MAGNETS & MIRACLES

______

A Project

Presented

to the Faculty of

California State University, Chico

______

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

in

English

______

by

© Anthony Paris DeCasper 2015

Spring 2015 MAGNETS & MIRACLES

A Project

by

Anthony Paris DeCasper

Spring 2015

APPROVED BY THE INTERIM DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF GRADUATE, INTERNATIONAL, AND INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES:

______Eun K. Park, Ph.D.

APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Paul Eggers, Ph.D., Chair

______Rob Davidson, Ph.D. PUBLICATION RIGHTS

No portion of this project may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner unacceptable to the usual copyright restrictions without the written permission of the author.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I must acknowledge the entire faculty at Chico State: thank you. I’d like to extend a special gratitude to the cornerstones of my graduate education:

To my thesis committee—Dr. Paul Eggers and Dr. Rob Davidson, thank you for your patience, time, and guidance. Your love and passion for narrative art is why I started to write creatively.

Dr. Kim Jaxon: our conversations from augmented reality and video games and network theory, to family and grit and professionalism, have forever informed and shaped my identity as an adult, and as an artist . . . Thank you for everything.

Dr. Thia Wolf: you once mentioned when we were designing our UNIV 202 syllabus together that “form shapes content,” and this one simple phrase has transformed and permuted into my writing in exciting, novel ways. Thank you. I appreciate you for taking me on as an apprentice, and for reminding me that the obstacle is always the path.

Nothing holy.

Dr. Leslie Atkins: I once had a candle with a bright flame that helped me explore my passions and curiosity in the dark, but I blew it out and tucked it away, forgotten. You, Leslie, reminded me of the utility of that candle, and how much fun it is to play in the dark with a bright flame. And thanks to you, that candle—now—burns brighter than ever. What I learned from you has forever changed my life, and you’ll always have my utmost respect and gratitude. Stay passionately curious, Sciencer.

iv Additionally it has been an honor working with all of my graduate colleagues in the English department: your mentorship, constructive criticism and drive provided me the support model to be successful as a scholar.

And to my students I’ve had the privilege to guide as a Graduate Instructor of

Record in English 130, English 30, University 202; mentored in FYE and U-courses:

Thank you for helping me become more mindful, more purposeful. More understanding and open-minded. More grounded in the present. Thank you for teaching me. You all allowed me a community of practice that allowed me to be the best version of myself . . .

I wish you all the best—Always explore, stay critical. Remember: if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.

Thank you to my family and friends: your love sustains me.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Publication Rights ...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Abstract ...... vii

PART

I. Critical Introduction ...... 1

The Foundation: Art, Imitation, Perception, and Reality...... 1 The Framing: Complexity and Composites ...... 21 The Insulation, Electrical & Plumbing: Story Craft Elements ...... 28

II. Magnets & Miracles ...... 36

EOD ...... 37 The Nature of Light ...... 77

Works Cited ...... 106

vi ABSTRACT

MAGNETS & MIRACLES

by

© Anthony DeCasper 2015

Master of Arts in English

California State University, Chico

Spring 2015

Magnets & Miracles is the culmination of my graduate studies and practice in fiction writing. The two stories that comprise Magnets & Miracles, “EOD,” and “The

Nature Of Light,” rely on a composite narrative aesthetic. In my critical introduction, I investigate the three primary principles of literature that informs my creative work in terms of process, form and practice: literary criticism, composite narratives, textual craft elements.

vii

PART I

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author say “go!” allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to map it and to name the natural objects it contains. --Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

There are three primary aspects of literature—and design—that fundamentally informs my creative work:

1. Literary Criticism: Art, Imitation, Perception, and Reality

2. Narrative Structure and Design: Complexity and Composites

3. Narrative Craft Elements: Subtext and Metaphor

In the following pages, I will trace, and survey, the significance of these aesthetic and design principles as they pertain to my creative work in terms of process, form, and practice. Subsequently, as I move through the discourse of each construct, I will forward, and synthesize, the construct into a critical reflection on my creative project and its relation to the contemporary literary landscape.

The Foundation: Art, Imitation, Perception, and Reality

The discourse regarding the relationship between art and life is a conversation that can be traced to the earliest examples of western criticism in ancient Greek writing.

1 2

From Plato to Aristotelian imitation, and, even, anti-mimesis from Oscar Wilde, asking whether art imitates life, or the reverse, while engaging and informative—to the extent that it forwards our attention to the general dynamic state of nature—is asking the wrong question.

Not that there is necessarily a correct question to ask about art, but there is a better, current appropriation of our mental faculties as it pertains to critically analyzing art and life from the position of the artist. After reviewing the literature and constructive discourse regarding art and life, a young scholar and artist like myself may formulate the premise that art doesn’t imitate life, or the reverse, but art and life are the same entity, spinning in tandem.

So the astute scholar and artist should focus his critical mental faculties on inquiries orbiting the synergistic, and reciprocal, relationship of art and life. Such as: If the psychological and philosophical atoms of art and life are the same, what do we call this fused molecule? All nature? One reality? What is reality? As I’ll show below, working with this question of reality in a literary framework yields fascinating discourse about the general nature of our universe. Furthermore, asking what is reality leads to other interesting conversations about art and life: how does art inform our sense of reality? How does life engage art? As an artist, how can I use this mode of thinking to forward my own creative endeavors? My hope in this introduction is to try and respond appropriately to these questions.

How people define the domain of reality reveals a hidden worldview about existence and what is, and is not, considered real. So for the general public, life is referred to as real-life, and as an ideological construct life is indistinguishable from the 3 concept of reality. Often people associate reality with truth, or deconstruct the context and meaning attached to reality and truth. But pure objective reality doesn’t really exist: everything is sifted and sorted through perception. Therefore, perception is reality, to the extent that perception governs our reality. In other words, how we perceive—external sensory stimuli or thought and emotion—shapes how we interpret what is reality and what is not.

This brief digression into an aspect of theoretical and philosophical criticism is paramount in establishing both how I study and interpret literary texts, and how I create and write literary texts. Understanding that I see value in viewing art and life as a dynamic reciprocal relationship, that is, one shared reality shaped through subjective perception, will provide a window into my creative work, particularly with my process and form.

Ask ten authors their thoughts on the relationship between life and art, and you’ll get a baker’s dozen different responses. For example, Stephen King preaches in his book, On Writing, that the true work of a writer “starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around” (ch. 2).

Or, here’s Vladimir Nabokov in Lectures on Literature (1980) speaking intimately about nature and art:

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead. (5)

4

I am fully aware of the trite and obtuse nature in broadly summarizing critical literary theories, particularly constructs as grand as reality, nature and art. Virginia Woolf in “Modern Fiction” (1925) laments this sentiment of the abstract:

It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. (227)

However, from my explorations as an artist and my study in academia, I hold that scientific laws and principles of nature engage art through general structural design and form, shaping content. My discussion about reality is a means to discuss the subjectivity of perception, and how that subjectivity informs literary texts for me as both a writer and a reader.

Additionally art is created by the human mind, and humans are a product of nature, so art is a product of nature. Therefore, I put a premium on studying the relationship between the adaptable, evolved human mind and our current established cultural knowledge, because understanding this relationship will illuminate art in terms of aesthetic and purpose. This premium on studying established cultural knowledge is summarized by Jenkins et al: “Within a knowledge community, no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity” (188). As I mentioned, perception shapes reality, so as our perception of our universe shifts through scientific understanding, so, too, will human art. The investigation and perception of 5 nature expressed through art feeds back into our system of reality as a means to inform an audience of what is, and isn’t, real and meaningful.

Reality and Nature: Literature is a Product of the Adapted Mind

Literary Darwinism, or Darwinian Literary Studies (DLS), is a new, emerging field of literary investigation combining the scientific principles of evolution with the study of literature. Brian Boyd, in his book On The Origin of Stories: Evolution,

Cognition, and Fiction, broad strokes the main claims of DLS:

Humans uniquely inhabit “the cognitive niche”: we gain most of our advantages from intelligence. We therefore have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. Information can be costly to obtain and analyze, but because it offers an invaluable basis for action, nature evolves sense and minds to gather and process information appropriate to particular modes of life. Like other species, humans can assimilate information through the rapid processing that specialized pattern recognition allows, but unlike other species we also seek, shape, and share information in an open-ended way. Since pattern makes data swiftly intelligible, we actively pursue patterns, especially those that yield the richest inferences to our minds, in our most valuable information systems, the senses of sight and sound, and in our most crucial domain, social information. We can define art as cognitive play with pattern. Just as play refines behavioral options over time by being self-rewarding, so art increases cognitive skills, repertoires, and sensitivities. A work of art acts like a playground for the mind. Like play, art succeeds by engaging and rewarding attention. (Book I)

These concepts of cognitive play, social information gathering and sharing, and pattern recognition provide fresh utilities to study literature, but also, more importantly to me, these concepts provide a novel utility in producing and creating literature. Artists can, and do, study patterns in nature for their own art. For example, in the process of drafting my story “The Nature of Light,” I explored the concept of art as cognitive play with pattern, which is where the various ending permutations derived from. I wanted to play with the expectations my reader may have with the convention of the short story form. 6

Brett Cooke, in his Style essay (2008), suggests that in order for DLS to make a notable study, DLS should appropriately address current questions in the academic literary establishment. Cooke provides a series of potential interesting questions with responses. For instance, he writes:

What is the relationship between an artistic text and reality? Naively stated, does art convey truth or some sort? Michelle Scalise Sugiyama advances the hypothesis that a major source of aesthetic attraction to stories lies in the information they impart. Literary historians are aware of instances where real world discoveries are soon reflected in narrative, much as composers respond to the invention of new instruments or artists to new technologies such as lead tubes for oil paint. This also applies to new philosophical and psychological insights. Indeed, literature can readily be seen as playing an active role in what is, after all, a co-evolutionary construct; culture is a means of accelerating biological adaptation, which itself is a means of retaining increasingly refined information . . . Literature also serves to develop awareness of our own capabilities. Aesthetic cognition, whereby art occasionally provides productive thinking, may account for some DLS appeal. (152-53)

So, if “real world discoveries” are often reflected in narrative, including novel psychological and philosophical insights, we’d expect the evolving, adapted human mind—with its dynamic, shifting worldview including scientific knowledge—to express such discoveries and perspectives in art. And we do see these aspects expressed in literature. Perception is altered. So, too, is reality.

It is not uncommon to see recent “real world discoveries” in many short stories published in annual literary anthologies. Often I’ve observed that recent scientific discoveries used by writers are implemented in an extended metaphor and image motif. I used a similar model in crafting the extended metaphor of light in “The Nature of Light,” as well as, with the image of the Hubble telescope, and the motif of objectivity. In similar fashion, Angela Pneuman in “Occupational Hazard” from Best American Short Stories

2012, uses the governing metaphor of bacteria and microbes as a main driver in her story. 7

She uses the “real world discovery” about the invisible-to-the-naked-eye microbial ecosystem flourishing all over our bodies as an image motif of how the protagonist fails to see certain realities in his life.

The Framing: Complexity and Composites

What I will be referring to as composite narrative design, ironically, is a composite of two conceptually different, yet thematically similar genre constructs: composite novel structure and short story cycles. A composite novel in literature is a genre that is discussed in great length in Dunn and Morris’ text The Composite Novel:

The Short Story Cycle in Transition.

