the cities they commuted into. Some superiority they adopted due to having a house exactly the same as the other eleven on the block.

Off went his mother now, and Sandy wheeled his computer chair over to his roller blinds, peeking out, seeing her dart over the road, the flickering light from the Hansen’s front room like cover fire laid down by a comrade. Was he the only one who noticed the clandestine nature of suburban life come nighttime?

He had started noticing the strain this affair was starting to take on his mother. To be honest, it was impressive that his mom and Gerry had still not been caught in the act in half a decade or so. His father seemed to notice nothing.

So mired down in routine were these suburbanites, that in all these years, every

Tuesday and Thursday come eight o’clock, they all did one thing or another thing and nobody truly knew what the other people they despised or envied or competed with were doing. Maybe it was because all of them were off cheating; cuckolding and being cuckolded in equal measure. For example, Sandy did not know where his father went on the nights he wasn’t holed up in his office.

But his mother had been uptight of late. Take this morning, as he had entered the kitchen she had spun around in surprise from her position peeking out through the kitchen window.

“What the hell kiddo? Try knocking once in a while.”

“Um, this is the kitchen Ma, I hardly need to knock to announce my arrival from upstairs.”

“Well, just be careful or you’ll give me a heart attack. You gonna move your lazy ass today at all by the way? Go into the city or something.”

He’d made himself some eggs and come back up here to his room. There was a distinct scent in the room, like week old deli meat and unwashed sheets. But he liked it that way, most of the time at least.

There was also his interaction with Gerry last week. His mother’s lover had been throwing a football around with one of the kids from the block and as Sandy had come out for the morning paper he had blushed as if the mere presence of his mistress’ son was enough to balk at.

Perhaps a few close shaves had startled his mother and Gerry, or perhaps the whole thing had grown stagnant. Maybe with age, came a lack of libido, or cheating on one fifty- something man with another a few years younger got a bit tedious when there were even younger and more able options out there, though of course, that may mean venturing out of this suburban drama they had made for themselves. Sandy had never cared about it whilst at college, whilst absorbed by the community of college. The sleaze just seemed to be less forced, like anything you knew of or were a part of was more acceptable, because it had some correlation with the unending pulse that was the city. But he noticed it now, as he lived back home again, another by-product of a Degree in the Arts.

He often wondered what Gerry’s wife Trudy thought about it all. She wasn’t a bad looking woman by all accounts. That said, she’d always treated Sandy with a certain amount of disdain. Last week he had answered the door to her as she came by selling gift

baskets for some charitable cause she was fronting. “Hey Andy,” she’d said not working hard to mask her disappointment that it was he who had appeared from inside the house.

He hadn’t corrected her.

“Hey, Mrs. Hansen, how can I help you?”

“Oh, you know, just selling these gift baskets, is anyone else in?”

“Afraid not Trudy.” He had said her name then to throw her off, but all it did was cause her to turn her nose up at him and retreat without another word. He had gone back inside shaking his head at the ridiculous lives they all led, pouring himself another bowl of cereal and getting back to his online game.

It was a bleak thing, to have moved back home at twenty-three, and feel as helpless as he had ever felt in his life. All but ignored by his father, who seemingly felt that by providing an allowance and a roof over his son’s head, all other paternal duties were null and void. Treated indifferently by his mother too, not that he bore any grudges against she and Gerry because they themselves were just by-products of the lifestyle they seemed to be contented with. Hell, the only person he liked interacting with (sparingly) was the little

Gerwin girl. She raced around the cul-de-sac on her push-scooter most of the day, so when he occasionally left his room for air, he would sometimes have brief conversations with her. She was a nice kid.

The framed photos, twice annual visits from in-laws, the Sunday cookouts, contemptuous morning nods of neighbors at mailboxes, the bi-weekly dinner parties in a different house each time, the golf trips, the spa trips, the manicures, the pedicures, the yoga, the affairs, the chatterbox women and the boastful men; this was Suburbia, and Sandy failed to see how he fit in, other than as a spectator.

His breath felt short in his lungs now, he stood up from his swivel chair but did so too fast, tumbling and grasping for anything to hold on to. His hand found the roller blinds and tore them from the window as he hit the carpet. He began to chuckle to himself. He hadn’t left the neighborhood in over a week now.

What if they were caught? If they ceased their affair, suburban life as they knew it might likewise grind to a halt. He imagined it from Gerry and his mother’s perspective.

Perhaps at first, they had seemed to be soaring, exploring such heights as they hadn’t in years. The new way to feel youthful was to ascend this way, thrust upwards with projectile force. But were they now falling, Icarus-like, plummeting faster than their lie could carry them?

He hated that he didn’t have a job and hated more that he had no burning desire to get one. Or was that true? Did he like the solitude he imposed upon himself? Sandy didn’t know anymore. Time itself seemed to have ceased functional operation. Clambering shakily to his feet with a last lingering look out over the cul-de-sac, Sandy hoped that as long as that light continued its gun barrel flashes in the Hansen’s front room, everything would stay as it was.

______

The little Gerwin girl was riding around on her scooter again. Sipping her morning cup of coffee, Trudy watched the child through the kitchen window. The coffee was a little too hot to drink fast. She liked to watch the children giddy with summertime exhilaration. It made her nostalgic for a time that had never come. Turning away she went upstairs, grabbing her phone as she did. She had to look her best, a lot of gift baskets to sell to stay

on target for next month’s fundraiser. She loved the fundraiser; it was the one time of year she got to be the center of attention for the outlying city neighborhoods.

“Hey Lara,” she said, always amused by she and Lara Gerwin’s laziness. They lived three doors down from one another but resorted to phone calls to make plans. Today was

Lara’s day off from door-to-door selling.

“Hi Trudy, all set for today? We need a big push, I was thinking for the next week we should veer over by the Dairy Queen, the eastern neighborhoods are untouched thus far,” Lara said back, though her voice sounded distant.

“Did I catch you at a bad time?” Trudy asked, upbeat at the prospect of wondering out of the shadow of the Morton’s place. She’d begrudgingly gone by to sell a gift basket last week, but it had been the boy, Randy, who had answered. She felt queasy at the sight of him. That was why they were behind on their targets, she’d been perturbed by his presence and had come home for a long bath. She looked at the bath now from her place in the en-suite doorway.

“Sorry Trudy yeah I’ll call you back, Macy’s not out back and I can’t hear her downstairs.”

“I saw her out on her scooter not five minutes ago Lara,” she said, but Lara had hung up.

Oh well, thought Trudy, reveling in the sight of her bathtub. That was her place of solitude. She opened the medicine cabinet, as if willed by an addict’s hand. She couldn’t remember ever having done so before. It was all Gerry’s prescriptions and medications. To be a healthy middle-aged man required an alarming amount of remedies. She spotted a prescription for Sildenafil; the small print stating that it was for erectile dysfunction.

She and Gerry had never had children—indeed they could not—though this was something she had never fully disclosed to her significant other. How could she? She was barren, yet how could he not know truly? For a few years they had tried intermittently and ever unsuccessfully to have kids. Then, before each knew it, life was what it was and the ease of it remained even if the passion became dormant. They still slept in the same bed, especially when friends or family came to visit, but never romantically. The ease then that a good income can bring you is not just decided in monetary terms. Perhaps the influx of cash comes at the cost of passion, the smell of cash and the effects of it more than the marital thrill that delves from spousal copulation. Yet still they snuck around each other when it came to the mundane parts of their union. Gerry, convinced that his wife was unknowing of how much he drank, liked to discard of all his beer and whisky bottles in their neighbors, the Perry’s, recycling bin. She would say she was off to yoga when really, she would go and do anything else that could be done alone.

She understood the lies more than anything. She knew but was loathe to think about

Gerry and Agnes Morton. She knew without ever having to have it confirmed, which was the best kind of knowing, because without full confirmation she still felt that it did not have to, and indeed could not, be fully visualized. Stood there in the bathroom, she thrust the container of tablets back where they had been. She realized that she was delusional. Hidden in plain sight! Know without knowing? More like live without acknowledging. She turned to look out of the bathroom window, across the block to the Morton’s place.

Why was she so uneasy around the Morton kid? Because he had to know. The kid snooped out of his window most of the day, the blinds moving almost constantly. It amused her now, ever so slightly, that Gerry needed some kind of Viagra substitute to please his

lover. That was more than she’d gotten in years, but maybe that wasn’t so bad after all. Yet she’d had times, fleeting moments in the bathtub mostly, when she’d wonder what Agnes had that she didn’t?

Perhaps Gerry’s suspicions of his wife’s barrenness fueled his desire. Agnes had borne fruit. Yes, perhaps that was it, the fast-fading fertility giving Gerry’s lover an element of ripeness that his own wife did not possess. Maybe the thrill that if they’d done it any earlier—weeks, hours, minutes even— than when they’d started they’d have illegitimate neighbor children. Neighbors to each other’s stepsiblings and parents, everyone a step relation of one another, which would only fuel the sense of rivalry that emanated from each suburban home.

She slammed the cabinet door shut, catching sight of herself in the mirror. Her face still had some of its youthfulness, and her lips still looked sumptuous from the Botox injections she’d had three years previously. Her hair had thus far avoided signs of greying, instead fading from dark brown to a lighter shade of auburn. There were bags under her eyes; the blotched purple of life’s faded bruises.

There was no point dwelling on any of it now, as she had some gift baskets to sell.

She went back down to the kitchen, lifted the coffee mug she’d been drinking from earlier.

Looking out the window she noticed that Macy Gerwin was no longer in sight. Trudy took a sip but the liquid had gone cold as old skin.

______

Chip Bellew was having another bad day. Sometimes he considered his recent run of bad luck as some kind of credence, payback for living the rogue life of a city banker, the clichéd breadwinner role all his, as were the cocaine addiction and apparently endless philandering.

22 That’s what kind of husband and person he was. He did not even know how many women

he had violated his marriage with. He could count on one hand the men he had violated his

marriage with, but that was another matter. Nor was he the last father to be driven round

the bend by an adolescent son. Now he loved his son in a sense, but he despised him in

another. All hate was a form of love and vice versa.

“Lewis, get your ass in here and clean up your mess from last night,” he now shouted from the kitchen. Processed meat and breadcrumbs seemed to amass itself on the

countertops, more and more daily. His deadbeat son, teetering on the edge of flunking out

of school and never cleaning up after himself, caught a number of times in possession of

marijuana. Textbook case, a by-product of a man like Chip and the life he led, neglect was

as much a part of their lives as anything else. Not that he had ever meant to neglect his

family, he was just predominantly aware of his own self so often that everything paled into

lesser levels of significance. His phone vibrated, he glanced at the screen. Lara Gerwin.

“What is it, Lara, I’m running late for work?” he asked impatiently.

“Chip, oh God, it’s my Macy, I can’t find her anywhere. Richard is at work all day

and the Mercedes is getting a new front fender. Could you pick me up? I think she’s ridden

off on her scooter,” she wailed down the phone.

“Fucking hell Lara, we’ve been over this. I’m not doing favors for you. I’m not

your go to guy, I’m not your husband. And I’m not buying any of your stupid hampers

either so don’t ask.”

“Didn’t you hear me? Rich is at work. My daughter is MISSING!”

“Cut the dramatics, Lara. This isn’t some crime haven, it’s the fucking ‘burbs, she’ll be around,” he hung up the phone. Too late, Lewis had been behind him all along in the kitchen doorway. Just what he needed.

“Fuck you, Dad,” Lewis said. Chip was suddenly amazed he’d managed to keep his infidelities a secret from his son this long. He’d have patted himself on the back if the situation weren’t so fired up. It didn’t matter much though; the kid still hated him regardless. Lewis spun and bolted for the front door, which promptly slammed shut behind him with an alarming crack.

Chip jolted into motion, storming from the kitchen through to the porch in a matter of seconds, wrenching open the door in anger. To his surprise he heard his BMW roar into life, saw his son behind the wheel. His own piece of shit son robbing him of his car when, as far as Chip knew, the little fucker had never driven a day in his life. That did not stop him though, as, heavy on the accelerator, he gunned the thing into life, firing forth into the suburban morning.

The car seemed to creak and groan, as if each extended sound were another warning, a crying out for him to cease his recklessness. But he got like this and couldn’t shake it. The rage would take a hold of him. He’d nearly make sense of a situation, such as his current predicament, but then he’d remember his father or the kids at school calling him names and the rage would come back, rising like vapour. Like that scene he had just witnessed in the kitchen. It was one thing having an absentee father but another to have confirmation at last that that man you’d once adored was an unfaithful shit.

Lewis tried and almost succeeded in understanding things from his father’s perspective. Your wife is a vegetable, requires twenty-four seven care due to a freak, botched surgical operation. That’d be hard for anybody, but what does Chip Bellew do?

He ignores his kids when they need him most. Audrey was fine; she’d learnt to deal with mom’s condition by departing for the city and a job at a swanky restaurant. But here he was, a fifteen-year-old kid who needed the people around him most. Absence made him angry, but he could almost explain it. But now to find out his father had been screwing around with some other woman?

He hurtled past familiar houses and stores, the places he’d walked by his entire life.

It surprised him how easy driving was. He’d thought he only knew the basics and yet here he was. The suburban streets were quiet, which suited him. He pressed down on the pedal and felt the surge all around him. The power of this contraption was almost scary. That was one good thing about his spells of rage; they trumped every other emotion he was likely to feel. But then how was that any different to what his father did? Cover up one form of feeling with absence or neglect.

The low-lying sun cast slanting rays down upon the street, and he pulled down the visor to protect his eyes from the glint, as he’d seen his father do before on long journeys.

A small card fell out from within and dropped down by his feet. “Ah shit,” Lewis muttered aloud, reaching down to see what it was. Sound seemed to travel more slowly, as if initially blocked by all of the blood pumping in his ears. So even as his left hand groped around for the fallen card, he couldn’t immediately fathom the noises emanating from outside of the vehicle.

Then in a sudden ferocious blare his perspective shifts from the insignificant piece of parchment on the car mat. A clustered explosion of car horns bombards him, and he turns his head in every direction. He cannot take it all in, but does notice the looming bus on this, the driver’s side. Rage replaced by a very real fear, he clambers over the passenger side and opens the door in one fluid movement. He tosses himself from the moving car and the last thing he sees is the roadside, a face full of camber, and then there is nothing.

Trudy descended the porch steps, delighted that the first batch of six baskets had sold in record time. Gerry asked her one time what it was exactly she was raising funds for.

“For sick kids at Juniper Mercy Hospital, god Gerry, do you ever listen?” she had responded, rolling her eyes in dramatic fashion. She did know of some women from the neighbourhood who threw these ‘fundraisers’ as a statement more than anything else. She hoped that she wasn’t one those women. She did give all the proceeds to the hospital every year, though that didn’t stop her from feeling some level of guilt when she took heed of how much her Lexus cost or when she truly considered those Botox filled lips of hers. She felt equal parts guilty and grateful when she realized that she did the fundraising itself as a means to escape the comfortable life that she led. But then much like everything else, she suppressed those concerns.

She felt her phone begin to ring; it was Lara, returning the call from earlier. She had ta couple of missed calls from her too, but they could wait until she was back in her car.

Crossing the street to the Dairy Queen and unlocking her Lexus she heard a sudden blast of car horns, as if signifying an imminent apocalyptic disaster. The sound seemed to come from every direction, and after throwing herself against the safety of her familiar silver vehicle, Trudy allowed herself to survey the scene of the commotion. Three cars were braking suddenly, one hurtling off to the side, barrelling through a bus shelter and coming to a halt. The other two collided, and, from the junction to the left came a black

BMW. From the adjacent direction a bus began to brake but it was already too late. It appeared gargantuan in relation to the other vehicles, and awaiting the screech of colliding metal, Trudy grimaced. Time seemed to fold backwards on itself as a figure barrelled out of the BMW and the bus tore into the car a second later. Sparks and strips of metal sprayed forth like strewn litter, and a gush of blood emanated from nearby as the person from inside the BMW collided with the curb of the sidewalk. Screams filled the mid-morning air,

Trudy’s included.

“Sandy, oh Sandy, please help!” cried Lara Gerwin, darting across the road to reach him.

Sandy, one hand still in the mailbox, was unsure what to do.

“Uh, what’s up Mrs. Gerwin?” he asked.

She bounded onto his lawn and grasped his free arm. Her face was bloated from crying and her breathing was quick and panicky. He contemplated for a second fleeing back inside, to the familiar stench of his darkened bedroom, but then he decided he probably couldn’t justify it by now. Mrs. Gerwin looked pretty worried.

“It’s Macy, I can’t see her anywhere and nobody will help. Nobody is answering my calls.”

“Okay, okay slow down, where did you see her last?”

“I think she was out here on her scooter, she sometimes goes up by the park round the corner but I already checked there.”

“Ok well you stay here and look out I’ll start at the park and go from there, don’t worry Mrs. Gerwin she’ll show up.”

“Thanks, Sandy, here’s my cell if you find her,” she said, passing him one of her business cards. “Lara Gerwin – Grief Counsellor” it read, with her contact details in small print underneath. He touched her arm in return, feeling a brief surge of arousal at the contact. Then he turned away from his house and began to run. He felt propelled into action.

For the first time in days he had something to do, he could help find the little girl and return a hero to the cul-de-sac. Though in truth the kid was probably near at hand, unharmed, basking in a school-less summer day.

“Gerry, oh God, Gerry it was horrible. Please rush home. The kid’s brains were all over the sidewalk. Just a young boy, fifteen at most.” Trudy stifled a sob as she spoke to Gerry over the phone. She was aimed homewards herself. She’d never seen death at such close proximity before. Nobody else had been hurt besides the boy who had flung himself from the moving car. He had died on impact, head turned to pulp like a slushed grapefruit. Like the others at the scene she had stood in a daze, not quite comprehending the whole thing.

“Okay honey, I’ll leave now, just get home and run yourself a bath or something, it’ll all be ok. I love you,” said Gerry, hanging up the phone. See, he can still be the doting husband, she thought to herself. She felt a sudden love for him, though perhaps it was to be confused with relief, because for a few seconds there she had nearly forgotten that grizzly image of the young boy, pretty much headless. That was their marriage now; they coped together through the big things, the profound moments. Maybe that was enough. She was nearing the turn to the neighbourhood when she saw the Morton boy, walking back in the direction of home. It was odd to see him outside of the cul-de-sac. The furthest she’d seen him go was to the mailbox some mornings. She slowed down and wound the window down as she spotted young Macy Gerwin walking alongside him wheeling her scooter behind her.

“Everything ok here, Andy?”

“Oh hey Mrs. Hansen, yeah everything is fine, Macy’s mom was worried about her so she asked me to look for her. Can you tell her we are on our way back when you get in?”

“Uh sure yeah,” she said a little confused. She’d have offered them a ride but there were gift baskets filling up the back seats. She drove away and as she did so she suddenly remembered that his name was not Andy but Sandy. She laughed to herself, again thankful for the distraction from the accident back by the Dairy Queen. Pulling into the neighbourhood, she spotted Agnes Morton unloading a car full of groceries. Parking in her own driveway, Trudy then got out, seized up a gift basket and crossed over the road.

“Agnes, hey!” she shouted, her voice a little unsteady, “I came by the other day but you weren’t home, it’s that time of year again!” she motioned to the gift basket, revelling in the awkward body language Agnes exhibited.

“Oh hey, Trudy, how are you? Oh really, doesn’t seem like a year since the last one,” she responded, “Is it still the same price?”

“They’ve gone up a little actually, sixty dollars now.”

The women stood facing one another, they made brief eye contact, and Agnes looked away first. Trudy felt a surprising elation at the small victory. Agnes rooted around in her purse, pulled out her check-book. When done she muttered an awkward “Goodbye” and returned to unloading her shopping. Trudy crossed the street with a smile, because actually the gift baskets had decreased in price, they were only forty dollars now.

She made for Lara’s place to inform her of Sandy Morton’s coming across Macy up the road a little, though they’d be back any minute now anyway. The door opened before she even got to the drive.

“Why haven’t you answered my calls? It was an emergency!” Lara said angrily, but Trudy calmed her down with a wave of her hand.

“It’s fine Lara, Sandy Morton is up there with Macy, I just passed them in the car.”

“Oh, thank God,” said Lara, sitting down on her step, as Trudy did so next to her.

They peered out at their neighbourhood, this place where things never seemed to happen.

All was well on the surface; to any outsider it must have seemed like commonplace bliss.

“You honestly won’t believe what I saw happen today Lara,” started Trudy, as the two figures of Sandy and Macy rounded the bend at the top of the street. Lara breathed a sigh of relief and slumped back against the door.