Dunn and Morris define a composite novel as “a literary work composed of shorter texts that—though individually complete and autonomous—are interrelated in a coherent whole according to one or more organizing principles” (2). In distinguishing between the composite novel and the short story cycle, Dunn and Morris contend:

Composite novel and short story cycle are terms diametrically opposed in their generic implications and assumptions. Composite novel emphasizes the integrity of the whole, while short story cycle emphasizes the integrity of the parts. Composite novel emphasizes its affinity to the novel proper. Although a novel is usually structured by plot, a linear narration involving causation, it can be structured alternatively, or by association—that is, by juxtaposing events, images, themes, and/or characters in some sort of coherent pattern. The composite novel, too, may be structured by causation or association or both, and again the emphasis is on the whole rather than the parts. (5-6)

In short, a composite novel, as a term and a genre, is an integrated whole aesthetic created by interconnectivity amongst its individual parts, but ultimately the emphasis is on the whole. 8

Another perspective of composite narrative design comes from Madison Bell in his seminal book Narrative Design: Working with imagination, craft, and form. He doesn’t go as far as to describe or define a literary design, but he discusses a narrative form he calls “modular design.”

The task of the artist is not to discover the essential form of the work by whittling away the dross, but to assemble the work out of small component parts [italics added]. This breed of artist is not so much a sculptor as mosaicist, assembling fragments of glass and tile to form what can be understood, at a greater distance, as a coherent, shapely image. In narrative art, this mosaic method is the basis for modular design. A sense of integrity in the work as a whole must be achieved by symmetrical arrangement of the modular parts [italics added], but not necessarily perfect symmetry as different kinds of symmetry are found in nature with only the lowest organisms radially symmetrical. (213-14)

Bell is echoing the sentiment of Dunn and Morris regarding the importance that the integrity of the design must be in the whole and not the pieces, but Bell seems to rub against Dunn and Morris’ need for the novel kinship:

The modular concept may be as old as storytelling itself. Within cycles of mythology, whether Greek, Roman, or Stone Age primitive, individual tales can be and often are rearranged and reordered with respect to one another, in ways that may alter the total effect of the whole body of the narrative to which they belong. Single-author story cycles also have an ancient lineage, going back to least as far as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. (Bell 215)

This idea that the modular construct “may be as old as storytelling itself” seems to dismiss Dunn and Morris’ claim that naming texts that rely on a modular aesthetic as composite novels to show kinship to the novel elevates its literary significance. Kasia

Boddy, in her book The American Short Story since 1950, extends Bell’s argument about the history of modular design:

The form of the linked story collection is both ancient and modern. Long before there were novels to aspire to or revolt against, writers grouped stories by supplying some excuse for their telling; consider, for example, the ‘framed miscellanies’ of Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or the Arabian Thousand and 9

One Nights. Within American literature, however, the idea of grouped stories really took off as part of the fashion for ‘local colour’ fiction that merged after the Civil War. (126)

Joining this conversation about short story book unity, Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay

An Endangered Species” in the June 2000 New York Review of Books acknowledges “the short story is a minor art form that, in the hands of a very few practitioners, becomes major art. Its effect is rarely isolated or singular, but accumulative; a distinguished story collection is one that is greater than the mere sum of its disparate parts.

A modular design allows a writer the following creative freedoms:

1. Liberate designer from linear logic: cause and effect, domino theory of narrative

2. Concerned with overall shapeliness of narrative versus story motion (domino theory)

3. Improvisation to key narrative elements like plot, exposition, and characterization

4. No burden of chronology (as seen in linear designs). (Bell 200-52)

Composite Narratives and Distributed Cognition

Grossly stated, distributed cognition argues that our memory, thinking, and emotions, do not necessarily just happen in our individual heads, but are distributed into the surrounding environment, including artifacts and other individuals. Salomon, in his text Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, affirms this stance about distributed cognition, stating:

. . . not all cases of distributed cognitions are of the same nature, still, all of them share one important quality: The product of the intellectual partnership that results from the distribution of cognitions across individuals or between individuals and cultural artifacts is a joint one; it cannot be attributed solely to one or another partner. (112)

10

So the distributed cognition of a narrative work can be expressed in a series of interactions between its major actors: author, text, and audience.

I want to zoom in on these interactions. Consider the following excerpts from

Salomon, imagining the lens of distributed cognition similar to that of a composite narrative, wherein a systems aesthetic is created by interaction of the small parts (like pieces in a mosaic):

I would like to make a few comments about the word ‘distribution.’ To be sure, the term means the absence of a clear, single locus, as when family responsibilities or financial investments become distributed over different individuals or portfolios. But this, of course, is not the whole story. Distribution also means sharing -- sharing authority, language, experiences, tasks, and a cultural heritage. (111)

Interaction usually means that independent entities affect one another reciprocally, the model case being billiard balls hitting one another. However, this is not what the idea of distributed cognitions is based on. Rather, it is based on the notion that the distributed system of cognitions is more than the sum of its components; thus, its operations cannot be understood by examination of its isolated parts, and the system should be examined as a whole. The components of the system, to the extent that they are of any interest, do not interact, for they, unlike billiard balls, do not exist as isolated entities. (120-21)

To study a system assumed to entail more than the sum of its components, one needs to assume neither (a) that its components are fully determined by the whole system, not having any existence of their own, nor (b) that they are totally independent of the system affecting one another without being changed themselves in some but not all of their characteristics through the interaction. In more concrete terms, interaction would mean that while, indeed, the joint products of a cognitively distributed system cannot be accounted for by the operations of its isolated components, each partner can still be seen as having qualities of his or her own, some of which enter the distributed partnership and are affected by it reciprocally, while other qualities may not be so influenced. (123)

In other words, synergy emerges when the individual parts of a narrative interact with one another to essentially create a story system. To name a few, notable literary examples exemplifying a story system: Dubliners (1914); Winesburg, Ohio

(1919); Go Down, Moses (1942); The Things They Carried (1990). The individual actors 11 or components in this sense are self-contained units (stories, poems, micro-fiction pieces, etc), and the grand system that is distributed among all the stories is a composite narrative aesthetic.

For a visual representation of what I’m suggesting, consider drawing a pentagram. The pentagram illustrates how I envision a true composite narrative aesthetic: where the connections (interactions and relationships) between the five endpoints create a star. These points, for purpose of illustration, represent self-contained nodes (or stories).

If this pentagram represented a composite narrative, then the composite narrative would be the emergent property of the pentagon in the middle (a structure that emerged out of simple interactions of nodes). I submit this is a basic example and contrived, but provides a simple visual representation of how a structure can exist in the interactions of the nodes, but neither exists in one specific node, nor without the nodes: remove the lines in the pentagram connecting the five endpoints and you indirectly dissolve the emergent pentagon.

Composite Narratives and Audience

In their book chapter “Meta-Design: A Framework for the Future of End-User

Development” Fischer and Giaccardi (2004) discuss the challenge of design and a new conceptual framework called meta-design:

The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of including it and making it an opportunity for more creative and more adequate solutions to problems. Meta-design is an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. It extends the traditional notion of system design beyond the original development of a system to include a co-adaptive process between users and a system, in which the users become co-developers or co-designers. (430)

12

To frame this concept of meta-design into literature, let’s call Fischer and Giaccardi’s

“users” an audience, and the “system” a text. So, meta-design puts emphasis on audience, or reader, as co-developer of a text. The careful reader will recognize this interaction and co-creation of text is similar to literary discourse orbiting reader-response criticism. In fact, “[Edgar Allan] Poe emphasized the role of the reader as cocreater [sic] since meaning was submerged beneath the obvious surface of the stories” (Iftekharuddin et al.,

1997, p. 158).

Distributing the cognition of the narrative across various individual self- contained modules allows for the literary text to be shaped by other pivotal cognitive faculties like the reader, because meaning-making between the modules resides partly in the work done by the careful, active reader experiencing a text. Wolfgang Iser in “The

Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” says this about the relationship a text has with an audience: “The literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the (reader’s) realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two”

(1005). Nabokov would agree, stating in Lectures on Literature, “Since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use his imagination too” (3-4). So the reader, exploring the networked narrative, will internalize different aspects of the narrative, whether intentional or unintentional by the author, and will extract contextual meaning. A literary text that relies on a composite narrative aesthetic has a “conviction that the audience plays a vitally important role in shaping the literary experience” (Richter 962).

A personal example I have with audience shaping text is when I first read the short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. I read the story as a standalone 13 in a literary journal. The story is self-contained and powerfully written with fully actualized dynamic characters.

It was some time later that I read the entire book The Things They Carried, and with the entire individual, self-contained stories collected together around the same theme, characters, and metaphors by the author I had a deeper understanding of the narrative cognition Tim O’brien was aiming for. Once I read the story “The Things They

Carried” in this context, I could never un-see it in this respect. Kasia Boddy discusses this importance of context in her “Sequences and Accumulations” chapter:

When reading a short story we tend to take account, consciously or unconsciously, of the context in which it appears: whether in a magazine, surrounded by a variety of other kinds of writing, in a volume of stories ‘selected’ by single author, in a multi-authored collection arranged around a common theme, or in an anthology labelled ‘the best’. Where we read the story shapes the expectations we bring to our reading of it, and thus the effect it has on us. (117)

So, context matters, insofar as it shifts how we approach a text. A colleague of mine read only the story “The Things They Carried” in the context of the composite book, and didn’t have the same appreciation for aspects in the story that I had (and vice- versa) because of the story’s context, which easily can be attributed to the story being part of a whole system for her in her initial reading, and not part of a system in my reading. This co-creation of meaning derived from the interaction of author, text, and audience puts rich value for the narrative artist to critically consider the reader, always.

Stephen King (2000) holds that “the reader must always be your main concern; without

Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void” (ch.3).

14

Composites and My Creative Work: Discussion and Application

I’ve always been fascinated with works of art, or aesthetic forms that rely on collections of smaller individual components to create a larger unity, like mosaics and pointillism. It’s not just art and collected networks that interest me, but complex systems in general. The laws of physics of this universe, this reality, allow networks and complex systems to emerge. These emerging networks and complex systems are built on lower level complete, simple systems. Complexity allows masks underlying simplicity. For example, the human body composed of individual cells, or galaxies composed of individual solar systems, or a book composed of short stories.

My fascination with networks and complex emergent systems, I believe, is a universal interest we all share on some primal level by being human. It is part of being human to seek out connections and relationships amongst things, living and inanimate, and it is part of being human to find meaning in complex connections, because, ultimately, the more we are networked with other individuals or objects the more value we have, but also the greater chance of survival. From the laws of physics to chemistry to biology, as each system builds on the previous, networked systems emerge, so I believe, consciously using this design model of the universe to shape creative texts just makes sense. However, I am also fascinated with unconscious use of this design model for narratives, because our perceptions shape our reality in ways we are unaware of more than we are aware of.

As digital culture increases and we immerse ourselves in the digital landscape our identities will meld into digital platforms, the self (the individual collection of 15 identities) becomes spread over separate digital systems (cultures) and identities of the self become fragmented and embody a more modular, composite form. Example: people having different identities/personas on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram and Tumblr and Twitter depending on who and what is in that networked platform. Why? I think, while speculative, the ability to spread our identities of self over different digital platforms allows us to invent and reinvent our perceptions in ways the human intellect hasn’t been afforded in the past.

Looking into the near future, literary texts that rely on a composite aesthetic in the form of ergodic/cybertext is a suitable model as our society merges our identities more deeply into digital space. So, although text forms may mutate or evolve, literature will always exist. Literature “will continue, just as story itself will continue, because human beings need connectedness in their lives. Perhaps the composite novel is a reflection--possibly it is even a result--of this essential fact” (Dunn and Morris 120).

Perception is reality: how we see the world shapes how we interact with it, so if you alter someone's perception you inevitably change his or her world. Jenkins et al puts this immersion into a digital culture in perspective with literature:

Over the past several decades, our culture has undergone a period of profound and prolonged media change, not simply a shift in the technical infrastructure for communication but shifts in the cultural logics and social practices that shape the ways we interact. As a society, we are still sorting through the long-term implications of these changes. But one thing is clear: these shifts point us toward a more participatory culture, one in which everyday citizen have an expanded capacity to communicate and circulate their ideas, one in which networked communities can help shape our collective agendas. The authors believe that these shifts require us to reimagine the nature of literacy itself. (7)

Why is this important as it pertains to narratology and literacy as distributed cognition?

Stories are windows into how people see the world. Stories are people’s perceptions of 16 what is important, what is meaningful, what matters, and it is this aspect of storytelling and narratology that I believe is the reason why a more spread-over narrative design, where modular components can come together to create a composite whole aesthetic is going to be the prevalent artistic form in our near future as it echoes what our society finds meaningful in our digital universe and cultures.

To me, there is nothing magical or mysterious with creative intuition or insight, but an inevitable outcome from the process of an individual (or collective group with shared purpose) moving through expertise in a given context (i.e. a newcomer writer entering creative writing to becoming an old-timer in writing circles), and the trajectory of that expertise mirrors remix culture: copy (imitate/model), transform (transfer), and combine. In fact, although she never used this specific language, Woolf discusses this concept of remix, in terms of writing: “In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old” (227). She furthers her claim by stating,

“we do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle” (227). Remix.

I’m fascinated with ergodic/cybertext literature and the utilities it affords not only for an artist and text but an audience as well. An integral aspect of the literary dynamic of ergodic/cybertext literature is the medium and organization that it is presented. A novel is linear, set and archaic to the extent that its format no longer fits the human experience, nor human understanding of how this universe operates. Dunn and

Morris endorse this claim by arguing: 17

. . . as the narrator of Witney Ott’s How to Make an American Quilt is explaining her fascination with history, she notes that she realized very early on that a linear ‘time line’ is deceptive because it is too reductive, that such a scheme leaves out ‘the small odd details’ and ‘historical gossip’ that characterize the human dimension of history. Then she makes this most significant statement: ‘the construction of the time line [must be] both horizontal and vertical, both distance and depth.’ She is saying, in other words, that when we think horizontally, as is the case when we identify and isolate fixed time points on a line, we lose sight of the connectedness of life. To achieve and maintain a sense of connectedness, we must also think vertically, three-dimensionally. (116)

So the more we discover about this universe, the more we come to understand the complex system of networks and interrelation amongst, well, everything: quantum entanglement. If art and life are reciprocally one reality, or in other words, art engages and informs our perception of nature, allowing for an augmentation of reality, then we need a model for art that mimics our nonlinear, networked nature. I believe a composite narrative design is a likely candidate for such a model.

Writer and literary theorist Ronald Sukenick would concur: “Instead of reproducing the form of previous fiction, the form of the novel should seek to approximate the shape of our experience” (42). Though Sukenick is speaking about the novel genre, his claim about an art form approximating our experience is true no matter the genre, and can be applied universally to all art disciplines. Here, Virginia Woolf would agree about this aim of art as it informs and engages reality, as she meditates in

“Modern Fiction”:

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this.’ Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon 18

convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent [sic] envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? (227)

In other words, life isn’t determined. Life according to Woolf is a boundless “luminous halo” around us, around our perceptions, so she suggests a narrative form that mimics such aspects of nature. Now, Woolf was arguing from the standpoint of Modernism, but her thesis about the task of the writer to convey the “luminous halo” of life in any appropriate fashion the writer sees fit, regardless of convention, is applicable to all modes of art and supports a composite narrative design because of its freedom from standard novel convention.

The title of this thesis is Magnets and Miracles, but the stories contained in it are part of a planned-for larger work of the same title. The larger work will be a composite narrative literary book of fiction that relies on a composite narrative design.

Think of the two stories that follow, “EOD” and “The Nature of Light,” as representations of two nodes (self-contained stories) that are part of a larger network

(book). My adapted mind is consciously using current discoveries, and worldviews, and perceptions to shape and form my stories and story networks. I’m trying to use our current knowledge about the rhythms and patterns of nature to establish similar rhythms in my work. 19

E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel (1927) discusses rhythm in narrative in regards to associative structure. Forster felt associative structure and rhythm in narrative was similar to music. Forster writes:

Is there any effect in novels comparable to the effect of the Fifth Symphony as a whole, where, when the orchestra stops, we hear something that has never actually been played? The opening movement, the andante, and the trio-scherzo-trio-finale- trio-finale that composes the third block, all enter the mind at once, and extend one another into a common entity. This common entity, this new thing, is the symphony as a whole, and it has been achieved mainly (though not entirely) by the relation between the three big blocks of sound which the orchestra has been playing. I am calling this relation ‘rhythmic.’ If the correct musical term is something else, that does not matter; what we know to ask ourselves is whether there is any analogy to it in fiction. (137)

In other words, Forster is describing the relationship and interaction between individual movements and the overall symphony, or put more rudimentary, the relationship between the parts and the whole. As Dunn and Morris explain in the following passage, this same relationship Forster describes in music does find a comparable analogy in fiction with a composite narrative design: “This is the aesthetic of the composite novel: its parts are named, identifiable, memorable; their interrelationship creates the coherent whole text. Encompassed within this aesthetic is the inherent capability of the composite novel to reflect and extend the protean qualities of the novel itself” (Dunn and Morris 6).

As current science understanding suggests with the laws of nature, there's an inherent connection between all matter and energy. So it’s not art or life, life or art—it’s all one reality, only divided and shuffled in the evolved primates brain adapted for pattern recognition and categorization. We are constantly evolving, exploring and expanding our knowledge and understanding. As a scholar and as an artist, I hold these principles as the 20 primary components of my literary identity, both in terms of scholarship and creative prose.

Creating links and meaning between story nodes in a composite book system is accomplished through the interaction of author, text and audience. As mentioned by other scholars of story cycles and composite novel aesthetics, often links are established in the composite book through a story’s craft elements, and the conversation generated between contrasting, or similar, craft elements between the individual stories strengthens those links.

James Nagel in Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic

Resonance of Genre recognizes the use of craft elements, such as setting, to establish a sense of continuity in composites:

In the history of the [story cycle] genre, the most persistent continuity in the form has been in setting, so that all of the shorter works constituting a cycle occur in the same general location, with prominent landmarks recurring throughout, tying the events to an enduring sense of place, as in Irving’s The Sketch Book, Grace King’s Balcony Stories, Crane’s Whilomville series, Kate Chopin’s Bayou Folk, Zona Gale’s Friendship Village, and Margaret Deland’s Old Chester Tales. (16)

This “enduring sense of place” and use of prominent recurring landmarks is the framework for Magnets and Miracles. Both “EOD” and “The Nature of Light” are set in the Northern California town of Odonata, a fictional composite of two real towns: my hometown of Corning, CA and current city of Chico, CA. Furthermore, I use the fictional landmark of the city limits bridge in both stories: In “The Nature of Light,” the bridge is a central setting throughout, and in “EOD” the bridge is crossed by Ellie and Oscar when they go to the orchards to detonate the IEDs, and they stop and sit on the bridge on their way back from the orchards. Though the events in these two stories are separated by 21 roughly twenty years, the recurring landmarks and setting provides entry points for links to be made between the stories, which aids in establishing a composite narrative design and aesthetic.

The Insulation, Electrical & Plumbing: Narrative Craft Elements

There is something important to be gained by distilling a story into its parts— craft elements—and observing how the individual parts stand alone in terms of quality and substance, because it is, arguably, the interaction of these craft parts that generates the eventual short story and helps co-build network bonds in a literary text; therefore, we can use this method of craft element distillation to respond and join the discourse around such narrative inquiries as what makes a great short story? How are great stories made?

Why is this story great, but these one’s bad? What’s great for the young author in studying and responding to these types of literary inquiries is that it provides invaluable mentorship in creating art, and creates a strategy guide for storytelling.

Ultimately, I feel there is an evolutionary pruning, or natural cultural selection that occurs in narrative structure. Like natural selection of species, with certain desirable traits being propagated, so, too, are desirable qualities propagated in short stories. Like the advantages that are assumed by evolutionary biologists and geneticists for studying natural selection processes in living organisms, so, too, are these advantages assumed by readers analyzing the parts of short stories as a living organism.

Subtext Part One: POV, Dialogue, Staging

Subtext in its rudimentary form can be described as the implicit meaning below the surface of the text. Subtext can be discussed in coordination with many 22 elements of craft in a narrative, but specifically, as will be discussed in this section, subtext is in conversation with point of view, dialogue and scene staging.

Point of View. Point of view is a craft element that creates or reveals subtext.

Point of view is a crucial craft element in storytelling, and the beginning writer often overlooks the importance and advantages of different types of point of view. Janet

Burroway writes in Writing Fiction: A Guide To Narrative Craft: “Point of view is the most complex element of fiction. We can label and analyze it in a number of different ways, but however we describe it, point of view ultimately concerns the relationship among writer, characters, and reader” (300). In other words, point of view is really important because it establishes a primary connection between the content of a text for a reader. Figuratively, there is a distancing that occurs between a text and its reader through point of view.

Each form of point of view has its advantages and disadvantages. Valerie

Miner in her essay “Casting Shadows, Hearing Voices: The Basics of Point of View,” writes:

Point of view is one of the most basic elements in the craft of fiction. Through this medium, storytellers see (hear, feel, smell, taste) from particular consciousness and metabolisms as well as from specific spatial and temporal perspectives. Since most contemporary fiction involves a ‘growth of perception’ (among characters and readers), the selection of viewpoint is crucial. Who is telling what story? Who is integral to what because the narrator shapes content. (96)

So, it is important to ask these questions of who is telling what story and who is integral to what in the story because this establishes the consciousness of the story. In other words, the tone and theme of any given story is filtered through the choice of point of view. In beginning writing workshops, stories that frequently feel off or don’t come 23 across in the way the author intended often are struggling with finding the proper point of view for the story to be told. I had asked myself these same questions in drafting both

“EOD” and “The Nature Of Light.” In fact, both stories had, originally, different points of views than they do now: “EOD” started out in third person unified and is now first person reminiscent. “The Nature of Light” was written and revised in third person omniscient before switching to third person objective for a draft, and, finally, the story found its point of view with first person plural. Critically asking myself these questions as I wrote these stories helped me understand what these stories were ultimately trying to convey.

Dialogue. Subtext in dialogue creates dramatic conflict and should remain genuine to the human condition. As Janet Burroway writes in Writing Fiction: A Guide

To Narrative Craft:

Often the most forceful dialogue can be achieved by not having the characters say what they mean. People in extreme emotional states—whether of fear, pain, anger, or love—are at their least articulate. Dialogue can fall flat if characters define their feelings too precisely and honestly, because often the purpose of human exchange is to conceal as well as to reveal—to impress, hurt, protect, seduce, or reject. Anton Chekhov believed that a line of dialogue should always leave the sense that more could have been said. Playwright David Mamet suggests that people may or may not say what they mean, but always say something designed to get what they want. (81)

Burroway is suggesting that part of the human condition and emotion is to conceal true intent and needs of characters in direct dialogue. If true meaning is hidden then an emphasis is placed on the context of the dialogue in order to unpack the meaning of a scene. David Trottier, in his book The Screenwriter’s Bible, spends considerable time describing the importance of subtext in dialogue and how it conveys meaning in a story in relation to its context. 24

Usually, the dialogue’s context in the story suggests the subtext. Characters not only have an outside goal but some inner need. The goal is the text of the story and the need may be thought of as the subtext of the story, or emotional through- line. It follows, therefore, that the subtext of the dialogue in a scene will often derive from the character’s underlying need or drive in the scene. Subtext has to do with the true intention of the character. (63-64)

Scene Staging. The context of a dialogue typically is dependent on where the scene takes place and where the characters are placed in the scene in relation to objects and one another. The position of the characters and objects in a scene is referred to as staging. In fiction writing, staging is a term borrowed from theater and described as a vital craft tool by Charles Baxter in The Art of Subtext. Early in this book Baxter writes about staging a scene to develop subtext:

Staging in fiction involves putting characters in specific strategic position in the scene so that some unvoiced nuance is revealed. Staging may include how close or how far away the characters are from each other, what their particular gestures and facial expressions might be at moments of dramatic emphasis, exactly how their words are said, and what props appear inside or outside. Staging might be called the micro-detailing implicit in scene-writing when the scene’s drama intensifies and takes flight out of the literal into the unspoken. It shows us how the characters are behaving, and it shows us what they cannot say through the manner in which they say what they can say. Staging gives us a glimpse of their inner lives, what is in their hearts. (14)

In other words, where one writes their characters in the scene is important to subtext and furthermore is important to any accompanying dialogue. Staging and subtext in dialogue allows the reader to feel engaged in a scene or story and piece together meaning from the details shown, instead of just being told by the writer.