“Thank god for that Morton kid,” she said, turning to Trudy, “tell me all about it afterward huh?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Trudy, shuddering once more at the image that would not leave her head. Lara began to walk toward her daughter and Sandy, who stepped out onto the road to cross towards her. Trudy stood too, making to follow her friend.

Gerry Hansen was beginning to unravel. He was feeling guilty on two fronts: it was emasculating, this balancing act of breadwinner and bravado. So, when Trudy called and told him what had happened he had to cancel his lunch date with Agnes in an hour and rush home. It was in that moment, the first he’d ever had to choose directly between the two, that it dawned on him that maybe they could fix things, he and his wife. He wanted to pick up flowers but opted not to, as he felt the need to hurry. She had been through a lot, and not just today. As he drove that familiar stretch of road from his office to his home he heard a load of sirens, saw a lot of backed up traffic and assumed it must be from the accident that Trudy had witnessed. He was held up in one stretch of gridlock for twenty minutes.

Amazing really, the threads that tangle themselves up just to come unfurled in drastic fashion. One little tragedy three blocks east of here and you’re stuck in a car for way longer than expected. But then that accident had him in this frame of mind too, intent on resolving the unspoken conflict between he and Trudy. Everything informed everything else.

Soon he was rounding the bend for home, and he made to take his foot off the gas, a little fast around the corner in his anxiety to get home. He’d never taken it at such speed

before and he just managed to slow it, the brakes screeching more than he thought they would, before he fully took stock of what was about to happen.

Sandy often wondered how people really saw Suburbia. His opinion of the place was like a pendulum swinging between hate and love. Indifferent was probably the word. It amazed him, people’s capacity for indifference, because to be so privy to such a thing was maybe the most accidental form of evil. It dawned on him that most of the people who lived here were all indifferent toward something or someone. He was much the same. It was his own existence he was indifferent towards.

He looked down at Macy and smiled. He had done nothing really, by the time he got to the park she had indeed ridden her scooter there. He’d told her of her mother’s concern and they had made their way back. Now he returned Lara’s wave even as he heard her cry out, his arm still extended that way when he heard the screech, loud from behind he and Macy. He spun on the spot, stunned to see Gerry Hansen’s SUV bearing down upon them. He was close enough to make out Gerry’s shocked expression, saw his mother’s lover jerk the car to the right.

In her fear Macy dropped the scooter and, in her childish folly, jumped to her left in an attempt to dodge the looming vehicle. Sandy himself lunged through the air in a sudden upwelling of fear. He’d seen it happen in movies, self-sacrifice, and he knew he had to do it for Macy. Forget about everything else, this was the real way to feel youthful.

Sandy had imagined he’d go further in his leap, but he realized now he’d miscalculated. Reaching out a hand to push Macy away from harm was entirely the wrong

thing to do. Gerry had cranked the wheel way too hard to his right, so that the SUV was veering away from them, even as the back of it skidded round. All Sandy could hear were those brakes, still screeching in his ears. He felt the young girl at the edge of his fingers and realized in horror that he’d thrust her into harm’s way instead.

He landed on top of Macy’s little pink scooter rather tamely. There was a sickening crack from the direction of the Hansen’s front lawn, where the SUV had come to a stop.

Sandy forced his eyes open but Macy was nowhere to be seen. Gerry Hansen sat sprawled over the steering wheel in apparent disbelief, face intermittently illuminated by the ever- flickering light from his own front room. Momentarily the sound of screaming filled the air.

Nothing Here Can Hurt You

You are a train between stations.

This he reads before he drops the crumbled fortune cookie to the tabletop. A little abstract, but aren’t all aphorisms? There’s probably a dude in Rust Belt America with a degree just like his own, who pens inane messages for the hapless who think their destiny lies inside such westernized traditions.

His sister Elizabeth comes back from the bathroom.

“Anything profound?” she asks him.

He rolls his eyes as she smiles. They leave into the warm night. Throngs of people are queued up outside the cupcake place next door, Friday evening Georgetown revelers.

“The Obama’s have a house here somewhere,” says Elizabeth.

“Think they come and mingle with the peasants?”

Now it’s Elizabeth’s turn to roll her eyes. The daylight is dwindling and a few bars are packed. They opt for one showing a baseball game on an extravagant projector screen which takes up the entire rear wall of the building itself. Something in the spectacle of turning the infrastructure into something akin to stadium viewing strikes Eric as quintessentially American. It’s over the top but he likes it.

“Bit much eh?” says his sister. She perches on a barstool.

“Yup.”

She looks at him quizzically. She knows him in that way that siblings do, full of insight and bias.

The brother does not return the sister’s look. He smirks. They order beers.

“That girl at the end of the bar is checking you out, bro,” Elizabeth says from behind her bottle rim.

He casts a furtive look that way, but he thinks her gaze is just beyond him, either another patron or the wall screen there. As if in response, the surround sound speakers echo out the solid smack of bat and ball, the chorus of drunken cheers. Two siblings walk into a bar. American quintessence, spectator sport, social cues gleamed from loud Americans still clad in their 9-5 clothes.

The culture of a place, he thinks, rubs off as if on his shoes. He orders his beer a little more effusively each time. His sister is observing him in what he wishes were his natural environment.

“Are you happy bro?” she asks him.

“I’m not unhappy.” He shrugs and sips his beer, looks around.

“Mum and Dad think you might be.”

“Ah, the hotelier as amateur psychiatrist. I’m his son, not a displeased guest.”

“Don’t be an asshole, your parents have a pretty good understanding of you as a person.”

“Our parents or all parents?”

“Both. Proverbial and otherwise. But you are restless back home, you’ve admitted as much.”

“Is restlessness unhappiness?”

“In your case, I think so, yeah.”

“Well I’m not restless here, I’m having fun. I love the U.S.” He means it when he says as such. For he loves the culture of the place after just three days. Just as he predicted he would.

“Everyone loves a holiday bro.”

He smiles over at her, holding his hand up to the barman for another round.

“I guess you could say I’m a train between stations.”

Eric smiles, because this trip isn’t about that. It’s about some time for them, he and

Elizabeth. Time they may never truly get again. What did they call this life stage here in their American rhetoric? Why did certain ages need to be defined by stages anyway? A life was a life and you did what you could with what was given you, the opportunities planted in your grasp. Every now and then he turns his gaze ever so fleetingly on the girl at the end of the bar, then diverts his eyes in the direction of the screen.

“You seem to be less aloof somehow,” she says to him now.

“Everyone loves a holiday, sis.” He grins at her, wondering how he could possibly seem less aloof than normal.

He knows she’s going somewhere with this. Maybe the night will end with her adopting her schoolteacherly tone to ask him to reveal his innermost insecurities. Maybe he’ll tell her a few of them. See where the night takes us. He can tell by that way she shuffles on her stool. Maybe people like us, families like ours, maybe they search for meaning this way, on the other end of a Transatlantic flight. Crossing an ocean and frittering away cash in order to ask their son if he’s depressed, employing the sibling as the vessel through which to extract information from the root of the perceived problem.

They’ve always been close. He considers Elizabeth his best friend. Then again, he has three other people he considers his best friends. Human closeness is probably dependent on proximity. But because you don’t choose your siblings, because they are thrust upon you from birth, being a brother always seems more real somehow. He knows friends who are only children who think the opposite, but they don’t know any different, right?

After the bar, they meander for a couple of streets, then go down to the river front.

The Potomac. In the distance just back from the water is the back of the Lincoln Memorial.

American history is world history, he thinks, which is strange because he knows better than that.

Elizabeth is excited to see the architecture, to feel the sheer scope of it all, gazing down the water to the Washington Monument. Something about being in D.C. makes them both feel as if in the grasp of some icon.

Everything’s named after American pillars: Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson, MLK.

Where they’re from, it’s seldom individuals who leave their print but some collectivism; the historical worth of patriotic and anti-English sentiment. But they’re half-English too, so they can’t quite cling to fully fledged Scottish nationalism, only an abstract sense of

British identity. Elizabeth has always been proud of this fact, their very Britishness. But to

Eric being from both Scotland and England strips him of something integral to his own identity.

This is why he likes America; you can be anybody you want to be, or so they have you believe. Still, it scares him some; everything is enormous, especially the patriotism.

Or the portions of food, the size of the same statues they’re here to see, the racism, the anti-

racism, the vehicles. It’s all about scope and scale. The people’s sense of self is itself larger in scope than anything back home. They both live quiet lives in the biggest city in Scotland, yet it is slow in comparison to here. He dislikes relying on his own familiarity of a place as the measure of his contentment. He wants to feel somewhat lost and be finding himself more each day; a liberty he thinks America is granting him, the more beers he consumes with a baseball game as background noise.

Eric stirs now as if from a reverie, the sunlight dwindling, the rush of cars on the bridge over yonder, the river’s lazy roils and the city’s Friday noises.

“How the fuck is ‘you’re a train between stations’ a fortune anyway?”

“What?” says Elizabeth, pulling herself away from the view before her.

“The fortune cookie said I’m ‘a train between stations. That’s not eastern wisdom, that’s a decent guess for anybody who opens an after-dinner accompaniment in a Chinese restaurant in Washington.”

“That’s been on your mind all night? Your fucking fortune cookie,” his sister laughs at him.

“Even the people who live here are working all over the country, or the world, at any point of the year, right? So that would make the vast majority of people in limbo, or transit, or whatever.”

“You’re annoyed because your cookie says less about your apparent destiny and more about transitory nature of American employment?” Elizabeth seems to be enjoying what is probably the little stab of insight she’s been seeking from him, her thorny little brother.

Eric’s thinks his own perspective of America is full of a yearning that is itself

American, that propensity to understand a thing as means to understand oneself.

He’s a little drunk too, he can’t remember what she just asked of him. Or if he does he’s uncertain how to respond. The evening is warm, the city chatter of young professionals, tourists, natives, families. They, too, add pitch to the chatter, two Scottish siblings who could just as well be from here.

So, when the sirens encroach it’s even more city sound, far off at first, nothing out of the ordinary. Familiar even, they hear sirens most nights back home, streaming down the empty streets of Glasgow, an occurrence in the areas just outside of their periphery, their own worldviews. Here, in Washington D.C., the noise advances toward them out of the evening ether, the cityscape encapsulated in the scene; a fountain where the day’s last children splash and giggle, outside patios where the business-suit professionals unwind, the waiters with their drink trays, and the tourists—some Asian and some evidently

European; Germanic or Slavic or Eric and Elizabeth—interspersed throughout the waterfront causeway. All of that splendored American history, the statued spectacles a little way across the water, maybe a mile away.

Most people surely think of the White House, not the Potbelly sandwich store just up the street from it, catering to the Washington workers. That’s what Eric’s first thought of D.C. was; that you could ostensibly sit in a Potbelly stuffing your face with bread and deli meat, and you could probably there gain insight and exposure into some of the secrets of America itself. You’re not in Scotland anymore. Scran a baloney sandwich and pucker up your ears. Just down the street there, the Washington Monument, its apex surrounded by scaffolding, like history can only be history with periodic fixups.

“Isn’t the Watergate Hotel somewhere near here?” he hears a middle-aged Irishman ask his wife, whose nose is buried in a city guidebook. The siren encroacheth, drowning out even the dialogues within earshot.

“You know, JFK used to regularly fuck Marilyn Monroe in the Oval Office. It’s a badly kept secret.” Eric had heard a wife say this to her husband the night before, over aperitifs in the hotel bar. Elizabeth was watching the jazz-and-blues band in the corner.

The husband had nodded, sipped his Old Fashioned, a glazed expression in his eyes. Their accents were not regionally identifiable to Eric, no Southern drawl or Texan twang. But he could identify the boredom of life in the man’s facial expression, the wistful hope still in his spouse’s tone. The English grad as amateur psychiatrist.

There’s a man only a few feet away whose facial expression gives him away. The sirens affect him in a Pavlovian sense, it seems. Hard coded, systemic. Even to Eric the sirens carry a rhetoric of their own. Where he’s from, the police don’t have guns, so there’s never the fear of being shot in a misunderstanding, nor callously. Then again, where he’s from, unarmed and innocent people of color are not shot at alarming rates. No wonder the man is twitchy. Eric is twitchy for him, wants to empathize as fully as a person can, but then again, he’s white and foreign yet Western, so who is he to hypothetically tread in this man’s shoes? If he wants to love America so much, it dawns on Eric now, he needs to understand that his experience here will never be one defined by the color of his skin.

His own perspective of fear is a diluted one in an American sense. For white immigrants fleeing oppression, nothing here can hurt them, right? For westerners like he and his sister it isn’t scary but spectacle; the calamity of American fear. They likely won’t be here long enough to have to dwell in the dirt of whatever it is they may witness. He

thinks: we aren’t immigrants, we’re tourists. Even if they were immigrants here, they’d still be tourists.

There’s a commotion now, over by the river. Somebody is screaming. There’s an agitated group gathering by the railings overlooking the water. People are leaving their seats and rushing to see, and Eric hears splashing from that direction. A person in the river, a siren approaching, a group gathering. He could run and vault the railing there, exhibit a kind of American heroism long exemplified in different media renderings. His sister would yell in alarm, the crowd would let out a collective hush, a breath intake that unified them all for the moments in which they watched the rescue unfold. Then he’d go back to his hotel, the adrenaline keeping him awake at first, and maybe that adrenaline would remain until morning so that he could trick himself into thinking he was not hungover.

“Oh shit a fire engine and everything!” he says, nudging his sister.

Police first, an ambulance, and bringing up the rear a fire engine.

“They call them fire trucks here I think.”

It edges through the gaps and the three vehicles come down onto the manmade promontory usually reserved for pedestrians.

“Hey, you want to go back into the city and hit up another bar?” he asks.

She looks at him like he’s a maniac, as if to not want to watch a potential tragedy unfold mars a person, strips them of all decency. He gravitates toward the things that seem absurd, to do something somebody expects of him causes him acute degrees of anxiety.

She castigates anything she cannot immediately comprehend, especially when that thing is her brother.

“Really? You don’t want to see the commotion?”

He thinks she should know his relationship to the world around them. Everything is its own commotion, a man drowning over there is no revelatory piece of evidence, it doesn’t move the needle, it doesn’t disprove his perspective on things. The police siren is harbinger on the one hand, and safe haven on the other. First responder. You’re no more dying in the water than you are on land.

“Yeah, sure, let’s go see what’s happening,” he says.

That’s what they do. It is a man, white, old, evidently clumsy. He’s taken on a blue tint, but the paramedics had indeed leapt into the water at great personal risk. Elizabeth is standing with her mouth a little open. They’re wrapping him up in a blanket. People applaud.

“Not often you see this eh?” she says in a low voice, like loudness might send the old geezer back into the river. Before long, the shock seems to lift, and people go back to their nights, to the things they came here to do.

“How about that drink?” Eric says, and they head back in the direction of Dupont

Circle, where the hotel is, where he hopes for another bar he can mine as his own

Americana depository.

A bag in a hole. Some regulars, maybe drinking after a long day on Capitol Hill, their ties askew and their dispositions reddening by the pint. They gather around the Cornhole board and yell as if the placement of sandbag in hole is an innate ability. Like hand eye coordination, especially after half a dozen drinks, is a gift bestowed by God.

Eric is drunk himself, squinting in the direction of the game players. His sister is beside him, also watching the game. The lights are dim, pleasant, the crowd varies in age,

refinement, sobriety, gender – maybe nationality too, but it’s pretty much just a bunch of white people in a dive bar in the middle of D.C. somewhere, so likelihood is they’re the only foreigners here.

“Why don’t we have cornhole in Europe – ever seen it anywhere?” Elizabeth asks

Eric.

“Don’t think so – maybe in hostels on the continent and that, but never in Scotland or England, certainly not in bars.”

“Some of those hipster bars in Glasgow and Edinburgh, they have the same stuff as arcade bars here – games consoles, or table tennis tables. Cornhole just seems particularly

American to me.” She tilts her beer at the men, and sloshes a little down herself.

“I think that’s a good thing though. Even the bars seem more easygoing over here.

If I was that loud down the pub in parts of Glasgow I’d get my head kicked in.”

“You really like it over here eh?” Elizabeth asks him.

He smiles and turns to her. He wonders if she wants to know for her or because she thinks she’s on some sisterly crusade to alleviate the anxiety he’s built up for himself, the discontent evident in his character.

“I always wanted to live here, experience the life for myself,” he shrugs. “It’s sad that it seems barely an option. We are born in Scotland and we live in Scotland. Probably fucking die there. Everybody I know is fine with that, they’re proud of who they are. Which they should be if it suits them. I want to be here I guess. America somewhere.”

From the look on her face, Eric imagines she’s mulling over how to respond to this.

What to say to the brother with a foot out the door but the rest of him stuck inside? The

world today, it isn’t what you want it to be, you can’t just go to the place you want to live and reside there. Itchy feet can’t always be scratched.

“There’s like, red tape and that. Immigration stuff. It’s not viable to just up and leave, but it might be something you have to research and plot and plan it, then a few years from now maybe an opportunity comes up. There’s nothing holding you back if you set your mind to it,” Elizabeth says.

“I’m not sure it’s so simple,” he says, already defeatist.

“Only because you think the place is glossy and amazing now. Living here would be something else altogether. The culture is so different than home. I feel like the longer I spend here the more I become numb to things. You know what I mean? I can’t quite explain it. Might be the booze.”

“We’ve been here three days, what can you possibly have become numb to in that time?”

As she answers he spaces out a little. Remembering news reports, from, what, eleven years ago? The D.C. sniper, how the whole city lived in fear as a gunman stalked its periphery, picking off innocent people at random. Rule of thumb, if an American tragedy spurned British news reports, it was notable. Massacre status. It intrigued him in a way, to consider every act of violence in every town or state, that never reached American audiences, let alone those back home. And if that old man had drowned in the Potomac back there, who would have blinked, other than those there gathered? He nods at Elizabeth to make it seem like he’d heard what she said. She looked into her drink as if shocked at its rate of depletion.

It wasn’t just a knowledge of the news though, was it? He knew more about the killings than that. The news merely piqued his interest. The internet had done the rest. The main culprit, a guy called John Allen Muhammed, who’d subsequently been put to death in 2009, had left a calling card at the scene of one of the crimes bearing the message “Call me God”. Eric had been eleven, but he remembered his father staring at the screen, his mother shaking her head. “Only in America,” one of them had decreed. It might have been the first time Eric realized that there were huge differences between his country and this one, staring at the screen and attempting to comprehend the scale of terror that must have, city-wide, descended upon these people as they left their homes, schools, and offices, each day the shootings went unsolved.

“You remember when that sniper was loose in D.C. when we were kids, and it was all over the news?” he asks Elizabeth.

“No,” she replies, before ordering another beer

Giant Eyeball

I’ve been in Dallas for a day. The Book Depository is over to my left, behind the memorial, and from the grassy knoll I wonder if this fence was here back then; if one could slip a rifle scope through its slender gaps. You’d have to be about my height, or taller than six-feet anyway, to see over the fence, certainly more for a comfortable eye line, which I assume is the minimum expectation when attempting a headshot.

Through the chicken-wire, his handwriting etched in white, a man named Ben

Landis has become, I think, the embodiment of this place: “This is where a President lost his life, and this is where a Nation lost its mind.” When did he scrawl this on the wood?

Just who Ben Landis is is unclear, but once upon he time he wrote this in, and of, the place where twentieth century America went ever more berserk.

I stroll around the memorial and down the side street by the Book Depository, scrape my fingernails along the brownstone bricks, stop a moment at the building’s entrance. I turn around and peer down the road, its curvature leading down to the right.

Two X’s mark the street there, where each shot plowed through the President. Logistically speaking, seeing where the shots hit, it seems impossible to me that six floors overhead, looking down on a right bearing decline, anybody could fire two perfect shots from a bolt- action rifle with or without a scope. Though I’d never seen a gun until I moved to America the year before, aged twenty-three, so my understanding of a bullet’s trajectory may be as foggy as any common conspiracy theory.

46 Dealey Plaza. Standing there, gazing down at a sight only formerly seen on a

YouTube clip of the slow motion Zapruder film, I feel a shudder, remembering the frame-

by-frame rendering of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s face being carved into segments, like

splitting a watermelon.

Here, with the Book Depository at my back, I get a sweeping sense of the magnitude of that day in 1963. Of what it must have been like, seeing the swiftness with which one man’s ascent to power can be undone. The yellow-orange orb of late morning sun peeks out from cloud cover, illuminates the scene before me. I cross the street, and a Japanese family asks me to take their photograph. The traffic has ceased at a red light, coming from downtown and crossing Dealey Plaza on their way to elsewhere, and tourists must take the breaks in car flow to snap pictures of the death spots. The youngest Japanese child, irrespective of my taking a family photo of he and his parents and sister, snaps a selfie with a protruding tongue lolling from his mouth, contorting his body so that he is seemingly licking the white X on the asphalt, the place that signifies that this is where, indeed, a

President lost his life.