This idea of piecing together details to convey emotion and meaning is similar to T.S. Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative: “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external 25 facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked” (28).

In his essay “On Emotional Investment & the Objective Correlative: Some

Thoughts on Craft for Young writers,” Rob Davidson suggests the objective correlative as “a means for indirectly suggesting or demonstrating emotion without having to be so literal. Or, in its simplest form, it is a means to show and not tell” (53). What’s great about Davidson’s synthesis of the show not tell construct with the objective correlative is that it establishes an operational strategy for writers to work through the challenges of showing emotion on the page. Davidson offers the following advice:

Using carefully selected details and emotive language, the writer suggests the emotions. The writer shows rather than tells; we, as readers, learn more about the character and his situation from this method than from a literal pronouncement like “I FEEL SO DEPRESSED. . .” We see that emotions manifest themselves in complex, suggestive ways that we, as people, don’t always understand. (54)

Steven King in On Writing discusses the importance of description in writing with the same root philosophy of “selected details” and “emotive language” to invoke a response: “Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill. Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with you translating what you see in your mind into words on the page” (ch. 5). However, I want to extend King’s claim here by stating that description doesn’t “end” with the author’s “words on the page,” but ends somewhere between author and text and audience, never fully actualized in one specific domain without considering its relationships.

Let’s investigate Hemingway’s use of these elements in a scene from his short story “Cat in the Rain” to unpack the utility and rich meaning contained in story subtext. 26

“Cat in the Rain” opens up with a lengthy description of an Italian hotel where the only two Americans, a husband and wife, are staying in a top-floor room overlooking the sea, public garden, and a war monument. The story opens in medias res with the man and woman in their room on a rainy day. The wife is standing, looking out the window, when she notices a cat crouched under a table in the rain.

‘I’m going down and get that kitty,’ the American wife said. ‘I’ll do it,’ her husband offered from the bed. ‘No, I’ll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.’ The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed. ‘Don’t get wet,’ he said. (91)

That there is conflict in the marriage between this husband and wife should be obvious.

Hemingway uses staging to show disconnect in the relationship. The woman is staring out the window in the opening scene, with her back to her husband and the room. The husband is lying on the bed, comfortably alone, doing a leisure activity that excludes his wife: silent reading. Immediately, the reader is drawn to an unnamed, hidden tension and conflict in the relationship, so when the cat is brought up in the conversation, the reader feels the subtext that the cat is a metaphor for the marriage and issues in the relationship.

Hemingway dives even deeper into the subtext of the marriage by combining the scene staging with the dialogue of the husband toward the end of the scene. Even though the husband says, “No, I’ll get it,” he doesn’t move from his position on the bed, and instead “went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed.” Hemingway makes it evident for the careful reader through scene staging that the husband never had any intention of going out into the rain and retrieving the cat for his 27 wife. Hemingway strategically is outlining the power dynamic of this marriage in this simple exchange.

Hemingway’s passage illustrates beautifully how writers place their characters in the scene is important to subtext. Now that I’ve read The Art of Subtext by Baxter I try to keep it in mind every time I write a scene. I implemented this aspect of staging in my story “EOD” to develop the changes Ellie had for Oscar without explicitly telling the reader that there was change. For instance, early in the story, after Oscar shows Ellie the first bomb, he is at his most vulnerable. He then asks Ellie to help him destroy the bombs, to which Ellie responds:

I stood over him. His body slumped and his spine made the shape of a question mark. A slurpy noise came from his nose and he peered up. His eyes buried into his face like two unearthed pieces of copper. It was the first time he had really looked into me. In his copper I could feel the black and blue. No visible damage, but you could tell something was broken, not much different than a puppy on the side of the freeway. Something familiar stared back at me. I took a big step toward him, lowering myself to his level. (45)

In this scene, Ellie views Oscar as weak. She is literally standing over him in a position of power, but she notices that something inside him reminds her of something she feels inside herself. It’s also important to note the echo of copper eyes here is a narrative anchor to the copper mine collapse. Later in the story after Oscar and Ellie detonate the bombs and are on the bridge, Ellie feels different about Oscar:

We just sat there and listened to the chirping symphony of insects and burned the rest of our American Spirit. After we smoked, Oscar stood and reached to help me up. His eyes glowed like polished bronze. In his bronze, I saw how he saw me. As I rose to his level he made a slight smile with his eyes closed. He squeezed my hand so tightly I felt him hugging every part of me—the physical, and the reverse. (64)

A shift in perception has occurred. Now the rhyming action and staging comes full circle in this scene and adds depth and complexity to the relationship between Oscar and Ellie. 28

In a form of repetition with variation Ellie is now the vulnerable character: Oscar is standing over Ellie, and his eyes are no longer copper but “glowing like polished bronze.”

Ellie is now looking up to Oscar, literally and metaphorically, and is starting to have deep feelings for him. The mirroring effect between these two scenes is quiet and semi- unconscious, but when set aside and unpacked, it becomes apparent how the subtext and asymmetrical anchoring ties together the aesthetic unity of this story.

Lastly, the staging of this second scene on a bridge was very conscious. I loved the metaphor of a bridge over water, which extends into the conversation Oscar has with Ellie on the bridge where Oscar implies his departure from Odonata. So, for me, the bridge represented a literal crossroad in their relationship.

Subtext Part Two: Metaphor and Defamiliarization

An important subtext feature that is often intricately braided in complex and layered narratives is the employment of metaphor. As Janet Burroway writes:

Metaphor is the literary device by which we are told that something is, or is like, something that it clearly is not, or is not exactly, like. It is a way of showing, because it particularizes the essential nature of one thing by comparing it to another. What a good metaphor does is surprise us with the unlikeness of the two things compared while at the same time convincing us of the truth of the likeness. In the process it may also illuminate the meaning of the story and its theme. A bad metaphor fails to surprise or convince or both—and so fails to illuminate. In both metaphor and simile, the resonance of comparison is in the essential or abstract quality that the two objects share, and a physical similarity can yield up a characterizing abstraction. A good metaphor reverberates with the essential; this is the writer’s principle of choice. (31)

In other words, metaphor can be a powerful craft utility in subtext and can deepen the complexity of a narrative, but when using a metaphor one teeters between making it too obvious and noticeable and cliché, or making it too vague and abstract and unnoticeable. 29

Metaphor is one of the most potent features of subtext, arguably, even over dialogue or character staging because it deals with higher cognitive functioning and association. In fact, Dr. Paul Thibodeau and Dr. Lera Boroditsky from the Stanford Department of

Psychology conducted an experiment on metaphors, and the role of metaphor in reasoning.

The scientists were interested in the way conversation and written language deal with complex and abstract ideas suffused with metaphor (1). So, the psychologists conducted a study where they gave separate participating groups different paragraphs regarding crime and drugs in a city, and asked them how they would deal with the crime issues. In one group, the participants were given an article where crime and drugs were called a “virus infecting a city,” while in another group the article described crime and drugs as a “wild beast preying on a city.” As the control of the experiment, the scientists asked another group of participants what they would do if a “virus spread through a city,” and also what they would do if a “beast was stalking and preying a community.” In the control the participants reported quarantine, initial education to the public, and finding the source for ways to stop a virus from spreading through a city. Also, these control group participants described “preventative methods for a beast preying on a city as: gathering a hunting party, setting traps, and caging or killing the beast” (3).

Participants given the article regarding crime and drugs as a beast demanded higher incarceration regulations, longer prison sentencing, and supported taxpayer money allocated to developing a specialized law enforcement team to capture the criminals. The participants given the virus metaphor pushed for better education about the dangers of 30 drugs, participation in community wide education and understanding of the warning signs of drug use, and they pushed for a systematic search for the source of the drugs.

All the participants pointed to the statistical bar graph, showing the crime and drug rate in a city, as what they felt determined their reasoning. But the bar graph in both articles was exactly the same. The metaphor influenced the participants unconsciously.

The application of this understanding, as the psychologists speculate, is endless in rhetoric and language. This finding about metaphor confirms David Richter claim in The

Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, where he states:

One consequence of the parallel development of neuroscience and cognitive theory is that the relationship between nature and culture has, in some areas, become murkier. We can think of metaphor and metonymy as tropes of purely literary interest to a Longinus or a Paul de Man, but cognitive psychologists view such verbal analogues and connections as deeply enmeshed in the ways human beings learn their world: they are the tools we think with. (977)

Arguably, this nature of metaphor and feature of the unconscious awareness of mind is evident in narrative literature through the braiding of a metaphor. In literature, scholars discuss this unconscious feature of metaphor as narrative anchoring, or asymmetrical echoes, or rhyming action. As Charles Baxter says in Burning Down the

House: Essays on Fiction:

Rhyming action exists in that curious area of writing between conscious intent and unconscious or semiconscious impulse. The writer who becomes too conscious of what s/he’s doing, using this technique, would create labored and implacable symmetries. We like to think that the craft of writing is conscious and learned. That’s why certain features about it can be taught. So how can I argue that the best forms of rhyming action are probably half-conscious? How can I argue for a half- conscious relaxing of the grip, for half thinking? (123)

Using echo effects or rhyming action can feel contrived and corny—mostly, I think, because in life we are seldom conscious of the way things come back to themselves. With 31 that in mind, what I would argue for is the conscious employment of rhyming action with the lightest touch that the reader scarcely—if ever—notices it. In order for rhyming action to be effective, the image or action or sound has to be forgotten before it can effectively be used again. Rhymes are often most telling when they are barely heard, when they are registered but not exactly noticed (114).

In my first revision of “EOD” I fleshed out asymmetrical rhyming actions and my narrative anchors to provide more depth. One rhyming action that I was initially unconscious of, but in revision revealed itself, was my use of food and the metaphor of the oatmeal. In the kitchen scene where Ellie first meets Oscar’s mother, Maria, Ellie refuses everything Oscar’s mom tries to feed her until she gets to the oatmeal: “She said that oatmeal is the best thing you can have because it’s so hearty and nourishing and it sticks to your ribs. My nose scrunched up to the idea of anything sticking inside me.

Cover models never look bloated” (52). Ellie watches what she eats, and it’s suggested but never fully revealed that Ellie might have an eating disorder as she tries to mold her body to fit her late mom’s body in old beauty pageant photos.

Later in the story after Oscar sends her the EOD helmet and Ellie discovers the writing in the helmet, Ellie writes: “I reread it: Elle. Oscars. Dragonfly. I read it over and over and over, tracing my finger over the impression. Now, even I knew back then that it wasn’t Earth shattering or anything like that but it stuck thick to my chest.” The fact that it’s mentioned that oatmeal is one of the best things you can have, and is hearty and sticks to one’s ribs, is echoed with how Ellie views the helmet, something that is good for her and something she doesn’t mind sticking inside her. 32

Also, an asymmetrical echo to Ellie’s eating issue in the kitchen scene is brought full circle in the end when Ellie buries her nose into the helmet and smells it.

This echo also connects back to the moment where Ellie mentions how she sometimes goes into the boxes of her mother’s things and smells the items, hoping a memory might come unstuck from the folds of her brain, but a memory of her mother never does come; however, with the helmet, the same act yields memories that do come unstuck. In the following passage, pay close attention to the terminology and how it mirrors the act of eating:

Speared deep [into the helmet]: Ellie Oscar’s Dragonfly. I reread it: Ellie. Oscar’s. Dragonfly. Now, even back then I knew that it wasn’t necessarily world shattering or epiphanic, but it has always stuck with me, thick to my ribs, nourishing me . . . I closed my eyes and burrowed my nose into the cushioned back of the helmet. I inhaled him, extracting everything: greasy bacon strips and crepes, kosher dill pickles and the American Spirit. I consumed the preserved. Forking and knifing every piece allowed me to ingest everything and appreciate the funsize things in life. That is what time does to events: time is the brine of memories— pickling the significant—removing the impurities and leaving the raw. It’s our choice, no one else’s, to allow time to be a good thing or not. (75)

These rhyming actions and reoccurring echoes in “EOD” are some of the strongest aspects it has, but weren’t fully flushed out until I applied Baxter’s book to it, so in that sense, I’m indebted to Baxter.

Another craft element of importance to my work is defamiliarization. Robert

Stacy in his book Defamiliarization in Language and Literature describes the essential feature of defamiliarization as “something ordinary, commonplace, or familiar (an object, event, situation, or tradition) is, in one way or another, made to appear unfamiliar” (8).

Shklovsky in “Art as Device” (1919) says,

If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our 33

habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and world half expressed. (780)

Stacy comments directly on Shklovsky here, stating that,

[Shklovsky] is pointing out here the tendency of language in general and words in particular to become mere phatic formulas; and the same applies to literature which, from one point of view, may be seen in bulk as traditional commonplaces expressed in conventional forms. (33)

Charles Baxter in his essay “On Defamiliarization” has this to say about the relationship of familiarity to the mind:

Familiarity, after all, is a kind of power, the power to predict and the power to abstract. It replaces the pleasure of the unknown with the pleasures of security. It signals that our defenses are in place and working. The kingdom is running smoothly. It’s running smoothly because no one is learning anything. The assumption that some writers work from, that any valuable truth may essentially be dramatic, is clearly and unhappily mistaken. What I would argue is that the truth that writers are after may be dramatic only if it has been forgotten first: if the story, in other words, pulls something contradictory and concealed out of its hiding place. (28-29)

Defamiliarization shifts perception into interesting, productive directions. A shift in our perception shifts our reality. As Stacy says,

. . . Man seems always to have longed for a new and different vision of things and the world. The theologian who attempts to invest man’s pitiful and precarious condition with transcendental significance is defamiliarizing reality as surely as the housewife does when she rearranges the furniture or the garden. (175)

So the ability for a writer to purposely shift a reader’s perception is rich in narrative possibility and application.

Consider the following passage from my story “The Nature of Light,” where I use my simple, beer drinking collective narrator, the four horsemen, as a filter to defamiliarize the commonplace traditions of religion and superstition: 34

People visited the bridge, leaving flowers and notes for Jasmine. Even people who didn't hear of Jasmine until after her crash came to the bridge to say their peace. These people shared their thoughts on Jasmine's life. A few fanatics took the whole thing extreme, dressing in Lion or Lamb costumes. The fanatics drenched their heads in lamb’s blood, and carried pickets that read: She Gave Herself So We Can Be The Light. Some of the signs read: She Gave Herself So We Can Be In The Light. For people who had claimed to have the only—true—direct communication with Jasmine’s spirit, they couldn't get their story bent straight. The yogis set up a small camp next to the bridge, and they handed out the copper WWJD bracelets and bumper stickers. They even held those exercise classes where your wife thinks she’s working out, but all they really ever did was sit on tarps and breathe heavy, humming in ritual. People shared stories of Jasmine: how she was such a leader, and how she led our varsity basketball team to the state championship (even though she never played sports, and was homeschooled). (92)

That the four horsemen are struggling to understand these behaviors extends to the reader as well, making strange the practice of faith and religious fanaticism.

The craft elements surveyed above help assess and define the quality of literary texts. It is through these craft elements that we can see my creative form, process, and practice in “EOD” and “The Nature of Light.” I am moved by the experiences of the people that inhabit my stories. Ellie’s questions about existence, truth, and reality are the same questions I carry with me daily. Ellie’s push to understand the human condition is my push. The depth of questions that stem from my stories in this thesis project have everything to do with how the characters deal (or don’t deal) with what is going on around them, and how they interact with their universe. I think, ultimately, this is a crucial aspect of storytelling: investigate an aspect of the human condition and allow your readers to ponder the multiple dimensions and complexities that stem from the narrative.

Our job as fiction writers isn’t to answer the riddles of reality, it’s to ask the real tough, gritty questions—the questions most people don’t even know exist yet. Writers alter perception, augmenting reality.

PART II

EOD

The Chilean Copper Mine collapse happened the same day I met Oscar. The mine collapse occurred that August many years ago only a few weeks after the

Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and a couple of months after the Guatemalan sinkhole and

Haitian earthquake. All these world catastrophes were happening somewhere else, and one disaster digging into the next hardened me to the miner ordeal. No one—not even you—would have blamed me.

Dad and I lived in Odonata, an olive-sized town sizzling on the valley plate of

Northern California. The rich and narrow Sacramento valley falls from the crown of

Mount Shasta, spreading all the way down the central interior of California’s abdomen.

Odonata was the throat of the valley, between the Sierra Nevada and Coastal Mountains.

We had veiny creeks and rivers. We had a dry and simple heat. We had a truck stop, a sawmill, and even a diner. Odonata had a Safeway. And we had orchard fields: rows on rows of walnut and almond and olive trees.

The Northern Coastal Range is where the sun sat widowed in the late afternoons, heavy and tired. After you passed, I often hugged the jewelry box you had given me while watching the sun set from my bedroom window—those fleeting moments before dusk stained everything red and pink and orange. And in that low light, I always imagined having wings. I imagined flying into the dissolve of that blue hour—believing there was some magical foreverland buried inside the sun.

37 38

I’m sitting now on the moon bridge over the Japanese pond at Huntington

Botanical Gardens, rereading your last annual from-the-grave letter as a study break from the

MCAT when a cluster of dragonflies swarms the pale blue lotuses …

* * *

Dad was watching the television coverage of the mine collapse before leaving for the sawmill, where he’s worked since he quit on his dreams. He grabbed the two baseball gloves and ball next to the couch and juggled them while whistling clichéd ballpark organ beats, then asked if I wanted to go outside and throw a few. I loved my dad, but when we spent time together it had always felt like a trope. The real juggle in life is how much you reject your desire to be stereotypical and average, and how much you accept you actually don’t have a choice.

I also didn’t want to stand in the backyard where we had these aggressive red beetles with black markings. I asked Dad to spray poison, but he gave me that expression where he bunches up his thoughts into the muscles on one side of his cheeks. His apathy toward my anxiety with bugs wore on me. I couldn't even watch those animated bug movies.

Dad left for work, and I moved into our covered veranda to get a little sun through the screen. Having a tan was an absolute must, according to a cover article in my

Cosmo, but I was a pale redhead so trying to attain a bronzed-body was impossible. Yet, there I was, under the damaging fingers of the summer sun, trying to make myself picturesque and timeless. 39

A hard hum of music dug into me from the other side of the backyard fence, on Mr. Martinez’ property. I had hated being a tall fourteen-year-old girl, but I did have the ability to peek over and into people’s private lives. I put on a pair of Dad’s work boots next to the backyard door so my toes wouldn’t touch any god-awful insects.

Lying on his back and wedged into an isolated corner of dead grass was a small, pudgy Hispanic boy not really old enough for high school or PG-13 movies, but old enough to know right from wrong. He had earphones on and was bobbing his head side to side. Next to his gummy frame was a sketchpad. He was holding a magnifying lens up to the sun, letting the focused beam strike his chest as he moved it around in squiggly circles. A few times he held the beam motionless on his sternum until, out from behind his gritting teeth, he’d expel a primal growl. There was something about watching this boy do this to himself that pulled down on me, yet I couldn’t piece together meaning in my nymph brain.

Dad told me Mr. Martinez had passed in his sleep and no one knew until a social worker stopped by, but I eavesdropped Dad telling one of his work buddies that

Bill Martinez had a heart attack while eating his morning porridge.

"Bullshit, Cliff. You and your stories,” Dad’s work buddy responded.

"No bullshit, man. Scout's honor," Dad said.

You once wrote me in one of your letters from-the-grave to always question everything—always ask what is the truth and what is the lie in a situation—because there’s always one to be found, you wrote. With Dad and bullshit, which was the truth and which was the lie? Is truth dependent on who is doing the storytelling or who is listening? 40

Dad said Mr. Martinez' daughter, a serious science professor, was going to take care of the estate sale. Simple logic: this was the daughter’s son I peeped.

* * *

In Odonata, everyone lived on a back road with few neighbors. So, the next few days, as I worked on my tan, Oscar dropped by after playing video games or eating bombass chilaquiles or watching a war movie. And we’d let each other see a little more of our real selves.

About a week after knowing Oscar, our acquaintanceship evolved into something deeper as friends. We were sitting on my front porch, listening to a Lotus album Oscar downloaded from an illegal torrent website. I had one earbud and he had the other. We were sitting almost hip to hip on the porch stairs—just listening.

We nodded at each other every few minutes to show our enjoyment. In between songs, he looked at his wristwatch then his grandfather’s garage then his wristwatch, then he tapped on his knees and asked me where my dad was. As Oscar asked me this I was multitasking. So I had yawned without covering my mouth and repeated his question back to him.

“Where’s your dad?”

He pulled his arm up and picked at the dead skin of his elbow. I didn’t mean to prosecute him about something I felt I shouldn’t. He kept picking at the dried skin where the two parts of his arm met. So I asked him again. 41

“I want to show you something,” he said. He led me into his grandfather’s garage. The room was bright, but musty. I wondered if the grimy smell was Mr.

Martinez—not death, but what he was before.

Sometimes when Dad was at work I would go through your old boxes in the attic and smell your things: your beauty pageant dresses, your numerous dance trophies and modeling photos, the silky pages of your pre-med textbooks. If you would have had the time to finish your study in medicine, you would have found a way to heal your body,

I just know it.

I’d wear your tiaras and crowns, and I’d wrap your dresses around my child body like a cocoon. I would take a lungful of you, thinking perhaps something forgotten might come unstuck from the folds in my brain, and you’d be there smiling or holding your hands out in all your grace and prettiness—not in death, but what you were before.

I always knew which boxes were Mom’s because Dad wrote in all caps:

KEEP OUT, on all sides in slurred, determined letters. Dad had entered the attic a few times and saw me peeking through those boxes, and immediately turned around and walked out without getting mad, so I always wondered who the warning was really meant for. Which was the truth? For him or me?

Oscar stood next to a workbench in the corner with a flickering wall light and took a dented toolbox off the table. He pulled out a cube of aluminum from the box. The metallic box had plastic tubing of varying sizes around it from the width of an intravenous drip to the lengths of defibrillator cords. The colored wires poked out from all directions and fed into an alarm clock duct-taped to one of the sides. 42

“You see something like this before?” he asked. He raised the bomb toward my hands. What was he talking about? I had always expected a bomb to look more, well

… more serious—more real. What was real though, was how small—and fragile—my reflection appeared on the bomb’s shiny surface. He had asked so nonchalantly, as if he was only asking my opinion about the movies Bambi or Lion King. I didn’t want to seem foolish for not seeing a real bomb in the flesh, so I cleared my throat:

“Of course,” I told him in a forced, nonchalant tone.