This may be sign enough that not just a nation has lost its mind, but the world itself.

Do we travel to scenes of death just to document our morbid desires, or do we do so to make light of them? Would this be like travelling to Auschwitz, or the Cambodian Killing

Fields, and uploading evidence on social media that to be well-travelled folk, we must court a kind of tourism blended with woe? How would it appear to mock lick the impact zone of the atom bomb in Hiroshima? History and circumstance, and whatever else, have aligned to attempt to forget this place, certainly on the grand scale of heinous killing. And maybe too, the death of the leader of the free world has no correlation to genocide, or maybe it

does because by most people’s reckoning, JFK’s assassination was the lighting of a fuse, and the explosion of that fuse was embodied in images of raining napalm and screaming, burning Vietnamese children. But for now, the Japanese family beam happily and go on their way, somewhere in the direction of downtown Dallas, and as they do a short, stocky man approaches me and passes me a knockoff newspaper of some sort.

“They seem awfully happy to be here. You don’t,” he says, referring to the departing family, and flashing a smile streaked with specks of gold, silver. “The name’s

Jimmy.”

I look at the paper he hands me, then back to his features. He’s maybe in his forties, dressed casually – t-shirt, shorts, and basketball trainers, “You like my kicks?” he laughs, causing creases by his eyes, which, as they smooth out once more, reveal the blue ink of three teardrop tattoos against brown skin. “You’d suit sneakers like these, bro,” he says in continued joviality. “What’s your name, my man?”

I flick open the newspaper-come-pamphlet, “I’m Dale,” I say, trying to gauge what’s happening, if he’s aiming to sell me something.

“Don’t look so worried, bossman.”

Such an effort to assign me arbitrary titles; bossman, bro, man – I’m aware these can be perceived as friendly, sure, but I’ve also had some dodgy experiences in similar circumstances. I wonder if I attract bother, or if I gravitate towards it on some unconscious level, drawn to the Dealey Plazas of the world to court that sense of devastation that will only ever incrementally thrust itself upon most individual lives, mine included.

I don’t recall how it happens exactly, but Jimmy and I are soon walking around the plaza, as he tells me a somewhat patchy history about his essay that I hold in my hand in

pamphlet/newspaper format, and how it had landed him a full-scholarship to university. He seems friendly, but I suspect some money-making ploy. I told him straight away, as I continued to dwell on the permutations of those tattoos, that I was just a broke-ass student on a budget, touring my way through some of the southern states before heading home to

Scotland. I informed him that the assassination was something that had long interested me, that I’d watched the Zapruder film at a young age, that my brother and I had both read Don

Delillo’s Libra – that it was my favorite novel. Jimmy hadn’t heard of it, but it was Delillo’s answer to three years of hard research on the case, and looking over what files of the

Warren Commission he could legally get his hands on. He dressed it up as fiction, as may have been the safest thing to do, but to me, Libra is the novelist’s idea of what he thinks went down. It paints Lee Harvey Oswald as shooter, sure, but not necessarily the killer. In much the same way as Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, it constructs a tapestry of cause and effect subterfuge that links the CIA to strands of the Government, and Oswald as pawn and patsy alike.

Jimmy has a take of his own on the assassination. We are over by the courthouse on the east side of Dealey, where a replica of the Lincoln convertible in which JFK rode that day sits. A small U.S flag attached to the back. More tourists mulling around for photographs.

“Never before in a Presidential motorcade was the Vice President’s car behind the

President’s, and when they left the airport for Dallas that day, Lyndon Johnson’s car was in fact behind the President’s in the procession,” Jimmy says, staunch in his opinions.

He is impassioned, forthright, and I want to trust him completely. He certainly seems to believe what he’s peddling, but it is some of the supplementary information he

provides that seems vague to me. He mentions this scholarship but then later drops a line about my “obvious college education” and something about not having experienced one himself. Later, curtailing back around by the white X’s, he shows me a nearby manhole he suspects “the real killer” escaped down on November 22, 1963, rifle and all. It doesn’t look big enough for Jimmy himself, who must be only five-foot-six. His story is convoluted at times, delusional at others, and on a few occasions, I catch him out on something he says, though only once do I challenge him on it, which seems to surprise him. I think he expects intrepid tourists to hang on his every word, and he seems annoyed when I do not. Straight away I had told him I wasn’t paying him, and he resolutely replied that he was not expecting payment, that he was happy to show me around and “impart his expertise”.

“Also, it was unheard of for an open-roofed car to transport the President and First

Lady, especially in a crowded city, but according to some reports, Lyndon Johnson encouraged JFK to travel without one.” Jimmy continues in his rant, though I have read before that the open-roofed idea was actually Kennedy’s own, so as to appear more accessible to the American people than a closed-roofed car might convey. There are certainly conspiracy theorists who believe Johnson had ties to the assassination, mostly due to the suspicious circumstances surrounding that day, and due to Johnson’s decision to fast- track further American involvement in Vietnam soon thereafter. Though these may just be even more differing theories in a world replete with them. One certainty is that the tale of the assassination makes the most sense when pieced together and labeled as fiction.

We arc round the plaza once more, cut past Dallas County Courthouse, and end up one block to the west, in front of John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza. Jimmy is on my left,

Dealey Plaza back to my right. A tale of two plazas.

The memorial itself is a roofless cube, thirty feet high, and fifty by fifty feet wide.

It is a cenotaph, an empty tomb to forever memorialize JFK, even as an eternal flame burns on his and Jackie Kennedy’s graves, side-by-side, in Arlington National Cemetery. Inside the memorial, you feel the walls surround you, though looking up I can see the sun, its rays slanting down, giving the white walls a level of brightness they do not really possess. I imagine that same sun in its same position on the afternoon of the assassination. I want to consider how a world changes by degrees over a certain time span, how we circle that same sun, and every act of violence intended or enacted, always roots us to particular places in particular moments.

“This is it man, this is all they constructed out of that day, out of that death just over there,” Jimmy extends his arm westward and motions back in the direction of Dealey. He looks slight, engulfed by the white walls that surround us. An elderly couple peek their heads in, and the man closes his eyes and shakes his head, perhaps flashing back to that day, to what and where he was back then, and then he and his wife turn and slowly walk away. Jimmy seems not to notice them, and he points me in the direction of a marker, with a message inscribed upon it:

The joy and excitement of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life belonged to all men. So did the pain and sorrow of his death. When he died on November 22, 1963, shock and agony touched human conscience throughout the world. In Dallas, Texas, there was a special sorrow. The young President died in Dallas. The death bullets were fired 200 yards west of this site. This memorial, designed by Philip Johnson, was erected by the people of Dallas. Thousands of citizens contributed support, money and effort. It is not a memorial to the pain and sorrow of death, but stands as a permanent tribute to the joy and excitement of one man’s life. John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life.

This message is just beside a larger coffin-like centerpiece to the tomb. Carved upon this in ornate golden letters, which further contrast the white walls around us, is the name John

Fitzgerald Kennedy. Two hundred yards back west, and then another twenty to thirty yards further than that, on the back of the fence overlooking the death spot, Ben Landis’ words seem to speak more to me in this moment. Landis seems to just be some citizen with an eye for the obvious yet unseemly nature of the world, and these exhibitions that spring up from acts of aggression and pain. Some institution played a part in funding and constructing this official memorial, and some institution may or may not have played a part in

Kennedy’s death, and/or covering up the fallout from it, even to this day.

I shake my head and look at Jimmy, see him standing there with his eyes fixed on me, taking in my reaction in the middle of the day-lit cube. So, if this Ben Landis character is correct, then a nation lost its mind. How does that happen? Collectively? Progressively, or all of a sudden with the pulling of an indeterminate amount of triggers? Can one cast an eye at this as a place where the country unraveled, where the old world and the new collided together like freight trains on rusted tracks?

Jimmy motions for me to follow him back to the street. He gets there before me and stands with his eyes trained on the memorial, then he motions for me to cross the road when

I get level with him. He hurries over, the memorial at our back now, and he stops at yet another memorial, this one honoring Dallas County Honor Guards. In the shadow of the

JFK memorial, this one lacks even more splendor than it otherwise would. It is a wooden shed, here on the other side of Main Street, looking even more paltry by comparison due to its also being square shaped. I look at Jimmy and roll my eyes, try to crack a joke about the gulf between structures, but his face has taken on a new look; gone is the warmth and ease of the last half hour. He nods at me and looks resigned to whatever has changed his

body language. He points a finger to his tattoos, and blinks slowly, looks me square in the face.

“You know what these are, bossman?”

I wonder why the streets are so quiet in this Texan heat, the death scene of an

American President over yonder, Dallas County Courthouse the nearest building to me, just behind the wooden shed we now stand beside.

One block further east is El Centro College, where, roughly a year and two months from this day, on July 7, 2016, five police officers will be killed and nine injured, at the culmination of a peaceful gathering outside of the nearby Courthouse, in protest of police killings of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota. It is the deadliest event involving

United States law enforcement since 9/11. This cityscape, a three to four block stretch, over which death and violence seem to preside, stretched out like slowly spreading smog over the course of a half century. In Libra, Delillo refers to Kennedy’s assassination as “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.” Maybe it did so for this stretch of Dallas too.

Hindsight allows for one to project their experiences into territories both profound and bizarre. There between two plazas, two memorials, two scenes of American tragedy, I suddenly felt a long way from the north of Scotland. I suppose looking back on it now, I feel and felt both in and out of time itself.

“I did things I really regret in the past, and these are what God uses to remind me of those things every day. You know what they’re for?” Jimmy asks.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I thank the Lord for blessing me with a wife and a kid, and the chance to be where

I am, but these tears are a reminder of the people that I killed when I was younger. I served jail time, years of it, and I found God and now I’m reformed,” he says without breaking eye contact.

I feel uncomfortable, even in the confirmation of something I already knew. I look at him, and wait to see what he’ll do next.

“I lied to you and I’m sorry for that, but I wanted you to see the tour, to get my expertise.”

I imagine he made a beeline for the Japanese family, the more blatantly obvious tourists, but I suppose a young man alone is as good a target as any. I think about the cause and effect of things, how a President’s death has accounted for everything that is encapsulated in both plazas and, moreover, the world at large: museums, memorials, tours from countless tour-guides (fake or real). Not to mention the thousands of books, movies,

TV series; art that will never truly come to imitate the ferocity of life.

“I ask you as a friend Dale, to please give what you can to a man just trying to do his job, make an honest living, provide for his family,” Jimmy starts again, some of that prior warmth seeping back into his voice.

I wonder if this gig keeps Jimmy afloat. Maybe that’s what makes him effective, what puts bread on the table. You go to a famed place of death and in your own economic, independent way, you lean upon it and base your income around the prevalence of morbid tourism, of people who just want to peer at empty places where tragedy used to be. It is

Jimmy’s way of counteracting killing people way back when; to use that prior and momentous death as a commodity. Between X’s marking the asphalt, and teardrops

marking his face, there was his pitch — a sales pitch of tour guide as common man; friend for an hour; formerly bright young student whose assassination-centric theses catapulted him to a full-ride through college. Or all of this is entirely fabricated, propped up by the curiosities of travelers like me. Truth or lies. Jimmy’s own version of American Dream.

“I told you I’m just a broke student, Jimmy, I have no cash in my wallet,” I say, a pleading tone in my voice. Am I reading this all wrong? Is his alluding to killing three people a threat of sorts? Even all that long ago, they may have killed a President in a public place with six hundred people as captive audience. Anything goes, right? I’m in gun-loving north Texas after all.

“Don’t give me that shit, there’s an ATM round the corner,” he says.

I feel as if I’m there but somewhere else, like I am under threat without having realized it. Maybe that is the purpose of the Dealey Plazas of the world: to throw people— and their perception of what is and what isn’t— into a liminality at the very edge of violence.

“Okay,” I say, and follow Jimmy as he leads me to a 7-Eleven nearby, north away from Main Street. He reaches for the door handle and goes in first. I realize I can either pay him or flee, and I honestly do not know which one to do.

***

I lean on a railing, in the heart of Downtown now, some ten blocks, I think, from the John

F. Kennedy memorial. I’d moved, first past El Centro College, then by the office buildings and shopfronts, coffee shops and sandwich joints, the heart of metropolitan Dallas. Jimmy is back there somewhere, going on with his life, and his job, probably venturing back towards the Book Depository and the next batch of tourists. Does it matter if his pocket is

heavier and my bank account lighter? Does it matter if it is not, if I sprinted away from him into the heart of this unfamiliar city?

I turn around and am struck by the sight of a gargantuan eyeball statue. I stare at it and ponder once more the intricacies of these sculptures that are presented to us. It must be around the same height as the Kennedy’s empty tomb. Thirty-feet high, a hulking orb of white against the glass backdrop of a downtown skyscraper. Permeating through the glossy whiteness of the sclera: straggling lines of bloodshot red lead to an iris of startlingly aesthetic blue, the black pupil centered therein, all mounted upon a copse of green, green grass. It’s a permanent display called Giant Eyeball. A piece of art, much like Kennedy’s cenotaph, or perhaps those two white X’s on the road back there.

And isn't that what places come to signify? Symbols and emblems that cast long standing doubt on ours, and a country's, collective consciousness. Isn't that what I'm here to do: attach significance to a moment and stretch that string taut? In 2016, half a mile west, a gunman will shoot down five police officers in cold blood. And Jimmy's eye, with its trio of inked tears below, and his aggressive turn, and Oswald and others with their eyes to rifle scopes or ironsights. Eyewitnesses thrown into disarray, ambiguous of their senses forever unto their own endings. And now? Could anybody, least of all the President of the United

States of America, be shot through the head, and somebody somewhere — even in far off rooms through closed circuit screens, or television screens, or social media news feeds — not see with their own senses just what the truth is of the world?

Looking through the railings at this eye that never closes, I feel foreign and tired, in close proximity to violence.

By Carousel 5

Hi Lucy,

I hope you still check your emails as often as you used to.

I’ve been thinking about you a lot since I moved back home. I know you always spoke of moving to the UK one day, but to me America was this freeing place that gave me the independence I’d never known I needed. I think we are similar in that we always felt too confined in our respective hometowns.

But Iain wasn’t like us, didn’t view the world through tinted lenses. All he had he was fine with and what he didn’t have was attainable in the context of his own worldview.

So, if I told you that he was not the type of guy to do what he did you probably wouldn’t believe me, yet here I am, talking about Iain like I knew him and you never did.

When he came to visit me in Florida he burned worse than I knew people could from the sun. That was his first day, so that the rest of his hard-earned vacation was a series of painful grunts as he tried to get comfortable on a piece of furniture or patch of carpet his skin wouldn’t lift off onto. Then by the time that cleared he only had two days left, so we went to a few bars and did some touristy things, but really his head was already back in

Scotland; and here he was in the ethnic jigsaw puzzle of South Florida, lobster-pink and peeling like drying fruit.

He didn’t call home while he was visiting because home was always there, or maybe because it wasn’t (if Iain leaves Inverness, Scotland, is it still there?). Everything I did over there was designed to keep me from settling here. The land of opportunity. Grief

is a web whose tendrils reach far, across the vast Atlantic, but that was too much for me, to be near to where it had happened. My parents have been great, but sometimes guilt is a really lonely thing.

When I first met Iain he was larger than the kids in their final year of school, and I was afraid to be in the presence of teenagers, had spent my whole life being told of their capacity for cruelty. I was eleven or twelve then, and Iain half a year younger but four stone heavier. He would manhandle seventeen and eighteen-year olds who picked on us new kids, and in doing so became one of my closest friends. I don’t want to use the term larger than life, because that’s what his uncle said at the funeral, and nobody is larger than a thing that goes unfulfilled. Besides, am I not to blame for the bullets that emblazoned his hefty frame in Arrivals at Fort Lauderdale airport, given that he was visiting me, and that was the first time he’d ever left Scotland?

The first time you told me you loved me was the day I should have done the equivalent of sending you this email. I wasn’t certain you did feel that way truly, because

I’ve never thought I was deserving of it, of you. I thought there would be time for us to be together in America eventually, and then the shooting happened, and my life came unraveled. Now here I am in Scotland and you’re in Oregon, and that feels so much further than I ever thought I’d be from you. I just didn’t know that then.

At work, the English department used to post flyers about active shooter protocols that we all scoffed at in the communal office, but I would still take pictures and send them to people back home so as to perturb them, aloof as I was to the prospect of guns intersecting with my life. I’ve still never seen a gun, but I was the one who identified Iain at the Broward County morgue in Dania Beach, and try as they might they couldn’t cover

all of the bullet wounds. That’s worse than seeing a gun, seeing its damage in the same corpus I’d just hugged goodbye, that I’d just bought ointment for, days previously, to lessen his pain from sunburn.

People often thought him somebody not to be taken seriously, which is why I say you might not have expected him to do what he did, and it’s easier for people who consider themselves academics, or complex in some way, to assign people like Iain categorizations.

But he was happier than them, than me, because of his simplistic nature, the way he operated and existed, the way he didn’t imagine his own life to be a burden unto him, but exactly the opposite. He was also the eleven-year-old kid who protected me and others from seventeen-year-old bullies.

You used to think me a jokester too, but the more you got to know me, the more you tried helping me through my demons, the more you thought you fell for me, the deeper

I seemingly was to you. Then, after Iain’s death I rejected all commiserations and forms of contact from everybody, including you. That was my biggest mistake in the aftermath of it all. But I wish he’d never come to see me and I wish that you had met him and that my guilt and grief hadn’t made me move home to live in my childhood bedroom. I wish I had just returned your feelings, because I did feel them too, I guess I’ve always had those issues with intimacy. The worst part is that now I think the time you spent thinking you loved me was a waste of your kindness, a waste of your nature.

All of this is really my way of saying that I didn’t expect him to do it, to put himself in the path of bullets and to save the adults and children at an American fucking airport

(for where else on Earth would he have got into such a situation) and why had I moved

here in the first place, inviting my friends to come experience some sunshine like I was doing them a favor?

My life is not what I thought it would be, but I told myself then that I couldn’t love you back because I was foreign and it wasn’t as easy as leaving to move to Portland, although I know that it was easier than I thought, and that if I had gone down that path, then Iain would still be alive.

The shooter will be put to death, probably twenty-five years from now, and isn’t

America an insanity zone, in that had Iain not manifested his inner rugby defensive-back and tackled a madman wielding an AR-15, more than just one person, my person, would have died? The process of this shooter’s death by lethal injection would have been expedited had my friend not sacrificed himself for a roomful of people awaiting their luggage from the Allegiant flight from Indianapolis-Fort Lauderdale that Tuesday afternoon in May. It would have been a massacre. And a massacre could have been explained by the press, the judicial system, politicians et al. One foreigner’s gun death does not an American headline make.

I’ve never told you that I took a wrong turn that day, a left down to Arrivals instead of straight ahead to Departures. Given the convoluted nature of the thruways at Fort

Lauderdale International Airport, Iain insisted he get out there and take the escalator up to where he needed to be. I hugged him goodbye and he hurried into the pit of the airport, and minutes later, as I rejoined the freeway to come up north, bullets pierced the same place where I’d pressed myself into a hug with him moments before, and he slammed the shooter down as he died and police responded quickly, I hear, to lift my friend from atop this

coward who was dazed by the weight of this hero, my hero, upon him. I wake up each day feeling like I pulled the trigger myself.

I’m just saying I’m sorry for everything I couldn’t be, especially now that there’s an ocean and a landmass between us. I hope you find happiness.

Be well,

Tim

The Contrarian

You’re a long way northwest of nowhere-in-particular, Wisconsin. A hamlet might be the term, or else an exurb, but Lorrie is quick to tell you this is one of the most American places in the state, the country. She’d said that “Our county has a huge sense of civic pride” - this beautiful blonde girl of Swedish-Nordic descent. You’re unsure what makes a place this or that, who attaches categories to these things. They could tell you that shooting people is a national pastime and you’re pretty sure they wouldn’t be wrong. America intrigues you daily.

A marching band takes to the field, trailed by a fat little Hispanic kid who Lorrie cheers loudly for.

“Yeah! Go Oscar! Lewis, that’s our neighbor Oscar,” she tells you. You nod and smile, smile and nod. The kid’s got some pipes on him, an expectant hush abounds, he begins his rendition of the national anthem in earnest. God bless America.

Either way you are happy to be far away from Wales. Nobody you’ve ever met back there gets you, so they certainly don’t get your fascination with Americana. That said, how faux patriotic should you feel when the starred and striped flag flies, a baritone kid sings the national anthem and fucks up his lines a little, and a guy in a cowboy hat wipes tears from his eyes a few seats over? You thought that was only a Southern thing, the cowboy hat.

Then the football game begins, Wisconsin high school sports par excellence. Later,

Lorrie beams with pride and asks you how you liked the game and wasn’t Oscar wonderful?

and you say “Yeah it was awesome” or words to that effect and Lorrie is delighted, justified in her decision to bring you north, feels as if she’s showing off on two fronts: her home and her man. That’s still weird to you – that you are this American woman’s, at least in her eyes.

Back in the familial household, casa Whyte, Uncle Marty sizes you up, and jokingly asks you what your intentions for his niece are. Lorrie’s father Desmond saves the day, throws an arm over your shoulder and stresses how much help you’ve offered around the house, and shouldn’t you assist Lorrie’s mother Cassandra with the turkey, and you oblige of course because this is his house and you came here on a last second invite.

After dinner Lorrie and you go outside for firewood and the cold is shocking and you ponder why you’re this far from home, how you came to be in in a tiny little outpost such as this, and then Lorrie’s hand is on your crotch and you’re rolling around behind the woodpile and in no time at all Uncle Marty is shining a torchlight in your face. Your first instinct is to wonder why you do some of the things that you do and then Uncle Marty is screaming and Lorrie is tugging her athletic pants back up her thighs, and you’re brushing snow from your skin and hurriedly buttoning yourself back up.

“There are children inside, you animals,” says Uncle Marty, the torch beam bobbing all over.

“Marty, shit, you can’t creep up on people like that,” Lorrie is saying, horrified.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” asks Uncle Marty, directed at you this time and you can only do up your zipper and shake your head,

“It’s inexcusable, what can I say? I’m deeply sorry sir,” and you think that you mean it, you know there’s a certain line one shouldn’t cross, certainly when it comes to

respecting foreign hospitality, and you are way over that line. Not for the first time you find yourself cursing custom, convention, and yourself, in your head.

Looking at Marty, you wonder how this debasement lines up with his worldview; he’s about thirty years your senior and he looks utterly despondent to be presented with this base underside of things, the sexual promiscuity inherent in youth; his niece and this strange guy with the accent, the casual relationship they’ve struck up. Best to consider that you have come into a man’s home and defiled his daughter in the backyard and his overly protective brother has caught you at it.

Ah, but what is this? Now you think it might be fine because Marty’s face is softening and a slight grin is playing on his lips, and you knew the wily old dude had it in him.

“I wrestled at college you know. Nebraska,” he says, directed at you. He’s almost daring you to shout “Go Cornhuskers!” A glossy look of long-gone bliss lights his face, “I get the whole standing out from the crowd thing; a young, tall, dark foreigner like you.”

He wants to relate to you, wants you to be impressed by his prior glory, maybe would like the two of you to strike up an accord, but then he looks disgusted again. His features are a warzone between the young and the old of him, the right and the wrong, the fun or the protective uncle. You remember you left a bottle of whisky in your rented car, and wonder if you can’t induce the old guy with it, or should you save that for the possible appeasement of parents?

Day two in the deep north. You wake in the basement, your room for the weekend. It’s the day before Thanksgiving, which Lorrie tells you is a pretty big deal. The family dog is

licking your feet as they extend over the edge of the sofa. The dog is a big, demented

Alsatian and from this angle, through the gaps in your toes, it bears an uncanny resemblance to Lorrie’s mother Cassandra. You don’t know why. You once saw somewhere that, subconsciously, people choose animals that look in some way like them.

The dog stops upon sensing that you’re awake, then scampers off upstairs. You have a sore head – you did not indulge in your scotch but you did get drunk with Uncles Frank and

Marty, who under the influence had come to wrestle on the patio until one of them was declared the victor. You can’t remember who won but you’re certain they can. They’re of that ilk of men, they want to be whisked back decades in their whimsies.

You throw on a fleece, some warm pants, and thermal socks. You go upstairs and only Lorrie is in the kitchen. She beams at your presence.

“Good morning! I was just making you some coffee,” she says, and leans into you, her hot breath not unpleasant. She kisses you passionately. You didn’t realize until now that you were over your head here with her, that you’d come too far too fast. Yet that feeling, her body on yours, your right arm wrapped around her waist. That’s a nice feeling.

She has a lithe figure, and she’s nearly as tall as you. She’s wearing a t-shirt that says

Illinois Women’s Volleyball. You flash back to your first drunken conversation where she told you she was on the team. You can’t remember anything that you said then.

“How did you like last night? I’m sorry if you found my family way intense, they seem to really like you though, babe.” She looks at you like nobody ever has and that’s a nice feeling too.

Her hands are on your cheeks; you wish you were naked together again. You realize that kind of thinking has to stop because you vaguely remember her father talking about

his hunting rifles in the attic. It’s an elk one day and the guy fornicating with your daughter out of wedlock the next. You know they’re a religious bunch, there is a cross above the dining room table and another at the top of the stairs. Marty seems to be different, and

Lorrie too. In your personal experience, it’s the ones who have had religion forced upon them that tend to rebel against the regulations they’re held to as youngsters. You nearly think about home, but then Cassandra enters the kitchen. Lorrie unpeels herself from you and you surreptitiously try to hide your hard-on by turning against the counter. The dog is by your feet making weird yelping sounds.

“Here’s your coffee, babe,” Lorrie says, “Would you like a cup, Mom?”

You like Cassandra, she’s in touch with the casual life approach her daughter has been heralding. She seems to give you and Lorrie a certain amount of leeway. You can only respect her for that, plus here you are in her home, eating her food and subtracting from her alcohol collection. You have to appear to be of value, of sound mind.

“Good morning Cassandra, did you sleep well?” you ask her, a shit eating grin plastered on your face.

“Well good morning Lewis, I really did. I hope the sofa wasn’t too uncomfortable for you?”

“Not at all, not at all.”

Lorrie is smiling at the exchange. You wonder if you could love her.

“I was going to go into town, I’d like to get more supplies or do a breakfast run whilst I’m at it,” you offer to them. The car is parked on the street, and you feel like a little space might be the requirement here.

“That’s really nice of you Lewis, you really don’t need to though, you’re our guest for the weekend.”

“That’s why I feel obliged to, Cassandra.”

Why do you have to use her first name? Mrs. Whyte would have made things so much easier, more ceremonial. Ah, now the dog is taking a piss on Lorrie’s leg.

“Oh Jesus, Harley!” cries Lorrie.

“Harley!” repeats Cassandra, “oh no, not inside Harley, not inside.”

“I’ll nip out Lorrie, let me know if you think we need anything in particular,” you say.

You turn and leave in the commotion. In the car you wait for the engine to heat up, the windscreen to demist. The passenger door opens, and Uncle Marty clambers in. You’re pretty pissed about this development. You wanted to be alone with your thoughts, about the way that being around Lorrie and her family is drawing you in. You think it is making you need Lorrie more.

“Jeezo kid, I’m not angling for a ride to Milwaukee, I just need you to drop me off at my place to refresh myself,” Marty says, noting the apparent look of disdain on your face. You clench your teeth, force a semi-smile.

“No worries Marty, hop in,” you say.

“Oh, Cassandra said for us to grab some pumpkins, Lorrie and the children would like to paint some together later,” he says, and there is something in his voice. You can tell from his haggard features that the hangover is hard on him today, but you figure he can’t quite get the look of you and his niece embroiled together in the snow out of his mind.

The windscreen has cleared, and you head back in the direction you remember from the drive up yesterday. Marty directs you for about a minute and a half then declares your arrival at his “bachelor pad.” He smirks with foolish pride and you don’t have the guts to tell him he’s matured far past the point where bachelorhood is a positive. He extends his fist for what you can only assume is a fist bump request.

“See you later Marty,” you say.

“Later bud,” he replies, and smiles once again as you quickly tap your knuckles off his. You hope the gesture will go a long way to appeasing him. As he gets out of the car you feel a pang of something akin to fear, that you might become like that one day. You get a feeling, as you sometimes do, that no matter what you do here in America, it will mean nothing in the grand scheme of your life. Maybe when Mum died you ceased thinking long-term, and you’ve done a very British job of suppressing the thoughts of your own family while in the midst of Lorrie’s. What might your mother say now if she saw you here? If she saw your father back home in his current state. She would be proud of how far you had come and the education you were receiving.You wish, as always, that she were still alive.

You drive eight miles to the nearest Walmart, in the nearest town, which seems to be called

Grace Township though in your opinion it lacks all that the name suggests and is very lucky to consider itself a town at all. The parking lot is close to overflowing, however, as hundreds of shoppers stock up last minute on the food they want to gorge themselves on.

You wonder where on earth they all came from. The roads are surprisingly manageable despite the snow piled up at their sides. You note that if that much snow pounded Northern

Wales, the country’s travel infrastructure would be negatively impacted for days. A bit of snow in Britain sees chaos reign, whereas here nothing stops anybody. You park up and get out.

In the store, people are running amok like the headless turkeys they’re here to collect. Again, you’re startled by the customs of this country, and simultaneously drawn to them in the manner of most perverse spectacles. Whole families seemed to have converged upon Walmart, representatives of every generation going. You think that this might be the only place besides a hospital where dying and living are allowed such proximity to one another – you see a baby being pushed in a stroller while holding a jar of almonds on your left, an old man battling his way to the checkouts with a pecan pie in hand on your right. It seems a veritable mystery to him, as well as to you, whether or not he will make it out of the store alive. His skin seems to sag in on itself like Lorrie’s strewn leggings, piled absentmindedly on her bedroom floor. You grab a few pumpkins and a crate of beer and hasten to the checkout. On your way out of the store, you pick up a bouquet of flowers, and return to the teller to pay for them.

“White lilies,” the teller says. “How beautiful.”

You smile in response, wondering where such things bloom in perpetual northern snow cold.

Later, the family orders pizza and play board games that descend into drunkenness. You clumsily paint pumpkins with Lorrie’s younger cousins and a few of their neighbors. You thought this only happened at Halloween.

Oscar, the anthem singer from the day before is a particularly dab hand. He’s meticulous with a paint brush in his hand. If he wasn’t such a mediocre singer you’d be encouraged for his future. In your mind, you associate this part of Wisconsin with mediocrity, mainly because the people remind you of your hometown in Northern Wales.

To your despair, you see that Lorrie seems to be writing your initials onto a pumpkin. Fuck! Was this always inevitable? That if you came up here, sooner or later, she’d put you on the spot and make you admit that you were a couple. You prefer the pedestal, you realize. From up there you’re impenetrable, safe, comfortable in your own aloof way. The spot, then, is a far worse position to be placed upon than the pedestal.

Her left arm holds the pumpkin at its top, her face is a study in concentration.

There’s a slight furrow to her brow, her tongue juts out ever so slightly through clenched teeth. You are wildly attracted to her even as you think of possible escape plans. How could you get the hell out of Wisconsin and be safely back on campus in Illinois by sunrise?

Would any excuse be worth it? A family tragedy, perhaps? You feel like a school kid, hurriedly formulating a plan to excuse you from P.E class.

Lorrie looks up at you, satisfied at her handiwork. Is it easy to know when you love a person? Nobody has ever taught you, ever told you.

She’s motioning to the pumpkin in her hand, her right arm cradling it against her torso now, the paintbrush still resting in her grip. It just says, LD – 2014 Thanksgiving.

There’s some floral pattern bordering the words on the top, and it’s a pretty skilled piece of work. You’re mainly relieved she hasn’t cut some juvenile banality such as “LW 4 LD” on there. She puts the pumpkin aside, crawls over to you and kisses you on the lips. The younger cousins giggle at the sight of it, and when Lorrie stops kissing you she’s a little

flushed with embarrassment. You look to your right; Oscar seems to be recreating the

American flag on his pumpkin.

“Your first fall pumpkin, babe,” she says, holding hers out to you.

Before long you’re in a minivan owned by the only taxi company in Grace. You, Lorrie,

Uncles Marty and Frank, Aunts Judith and Lara, and two of Lorrie’s cousins, Edith and

Ted, are crammed into the vehicle. Edith and Ted are twins, freshmen at Wisconsin and

Minnesota respectively. Ted seems to think that all of Minneapolis is the greatest place on earth, despite his having never left the greater Twin Cities metropolitan area, and Edith feels the same way about Madison, about Wisconsin as a whole. You think you hate both cousins equally, though you’re certain you’ll know one way or the other by Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.

The car seems to have passed through Grace and out the other side, which means you’re going to Uncle Frank’s place, or Marty knows of some rural bar that is serving cheese curds and pilsner in unlimited quantity. Lorrie said that this was custom, that they did it the Wednesday before Thanksgiving every year.

“It’s Blackout Wednesday,” she’d said, “you have to come. I won’t tell you where, it’s a surprise. I promise you’ll love it though, babe” she’d said, as she forced you to change your shirt then ushered you into the car.

You’re somewhat alarmed with the regularity with which she calls you “Babe”, and whether it perturbs you or thrills you. Desmond and Cassandra, or Mr. and Mrs. Whyte, had waved you off, remaining behind with a grandparent or two, and a handful of the other relatives who were putting giddy offspring to bed. In the backseats at the rear of the

minivan, as you speed through winter darkness, Lorrie sucks on your finger. Nobody notices, not even weird old Uncle Marty. Lorrie is beginning to turn you on in ways you’ve never experienced.

You can’t explain it. You want to be caught in the snow with her, her whole family could catch you for all you care. You feel a brief pang of disappointment that you hadn’t stayed warm around the fire with her, fooling around, drinking hot wine and laughing.

Soon, the car pulls up to what a large sign describes as “Dalton’s Rodeo Bar, Rib, and Strip

Joint.” You feel light-headed from the feelings swirling around in your mind, from the weakness you have identified in yourself. Your father would chastise you for it, much like he had when you’d told him you were leaving for the U.S for a year. Much like he always had done. You hadn’t come this far from home to come unraveled like this. Everybody exits the minivan; Frank pays the driver.

You hang back momentarily, trying to push your thoughts elsewhere.

Lorrie looks concerned. “What is it, babe? You can tell me anything you know.

Anytime. What’s up?”

“Let me get you a drink,” says Uncle Marty. You don’t say no. His breath reeks of halitosis, and as he peers at you sidelong from his spot at the bar you begin to feel sorry for the guy.

He’s a loser, sure, but he seems like a nice dude. He’s making an effort with you still, even after he saw you and Lorrie in the snow. It is endearing of him to still want to try, was a nice thing, just like Lorrie bringing you up here was. Then there were her parents, welcoming you freely into their home. In that way, the Whyte’s have done more for you in

two days than your father has in years, at least since your brothers moved away, and since

Mum died. You’ve wanted to meet people like this lot your whole life.

Marty babbles on awhile then drunkenly stumbles off with a sad expression on his face. You order a few drinks from an overweight bartender, who may be the most miserable person you’ve encountered in this part of the world, which is a whole load of misery from your perspective. Or maybe it is exactly the opposite. Maybe the people of Grace, of the wider county around Grace township, of this part of the state and country, maybe they are happy with their lot in life. It seems a lot like settling to you, but you’ve always been an outsider regardless of the country you live in.

“Get yourself one buddy,” you say, motioning towards the array of alcohol lining the wall behind Unhappy Bartender, “it’s Thanksgiving after all.”

He looks at you noncommittally for a moment, nods, and pours himself a shot of tequila. He turns to face you again rather robotically, and then dispenses it down his gullet, thereafter not hiding his grimace at the taste. He slowly walks away to the other end of the bar just as Lorrie reappears with her cousin Edith by her side. Edith has a glossy look on her face, like she’s been dabbling in some sort of contraband in the bathroom, but then again, she’s a pretty gormless girl at the best of times, so you cannot be sure.

A voice on the speakers drowns out the shriek of country music. “LADIES AND

GENTLEMEN – GIVE A WARM DALTON’S WELCOME TO VIVIENNE THE

VIXEN, NOW ON STAGE IN ROOM 2.” Lorrie is nonplussed by the announcement, but

Edith rushes away in excitement. You and Lorrie share a look and can’t help from laughing.

“You’d think they don’t have strip joints in Madison, the way she gets whenever she’s here,” Lorrie says. She sits on the empty stool by your side, rests her hand atop of

yours on the bar. You feel as if your pulse has quickened, you savor her smell, the way she tucks her hair behind her ear with her other hand.

“Can we get out of here?” you ask her.

She smiles and takes a sip of your drink.

“Sure,” she says, “let’s just go tell the others we are leaving.”

You leave cash on the bar, plus a generous tip for Unhappy Bartender. Lorrie takes your hand and leads you into Room 2.

You drink too much in Room 2 to account for having to watch Vivienne wipe her sweat lashed body off of old Midwestern men with perpetual sneers, and seeing Edith throw mini- seizures whenever the stripper’s nipples are close enough to nuzzle. Lorrie has seen some ex from high school and is preoccupied with him. You pretend not to care, though that swelling rage suggests otherwise. Marty materializes by your side.

“Howdy partner,” he says, sliding a shot before you. He’s wearing a cowboy hat and there are remnants of barbecue sauce around his mouth. You decide not to comment.

“Sorry about that, the whole family used to love Jimbo,” he continues, motioning towards Lorrie’s ex, who’s dressed like some kind of lumberjack, you deduce.

“Jimbo?” you reply incredulously, facing Marty now.

“It’s a weird world my friend, a weird, weird world,” he says.

You both do your shots in unison. You continue to look over at Lorrie as you feel his hand on your leg, rising higher.

“Oh shit Marty,” you say, reaching and pulling his hand off your upper thigh.

He looks despondent, then angry, then he just looks pleadingly up at you.

“I want to feel like I’m a person again, Lewis, I’ve looked everywhere. I don’t even know when I last felt functional.”

Who the hell does? There are tears in his eyes. Lorrie is no longer in sight. You unnaturally assume that her and Jimbo are off in the toilets going at it. You nod at Marty in feigned sympathy, but sit there with him in your immediate silence, there in the neon blare, as old men forget where they hail from and who is or isn’t waiting at home for them.

Edith seems on the edge of a Vivienne the Vixen induced frenzy over in front of the stage.

Lorrie returns with a shitload of drugs; Ted picks up a spiked drink and Aunt Lara rushes him away as he loses consciousness; Frank gets beaten up by a bouncer; you drunkenly ask

Lorrie if she had to suck Jimbo off to score this shitty cocaine; you ply Marty with most of the drugs to cheer him up, but it has the opposite effect; at some point you and Lorrie fall into a car and make out like teenagers; the car is moving, Jimbo is driving; who the fuck does Jimbo think he is? Where is Marty? Grace isn’t all bad; Grace is the personification of hell; isn’t it funny that Ted got his drink spiked? you hope the little shit is okay; who else came here with you? is there an Aunt unaccounted for? You kind of hope the dog licks your feet in the morning, maybe Lorrie will if not. What does a person do on Thanksgiving?

Is it a whole day of being thankful for your own gluttony? These drugs are shit, or they aren’t and it’s just you who is; Lorrie is fumbling around in your briefs but you cannot get hard; Jimbo says cut it out; you want to punch him on his nose or something, wherever people punch each other; what is the Welsh equivalent of Thanksgiving? you wonder if

Vivienne the Vixen is the richest woman for miles around; you wonder why Edith adores her so; did you finish that paper for sports journalism? Do you miss Urbana-Champaign?

Or Wales? You know why there are stars but what do the stripes mean? Are you intolerant of other cultures or are you intolerant of you? Jimbo urges you out of the car and Lorrie is laughing, and now so are you because Jimbo looks devastated; Wales 1-0 America; it’s already light out; or, the snow makes it seem so; on the porch next door Oscar’s pumpkin sits in place, outline of American flag and all; on the roof of his parent’s house flies a

Honduran flag however; what brings people to Grace? the table is set for Thanksgiving already, with lots of seats and plates and cutlery; Lorrie is reaching for your hand; you reach for her ass; you fall up the stairs, she falls over you; in her room, you awkwardly try to have sex, she whispers “make love to me”; you feel sick, you’re flaccid and useless; she says “it’s fine”; you lie in dark silence; soon your head throbs from the drugs, mouth dry;

Lorrie sleepily whispers “I love you” in your ear, you say nothing back for a while; soon you feel your dick coming to life down there and you whisper “I love you too” and you’ve never felt this giddy; Lorrie snores lightly.

You hastily packed your bag as Harley the Alsatian looked at you with her head tilted to the side. Lorrie stayed snoring as you left her room but she was out for the count, the scent of last night’s alcohol hovering over all like exhaust fumes in winter air. The car still takes so long to warm; you’re getting worried that somebody will find you trying to leave. You look back at the house. She is in there; is she awake yet? You hate that feeling in your gut right now. Later, you imagine you will long for it again, will expose yourself to all manner of mishaps to find it. You wonder what brings a person to do the things that they do, and the things that they don’t.