“Stellar,” he said. He tossed the bomb into my stomach. I didn’t want to inhale. How the hell did I get here and why hadn’t I seen this in him before?

* * *

The day I met Oscar in the backyard he had leaned on the back of his elbows, his shirtless brown body revealing every fat roll with no shame. He brought the magnifying glass to his eye and turned stone-faced. I had freaked and crouched.

I needed an out. The bzzing, from his earbuds, got louder—deafening. I had been embarrassed I was caught peeking, but my embarrassment was erased—replaced with terror that a giant insect buzzing-sound was flying my way. I scurried hunched-over toward the back sliding door.

“What you doing?” I heard him ask from the fence. His voice didn’t sound as

Mexican as he looked. His eyes were barely over the wood railing and his shaggy black hair was mostly over his face. He had pulled himself up to the top of the fence. I acted as if I was looking for something important. I pretended to study something in the ground. I 43 got down close to the grass, but hadn’t touched it. There was a caterpillar squirming a nearby dandelion stem.

“You must be Eleanor,” he said and pointed at himself. “Oscar.” He made a military salute with a few fingers. He must have spoken to Dad already, or worse, Dad had talked to his mother. This made me cringe. Oscar’s mother, with slender feline curves, was also in the backyard. She had been sitting at a solid stone patio table with dozens of large books stacked across the surface. Her face was buried into the screen of a laptop. I rolled some of my hair around my ear and told him I preferred to be called Ellie.

“I dig it,” he said. “Want a pickle?”

He reached over the fence with a giant jar of pickles in his hand. The jar was almost empty and the juice from the pickles swashed out of the container. Everything about pickles grossed me out, from their Jerusalem cricket-like slick surface to their slimy texture and creepy shape. I hadn’t found Oscar my type, at all, so this made it easy for me to feel comfortable, and through this comfort I expressed my true opinion—we all do this: you can always bullshit down, never up. An example of this was he loved music as much as I did, but his taste in music was as slimy and slick as pickles. And I told him that.

As a teenager, when getting to know someone it had been the silences that bothered me. Those moments where you just stared at one another and wondered if they were judging you. Fortunately, there was the Chilean mine collapse, so I had broken through the awkward silence by asking him his thoughts. Thirty-three miners were buried alive by hundreds of meters of earth, yet there I was, using the event to shovel past 44 uncomfortable silences in my backyard conversations. We all do this: not my disaster, not my problem, no need to be sensitive.

I joked how the miners really were stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Oscar chuckled after crunching down on a pickle, unlocking the tension in my shoulders.

It was a simple formula in my Ellie’s Survival Equations: you tell joke + people laugh = people think you’re funny. If people find you funny they will inevitably like you. Life is seasoned, ironically, with—insignificantly serious—social equations like these:

Indifference + greed = attraction. Skinny + curves = beautiful: people don’t criticize you.

Make people not feel judged + make people feel comfortable = people want to orbit you.

* * *

In the garage, with the bomb in my hands, Oscar dug through a white crate and pulled out a few blue and black wires. “There’s enough material,” he said out loud, as if he was thinking through his mouth. “I need help. Ya dig?”

Help with whaaat? Why meee? I questioned.

“Are you going to help or not?” he pressed. The pressure was suffocating. The threshold of the door was only three or five steps, and if I moved fast enough I could drop what I was holding onto and make it. But it wasn’t that easy, nothing ever was. I wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted help with, and I was afraid if I backed out now he’d see me a fraud. No one wants to spend time with a fraud. Someone who could handle a device like a bomb so easily was capable of doing anything. Oscar lowered his head and grabbed the 45 device from me with a few fingers. He shuffled over to the workbench and tossed it onto the wood countertop. The bomb made a hollow and empty thud.

“My Father defused these in Afghanistan. He was in the Navy.” His voice cracked and he wrapped his arms across his torso in a hugging manner. “He’s dead now,” he whispered. Before I could respond, Oscar fronted me. “I know what you’re thinking, but he didn’t vaporize.”

My tongue stuck to the innards of my mouth. My heartbeat drummed my ears and I was sure even he felt it. “—I can’t.” Oscar exhaled and sat down on the workbench stool. I walked over to him because it felt like the right thing to do, but I was unsure if I should comfort him with a pat on the back or rub his shoulder.

I stood over him. His body slumped and his spine made the shape of a question mark. A slurpy noise came from his nose and he peered up. His eyes buried into his face like two unearthed pieces of copper. It was the first time he had really looked into me. In his copper I could feel the black and blue. No visible damage, but you could tell something was broken, not much different than a puppy on the side of the freeway.

Something familiar stared back at me. I took a big step toward him, lowering myself to his level.

“I’ll help, but one rule.” I let a smile slip. “Don’t toss those things at me anymore.”

“I dig it,” he said.

Oscar told me there were five bombs in total that needed to be destroyed, and that was what he intended to do. But every Explosive Ordnance Disposal team needed to 46 have one special suit to handle the detonations. It was referred to as the EOD bomb suit.

He wanted help building a protection suit.

Shrapnel and fire, Oscar told me, cause most injuries from IEDs, but most deaths by IEDs are caused by something unseen. An explosion creates a death-wave that slams surrounding air molecules so forcefully it literally compresses everything flat and turns objects—even people—inside out. Turning something inside out exposes the real integrity of its internal components: brain, heart, lungs. Nothing would be spared. And as

Oscar said in regard to his father: you can’t live without a heart.

Oscar handed me a sketch of a boy wrapped in a puffy apparatus. Next to the drawing was a list of possible materials. Oscar didn’t say anything after handing me the sketch, and it definitely felt as if he wanted me to say something. I browsed my mind for something significant, but everything I thought of saying was from a movie and sounded too stereotypical. I tried to swallow my pulpy thoughts but as they stuck to the back of my throat I blurted:

“I dig it.”

He nodded in slow motion, like people do when they really like something.

And he smiled wide, squinching the skin around his eyes into thick meaty folds of appreciation. I learned something about people that day. In social interactions people are unconsciously fond of you when you mimic their behavior. Deep down, this makes people feel relaxed. A positive change in familiarity turns into the equivalent for relaxation. Relaxation turns into comfort and that yields a greater chance people won’t judge you: +familiarity = +proximal relaxation = +comfort > judgment x punishment.

47

* * *

I renamed the bomb suit, on the first day of construction, Ubersuit. We dug through the stuff Oscar’s grandfather had in his garage, uncovering this old firefighter outfit. The pants were too long for Oscar’s short body, so we cut the pant legs at the knees. The fire jacket draped to his shins, but Oscar liked the overlapped protection.

Oscar asked if I had any materials sitting around my house for the Ubersuit.

Dad had received a package from his old Triple-A team, The Fresno Grizzlies. Dad befriended a ballpark janitor when he had played, and that janitor was now retiring. In his janitor’s office he had miscellaneous photos of Dad. The package had all the framed photos wrapped with packaging peanuts and bubble wrap.

Before Dad had a chance to be called up into the Bigs, Mom’s brain started to grow out of control—opening up a hole in everything. And just like that Dad was working double shifts at the sawmill to pay for radiation and chemo: no Giants uniform, no fancy cars or big vacation houses, no more ambitions.

Oscar and I duct-taped the bubble wrap to the inside of the Ubersuit, creating a thick layer of padding that would absorb any blastwaves. We had walked the mile and a half into town, where he bought supplies from a thrift shop: an old dirt bike chest plate and spine protector and a tarnished brass diving helmet with the facemask missing and a large dog cone. He’d modified the dog cone to keep his head from whipping in odd ways from a blast. We found a welding mask with a flip-close visor in a shed at my house. He drilled screws into the sides of the visor and attached it to the diving helmet so he could flip it up and down off his face. 48

I wasn’t entirely sure why Oscar needed my help since he was doing all the work, but I enjoyed the companionship. I helped by providing materials for the bomb suit. Old wall insulation sheets sat in the corner of my attic. From the insulation sheets, we cut hand-sized star shapes and glued the pieces into the innards of the Ubersuit. While we were in my attic Oscar asked about the unfinished jigsaw puzzle next to the window.

Since he had opened up to me about his father, it was the friend thing to do to tell him about the jigsaw.

I had no clue what the 10,000-piece jigsaw was exactly. Dad and Mom started doing the puzzle together when I was a baby. Dad told me he wouldn’t tell me what the puzzle really was, and he liked to remind me often that I’d have to wait till completion to get the answers. What Dad hadn’t understood: knowing wasn’t the most important thing to me about the puzzle—it was one of the last things Mom touched before she passed.

Eight years pushed into the future, when I was eleven or twelve, while Dad had been on worker’s comp for a back injury, I spied him shovel through about half of the puzzle late at night. I had been concerned he would actually finish. I was worried he didn’t see a need for Mom anymore.

In front of me Dad never cursed or cried but when he thought he was alone, he sat with the jigsaw and sobbed. And he drank too, no bullshit. He chanted curses, most of it incoherent in his slurred tongue, but I occasionally pick up on the it’s not fair or you shouldn’t have taken her.

Dad still believes in him and I guess it’s easier for Dad to blame someone. I can’t even convince myself to capitalize him. I can’t subscribe to the belief god even exists, because we live in a world with cancerous earthquakes that crumble goodness and 49 tsunamis that envelope the innocent like a tumor, destroying their ambitions. It’s worse than killing someone—if you can take away someone’s self-belief and ability to dream then all you’re left with is a densely packed ball of soot, void of all real energy.

In the puzzle’s finish there would be no need for her anymore. She’d vanish into the landscape of completion. Sometimes when Dad was at work, I would remove some of the parts and place them back into the slush of disjointed pieces. There was one piece: a part of a flower petal or sky or river in the landscape, and in middle school, after having a fight with Dad about a woman he was dating, I had stolen that piece and locked it in my ballerina music box where Dad would never find it.

The ballerina box was homemade by my grandpa for my mom when she was a child. Right before the tumor engulfed Mom, she sanded and polished the outer layer of the box. She dipped her hand in blue paint and stamped her handprint onto the top of the box. My baby hand was dipped in violet and stamped inside of hers, overlapping the palms.

I always traced my finger on the outline of our hands as if that was the only way to unlock the box. Freshman year of high school, my hands were the same size as my mom’s hand stamp, so I would cup my palm, allowing my hand to always interlock inside hers. I slept with my hand on the box, but after a few years the sweat and heat from my hand rubbing the paint made it distort, but still I couldn’t stop.

50

* * *

Once school started again I only saw Oscar in the evenings and weekends when Dad was at work. One Saturday I went over to Oscar’s when there was still morning dew on the ground. Oscar’s mother was at the grocery store. I felt guilty I was in their house and still hadn’t introduced myself to her yet after hanging out with Oscar for two weeks. In all honesty, the opportunity had never presented itself, especially with her gone at the nearby university all the time.

Oscar was tweaking with the helmet. I loaded a Pandora Radio station of a band I liked and wanted to introduce to Oscar. He was writing the letters EOD on a piece of Scotch Tape with a blue sharpie. He taped it somewhere inside the helmet. Oscar dug the song. He slipped on the helmet and leaned back on the futon with his limbs hanging off the edge.

Next to the computer was an Etch A Sketch. The—most incredible—image of a dragonfly was drawn on the display. There were no edges or straight lines, just curves.

The full wings overlaid each other. The mature shape hadn’t repulsed me—it was perfect: grace and prettiness, strong and mindful.

“Beautiful,” I whispered. He grabbed the toy from me, studying the image like he was trying to see something unseen.

“No, I messed up the best part,” he responded. I asked him which part he meant and he said the only part that matters if you’re a dragonfly. I hadn’t figured out what part he was referring to, and he said it so nonchalantly that I would have felt foolish and horrible asking for clarification, like I wasn’t paying attention or, worse, like I was 51 judging him. With a shake, the image was erased, like it never existed. “I’ll do better next time,” he said, and handed me the blank Etch A Sketch.