76 You hear a porch shutter slam, and you put the car into gear and speed away, skidding slightly then correcting it. You’re aiming south, you think, as you come through

Grace, but soon you’re lost in yet another quaint street of lookalike houses and you pull over once more.

Then you see the flowers on the passenger seat that you bought the day before. For the first time, your father feels an entire ocean away. He cannot hurt you when you’re here.

It strikes you, in some snow shrouded revelatory moment, there in your little rental car, that the only place you need to be is in fact here, at the edge of Grace township. You turn around and head back to the Whyte’s.

You get out of the car and look straight at the house. Uncle Marty nods at you from an upstairs window. You’re sure he’s had better days. In some ways, the two of you are alike. You nod back, and smile up at him despite yourself.

Inside, Cassandra and Lorrie are once again the first people up. They look concerned, but their expressions change at the sight of you, at the lilies in your hand. It’s probably best if you give them to Cassandra.

“Oh Lewis! You shouldn’t have,” Cassandra says, grinning.

Lorrie has a familiar look on her face, one you loved the sight of when you first moved to college-town America, with its plethora of young women. It’s a look you’ve come to find dehumanizing, somehow. The same expression Lorrie has when introducing you to her friends and teammates at college, when she says things like “listen to his accent, isn’t it cute?” and “he’s from Wales, that’s in the UK.”

Jones County Lowlands

(I)

I remember wiping the sleep from my eyes, my body buckling in the cold as they lead Papa away in cuffs. Papa’s eyes were a red blare, his collar up high, and he was attempting to wriggle down into that oversized shirt, as if to hide his shame. Momma was on the porch smoking a cigarette and Jodie cowered behind her legs. Sirens cascaded light through the blackness, enough to show their tears. As Papa looked out from the backseat of the car, I felt the urge to laugh like a maniac might do.

After that night, they spoke of us in whispers in town, and it took me a long time to get the answers that would explain the ravaging of my childhood. For months, I asked

Momma why they’d taken him away, and all she ever said was “You’ll never see that man again” or words to that effect, and always when I brought Papa up she ushered Jodie into the next room, like even the non-answers she was offering me were too much for his little ears to absorb.

Knowing what I know now, sheltering Jodie from these things was a good enough parenting decision on paper, but I think it began the long suppression of memories that invariably brought my brother to suicide years later. It seems odd to me that anybody in

Kansas can die a watery death, but there you have it. Jodie’s life was never a conventional one, stemming from all of the things our father enacted upon him, all the evils and perils inherent in a sick man’s mind.

When I first came to realize some of what Papa had been doing, what he was really away for, I must have been in my early teens, becoming wiser each day to the sniggering of classmates or the whispers of townspeople down at the Hy-Vee in Jones. Jodie had flourished for a time as he too approached adolescence, and I didn’t realize it then, but as he developed the ability to contextualize his own trauma through his teenage years, his past seemed to rear back towards him, setting him on the path toward the end of his hapless life.

(II)

Momma is still in the house Papa had bought with his inheritance. She was shrewd, my

Momma, even approaching seventy, and though she never discussed it, she’d finagled her way into owning the deed. I wonder how she did it, persuading a man who was dead to her to sign away his family home. I enquired once, but she looked at me and said “Bo, we have what we have but we lost far more,” before taking a sip from a jar of her homemade peach tea, “Never forget that we should have more than just this goddamned house.”

The wind whistled through the rafters overhead, causing the wood to creak. I could see the car coming from a mile or so away. With this flatland panorama before us, we awaited Gertrude Kember’s arrival.

Kember is one of the lawyers whose family had long been established in Jones.

She’d gotten her degree from Wichita State or KU, and had promptly returned home to a job she’d always been guaranteed. There was a kind of mutual respect between the people who left Jones for college and came back, as if we were doing our town and county a special service by returning. Maybe we were, I didn’t really know. The only reason I was still here at thirty was for Momma.

I was still clad in my work gear, stinking like a sump, when Kember turned into the drive. Momma supped on her drink, rocking there on the porch where years before my brother had taken shelter behind her.

“Here she comes, Momma,” I said, descending the porch steps.

“Hello, Ms. Layton, Mr. Layton,” Kember said even as she pulled herself out of her

Camry. She straightened her business suit with one hand and strode towards us.

“Would you care for some peach tea, Mrs. Kember?”

“No thank you, Bo, let’s just get to business, shall we?”

I gave her a chair next to Momma, settled down on my knees on the other side, leaning on the arm of Momma’s rocker.

“Once again I’m sorry for the long-windedness of all of this,” Kember said, “I know the years since haven’t been easy for you.” She had the sound of real empathy in her voice.

I knew the difference between it and the put-on kind, from years of fielding questions about my father, and from years of combatting talk of being a violent man myself, given my propensity for hunting.

She passed me a pen, looking closely at the papers as she did so. Kember had a great knack for doing multiple things at once, it made me think her talents were wasted in

Jones County, Kansas.

“I never thought about it before, didn’t know Bo was short for Bozeman,” she said, her face close to the document. I looked at Momma, willed her to answer for me.

“Yeah Jeff was from Montana, grew up in Bozeman,” Momma replied, before she took her obligatory tea sip, “thought he’d name his first born after his first home.”

“And Jodie?” asked Kember, though she looked immediately as if she wanted to take the question back.

“Nothing Jeff did for or with that child ever made logical sense, wanted to give him a fucking girl’s name and I just did as he bid. A weak bitch,” Momma slammed her glass down, looking out from her place on the porch at the far-off horizon, the wheatgrass and the clouds out there.

“These signatures, the evidence you have provided over the years Ms. Layton, these are all necessary for the course of justice.”

“We’re all just intermediaries between what he did and the reckoning he will finally get,” said Momma, and she looked at me. I nodded, signed where I needed to, looked back at her.

“And what about Antwon?” I asked, more to Momma than to Kember.

“Well, that’s what these other papers are for,” Kember said, and again showed me half-a-dozen places where my signature was required. This time Momma’s signature wasn’t needed.

(III)

After Momma died, I actually began to go into town more. I didn’t live down the road any longer, but in the house bequeathed to me. I bought new furniture and decorated the place with some help from some ex-college friends from Manhattan, who came to visit me once or twice a year.

Antwon and I drew odd looks in town because nobody in Jones knew why I’d be hanging out with a young black boy, and I knew how rumors started, knew that my Papa’s history fueled the cruelest stories.

But my life changed in a good way, caring for Antwon and working when I got the time as a hunter’s guide, and doing odd jobs on any of the nearby farms.

Like today, Antwon and I had come into town to get haircuts. Most people, at least now, do get that evil is out there; that we can watch it unfurl on our computer or TV screen, read about it in our very hands, so they have almost come to terms with what my Papa did before. Some people don’t know, just look at Antwon in that occasionally small-minded, backwards way. That’s fine, it is what it is.

“Uncle Bo, can we get some pancakes?” Antwon asked.

“Hell, yeah kiddo, let’s go to Fran’s.”

Out of the barbershop, we hung a left, crossed over Main and walked by the two bars Jodie had used to frequent, further down by the back of the Hy-Vee parking lot, and the gas station that was constantly running out of gas and had been for years, even after they put the new Subway sandwich store in there in 2011. We crossed the rail tracks which, people said, were possibly going to be up and running again soon, rather than having to lug ourselves out to one of the college towns just to catch an Amtrak. You had to leave Jones

County just to leave Jones County.

Outside Fran’s there were two patrol cars parked up. Above the diner, were the now vacant offices of Kember Law Associates. Gertrude had recently moved to Tulsa,

Oklahoma, after a high-profile case involving some bureaucratic bullshit with the aviation big-shots down in Wichita. The exposure had caused her to do what no Kember had seemingly ever done; moved up in the world and got the hell out of town.

We went on in and got a seat right at the counter, which caused Antwon to grin in anticipation. He loved to watch them cook up everything right before his eyes, see them blend his frozen shake into a swirling creamy goodness.

Martha, our regular waitress, put down the shake for Antwon, and then a coffee for me.

“Thanks Martha,” I said.

“Always, honey,” she said, swooping down on the police officers down at the other end of the counter. One of them I didn’t recognize, but the Deputy, Leyland, who I’d gone to school with back in the day, nodded towards the door.

“Just gimme a minute, buddy,” I said to Antwon, but he was engrossed in giving himself brain freeze. Maybe that was the Jodie in him, a fleeting desire to suffer from a source of enjoyment.

Leyland and I stepped outside, and shook each other’s hand.

“How’s it going Bo? How’s the father-uncle thing treating you?”

“You know how it is Ley, easy and hard, easy and hard.”

He smiled. He’d been good to me in school, especially after Papa went away. He was from a law enforcement family, knew even the living were the victims of crimes like those my father committed. He’d also been first on the scene when Jodie slashed his wrists and waded into the water, had been the one to call me down to the river that day.

“That thing you wanted me to follow up on - well my buddy in Topeka PD filled me in on it.”

“Not good news I suppose?”

“There wasn’t much information besides what we could find online. It seems that maybe Antwon’s mother holed up in a shitty part of town for a while, I don’t know. By all accounts it seems as though she’s gone from Topeka. Very little trace.”

“Ok, well thanks for enquiring Ley, I owe you one.”

“You don’t owe me shit Bo. I hope this gives you some closure though.”

“Yeah I guess so – she did ask for him to go to Jodie’s family after all.”

“Hell man, he’s better off here with you.”

“I hope so Ley. Hey, hit me up, let’s go out buck hunting when the season starts.”

“Absolutely Bo, sounds like a plan. You have a good day now.” Leyland didn’t go back inside but crossed to his patrol car.

I stood there for moment, feeling that way I often do when nearly overwhelmed; my eyes get hot as if about to tear up, then I have to suppress the urge to laugh, like these disparate emotions might allow me to make sense of a moment, an unfortunate thing, a life full of loss and carnage, yet full of simplicity too. I laughed then, aloud to myself, and when it passed I went inside once more.

Back indoors, Lee Johansen had sat up next to Antwon and was regaling Martha with his usual bullshit.

“Not since my Daddy moved down from St. Paul, Minnesota have you seen a deal like this one Martha. You could trade in your Taurus and pay next to nothing for a brand- new truck of your choosing.”

“Isn’t it your day off, Lee?” Martha quipped back.

Lee turned to me now, his face lighting up. It had surely been a slow season, especially because the real serious truck drivers went to KC or Topeka for the top-tier stuff, and Lee Johansen Motors was about four years behind the times, at least in terms of stock.

“Well! If it isn’t Bo. Looking for a new motor, my boy?” Lee said.

“Now Lee, why would today be any different than when I spoke to you two weeks ago?”

“It’s the Viking blood in me, Bo my boy! I’m ruthless, my ancestors didn’t traverse the Atlantic to have us Johansen’s stagnate and die. This is America, Bo! Making a living is the lifeblood of Americans, but we Vikings were at it long before all of you!” Lee said, as if to the whole diner.

Try to imagine a man like that; hooting all his life about how proud he was to be

Finnish, a real Nordic Warrior; and yet he couldn’t point out Helsinki on a map. That was what most everyone I’d ever known was guilty of, misplacing the relevance of their lives, of what it meant to be living here on Earth, here in Jones. Our neighbor Phil, he’d go once a month, after his paycheck came in, load up his truck with beer coolers and turkey jerky, and traverse the plains, always via the back roads until he came to Lebanon, until he was smack bang in the middle of our dear continent; and he’d think himself significant, he’d think his life a splendid one, like being equilaterally distant from each ocean was a great achievement. He’d never even been into Missouri, but here he was thinking himself travelled. Jodie never had that, he only had his hurt. I suppose I get my peace from the bogs, the prairie; like there is something profound in extracting from the earth what is best left be, slurping the life from soil like a kid drinking soda at the old drive-in over off 8th street. But it’s a great gig sometimes, finding trinkets in the dirt or old Indian weaponry in

the fields or the backwoods, taking would-be hunters to the best spots for game. I don’t think it’s much amounting to relevance, but I feel lucky sometimes. Lucky that Papa only had eyes for Jodie and lucky I don’t have all of the mental fallout that pushed my brother to slice his wrists up with a sharpened crucifix and wade into the Three Rivers one summer evening. While that fills me with a lot of guilt, it’s nothing close to the guilt I have when I feel glad that Jodie is dead, so he doesn’t need to have those images and those thoughts anymore, and so that I don’t have to be the one to take him out into the nature reserves with me and soothe him temporarily sane. It doesn’t mean I don’t love my brother; I do and I did, it just means that eternal peace seems a kinder substitute than constant pain and lifelong suppression. Jodie probably felt that when you’re dead you’re off the hook, and when you aren’t you’re just wriggling bait above a prairie bog.

My eyes must have glossed over; Martha, Antwon, and Lee were all looking expectantly at me.

“I’m not going to buy a truck anytime soon, Lee, but when I do you’re the only man I’ll call,” I said. Men like Lee Johansen needed appeasing rather than berating, it added to their notion that capitalism was not a fool’s game and that they were probably par for the course.

“Glad to hear it pal, get the kid another milkshake on me, one of these days he’ll be big and strong as a Viking himself,” Lee said, though he got up and left the diner without proffering a single penny.

Antwon watched him go wordlessly. He was a keen observer of this odd world he had, through no fault of his own, been thrust into. Martha watched Antwon, a pitying yet kind look on her face. I followed Antwon’s look to see Lee speed off in his car.

Lee wasn’t all bad. Maybe it was jealously and irritation both that fueled my view of him, of the likes of Gertrude Kember, escaped from Jones the town and Jones the county.

Maybe that was all I really needed to do; cut out the negativity with regards to other people.

I had a lot to be thankful about this existence of mine, my role in Antwon’s life and his in mine, our place together within Jones, both of our relationship to the lowlands that put bread on the table.

(IV)

Antwon moved through the branches like a bogger incarnate. His uncle’s boy. To the untrained eye we’d be hard to spot, in and out of the bog and the woodlands, squelching slowly across the reserve.

“Uncle Bo, when we gonna see some action here?” he asked me over his shoulder.

“That’s up to you bud, you’re running point here, keep your eyes ahead.” I motioned with my fingers and he turned back, strode forth. He was getting better certainly, but he had Jodie’s knack for getting distracted.

Four days earlier, the State of Kansas had rejected my father’s appeal against lethal injection. As he had been for decades, he was on Death Row. The charges against my papa had amassed over the years, so that he was now the confirmed killer of eight boys and the suspect in the disappearance of a dozen more. With each new conviction, he was seemingly pushed closer toward an execution that would, in reality, never come. He’d been on death row for nearly twenty-five years, but in all that time, nobody had been executed in the state of Kansas.

Antwon knew nothing of his grandfather, what he’d enacted upon his own son, what he’d done to eight other boys across Montana, Nebraska, and Kansas before he’d

settled down into fabricated bliss with Momma. I hadn’t fully known for the longest time, not until I’d moved to Manhattan, done two years at K-State. The rumors had been there but not even the townspeople had known the full extent of my father’s depravity. He’d repaired farm machinery after all; he was the guy to talk to if your combine stopped running, so who would assume he was a serial killer stalking the lowlands of America for pre-teen boys? Certainly not his wife and his eldest boy; not even when he’d been abusing the youngest son under their very roof and their very noses.

When the wind picked up and ruffled the tops of the cornstalks a little over yonder, you knew it was strengthening because the branches around you creaked, the stagnant water rippled slightly.

“Wind’ll drive ‘em out kiddo, the herds will be moving for cover.”

We picked up our pace, forcing ourselves through the foliage and splashing out into the sunrise.

There are times when I’m content, with Antwon here at the day’s dawn, as if Central

Kansas is a playing field all our own, the orange hue of the world illuminating the plains, the silhouettes of wild animals in the middle distance.

“They’re too far off Uncle Bo, too far away.”

“We’ll get one kiddo,” I pointed at the stragglers, their hinds, “You can tell where you are in Kansas by which deer you’re tailing. These are Mules, if we were any further west we’d be seeing Whitetails,” Antwon smiled, put his eye to his scope. He was good for his age.

Just back behind us, as if where we’d just come out of, there was noise in the trees.

We turned slowly, alert.

Could I ever tell the boy why his father was dead? That Jodie was weak, a piss- poor Papa himself, because of his own childhood? Antwon reminded me of the Jodie I saw glimpses of just before he got old enough to remember it all. There was an exuberance to him that prefaced the stress of adolescent questioning and its answers, the ones that would begin to establish in him a Self he could make sense of. We were kin, the only family each other had.

“It’s a baby, it’s just a baby, Uncle Bo. Should I pop it or let it go?”

The stag came out behind its young, his breath sending steam into the air, the birds cooing from the trees. The stag took off running and so did the babe, and I motioned at

Antwon to fire. We stood there in the pallid morning glow of the prairie, firing in the direction of the daddy and the baby deer, not even aiming just shooting, and I think we were laughing, or at least I know I was

U.S Tour

I wasn’t yet talented or successful enough to qualify for a U.S arts visa so instead my agent

Mick had secured us three-month tourist visas. It was an off-the-books kind of trip, possibly illegal in terms of immigration and foreign income we weren’t planning on declaring. A lot of mine and Mick’s relationship was made up of blind faith; his in me and mine in him.

He’d told me I had garnered quite a cult following amongst university students in the southern states. I liked to hang on his every word at such times. The blind leading the blind, and I was a sucker for any praise I could get.

We’d travelled light, and so only had a bag each at O’Hare. Just the day before,

Mick had split with his boyfriend of seven years. He didn’t seem too downcast. “Look,” he’d said, “this could be the making of us, Lewis,” when I’d asked why he had broken it off with Tim. “I can’t afford to have anything holding me back, not now. All we need is one big timer or somebody with any connections to take in one of your readings and we could be set.”

I wasn’t so sure. Up to a point only so much of his faith in me was motivational.

He’d uprooted his entire life in the name of some clichéd belief in an American dream of his own. I felt somewhat pressured by his decision to come out here single.

We soon flagged a taxi outside O’Hare, headed for the city. Mick knew a guy who owned an independent bookstore a few blocks from DePaul University’s downtown campus, and the guy was putting us up in the bedsit above it for two nights. The bookstore owner, a family friend of Mick’s, had arranged for me to perform a reading tomorrow night

from my novel. I was still undecided on which passage to read, mulling it over in the back of the cab when Mick spoke up suddenly, pointing my attention out the front of the windscreen. Before us, the Chicago skyline seemed to materialize as if suddenly sketched on a sky-blue canvas.

“Take a look at that, Lew,” Mick said , and I nodded in agreement at the impressive buildings before us, at the Willis Tower and John Hancock Building, pointed upwards, sprouting up in endless fashion against that backdrop of blue.

Mick turned back to the driver and resumed the conversation they had been having.

There was seemingly an element of flirtation to their conversation. “A striking guy like you?” said Mick, “Well you must have been quite the football player in your day.” The taxi driver chuckled, throwing a glance back at Mick, “You have no idea, my friend, I had a scholarship from Northwestern before I injured my back sophomore year.” Mick chuckled, before leaning in a little closer. I rolled my eyes, and looked out at the fast passing traffic.

Were you a cult writer if you attracted a couple hundred sales predominantly around

Oklahoma? I’d spent a festive period there once and when one day I sat down to plan my first novel, it had suddenly appealed to me to set my story in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. I had a notion of emulating Steinbeck, but in the end my Oklahoma had been far different than that of the Joads, especially when it came to the arousal of horny college students, mainly in attendance at the University of Oklahoma (Tulsa campus). There was a professor there who had discovered my book and soon installed it on the syllabus. I’d like to buy the professor in question a drink, especially if his installing my book as mandatory reading got me some ass off of his students. Or better yet, I got some kind of exposure to some big shot publishers. There had been limited success elsewhere around the country, and also back

home in the UK. Mick had shown me some of the fan mail from some particularly turned on university students (both male and female) bordering on fanatical. My inner sleazebag had been just as tempted as Mick, and thus here we were. The blind leading the blind after all.

* * *

I closed the book, immediately regretting my decision to read a sex scene. I was a little tipsier than I’d intended to be, but it had helped to alleviate my nerves. I was surprised I’d blushed as much as I had for the crowd here gathered. There were around half a dozen patrons in the bookstore: two men, who likely had only come in for warmth and shelter, and off of whom the stench of piss was particularly pungent; Mick’s friend and owner of the store; and three middle aged women who had been somewhat more interested than the others. Mick had slipped out shortly after I began, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d gone up town for one of the rent boys he and the taxi driver had conversed about shortly before we were dropped off. He and Mick had exchanged numbers as I got our bags out of the trunk. I stepped away from the makeshift podium to no applause, only strained silence. They weren’t the demographic anyway.

I looked to Burke, the storeowner, but he had a disinterested glazy look to his face, and he chewed noisily on tobacco before spitting it in a jar in his hands. Then he turned and went into the backroom he called an office. I wasn’t offended; I’d not been feeling it either in all honesty. I’m a not-so successful novelist who is behind on his rent payments.

Far be it from me to expect the world to want to read my shit. I was aware in that moment that I was indeed far too drunk, because I get particularly bitter and self-loathing when I am. I looked around the store once more then went outside for a cigarette. In my experience,

performing my work live tends not to go down too well. Even my English accent couldn’t save me here. I’d met my ex-fiancé at one such reading, my first as a student writer in fact.

I never could pinpoint the moment I began hating her, I’ve always had trouble blurring the line between lust and loathing. At this point in time, Mick was the only person I hadn’t severed ties with, mainly because he still clung fastidiously to the notion that I was a pretty great writer of prose, and therefore I was a potential meal ticket.

The bright blue day had become a cold night. I shivered as the cacophonous blare of traffic emanated from all sides. I smoked a cigarette and looked forward to more fruitful times further south. Mick seemed particularly certain that this trip would be a roaring success. The fan mail helped, one such email to Mick’s office had involved a senior year student in an assortment of risqué positions, none of which I could ever hope to contort my unfit body into. Another had contained locks of hair and some students even included work of their own, poetry most often. To think, people looked down upon self-publishing! It was a nice thing to be adulated wasn’t it?

At that minute, two of the middle-aged women exited the store. One was on her phone and scurried away into the night, but the other pulled out a cigarette and staggered over to me. She smelt like a cocktail of out of date perfume, tobacco, and halitosis. But she wasn’t all that bad on the eye. I could make out the outlines of her nipples through her skin- tight leather jacket.

“You were pretty good in there,” she said as if bored, looking me up and down.

“Thanks,” I said, though I was feigning as much interest as her in a conversation.

“You a famous writer back over the pond then?”

“Afraid not, this is about as good as it’s been for me.” I motioned behind her to the bookstore, which looked pathetic in the pallid glow of an exterior light.

“Cold out huh? Wanna go someplace warmer?” she asked, abandoning a subtle approach. Another time I’d probably take her up on her offer.

“Is that a wedding ring on your finger?” I asked, motioning to the hand clutching the cigarette. She snarled in response.

“Don’t get all pious on me you posh English twat,” she thrust her body out towards me and it struck me that I shouldn’t have asked.

“Hey I’m no home-wrecker,” I said, taking a step back, “sorry but it’s not gonna happen lady.”

She tossed her cigarette bud down at my feet and went off in the same direction as her friend. “Shit,” I said aloud, alone in the Chicago night once more.

I stomped out the last of my own cigarette and went back inside, up to the bedsit.

The door wouldn’t budge though, it was locked tight and I knocked a couple of times, certain I could hear movement inside. The rest of my cash was inside and I didn’t like the prospect of cutting myself off for the night just yet. I knocked once more but there was no answer. I was getting frustrated now, so remembering the look on Burke’s face, chewing on his tobacco as I came off stage, I delivered a quick, hard kick to the door and it gave way.

Now I’m not one to shy away from many sights, but what greeted me made me contemplate my place on this literary tour of sorts. One of the two homeless men from my reading appeared to be out cold on the deck, and Mick was holding a dripping candle in one hand whilst removing his own clothes with the other. I was somewhat relieved to hear

the man move as the wax sizzled into his skin, though not too glad to see the look of pure bliss on his features now his eyes were open. I turned so as to try to get the image out of my head when the other homeless man appeared at the door beside me. The smell of piss was worse than ever. You can write all the fiction you like but sometimes fact is more unfathomable. Mick had recently broken off his relationship with a very successful banker from London and here he was in Chicago with two foul smelling homeless men. He’d skipped out tonight on the first of six or seven readings he told me could make us rich and here he was, slumming it up here instead. I heard Mick say from behind me, back in the room, “For fucks sake Lewis close the fucking door,” and the second homeless man pushed by me. I swept up my bag then bailed out into the cold Chicago night.

* * *

“Look Lew, I’m sorry you had to see us like that,” Mick said the next morning over coffee.

“The thing is Mick, I don’t care about that, you can fuck all the unshowered men in the Midwest for all I care, it’s just… ah shit I don’t know man.” I took a loud slurp of my coffee, scalding my lips. My eyes watered from the pain, and I remembered very clearly the look on Hobo Number One’s face as Mick stood atop of him. Maybe it was too soon to order food.

“Shit, the last thing I want is for you to lose faith in me, Lewis. I just got an urge, I didn’t mean to skip out on the reading.”

“It wasn’t even the reading, that was cursed the minute I opted to read the farmhand sex scene,” I tried to suppress a smile. Mick was perhaps my only ally in the world at this point. My phone began to ring, and I stared at the caller I.D. Lucy. Shit. Mick noticed too, looked up at me.

“You still ignoring her calls? Maybe that’s not such a good idea, you have your son to worry about.”

“Come on Mick, what did we say on the flight yesterday, no talk of anyone back home. For either of us.” I flashed him a look that made him stare down at his coffee. I couldn’t take her call, she’d be whining about something she needed and as far as I was concerned this trip was my only viable option as far as future income was concerned.

“She’s probably pissed we splashed out on this trip. I take it you never paid her rent?”

“You kidding me, Mick? What did I just say? Of course I never paid their rent, I didn’t even pay my own goddamn rent.”

“Shit, sorry man, I’ll stop,” he said, but he looked a little concerned. It was one thing for him to be concerned now, but it was all rosy when the prospect of gaining popularity down south was mentioned. He sure had not hesitated to apply for our visas when that came to light.

“Let’s change the subject huh? We were talking about last night?”

What could I say to him? That it had irked me that I’d passed up on sex with that middle-aged woman just to then see him getting it on with two homeless guys?

“It’s fine man, I guess the booze had me feeling a little lonely that’s all,” I said, trying to shrug this off even as I disclosed the information to him. There really is nothing worse than feeling lonely, and yet I can’t seem to stomach a sustainable relationship.

“Hey, it’ll all be good down south, you’ll see. Big shot writer like you? You’ll be swimming in it,” he said with a grin, finishing the remainder of his coffee.

I managed to suppress a surge of panic rising in my chest, and faked a laugh along with him as he motioned for the bill. I was beginning to feel out of my depth.

* * *

“Ladies and gentleman may I introduce novelist Lewis Lamarr.”

We’d been cancelled on for three of the readings, but I’d personally phoned the

Professor in Oklahoma and informed him of our arrival, and he had arranged for me to do a few more readings around the state at literary events. I’d been feeling pretty studious of late; Mick and I had been on a high since Chicago. My work was being well received and that feeling of being out of my depth had begun to recede over time. It was the good

Professor, a scholarly old chap who ran a course on Contemporary Literature, who now introduced me to the crowd.

“Thanks very much Professor Watts, it’s great to be here,” I said as I took to the podium. It was a pretty big turnout. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket, but thankfully it wasn’t on loud. I’d been entirely neglectful of any sign from back home and I supposed it was Lucy trying me yet again. We were at another reading in Tulsa, the one we’d been preparing for. Mick was at the back of the room talking to a nice girl, a fan of mine by the name of Hannah. Whilst she’d come across as a little crazy, she’d had some glowing praise for my novel and for an old short story I’d almost forgotten I’d had published (I’d never actually forget). I don’t claim not to be a little narcissistic myself, so my vanity once again got the better of me and I was hoping to hook up with her afterwards. There were around fifty people present, and an air of expectation that I’d not yet experienced.

Maybe Mick had been right all along about Oklahoma. It was one thing his hedging all his bets on me, but this was as close to artistic adulation as I had experienced first-hand.

I’d perhaps had too much time to reflect on the long bus journeys south from Chicago, when I’d think of that son of mine back home. I’d never been part of his life on his mother’s wishes. I provided what monetary support I could, but self-publication had at best garnered me a cult reputation in this pocket of North America and at worst a feeling of self-worth I knew had no true credence on a deeper level. I had very little else to show for my writing career, afterall. This trip was ultimately proving to be a good representation of how I spent my life, delaying the need to take responsibility for substantial things. I felt very thankful for Mick, up there on the podium, and it allowed me to push any thoughts of my ex and my son to the back of my mind.

I read from my novel, about a British family uprooted and immigrated to Oklahoma.

The novel follows their systemic decline, starting from when the father dies in a freak accident, and thereafter predominantly following the youngest son as he becomes an alcoholic ranch-hand, culminating in his arriving in Oklahoma City on the day of the

Oklahoma bombings and the resolution of his plight being left up in the air. I remember when I’d planned out the character, basing so much of his likenesses upon my own, and I realized my decline in life had followed the trajectory of his own downfall. Odd isn’t it how our own creations can echo us so clearly, stranger too the fact that we never see these embodiments until all is nearly ruined. You’d think for a writer there’d be more self- awareness regarding the things that matter. Somehow, I finished my reading without balking, without becoming overwhelmed by what had become of my life. I stepped down to rigorous applause, seemingly having won over the crowd. Mick took me to the side as the Professor took to the stage again.

“Great reading Lew, best one yet,” said Mick, patting me on the back. He had a little white powder on his nose, which I reached and rubbed off for him before anyone should notice.

“Thanks, Mick. Hey, where’s Hannah?” I asked, looking around.

“My phone wouldn’t stop ringing so I asked her to answer it for me, so as not to interrupt your flow up there,” he replied. I noticed now how glazed his eyes were and how often his nose twitched.

“Holy shit Mick, you really are on one. That’ll be fucking Lucy on the phone, who else has been calling us non-stop for the last couple of weeks? Shit.”

Professor Watts suddenly arrived at our side, clapping me hard on the back.

“Come sign some books Mr. Lamarr, you’re a big hit here,” he said in his booming voice, and I couldn’t really say no as he escorted me over to a group of young female students.

I’d been signing some copies of my book for about ten minutes when I got a tap on my shoulder. It was Hannah. She didn’t look mad as she passed me the phone, but now I did balk and let it pass on to Mick. I signed a few more copies whilst casting intermittent looks at his facial expression for any sign of bad news. Hannah was still close by which encouraged me. Watts was back on the podium booming out some more information to some assembled listeners. Mick hung up the phone before long, coming closer to Hannah and I. He leant in close.

“Lewis I really don’t know what to say,” he said, looking at Hannah, who looked down at the ground.

“Just spit it out Mick.”

“It’s a couple of things. Oh shit Lew, we really should have been answering our calls.”

“That wasn’t the deal we made,” I said jovially, trying to get a laugh out of him.

“It’s Noah, he’s ill. Real badly ill,” he said, looking at me, “Noah’s his son,” he said facing Hannah. The bastard had to disclose that information to her, didn’t he?

“What’s wrong with him Mick?”

“They’re carrying out tests but it’s some sort of “medical mystery” according to your father.”

“My father? What does he want? Jesus.”

Hannah stayed silent, occasionally casting glances at me.

What would a real man think, do, say? Your only ally in the world tells you your son is potentially in danger and you should drop everything, right? I envy Mick. I wish I could find bliss as fleetingly as he. Jealously has rendered me unable to erase those hobos out from my nostrils, or my mind, and I cannot shake the sight of the dripping candle wax and the ensuing look of delight it caused. I want a relationship as mutually beneficial as there’s was in the space of fifteen minutes. Not to be burned, only needed. I even blame

Mick for my entire lack of success in life thus far. The stupid cokehead is off his rocker even as he speaks. But then again I’ve always blamed others.

For a long, long time now I’ve been pursuing in vain the pipe dream of winning a

Booker Prize, say, or some other award, any award! Any recognition at all! I learnt a long time ago, probably when I first fell out with dad, that realistically I cannot sustain yourself and the piles and piles of rejected manuscripts are just always pushed to the back of my

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head. I want so badly to like myself that I neglect everybody else, even that endangered son, who is probably wriggling in pain even now yelling for the father I’ve never been to him. So I take this pretty blonde girl’s hand, move my other hand down to her sumptuous ass and look at my agent with scorn.

“Wanna get out of here?” I say to her, but she looks from Mick to me, then shakes off my hand and goes off in the other direction. Yeah, now you’re out of your depth Lamarr.

Mick and I are stood in a bookstore in Tulsa, some other such fans huddling around us and

Professor Watts is making his way over. It strikes me that it is time to flee once again. But where do I go to and what do I have? There is loneliness out there and there is loneliness in here. Sometimes no amount of people can fix that fact.

It dawns on me that I don’t know what next to do. I never really have. Not even

America can fix that fact.

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Backboard Confessions

I roll out from the corner and post-up, body against body as I come back down from the shot, absorbing the contact as the ball arcs the rim and bounces off the backboard.

Immediately, I spin the weakside defender and seize the rebound, drawing the contact once again as I barely retain the ball, bumping it back off the board where it banks slightly and, slow-mo, takes a fortunate roll and drops into the basket.

The ball an expansion of my digits, as it rolls off them I know whether or not it’s gonna go in the hoop and when it doesn’t I can pretty much pinpoint exactly why: feet not planted fully, drifting from my set stance in mid-air, defender too vigorous and in my face, which is itself a byproduct of my slow court acuity. That’s a term I think I penciled: “slow court acuity”. Basketball is clinical in a way that life cannot consistently be. It’s a head game more than a body game, though of course you need some base amount of strength and stamina if you’re gonna do this: take on the challengers at the court off 4th Street. I would never have brought anybody I knew well, because here is a place where who you are is just a baller, and being a baller is a categorization that, to me, doesn’t extend beyond

American borders. We barely have the game back home. Just a shitty pro-league, and in terms of courts in my hometown there’s only a few rust-bucket hoops a few miles from my parent’s house. The UK cut the Olympic basketball funding money to nil just after the 2012

Olympic Games, not as a cause but as an effect; it’s an American game and Scotland is not

America, we prefer our sport to be body games that can be dictated by smart head moves,

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and basketball cannot be defined as one or the other, really – though as it pertains to me, it’s a head game for sure. Basketball just does not translate from here to there.

My three-point game is coming on strong; at the ten and two positions of a clock face, if the clock face were the semi-circle extending outwards from the basket, I’m lights out, seldom streaky. Corners threes should be the hardest shot on the court but they don’t seem to be for me. I like watching the trajectory of a shot I know is going to swish in cleanly, the same way I like to know when something I’ve done has been worth it off the court. The game is the game, and when I’m here the only non-fleeting thought is how best to get the ball back in my hands, either by draining a shot of my own or pestering the opposing player into a turnover.

As the other players disperse I see there’s one newcomer here to challenge. A kid who’s here pretty regularly. One-on-one can be the best workout of all.

“Wanna go to 21?” he asks, bouncing his ball towards me. The tred is whittled away with time’s usage. A ball he is familiar with, but we can use it anyway, lest he think the advantage be on my end.

“Yeah man, that works,” I extend my fist which he bumps in return. These are the intimacies of the one-on-one game, fleeting human contact and a stranger’s mutual respect.

“You can call me Jazz,” he says, pointing to his Utah jersey.

“I’m Sam,” I say. The simplicity of it exposes a potential gulf in basketball acumen.

So too do our nationalities however; he’s likely played since he was a kid, and I self-made my game without any training. Rugby or footy on the other hand, I’d had burned into my psyche from childhood. The game is a million little things, the minutiae and the memory of it, of court awareness and position and playing to your strengths.

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Jazz drains a long-range three right in my face, then is tad too short on his next shot.

I seize the rebound and courteously take it back outside, before dropping a shoulder and breezing by him for a layup.

“Fuck. Simple D, Jazz. Fix it,” he exclaims..

I guess that the notion of self-making my game, sans coaching, is actually quite an

American idea. The man goes west and fashions himself over. I came to these shores and taught myself this game the British barely believe in.

I drain three more shots from different points in the mid-range. The last is a one- handed floater that brings me back down and into contact with Jazz’s trailing leg, who shoves me off in a brief rising rage. I shrug it off. The guy will beat himself with all that negative energy. Imagine if we went into every life scenario, or every pickup game, with all our emotions laid bare: they’d read us in seconds, figure out our weaknesses before we’d even got started.

Sometimes I think when it all started to go to shit, I should have brought Sasha here after all. I hadn’t, lest the two worlds overlapped. Rebounding is a mental game, and if she were ever here I’d be caught slacking. I’m a person who needs to compartmentalize the aspects of their life.

“13-11?” queries Jazz, though he knows he’s winning and by how much. There’s something filial about his devotion to the game, the same way my game appears less natural. It pains him to only be up by two against this big British brute with an awkward jumper and heavy hands. But I’m making my possessions count, and if you do that out here you give yourself a shot at winning.

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We are both out of breath, and this close, I notice Jazz has a small slash under his eye and a bruise too, like he’s been hit or scratched within the last day or two. As he hits his next shot, barreling by me and banking one in off the backboard, I notice that he subconsciously reaches to it after he makes a shot. Brushes it lightly. He’s using whatever transpired as motivation.

“Ball don’t lie,” he says to himself, flexing his muscles. This is an Americanism that I think I understand. Talent makes the ball go in, talent and a court awareness, and he’s pulling away a little in terms of score, his natural talent superseding my on-the-fly brand of basketball. He’s a brutish guy himself, bigger than he first appeared, tanned, and wiry, hard to bump against like he’s made out of mahogany. He hits a few more shots, and I’m feeling the bruises from contact. It’s a head game, but it’s starting to feel Sisyphean, trying to attack the basket against Jazz. He’s growing in confidence as the game goes on, and I’m buckling under the pressure. Life is like that too. He’s a rock on defense.

Natural ability wins out. Jazz grins at me.

“Good game, bruh,” he says, fist-bumping me once more.

“You too mate,” I say, sore and sweating.

“Keep at it, bruh,” he smiles and turns on his way, a swagger to his gait as he goes to unlock his bicycle over by the old bleachers at the far end of the court.

You learn a lot about yourself when there’s only a half court before you. A ball, a basket. Head game is the best game, I think, because it blocks out all the other thoughts.

The fear of being alone, the fear of not being alone, homesickness, the desire to leave the

USA, the desire to stay.

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The swish-clink of the metal net is soothing in the cold patter of rainfall. I’m chilled and warm at the same time, hard to discern what’s sweat and what’s water, and more than ever the court is hallowed ground and not-home, both. Home is an alien concept to a foreigner, so one must deign to establish little homes, little markers of existence that, combined, amount to the same security usually given by four walls, doors, a roof. People can be the main components of home, but Jazz is the only face I recognize from multiple games – everybody else who occasionally plays here seems to have the notion of house/home/health/hearth/happiness down pat.

Ball don’t lie. I pivot where I stand and brick the fade away jumper, slipping as I come down on my standing foot as the ball careers away into the shrubbery on the far side of the court. I sit in the water that is beginning to accrue on the concrete court. Before long

I’ll retrieve the ball, resume my solitary game. I’ve got work to do, handles to improve, shooting stroke to refine, shot selection to get smarter about. When I first moved to

America, I went down to the nearest gym and joined in a pickup game, five-on-five. It was humbling, to be whipped like that, an outsider made more so by my slow uptake, slower court acuity.

Yes, I’ll retrieve the ball, shoot until my limbs ache, then go back to my apartment and cook myself some dinner, call my parents back in Scotland before they go to sleep, then watch an NBA game on the TV. I wonder if Jazz will be back tomorrow, if I’ll make any friends here who might fancy a game every now and then.

I’ve improved since that first day’s game, but I have a long way to go. There’s something pure about the game of basketball to me, something that feels like I belong here when I play.

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Ligature

There was a morbid thing to be done. That was all Jarvis told himself, that this was a necessity, an inescapable byproduct of his line of work. Sound played an important part, the muffled voices, speaking in low macabre anticipation, a few photographers, some state officials, seven other journalists and the sons of Bailey’s victims, who were strictly off limits to the press. It was a bizarre notion to Jarvis – that eight different papers were to concoct articles out of the tight finality of the hangman’s noose.

He shuffled a little now, uneasy as they waited for the prisoner to be brought out.

It all came down to punishment really, all life actions and inactions, invariably decided by some form of retribution. In this case, Bailey was to hang for a crime he had needlessly carried out. In that way, his victims were punished for nothing, innocents murdered without cause. Punished for nothing or punished for something. That was what everything boiled down to. A door slammed, the metallic definiteness of a steel door, then the echoing jangle of shackles, as they paraded the prisoner towards his death. Bailey had been presented two options. Lethal injection or death by hanging, and had opted for the latter.

Not for fifty years had there been a hanging in Delaware, and so in a way Jarvis felt himself lucky to be one of the reporters on hand, and yet even as he felt this way, he knew the gruesome nature of his being here, a spectator brought here to scribe the intricate details of what it was to watch a man be hanged.