“Why dragonflies? Why bugs?” I questioned playfully, but as I did he looked up with the wide eyes of someone who felt judged. “That’s cool. I dig it,” I said holding a smile.

Oscar was burying the dragonfly’s true meaning from me or maybe he was still piecing together his own. Or maybe part of the truth inside dragonflies is felt—like the experiential difference between understanding something and knowing something.

All he told me was that a dragonfly is perfect and extraordinary—something you hold on to when everything else isn’t going well. He smiled with his eyes closed. He told me to think about what I might assign as meaning to a dragonfly. I thought about first, of course, my issues with insects. Second, flying. Then freedom. And love: surrounding, dissolving, all-embracing love.

Salsa music danced out of the kitchen archway. The kitchen was warmer than the rest of the house. Oscar’s mom was facing away from us, turning what looked like a very thin and wide pancake over on the stovetop. The fan above the oven was on full blast.

“Wash your hands, O, and set the table,” his mother said to him as she turned off the music and oven fan. It was awkward meeting adults as a teenager, because I was never sure if I should be a kid or act adult-like. Maria faced me and introduced herself.

Her eyes graced over my body, which had made me feel special and mature. Maria turned toward Oscar and flashed an expression of approval. She had exhausted something in

Spanish toward Oscar and he whipped away from both of us. 52

“What did you have for breakfast?” Maria asked me. She grabbed a paper towel and wiped her nose. “O mentioned you never eat.” Oscar was forking a piece of egg into his mouth with his eyes closed. Why would he say that?

“I’m just really picky, sorry, Ms. Martinez.”

“Sweetie, take this opportunity to nourish yourself.” She opened the pantry next to the refrigerator and made a loud humming sound as if she was a doctor checking your throat to see if you’re sick. “Oatmeal. Yum.” She grabbed the cylinder of oats and used a small cooking pot hanging from a hook. She filled the pot with water and poured oatmeal into it without measuring anything. She said that oatmeal is the best thing you can have because it’s so hearty and nourishing and it sticks to your ribs. My nose scrunched up to the idea of anything sticking inside me. Cover models never look bloated. Oscar was finishing his breakfast but I was already feeling uncomfortable.

“I’d love oatmeal. Thank you,” I told her.

Maria told Oscar he should take a shower and give her and me some girl time while we ate. The bathroom door had closed and we heard the shower running.

“Does he open up to you?” she asked. I shook my head. “Did he tell you what happened with his Dad?” I nodded. “O has trouble understanding.” I could hear the mother in her voice. She sat and handed me the oatmeal. She had a small bowl of mixed fruit with a dollop of cottage cheese.

“Isn’t it a miracle about those Chilean Miners?” she asked, staring through the ceiling. “My Papa worked the copper mines before coming to the States,” she trailed off.

A few days before, rescue crews had discovered all thirty-three miners were still alive.

When the emergency drill crew finally sent down a video feed, the miners were all 53 shirtless and filthy. The news reports freeze-framed the video feed of the pixilated men with distorted faces and crooked teeth crowding around the camera light. I told Maria I didn’t think it was a miracle, but it was pretty extraordinary. So which is the truth?

Miracle or not?

I forked cautiously, moving the food around the plate more than into my mouth, but Maria didn’t have that same way of concerned eating. Her spoonfuls were mindful. For her, this was a time to reenergize. For me, eating reminded me that I wasn’t perfect with my formless body. I had missed the little girl fantasy that I could eventually be in the pages of a magazine, wearing pageant crowns and dancing ballet like my mom.

Maria asked me how the oatmeal was, but I didn’t want to talk about food. I needed to throw her a curveball. I asked, “What do you do exactly?” She straightened her spine into an exclamation mark and her eyes enlarged, brightening her face. She pulled a necklace of an unrefined piece of metal off her chest.

“It started with copper,” she said. Her Papa mined the copper when she was a child and he showed her with a battery and circuit how electricity flowed through and within the copper. She said she asked her father what was happening, but he didn’t know other than it had something to do with energy. “So, I’ve looked for real answers all my life. If you search long enough for meaning, eventually you’ll become a physicist,” she laughed, and I followed my social equation and laughed too. “That’s the real paradox of life, Eleanor.” What was the paradox? I didn’t want to seem like I couldn’t keep up with her, so I didn’t ask.

I had never given outer space or stars much thought until Maria spoke about them with such grace and prettiness. Why should I care about space? But ever since 54

Maria shared her love with me for stars, I have felt the energy to understand them, especially after what she showed me at the sink as we washed our plates:

“The processes that conduct energy and movement in our world are the same laws that conduct all energy and movement in our universe,” she said, pointing to the angular momentum of the water spinning down the drain.

“All?” I questioned.

“Everywhere,” she affirmed.

“The exact same?”

“No different,” she validated—with no hint of bullshit.

* * *

We spent the weekends in September making sure everything about the

Ubersuit was perfect. Maria brought Oscar snacks or treats before leaving to work at the library, and she never asked what we were doing. Sometimes she had lingered and tried to watch Oscar at the workbench, but he would fold a canvas tarp over his devices and give her a piercing glare until she left. Once she bought us a few bags of the mini version of candy bars like Twix and Milky Way, and a whole bag of Starburst. The candies were called the “funsize” version. I made a joke that Oscar was like a funsize piece of candy.

He responded, “I’m like a candy bar: half sweet and half nuts.” I laughed, but not at him.

None of the IEDs were live because they were used as training tools by

Oscar’s dad before his deployment. Most of what Oscar had been doing was wiring the units for a real detonation. He wouldn’t tell me why he wanted to get rid of them, only 55 that he needed to soon. He treated it like a direct order from his superior. If IEDs had taken my Dad from me, I’d want to destroy everything bomb-related, too.

Maria put together an Estate Sale one Saturday, and by the following weekend everything was gone except necessary items like the beds and her desk with her work on it. Every so often a young couple would stop by the Martinez property with a real estate agent. Maria never was with them. She was on the cusp of an opportunity to work at some high-tech telescope facility in an exotic location like South America or Hawaii where she would be able to do her research on supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and singularities. The moments that I had to speak with Maria, I would ask her everything I could about stars and energy and the motion of things.

Gravity and pressure, Maria told me, are so massive in stars that elements are smeared and fused together. Hydrogen atoms fuse to create helium. The matter lost in the reaction is converted into the pure energy of light. So, which was the truth and which was the lie: energy is matter or matter is energy? Energy = Matter? I started to wonder if energy really does equal matter, or the reverse, then what else in our universe shares that relationship? What about truth and falsehood? Could truth = lie?

Helium fuses to create carbon, carbon to oxygen, the star devours lighter elements into heavy metal elements to sustain an equilibrium between the inward pull of gravity and outward push of nuclear pressure. I thought often about what Maria shared with me when I spent time with Oscar. We took breaks wiring the IEDs with live copper wire by hanging out in the backyard. Now when I think about it, we spent more time hanging out than actually working on the bombs. So really, I should say, Oscar and I often took breaks from hanging out by wiring the IEDS. Oscar always caught and 56 released any crickets or flying insects that had crawled too close to me during our backyard hangouts. We’d sit on the grass and look out toward the Coastals, never really talking—just taking in everything.

In the middle of October, as the cold dropped the leaves from seasonal trees, we finished everything we needed to do with the Ubersuit and IEDs. We had planned to go out into the olive orchards the following weekend to destroy the IEDs. We sat on the grass of his grandfather’s backyard just before sunset. Dad had wanted me home soon to watch Game 6 between the Giants and Phillies for the National League pennant.

“Do you ever wish?” Oscar asked. The sun hung low in the bra of the horizon, nestled into the cleavage of the overlapping mountains in the Coastal Range. The air had been stickier and warmer than usual for October, and my shirt plastered to the flat contours of my arms and torso.

“I wish for people to like me,” I had said. I thought I heard him scoff but I’m still unsure.

“My mama and father fought a lot before he was deployed,” Oscar said, pausing and leaning back on his elbows. “Ma said it was because my father tried to defuse every bomb, and that’s impossible. I wish it was possible.” He rubbed his hands across his face, sweeping away sweat, but the grease and dirt from his hands smeared into his cheeks and forehead so it looked like camouflage.

“I think it’s possible, O,” I said. He sat up and crossed his legs.

“Two types of people: those who build’em and those who defuse’em.”

For Oscar, everything could be separated and organized into absolutes. I knew no matter what I had said to him about this he’d disagree. You’re either bad or good. 57

You’re either with him, or the reverse. But he was a friend, and to show you’re close with someone you tease and play with their understanding of things. I sarcastically fired at him, “what about a world without IEDs?” He flipped the visor closed so I couldn’t see his eyes. From under the helmet his voice sounded much too deep and old.

“No world without bombs. No bombs, no people, ya dig?”

A world without bombs is a world without people? A world - bombs = no people? Bombs + people = a world?

* * *

The next weekend, we loaded up the IEDs and the Ubersuit into a red pull wagon. A few weeks before, he decided that since anything close to the explosions would vaporize, we should bring along items we wanted to get rid of. He brought his first place pinewood derby car he had built with his father and his Boy Scout badges. I brought along a stack of magazines and a few pieces of cheap jewelry. He asked me why I didn’t bring something more serious and substantial, from the KEEP OUT boxes in my attic, or from my ballerina music box in my bedroom, like my Mom’s annual birthday cards from-the-grave. Since death had taken over a year to eat its way through Mom, she wrote me annual birthday letters up to the age of twenty-two, so my last letter would be opened during my last semester of college. Dad had always handed me the letter first thing every morning of my birthday. Mom had such a dry and vertical sense of humor. She would always sign the letter envelope:

To My Lovebug, Ellie: 58

XOXO Forever, Mom from-the-grave

Those objects were too meaningful—things I didn’t want to get rid of, and I told him how I felt about the idea of vaporizing those objects.

“That’s the goddamned point,” he snapped. I was pushed off-balance by his response. “What kind of game do you think we’re playing anyhow?” he pushed further.

I didn’t know it was a game. I thought this was real. How dare him be so cavalier about our connection.

“I don’t see this as just a game, O.”

Without looking at me, he said, “I don’t care. Everything is a game.”

Everything was a game to Oscar because for him, everything had a set of defined rules, and people either played by the rules or people cheated. “Believe me or don’t,” he said.

“Truth is, whatever.”

“What? That doesn’t make any sense,” I had said.

“It does to me. Never mind, Eleanor.”

I still try and decipher his words about belief and truth. I had thought I understood him at the time, but now my understanding has evolved into compassion.

Now I decipher his words as he had tried to tell me that truth is—whatever you give power to, that is—your game.

We trekked along the paved roads that led out of town. The roads rose and fell up the small rolling hills leading toward the Coastals. We walked over a single lane bridge that crossed over a creek that marked the city limits. Just outside the city limits, roads turned into dirt paths. We pushed further still, until the dirt paths became less defined, dissolving into orchards. With no clear path, we marched along a dry creek. 59

I led our funsized adventure. Wherever I stepped, he followed. I had a larger stride than him so it was cute watching him hop to reach all of my foot impressions. I cut through old almond and olive and walnut orchards. The trees of the olive orchards grew so large they arched over the rows and touched one another and became one interconnected tree, creating a giant canopy. The rays of the noon sun had peeked through canopy openings and focused light beams speared into the ground.

After about two or three miles of hiking through high weeds, we came across a young olive orchard with small trees that didn’t block the sky or touch one another. We found a soggy twin mattress in the orchard left by one of the olive pickers that season.

Oscar had leaned the mattress on its side and told me to stand behind it for protection.

I wish I could say that we were standing in an open field of fresh flowers under the arch of a double rainbow like I had imagined we would this far in nature, but that wasn’t the case. This was the fall. Everything was in decay. The ground was hard and barren and cold, beat down with time and change, like the warped and tired hands of a sawmill foreman. The sky was empty, no animal noises, no wind, nothing.