Two prison guards bustled the murderer through another set of steel doors, causing those here to watch to perk up at the sight of them. Bailey appeared emotionless, which

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made sense -here was a man who had mercilessly shot an elderly couple in their own home.

Jarvis was new at this, in fact not long out of a degree in journalism, but he figured this was what you would expect from a man such as Bailey. Not a morsel of remorse, not a hint of fear, even as he first set eyes on the gallows he was being led toward. Scribbling down some notes in shorthand, Jarvis felt a pang of excitement, as morose as the muffled whisper of those alongside him. There was a perverse buzz in the air now.

The preparation went quicker than Jarvis thought it would, and before long, one of the guards descended from the gallows up high. One remained, retreating back behind

Bailey to the lever that was to send him to his doom. There was a collective intake of breath around Jarvis, and he cast his eyes to his left, where on of his rival journalists stared in transfixed wonder, running the tip of his tongue over his lips like some soon to be satisfied animal.

Jarvis felt a pang of sickness now. So odd, to be alive in the 20th century, here in the Western world and be reveling in death, no matter if it was all in the line of duty. Fuck!

Lending such importance to his reporting. Yet even as he thought these things, he paid close attention to detail; the creak of the knotted noose, moments before it was to kill

Bailey, these gross nuances of collected journalists and photographers, the apparent happiness etched on the face of one of the state officials to his left. A priest ascended the wooden stairs to the gallows, opening his Bible, beginning to speak, his voice almost regretful, as bailey remained a blank canvas, staring straight ahead. In that very moment, did guilt begin to set in? Or was it solely sorrow for his being caught? As a non-religious man, Jarvis imagined his own reaction to the words the priest began to speak, was similar to those of the man about to hang; such was the lack of emotion Bailey was exhibiting. As

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the Priest finished up, the other security guard took his place back up on the gallows, placing Bailey over the trapdoor. He backed up now, looking Bailey over, before stepping forwards a final time.

‘Any last words?’ he asked the prisoner.

Bailey looked straight at the man, ‘No sir’ he said, steely cold, his face a picture of nothingness. Before his eyes darted down beyond the guard, coming to rest fleetingly, still emotionless, on Jarvis. Jarvis was rendered breathless, even in that one second glare, before the guard hoisted a hood over the head of Billy Bailey. The guard stepped back again, further than before and motioned to his colleague.

Sound played an important part; the sickening creak of a rope gone taut, crushing the breath from bailey’s windpipe, the continued creak as the man died, swinging limply for half a minute or so, before the awestruck spectators were stewarded away. The flash from the photographs blurred Jarvis’ vision a little, the snapper crack of a half dozen cameras lingering in his ears. Death was such a sensory thing, you experienced it from the perspective of your different senses, and every one was a contrasting mix of grotesque fascination, downright fear and a slight contentment that this man had received his eventual punishment.

Then came the hush. Perhaps the most sensory aspect of all, empty silence, even as the hanged man still twitched. Then the state officials motioned for those gathered to retreat away from the gallows, and Jarvis’ photographer colleague approached him as they made to leave.

‘Did you get good snaps?’ Jarvis asked, struggling initially to muster the strength to speak.

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Hallamite

(I)

There are methods of coping. I am aware that there are methods, yes. But when Martha is at work I wonder where all the other uprooted spouses are: for there must be many on this continent besides myself. Though legal, my initial immigration restricts opportunities in the land of opportunity—the American spousal visa is empowering tool and emasculation screed, both. One gets to live in America, to pursue happiness, but one does not yet get to earn money here.

But it’s Tuesday, when I do the bi-weekly grocery shop. I note how the names of vegetables differ from back home; aubergine become eggplant; red pepper, orange pepper, green pepper become the inclusive bell pepper. How forward thinking, to not assign colour

(color) titles to produce. It’s somehow both American and un-American to do so.

The shopping trolley (cart) is full with all of Martha’s favourite (favorite) things.

I’m a good husband but I think for two—or for her—more prevalently than I think for myself.

I go to pay.

“That’ll be $88 and 17 cents,” the septuagenarian check-out clerk says.

I count out ninety bucks and hand them to her.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“Cash,” I say, shocked. She opens and closes her mouth like a goldfish. I worry she might be having a stroke.

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“I mean I have card too, if that’s easier? It’s just money.”

She sighs and rolls her eyes, and I notice the cash machine (ATM) by the door. I wonder when last somebody used paper currency in this particular supermarket. It’s dollars, not pounds, so I’m especially confused at her being dumbfounded. She processes the transaction and gives me my shrapnel as change.

Outside, I clamber into the car. I wonder why that just happened in there. The shopping is on the passenger seat. There’s a pre-packaged sandwich and a bottle of kombucha for Martha’s lunch. I aim for the university to drop them by her office. This is technically Martha’s car, but I passed my U.S driving test last week, even though I’ve been driving for eleven years back home. I turn right on red, which still amazes me, and head toward the campus. Our weekend was spent updating the interior of Martha’s apartment in keeping with my recent arrival, and it had slipped our mind(s) to stock up on food for the week.

Hallam University occupies a 750-acre plot on the edge of town. One marker that highlights the discrepancies between home and here, is the American college system.

Hallam’s campus, and the college-town born from enrollment, and subsequent economy, make the British education system look wholly different. I wouldn’t say antiquated; for the payoff of history is having history to work with, reminisce over. Hallam University is only a hundred years old or so, but for this part of the country it has a fairly sizable reputation, especially in its basketball and female football (soccer) programs.

Martha says one marker of my possessing the traits to fit in in America is love. I love Martha, obviously, but I love basketball too. Most sports. This is just an observation

Martha makes sometimes, a kind of in-joke of ours. But Martha also says quirky stuff like

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“Eros and Agape pull at all of us in our ways.” Not knowing anybody in this college-town, in this country, warrants a passion for something outside of oneself, I guess. Maybe you’re already on-the-outs a little when you’re a thirtysomething man with no affiliation to the college in said college-town. Add the label of foreigner to that, and an inability to work for the next six months, and I am what you get: the out of work architect turned house-husband, delivering prepackaged lunches to his academic high-flier of a wife.

It’s still hot before the cold front comes in a month or two from now, and the university looks older than its age in this weather. It was built to appear more historic in the Richardsonian Romanesque style popularized in Boston, though Hallam U was developed a good few decades later than most universities across North America. It was this nod to historical European design that first piqued my interest in Hallam, immediately after meeting Martha.

The term (semester) is merely a fortnight old. A few weeks back, I met a handful of Martha’s colleagues at the mixer to celebrate the new school year. They do that thing that people (Americans?) do, acting impressed by Martha’s taste in tall men with accents.

They act so impressed they either ignore me altogether and talk to Martha like I’m an idea more than a person, or else they do seem genuinely friendly, which is nice until they misremember my name when I offer them a beer some time later. But people are people, geography need not always enter into first impressions.

I park up in the guest spots by the library and walk across the quad to the

Psychology building. The front desk is vacant, but I head up to where Martha’s office occupies the rear corner of the second-floor, a pretty spacious workspace for a fresh hire, by my wife’s own admission.

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She’s not there, so I put her lunch on her desk and seize a post-it note from atop some scrap papers. I scribe “Enjoy your lunch, see you tonight – Warren” She’d know it was from me of course, but I want her to read my name, say it to herself, think of me amidst her day of lectures. I like to think I’m as present in her mind as she is in mine, at least between lessons.

Martha has expressed some doubt, as recently as this week, about the nature of my

“sacrifice”. She thinks I have given up too much. The validity of my spousal visa is but another complication following our union. Geography dictates some complications, negates others.

I turn and take the long route down the corridor, in no rush to head downtown just yet. I pass an open classroom, and nosily peek in to check if my wife is inside. I can’t immediately tell, for there are around fifty or so students eagerly fixed on the professor at the front of the room, one of Martha’s colleagues who I’d met in passing at the pre-semester mixer - Dr. David Gloom, as fitting a name for a psychology professor as any.

His voice is loud, projected expertly, filling the corners of the room, and some of the hallway I’m still half hanging in from. I become conscious of my standing body and enter the lecture room, taking a nearby seat, unseen.

“If we look at this abstract, we see some examples of how Wong’s work attempts to fathom the cognitive and cultural discrepancies of immigrant life. They overlap, certainly, with so many aspects of the modules we have already considered these past two weeks: how much cultural insertion equates to a kind of buyer’s remorse is certainly an intersection worth considering. So too, how much of one’s assimilation into a culture may align with all that we have covered thus far of the free-choice paradigm?”

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“Allow me then to quote Wong’s abstract to you now: “Festinger postulated that within each person’s mind is a mechanism that creates an uncomfortable feeling of dissonance, or lack of harmony, when we become aware of some inconsistency among various attitudes, beliefs, and items of knowledge that constitute our mental store.”

“For Thursday, provide me with a short two to three-page paper of the overlaps between Wong’s observations and your previous analysis of the free-choice paradigm.

How does Festinger’s work validate or invalidate your findings thus far, or indeed, vice versa? See the class website for specifics. Thanks.”

With that, Gloom leaves via the backdoor in a hurry. The students seem eager as they pack up their materials. I note the citations on the board in my phone, intrigued in the same way as I am in Martha’s burgeoning research on logotherapy and the more existential strands of psychology. Gloom is evidently more geared toward the fields of social and cognitive psychology, if my minutes of observation have taught me anything.

I can’t tell if it vexes me, as I head back across the quad: Gloom’s referring to immigrants. The psychological commodity of the stranger in the strange land. Was I not one of the subjects in question, isolated in my adaptation period? I’m still certain, if I use the mixer as my lean-to example, that these professors don’t envisage the likes of me as an immigrant but more an extension of Martha. Moving here had been a reorienting of my entire ability to socialise (socialize). “Cultural insertion” Gloom had called it.

I get into the left (wrong) side of the car to drive on the right (wrong) side of the road. I head for downtown, to walk up Hallam Ave, the American college-town equivalent of a British high street.

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I like to walk up the streets of any place where I am, familiar or otherwise, and take in the structural make-up of the main areas: the thoroughfares and gathering zones of that community. I’m not here just to dote on my wife after all, I have a career to get back on track when I can legally do so. So much feels like starting over, however, and asserting myself once more as an architect would be an ask anywhere, let alone somewhere such as a small college-town in another country. Most of these places have specific zoning laws that do not allow for buildings over a certain height, and must adhere to a general aesthetic, in keeping with the community’s current building codes.

So, I walk around and I observe the peculiarities of these buildings. Just what constitutes what: which buildings qualify as things of historical importance. Again, the

North American and the European considerations of history are themselves great divides in and of culture.

Culture. At once it’s a tangible thing, the refinement in a place or its edifying components: that which stimulates and enriches. There is this country’s culture and that country’s culture, and whoever and wherever you are you have to try your best to engage with it. Insertion.

Hallam Avenue winds its way as if between European and American schools of thought. At first, it adheres to the grid-like layout of the American downtown, running east to west through the middle of Hallam itself, all the way out to the interstate toward Little

Rock. From where I stand here, headed east, the road takes a drastic makeover, spiraling seashell-like in on itself before unwinding once more and continuing to intersect through different streets in a scurried pattern towards the university. Urban planning be damned, or at least half so. It seems the area’s first settlers were more interested in western expansion:

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the eastern edge of town is, even by European standards, a mish mash of streets and overlapping addresses, whereas from the centre (center) of town outwards, the city becomes Americanised (Americanized). Or maybe it’s just my British mind-state constructing a bridge across my own social divide.

I stand in front of City Hall and breathe in the sights of Hallam: the winding eastern section and the straight line west, and I am stunned to see the only recently familiar sight of Dr. David Gloom as he enters the Coffee Free-Press, the best espresso joint in town. So, he was rushing from his classroom toward a caffeine fix, or date, or something else altogether. I surreptitiously observe him get comfortable in one of the big armchairs by the window, and vow to go in and speak to him if he’s still there after my walk up the Ave.

I haven’t gone five steps when Martha calls me:

“Hey you,” I answer.

“Hey hon. Thank you so much for the lunch. You’re a sweetheart, I wish I’d caught you.”

“No worries, you’ll see me after. Sandwich good?”

“Eating it when I hang-up, will let you know.”

“Great. Hey hon, do you know much about the stuff that Dr. Gloom teaches in his classes?”

“Oh, they love Gloom, he just got tenure. Not so much, but I have a ton of books and some of his published articles at home in the cabinet. Check it out if it interests you.”

“I will do, have a great day. I’ll pick you up at 6. Love you.”

“I love you too Warren,” she replies before cutting the connection.

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Yesterday, she’d been concerned about me looking off into space between coats of paint in the kitchen. Only after I’d moved here had it struck her that this was seemingly too big an ask—displacing myself, leaving behind my friends and family back home. It annoyed me when she said this, because we had planned our lives together intricately: stay here until she got tenured, or another, better job option became available, all while I adjusted and then got a job at some local or in-state architectural firm until, cards in place, we could be selective about our next move. I’d shrugged off the question.

I walk down a few streets (blocks), and then turned back on myself, thinking to strike up a conversation with Dr. Gloom in the Coffee Free-Press already. Back in the day, they’d run a publishing house out of the same building as the coffeeshop, and it had been the home of Hallam University Press until around a decade ago, when the old campus buildings were diluted somewhat by the construction of some hyper-modern, solar powered outbuildings, housing—along with a recreation centre (center) and a hotel—a brand new printmaking factory wherein were located the design and print headquarters of Hallam

University Press, a now esteemed mid-size publisher.

I see Gloom leaving the Free-Press with a young student in tow, a short red-haired guy clutching a notebook and lapping up the Professor’s every word. The only word I made out was “homesickness,” before they faded from earshot.

Which made me think—it wasn’t homesickness that I was feeling, more an out of body experience where the cadaver itself is here beside me, and I observe it as it tries to fit in and understand all of its new environs, and it observes me right back. We want so much to be as one and to be a person who gets by here, but we are both outside of our self, looking

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at ourself. You can’t insert yourself anywhere, figuratively or otherwise, when you can’t even contain yourself to one corpus.

I should love Hallam, should be in the honeymoon phase of living here. Instead I see myself in it, and it in me: split down the centre (center) into something that reflects one place and also reflects another. A past and a present, an east and a west.

(II)

Disharmony has a half-life. This you’ve learned over these past few years here. It’s not your differences but your similarities that stand you apart from the people of America. That said, you’ve adjusted well to Hallam proper, now that you’re a member of the work force.

If reorientation was the initial phase of living here, then when your visa hold cleared, another reorientation of sorts was what you needed to become a taxpaying Hallam-ite, an ex-pat.

Perhaps it was a buyer’s remorse of sorts, to use the psychological jargon. The initial fear of settling after the monetary and mental commitment of moving. Buyer’s remorse has entered everyday lexicon now, but the initial concept was indeed a psychological one. The lesser of two evils, a consideration of the two roads after the taking of one path. The imprecise benefit of hindsight. You move the goalposts in life, you think to yourself, you do whatever you can to assimilate.

The U.P is busy for a Wednesday, with a new in-house printmaking machine recently installed, and three concrete offers being finalized (finalised) for new publications.

In a clear act of institutional nepotism, the first is Dr. David Gloom’s research compiled into a hefty tome titled The Cultural Dissonance of Expatriation, while the others mark

Hallam University Press’ first foray into the fiction field—a collection of stories about

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disparate characters adrift in the Pacific Northwest and Canada—and a compendium of the more obscure aspects of Arkansan history by a professor over at Arkansas State. There’s no shared theme or genre with the U.P’s selected catalog, although you appreciate your opinion being valued at every level of the operation, such as which books to consider, despite your role pertaining chiefly to these materials’ design.

Did you expect to work in the Hallam University Press? No, but the limitations of a small-to-mid size Arkansan college town is that building projects are not in huge demand.

Being the Chief Designer at the U.P is a decent job given the circumstances, it still allows you to utilize your design experience, and you and Martha carshare to work every day, are as happy as you could have envisaged back in the Fall of your arrival in America.

Nigel comes into your office with a grin on his face.

“Hey buddy, you see the OKC box score last night? That big center went off for twenty-six rebounds. Twenty-six. Guy’s a freak under the basket.”

“I saw the numbers, not the game. Martha’s parents arrived late last night, we got

‘em from Little Rock.”

“Ah the in-laws. Where did you say they hail from again?”

“Cleveland.”

“Ah yeah – Ohio baby! Should’ve remembered that. Hey, we could grab dinner while they’re in town?”

“Yeah sure, if it works out, maybe we’ll host?”

“You got it big guy,” he says, departing once more.

Nigel Laszlo hails from Toledo, a third-generation Hungarian-American.

You think back to the night before:

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[en route to airport]:

Martha: Why don’t you invite some of the people from work over, I know Mom

and Pa would love to hear about you from your colleagues.

You: I dunno babe, I’m wary of putting too much pressure on Laszlo or Barry Pine,

they’re decent guys but I think maybe just colleagues, ya know? All the others are

married with kids or approaching retirement.

Martha: Why do you always keep yourself at arm’s length from people and social

settings?

You: I don’t do that.

Martha: This is your home. Most people we encounter were transplants to Hallam

too, Warren. Bear that in mind once in a while.

You: It’s not that, I just don’t want people to have to conflate working relationships

with friend ones. Not everything is about my being foreign you know.

Martha: Isn’t it?

You haven’t thought about this since. That note in Martha’s voice, before she turned the radio up louder, it’s how she broached the “sacrifice” that she felt guilty about back when you first moved to the U.S. In time she moved beyond this, the more you became comfortable here. But that note in her voice last night, that gave you a nasty feeling of déjà vu. It gives you that same sensation in your stomach now.

Susan from Marketing comes into your office: she’s a few weeks from retirement.

If this were an American cop movie, and Susan among the cast, you’d fear for her life.

“Hey there Warren. Can I ask you something, since you’re the resident Hallam history buff?”

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“I don’t know about that, but sure thing, what’s up?”

“Well, you know how the Hallam Festival of Historical Worth is coming up again next month?”

“How could I forget?”

“Nigel has handed the reigns solely to Marketing on this one, so we are thinking of ways to reflect some of the historical importance of the Press, and of printmaking in general, to Hallam over the years.”

You’re a designer to whom the bane of your daily life is the widespread knowledge that you had nothing better to do for your first six months in America (and the few prior to that) besides learn about the place where you live.

“Happy to help in any way Susan: do you want me to attend the Marketing meeting tomorrow and pitch in with ideas?”

“That would be swell, thanks. Nigel mentioned that you’re meeting with the client later to detail the Historical Arkansan designs?”

“Yeah, a lunch meeting at Gaz-Patch.”

“Maybe you could pick his brains about how best to reflect our historical importance on the day? There’s that chapter on the importance of industry in Hallam and

Jesper, so I’m sure he’d be the ideal person to ask about the U.P aspects?”

“Good thinking, Susan, I’ll drop it into the conversation.”

“You’re a star, Warren.”

She leaves and you grab your jacket. It’s an easy drive, but the car is on the other side of campus by Psychology. If you leave now you can make it on foot to the restaurant in plenty of time. You stick your head around the door of Nigel’s office.

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“Heading out now, Nigel.”

“Hey, if I can make time I’ll come join for a drink after.”

“Sounds good, boss,” you reply. You depart into the orange-green afternoon.

Spring in Hallam cascades the place in color (colour). The brutal winter is finally passing, having forced you over the last two years to learn that wind chill, temperature—weather in general—is a powerful and ruinous master, and that the only thing you can modulate is your head’s response to it. When first you came to Hallam and had to fill up your hours and days, you became a little obsessed with some of the psychological insights of Martha and her departmental associates. You readily admit that now. It was only when the winter picked up that you began to appreciate that much of what they were peddling was purely academic in nature: lacking the heft of real life, propagated on the buzzwords of psychological thought, less interesting when viewed alongside something as everyday as a

Middle American winter, a region’s design, it’s people. This was just one of the small realizations (realisations) you needed to veer toward positivity and control. There are methods of coping, yes. You are well aware that there are methods of coping.

The apricotty hue of late morning light through the campus’ skeletal branches is beautiful after the modernity of your office. Not for the first time you find yourself surprised by the difference between adverse weather in Britain versus that of the United

States. So much of American life just seems over the top, certainly the highs and lows of climate. That’s why a place like Hallam still intrigues you after this amount of time. It is small and charming in its civic pride, the university a staple of the wider community but also separate from it too. There’s a college-town vibe to the place, certainly since the

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perennially underwhelming basketball team had an unprecedented run to the Sweet Sixteen last March, and since a few of the bars were granted later licensing hours at the start of this academic year. This elicited anger in some of the older residents of Hallam, especially given the rise in petty, drunken crime on weekends and football game days. But all in all, the place has remained peaceful and charming, if somewhat boisterous now and then.

College students seek civic pride in their own ways.

Out onto the mazy twists of Arkansas Ave, where it overlaps with Ozark Street, before a left decline intersects eventually onto Hallam Ave, you are struck as always by the regality of the houses on the tree-lined streets. Here is where Hallam’s Mayor, Davis

Lambert, resides. His house is a resplendent golden brick-build, at once harking back to yesteryear and also making the neighboring homes —themselves in no way small—seem distinctly less lavish, though this may be the cinematic framing of Spring’s transitioning color (colour). The majority of the houses here are constructed in the Midwestern Prairie style of architecture as popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1920s, though your calculated guess is that the golden brickwork of Lambert’s residence predates these other builds, likely shipped over from Europe sometime after Arkansas’ first instances of French settlement. For a small town south of the Ozarks, in a state considered the American south, there’s so much European and Midwestern influence, at least on architectural level. These moments, too, are methods of coping for you: architecture is not just how buildings are plotted, designed, or constructed, it is so much more than that. It is the bridging of customs, the intermediary of culture itself. You like to think that an architect today is the twenty- first century pioneer.

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Or at least you could be one day. For now you have to meet the historian behind the U.P’s next project. He’s pushing hard for a paperback-only release, one which he also wants to seem like a historical text, desiring a mezzoprint appearance to any and all illustrations. He wants the book to appear as if it predates the very history it is illuminating.

Obvious contradictions arise, at least to your European sensitivities. Nigel may have put it best when he described the client as an “eccentric primadonna” – but the guy’s just after excellence, and at the end of the day we all want that, you think.

You pass a house a few doors down from the Mayor’s which you know to be David

Gloom’s. Martha has strucken up a professional friendship with the man who knows immigrant dissonance inside out, and together you have double-dated with David and his wife Stella three or four times in as many semesters (terms). You often wonder if they sit in one or the other’s office—Martha and Gloom—critiquing their respective spouse’s current frame of mind. Stella is a second-generation Swedish-American, whose family came over to Minnesota sometime much later than their filial counterparts, and thus she still possesses an odd Swedish accent that stems, largely, from her youth summering back in her homeland. Dr. Gloom looks at his wife with the kind of lust-glee usually reserved for circus freaks, pornstars, and exceedingly rare art exhibits. Naturally, Martha is delighted that the University Press are publishing her esteemed colleague’s pioneering work. You are intrigued to think how Gloom might view your recent conclusion that the architect is the new world innovator whom we’ve all been seeking.

Onto Ozark Avenue you notice a few yellow flowers starting to sprout on some of the lawns. You stop and note the thorny brambles growing out of a front yard. Already

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there are berries nearly full-grown. You pull at the vine, shaking them loose, plucking them into your grasp with ease due to their under-ripeness.

These houses lack some of the character of the Prairies a street over, as if the hodgepodge of streets themselves once dictated how the structures differed, which in turn now dictates how much rent students pay. There are state flags, sports team flags, and emblazoned Greek-life paddles adorning lawns and decks and windows.

A recent city hall vote furthered the ban on Greek housing within Hallam city limits.

Fraternity and sorority houses were considered an invariable scourge on any community’s quaint streets and mostly slow pace of life. This was something you found yourself surprisingly glad about: for you comprehend little of how American Greek-life works from top to bottom, it is perhaps more alien to you than any other aspect of American life, other than the fact it does seem to be entirely representative of the capitalistic machine on some culturally engrained level. You read once that all but two of the U.S Presidents, and forty of the forty-seven Supreme Court Justices, have been Fraternity members.

You reach Hallam Ave and worm your way westward onto the downtown grid system. You are a few blocks (streets) from Gaz-Patch, Martha’s favorite restaurant, where you are meeting with the historian within the hour.

A crowd is gathering and streaming into City Hall, and couple of news crews congregate outside, comparing their notes. Approaching, you wonder what is up, what is piquing public interest on a Tuesday lunchtime in downtown Hallam.

You push into the building amidst the crowd, and immediately hear the furor of concerned citizens, as Mayor Davis Lambert waves them silent.

125 “Mayor Lambert, can you fill us in on the latest report, is this thought to be a hoax

or a legitimate threat to Hallam, to the University?”

You flush red and feel a tightness in your throat. You muscle in closer to hear what

he has to say.

“In the last five minutes we have had a confirmed bomb threat on the Hallam

University Campus. Teams have initiated a lockdown around the perimeter of the campus,

and those inside have been implored to take cover in signposted safe areas, or else get to a

perceived safe area,” the Mayor says.

Your phone begins to vibrate, and you grab it to see if it is Martha, but it is just the automated emergency response for the threat itself. You try to phone Martha but the call drops.You text her frantically, asking where she is and if she is safe.

Is anywhere safe in America? Your wife is somewhere back in the direction you casually strolled from, assessing the structural evolution of this small town in all of its assemblage. It all means nothing. You are the innovator of nothing,

The nightly regional news depicts the arrest of the student, a red-headed psych major up in arms at Dr. David Gloom’s bestowing on him a B- for his term paper. Gloom is interviewed by the same reporters you had earlier seen.

“I understand due diligence, yes. I know the boy well though, Jason was likely just posturing. If we are to severely punish every disillusioned or stressed student, we may not like the society we become, I fear. This is a young man far from home we are talking about here.” Psychobabble extraordinaire.

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Martha is staring at the screen. You wonder how much Gloom wishes the boy were a foreigner rather than a Michigander, so as to better peddle his hypotheses to the Hallam

County viewers.

You had cried when reunited with Martha, though the lockdown was over shortly after it had begun. Martha cried too, grabbing at you in relief. Later, Gloom had come and shaken your hand and he and Martha had hugged and you and your wife had come on home, leaving Gloom to the spotlight.

“For a minute I thought you were going to die there and all I’d be able to do was hear it in the distance, this explosion that swallows everything up.” The two of you are naked in the dark of the bedroom and your hands are touching, just.

“It was such a blur, we just heard the sirens and locked ourselves away in our offices. Dana said that the kid is obsessed with David’s studies, he idolizes him, has done since his Freshman year. Dana TA’d for David for a year, so she should know. She thinks

Jason’s fall in grades likely manifested some internal inconsistency tendencies in him. He felt betrayed by the man whose very hypotheses he champions. The irony of psychology I guess: you must avoid the pitfalls of the very studies you undertake,” she says.

You say nothing, nodding in the dark as if understanding. When she talks shop like this you feel alone. Even in light of today. Just what the fuck is wrong with me, you think, just what the fuck is wrong with my level of cognition, even in this moment.

“God what a day. Good night my love,” she says to you.

But you aren’t alone, you have Martha and Martha has you. Hypotheses and cognition, all those other buzzwords of her field – they are just that: terms. Markers that

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allow for the loose categorization of others, loose like those roadside berries shaken from the vine. How happy are the people who hypothesize happiness?

“I love you,” she says from the other side of the bed.

“I love you Martha,” you reply and your wife sighs contentedly.

Love is a buzzword too. You wait until Martha falls asleep and then move back into the living room to catch the end of the basketball.

(III)

Warren’s recent methods of coping: social activities in and around Hallam, taking part in holiday food drives and litter pick-ups before the first of the season’s late snowfalls. Except it doesn’t feel like coping anymore, it just feels like life.

“Whisky: Irish, hot dog: American, sense of self-loathing: British.” Nigel Laszlo laughs, raising his eyebrows as he awaits Warren’s amusement.

Warren laughs, and his boss orders another round for them. They have, for the first time in the U.P’s recent history, no publications immediately in the pipeline. Their last four works had been unprecedented successes on the back of the publication of This Historical

Arkansan: A Foray into Obscure Arkansan History. Due to good fortune, and Hallam

University’s prior two years of sporting excellence, the town has seen an uptick of college sport fans throughout the academic year.

“I joke buddy. What have you got to be bitter about eh? You moved to Hallam at just the right time. Maybe you’re the good luck charm we always needed, the spark to make us a modern-day boom town,” Laszlo continues, glugging down his whisky.

“I’m not sure a Brit in rural Arkansas is a good luck charm, more a coincidence or a colossal fuck up somewhere down the line,” Warren jokes back.

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“Hallam? Rural? You mind your manners there big shot – just cause I’m not from here don’t mean I won’t defend her ‘til I die,” he grins his wide smile, seldom too serious out of the office. “How’s things anyway, ready for the holidays?”

“Yeah, we’re heading to your neck of the woods the week before Christmas itself actually, Martha just booked our flights this morning. Then on the 22nd we fly from

Columbus to O’Hare, and back to London in time for Christmas at my brother’s – my parents are making the trip down south too.”

“Your first time back home since you moved here, right? You excited?” Laszlo asks.

“Yeah it’ll be nice being back there for sure. Martha is excited too, she loves it over there.”

“Back there, not back home, huh?”

“That’s just where I’m from,” Warren replies, finishing his own drink.

“Well I’ll raise a drink to that. We’re lucky to have you here in Hallam, Warren.

That said, you should still be smarting after that loss though – call yourself a pool player?

If that doesn’t fill you with British woe I don’t know what will.”

They sip their whisky and finish their hot dogs as Martha enters the bar.

“Hey guys.”

“How the devil are you?” Nigel feigns his posh British accent for this, casting a sideways glance at Warren. Martha merely laughs in approval, kisses Warren.

“Final day of the semester! Relieved?” Warren asks his wife.

They have reached the days of their lives between layered commitments, between the first step and the next logical ones. They are happy with their jobs and their living

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situation. But Martha thinks she sees an uptick, every now and then, in her husband’s disillusionment. She’s always been conscious that he is a man who knows himself well, but not well enough to know that he can be his own worst enemy, too in his own head or too devoted to her to really put himself and his wants first. It’s why she sometimes wakes up late at night and fears for them: for the man sleeping lightly beside her. He doesn’t know what home is and he’ll seemingly never allow himself to. The concept of home was one from childhood, and a happy childhood at that, but Warren has been misinterpreting what constitutes contentment ever since. To use one of her husband’s sporting analogies – he has been moving the goalposts for so long now that he’s forgotten what the score is, what the game being played even was in the first place. She has these brief pangs of worry, of fear even, and then they pass. She’s always been good at coping. Or is what she considers coping often just a form of suppression? She often wonders would her peers say about these fleeting fears of hers. She keeps meaning to ask, perhaps she will after the holidays.

“How is the reshuffle working out Nigel?” Martha asks now.

“It’s going ok, Martha, thanks for asking. I think expanding and dedicating a whole team to the day to day of university printing—posters and event advertisement, you know—they have their own floor now, in the old international student office on the third floor. I think it’ll be a godsend for us when we get back into soliciting new work after the new year,” Laszlo responds.

“It’s exciting, busy times ahead,” Warren pitches in.

“I’d best run to the bathroom,” says Nigel, excusing himself.

“Hey, you’ll be right back at the fore of it when more projects come in babe,”

Martha says, grabbing her husband’s hand.

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“Any word on your articles?”

“On one of them, approved for the conference in Little Rock in May, and David says there’s a pretty good chance that the article will be published before too long. He spoke to somebody in Colorado about it. Fort Collins, Colorado State.”

“Coloradoans dabbling in a bit of existentialism eh? Good mix with all that weed,” he says, flashing her a smile. She returns one as he squeezes her hand.

“I’m proud of you Martha.”

She appreciates the sentiment, but hates when he calls her research ‘existentialism,” like she’s a two-bit philosopher playing at guesswork. But she knows he means not to offend, and she knows the look in his eyes well enough to know he is indeed proud of her.

He has always thought of her as his crowning achievement. Not his two degrees, not his immigration to America. It’s a trend in his behavior she finds both endearing and worrying, like he thinks he hit the heights of his life with her, and that he shouldn’t focus on the other parts of himself that she loves best: his intelligence, his grace when he’s at ease, that astounding way he sees things – not even those skills that make him a gifted architect, but his skills as a cultured man, an empathetic man, her English charming man.

He sits there opposite her and the look in his eyes is one of adulation. She smiles at him and he smiles eagerly back, the light in his eyes clearer when he beams like this, when so often there’s a dim, dark specter there, behind the immediate blue.

They are happy. In Ohio it seemed there’s was a blissful existence, and then in the sky over the wintry grey Atlantic, there was a tangible excitement that they shared over gin and

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tonics and badly dubbed airline movies. Then they were back where they’d began. London held a special pull over them as a couple; the place where their relationship had first formed, and then evolved to become their life together.

She’s a cultural sponge wherever she goes, though to Martha, hers has never been an adjustment as complex, a sacrifice as rooted in love, as Warren’s has been. She moved for her job and he moved for her, for them.

On one level a cultural overhaul as dramatic as Warren’s switch from Richmond- upon-Thames to Hallam, Arkansas, would unearth a certain disconnect in him forever, and the only thing to stop that feeling of discord in her husband was her support, her love for him, and his ability to endlessly embrace change. Because that’s what he was doing - throwing himself, every day, into the fabric of another society.

Waiting by the baggage claim in Heathrow airport, she looks at Warren.

“I don’t know if I tell you it enough, but you are the best man I know. I appreciate you more than anything. I’m happy we are back here for the holidays,” she says softly to him.

“Me too,” he says in return, pulling her in close as the apparatus before them begins to move, the beeping noise informing them of their impending luggage. Another instrument of sound denoting departure, arrival, ad infinitum. David Gloom had written an article once about the international airport as the literal arrival and departure points of any trip, sure, but also the figurative connectors of culture, the link between different forms of living, different kinds of lives.

Then what did that make love? Martha thought to herself. What did that make their marriage, the thing that had bridged their cultures, their lives, had allowed her husband the

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ability to traverse that great Atlantic dividing line and become the closest thing to American that an Englishman could be. He was a citizen now after all, after these years together in

Hallam. Perhaps David could consider the ways that his own marriage, as well as hers and

Warren’s, could tie into the study of cultural dissonance. Were not they the cultural coders of their own lives?

Culture is everything and she and Warren weave between the lines of it, together.

This fills her with a distinct glee, like she’s cracked the code pertinent to her own survival.

She looks at Warren with a smile on her face as wide as the Atlantic itself, but his thoughts are somewhere else, his eyes on the large illuminated billboard on the other side of the baggage claim, with large, semitransparent lettering contrasted against a backdrop of the

Grand Canyon: “The United States of America: Come and Visit the Land of the Free.”

He says: “Just once, one of those billboards should show industrial Pennsylvania or New Jersey; the cornfields of Iowa; or an obscure patch of Nebraska prairie; the radioactive Nevada desert; hell, even some rundown section of inner-city Baltimore: somewhere untouched, or too touched, somewhere that people don’t automatically associate with America. Hell, show the old factories in West Hallam, the ones those kids burnt down last summer with all the stray dogs inside. Then do the same back home, show the green polluted Thames in JFK airport, or the shittier parts of Sunderland, or West

London, the rundown parts of cities or the raining cold everywhere most of the year. Have them make assumptions, decisions, choices for themselves before they’ve even departed for that other country. Let people discover a culture for themselves, for fuck’s sake, then you wouldn’t have so many Brits at Disneyland and Times Square and nowhere else at all, shitting on America before they’ve ever really been.”

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Martha is smiling even wider now.

“You called it home,” she says, taking his hand, “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you say that Hallam is your home.

(IV)

On the day that the Hallam Hounds get to the Final Four only to lose to a last second buzzer beater, there’s a palpable sense of togetherness coursing through the annals of the ever- growing city. You could be from anywhere, linked together by your support for this assemblage of college students—none of them projected as NBA players—at the bars and homes that pepper Hallam itself, or even those that stretch throughout the state of Arkansas;

Little Rock in particular, or Fayetteville (where they’ve surprisingly banded together to support their in-state rival Hallam University Hounds), or you might just root for the underdog wherever you might watch this broadcast, even there in the arena itself as Hallam hearts break when the last shot falls. Finding something larger than oneself is a sure-fire way to cope with the aspects of identity one feels they cannot escape from. There are methods of coping, yes, there are methods of coping.

“Can you believe the transformation of this town, this school, in the years we’ve been here?” Warren says, in disbelief, to Martha when the nature of the loss has subsided.

She stands with her hands cupping the bump of her stomach, as revelers around them begin to brighten up once more. She smiles at her husband in the crowded bar.

“We’d better get a move on honey. Time waits for nobody in Hallam these days,” she responds, and he carefully puts a hand her stomach also. They kiss, get their coats, and leave with the other revelers, aiming for city hall.

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Mayor Davis Lambert stands at the podium, taking a pause in his introductory speech, looking out at the intrepid faces of a thousand or so Hallam citizens.

“We witnessed history today in this city, in our homes, as our basketball team thrust itself into the nationwide consciousness of America. What finer day than that to have such a wonderful unveiling here in the heart of downtown? I have been fortunate to figurehead this city as we have grown from quaint college town, to something larger than that - a civic point of pride in the state of Arkansas, and within this country as a whole.

The university does a lot for this community, as evidenced by the Hounds on a sporting scale, but we have lots of other reasons to be proud of ourselves and our community today, and every day.

“Nothing represents Hallam more than the people. We are a diverse, proud, and mighty community, and that’s what this building here behind me represents today. The

Hallam Museum of History, an extension to our own city hall, owes a large debt to the past, certainly, but it is also a marker of our present, and of what our future holds. But before I say anything more, I’m honored to hand you over to the Museum’s head architect, Hallam’s very own Warren Heston.”

Warren smiles, inhales, exhales. Standing, he smooths his tie and his shirt, and bends to kiss Martha’s cheek. He approaches the podium where Mayor Lambert shakes his hand, the grip strong and enthusiastic. There is applause, which dies down as he turns to face these people, his people. It dawns on him, just before he begins to speak, that this is how the world can open itself up, that this is how America allows for assimilation – first through partnership and then through dissonance, through dreaming, and then persevering. Through love.

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“I came to Hallam five years ago, new to this country, freshly married to my wife

Martha, a psychology professor at Hallam University. I had left behind a somewhat successful architectural career in England. After living in and around London for most of my life, Arkansas and the American college town were a pretty drastic cultural overhaul.

“But a few things allowed for me to adapt here. The first and most important was my wife Martha, whose unwavering support was necessary until I could stand on my own feet and be considered an American in my own right. Or at least one through naturalization. The second was Hallam itself, which I took some time to adjust to. A lot has happened, not just to me, but to the city itself in my years here. I’ve been fortunate to be here for some of the most productive years of growth Hallam has ever known, and been privileged to be able to have a hand in some of this prosperity, in some of this growth, and to grow with it.

“Growth is perhaps the most intrinsic American ideal. From conception, America has sought to grow exponentially in every way – ideologically, psychologically, structurally, in terms of finance, or identity. This too has been my experience of growth here in Hallam. To be asked to now be a part of the team that brings the Hallam Museum of History to life is one of the finest honors I’ve had bestowed upon me. It wraps up my identity with that of Hallam, with that of Arkansas, with that of America.

“Architecture is such a fundamental component of our world, in bridging cultures and countries and identities – literally and otherwise. So, I have been truly blessed that architecture has bound me to this country.”

Warren had this all memorized – he had been saying a version of it to himself for years, on transatlantic flights, on his workdays at the UP, at home with Martha. A

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building was the cornerstone of a city, and this one was part his. He looked at Martha, picking her face out from the buzzing crowd. She cradled her burgeoning belly and her eyes were welling up some. He wondered what their child would like, what he or she would come to be. They’d have dual citizenship, could fluctuate between continents at will. Maybe that was the ultimate identity forger – a foot in each continent, Transatlantic family, the opportunities of both cultures. He smiled and exhaled heavily, thankful he’d landed in a place like Hallam. Now, to conclude.

“I close out not with my own words, but rather those of my hero, Frank Lloyd

Wright, a man I consider America’s finest ever architect, who had a hand in some of the properties around town, at least in terms of influence. These are the houses you live or pass each day. The markers that make up place:

“As we work along our various ways, there takes shape within us, in some sort, an ideal - something we are to become - some work to be done. This, I think, is denied to very few, and we begin really to live only when the thrill of this ideality moves us in what we will to accomplish.””

The Mayor clapped him on the back as the gathered Hallamites let out a loud cheer, the sun’s rays casting them from behind in a golden miasma. The hair on Warren’s arms stood up, and the oddest feeling went through him. He felt far, far away from his parents, from England, and yet he felt a sense of place he’d long sought. He knew now he could not have one feeling without the other.

Above Hallam City Hall, the two flags whipped discordantly around in the late afternoon wind. The Arkansas state flag, its blue-and-white diamond, adorned by five stars, lower than the larger and more imposing piece of nylon. That mighty flag there,

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stars, stripes, red, white, blue. The cheer below and the flap, flap above, that could have been wings but was not, that could have been America’s own exhalation, but, alas, was not that either.

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