Oscar wheeled the cart into the middle of two rows. He wiped his foot back and forth on the dirt, brushing away any loose foliage. He called the spot ground zero.

Sitting on the edge of the cart, Oscar wiggled into the cocoon of the Ubersuit. After he buttoned up the jacket, covering the soft skin of his throat. He was no longer Oscar the underdeveloped boy, but he wasn’t really fused into a man either. He was refined.

An IED was positioned in the center of the orchard row. He oozed homemade goop he called napalm into a large chamber on the bomb. He set his magnifying glass and one of his mother’s important physics notebooks she was always writing in next to the 60 bomb. I both admired and feared him for having the capacity to take that important artifact from his mom. At that time, I hadn’t known what to make of those equal but opposing forces fusing inside of me. Could Oscar have done the same to me with my important objects? Could I have done the same to him?

Without taking his attention away from his hands he said, “I’m going to dedicate this first one to my mom.” I told him I would do the same with the second bomb.

He placed a gray detonation box on top of the IEDs and got to work by wrapping some of the green copper wires around the metal prongs on the crown of the devices.

Oscar unraveled ten meters of yellow wire, connecting one end to the bomb and the other to a contraption the size of a mascara bottle with a little push button on top.

He gave me an okay sign with his left hand. He held three fingers high above his head, about a second later dropped one finger, a few moments ticked and he dropped the second.

An orange, red-hot flash … Ringing: a cyclical beat, quick—high-pitched …

Static overload. There was a sensation of being pulled and pushed in all directions—torn apart and pieced together: all-at-the-same-time. Etch A Sketch incarnate.

Grief, imperfection: erased. A blank screen of endless possibility and pure energy uncovered. Everything moved so fast. Circled back on itself—slowed, congealing in this gradual but relative, endless bomb-time.

After that, nothing.

I was flat on my chest, baptized into the moist sludge of weeds and decay. The dirty mattress was on top of my back. I flipped onto my side and shimmied out from the 61 mattress, brushing my hair off my face. I felt the flow of something crawling all over, like black widows dancing in my veins.

Oscar ran to me, “Elle? ELLIE?” His voice was muffled under the Ubersuit.

My body was sprawled out on the ground. I had been looking down into the orchard, seeing Oscar and myself in third person. My body had sucked in large amounts of air and inhaled a fruit fly, and it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered—everything mattered. My body felt reenergized. My chest rose toward the atmosphere.

The sky was pale blue and cloudless, no beginning. No end. Day and night nested into a singularity so complete no need for time or space. No need for linearity.

Energy flipped outside in, becoming matter and the reverse: M=E. Everyone was able to move in all directions and always be touching and there, in that panangelium, you were floating, not adrift—but waiting. You weren’t sad or restricted to beds—no—you were limitless, in that eternal ballroom where seizures and brain scans, even pain, cannot penetrate. I let a giant smile piece together across my face.

“Again,” I exhaled. “Take me there again.” I let the vibrations of my voice expand, through him and past the threshold of the terrestrial—like fear and anger—and into that discovered universe. I couldn’t see his face, but I had pictured him returning an expression of approval. Oscar wobbled over to ground zero where he placed another bomb on the platform and tied a jar of pickles to it. “This time, O.” I took a deep breath and held it. “More.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon detonating the remainder of his father’s bombs in the olive orchard. Every time he’d place a new bomb, Oscar would stand a little closer to the blast. He was standing a little too close on two of the blasts, and small shards 62 of wood splintered into shrapnel and dug into every part of the Ubersuit. I said he should stand further back, but he had embraced the pain of the shrapnel in a way I will never understand.

* * *

By the end of that afternoon, after the sun stretched across the valley and vanished behind the Coastals, our ground zero explosion pad was charred and smoldering. The grass around the ground zero was frayed, peeling inward. As we made the long hike back home, Oscar stopped when we were crossing the single lane bridge.

He sat down, dangling his feet over the edge and leaned on the metal railing over the creek. I rested next to him and he pulled out a Natural American Spirit cigarette. He lit one end of the cigarette and sucked on the other side all in a single motion without hesitating. The glowing end of the cigarette sparkled in the dusk. I had never smoked before but didn’t want him knowing what I had and hadn’t done.

I inhaled, feeling the smoke burn the back of my tongue and swirl in my chest.

My head became light and my eyes watery, blurring my vision. Oscar was rocking and his lips were miming as if he was trying to convince himself of something. He pulled out a few wood shards from his obliterated pinewood derby car and fingered the pieces off his open palm into the water below until he had only two pieces overlapping each other in the center of his palm. He took the sharper of the two and handed me the other.

“Nothing lasts forever,” he mumbled. The creek water was flat and by then night fully embraced Odonata. The twilight reflected off the creek, and in my hazy vision 63 it was difficult for me to make out where stuff in the sky ended and the chaos below emerged. My heart had been cracked opened, exposed and vulnerable—like the juicy flesh of a split pomegranate. “Ellie? You agree? Right? Nothing lasts, nothing.”

I rubbed my face and stellar constellations appeared and faded into unfamiliar designs under my eyelids. I felt the stars, but not just stars, us—our stars billions of years ago that transformed energy into the matter of our sun, our world, our bodies. I turned toward him and nodded in slow motion.

He yawned, “Everything means nothing.” He let the woodpick fall between his fingers. I think, now, what Oscar meant by everything means nothing was that he saw everything reduced to meaninglessness and inevitability. He wrapped his arm around my neck. He stroked the side of my arm and shoulder, and pianoed my elbow with his dangling fingers. I felt invincible. I just couldn’t convince myself to lean in, give in, be in the moment and kiss his pudgy cheeks. So which was the lie? Was it that I couldn’t convince myself, or that I didn’t want to convince myself?

I wondered if the bridge we were on would collapse if an earthquake struck. I wondered what it would be like to be sitting on that bridge if a tsunami came roaring down the river, somehow. I wondered what it would be like to be sitting on that bridge if a supernova explosion blasted our world. The ugly beauty of that moment—how would he have acted in those concluding moments of inevitability? What would he have revealed from under his surface? What would I uncover?

I wondered, since that moment would be final, if I would say and do what I truly felt instead of trying to fit myself into a corner slot I hadn’t belonged to. But now I 64 see that all moments to some extent are always inevitable. Final. That’s it, a paradox: the equation I’ve never solved.

I’ve wondered about you and—since your death was slowed to tumor growth—if you ever lost the things that made you human. If what spread over you ever isolated you with inevitability—exhausting you so much you stopped trying to hold on.

Convincing you to just let go. Did you let go? Would you let go? Could you let go of me?

Did it strip you of your goodness—of your timeless beauty and your energy to study medicine? I refuse to believe it did. I reject it completely because if something is passed on to someone else then it won’t die. It can’t die.

“What about good things?” I said to Oscar. “You think those things die? Even if they’re passed on?”

“Die? I don’t know.” He flicked the ash over the creek and the glowing embers faded into the blackness. “But I like that, no good thing really ever dies.”

“Especially if it’s shared,” I added. Good things + shared = never die!

We just sat there and listened to the chirping symphony of insects and burned the rest of our American Spirit. After we smoked, Oscar stood and reached to help me up.

His eyes glowed like polished bronze. In his bronze, I saw how he saw me. As I rose to his level he made a slight smile with his eyes closed. He squeezed my hand so tightly I felt him hugging every part of me—the physical, and the reverse.

* * *

65

Sometimes in the afternoons after school I sat on the porch and browsed the spam catalogues from Urban Outfitters or Victoria’s Secret. A week after detonating the bombs, I was flipping through the lingerie pages as the rumble of an engine came barreling down the road. A mint-condition white Mustang roared past and pulled onto the side of the road, parking at an angle on the pavement, but mostly on the lawn next to the real estate sign with the posted Sale Pending.

The license plate read LT LOCO, and on the back window of the Mustang there was a gold emblem decal that looked like a crab with a star on its head. Below the sticker, in italics, was the phrase Initial Success or Total Failure. I didn’t comprehend the meaning and I didn’t like the absoluteness of the expression. The gravity of it all was heavy, even for me back then.

The male driver was talking to a woman in the passenger seat. He kissed her on the forehead and opened his door while leaving the engine running. The tall and muscular man had brown skin and a haircut so short it gave the perception he didn’t have hair. The man was wearing pleated slacks with a yellow bandana sticking out the back pocket and polished black shoes and his buttoned navy blue shirt was tucked. He was carrying a package the size of an Xbox wrapped in dragonfly print gift paper.

I hadn’t seen who opened the door and let the gentleman in but by the man’s lack of facial animation and reserved head nod when the door opened I like to imagine it was Maria, and I imagine this to be real so much now that when I recall this moment I really truly see her opening the door like I’m seeing the moment from the point of view of the gentleman. The man disappeared inside and after five minutes, the young woman in the car turned off the engine and opened her door. 66

She stood, stretching her arms and shaking her feet. She wore this cute paisley halter-top and solid white A-line skirt. Her hair was layered and wavy blond. This was what models looked like outside the pages of magazines. She reached into the back seat and cradled a baby up to her arms. The baby couldn’t have been older than a year and was wearing little denim pants and a red shirt with a racecar printed on the front.

At one point her baby swiveled its tiny head toward my house and I gave a little wave with my fingers, and the mother smiled, waving back with her baby’s hand.

She pointed at different objects and swayed, singing “All the Pretty Little Horses.”

A half hour later, the man dragged his feet out of the house with his head down, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. The man’s face was flushed red, slick and puffy. The window shade to Mr. Martinez’ office, facing the road, was pulled back. When I stared at the window, little brown fingers—holding a yellow bandana—let go of the curtain. The man walked up to the woman and the baby. The woman wiped the man’s face under his eyes and stroked his cheek with her fingertips. He made a smile and kissed the baby on the forehead and rubbed the side of the woman’s neck. And just like that, they were gone.

I tried calling Oscar at his grandfather’s home number that evening but no one answered. I hadn’t cared about Oscar’s lie—I mean, of course I had been slighted—but falsehoods, as I had started to fuse, were just as much based on truth as truth is built upon its opposite. I had thought he had no right to make me believe something that wasn’t real—now I feel the opposite: he had every right to make me believe something that was real to him. Oscar had been embarrassed and terrified that I saw into his core and 67 snatched a piece of his secret, but all I had been concerned with at that time was making sure Oscar didn’t feel as if he was now alone—or worse, that he was nothing.

The next day Dad took me to Game One of the World Series in San Francisco.

It had been really something being at the game with Dad, even though my thoughts and concerns were back in Odonata. Dad stared at the bullpen and waved down a few of his buddies from Triple-A that got called up over the years. Dad stretched and rolled his throwing arm every so often after turning away from the bullpen to view the real game.

Or was that the real game for Dad? Which was the lie?

* * *

Oscar left a note on my front door asking me to come over at six o’clock. I tried working on my homework to calm time and occupy my mind, but I never finished the first equation. What did he want to meet about? I carved plump, overlapping circles into my wood desk with a broken pencil head. My father opened my door without knocking and leaned against the doorframe holding a baseball with two gloves under his arm. “Wanna throw, Elle?”

Dad was going out a lot more with his latest girlfriend. I had a feeling he wanted to discuss the seriousness of their seeing each other. I wasn’t in the mood to play daughter—no, I had wanted to play friend, companion … significant other, to a boy who had been just as confused about the world as I was. I felt the room whipping around me. I needed my space. “I’m studying,” I said. 68

I covered my carvings on my desk with my notebook so my dad wouldn’t scold me. I pointed at my desk with my broken pencil and told him, in a totally bitchy and unwarranted tone, I was busy and he needed to knock before coming into my space.

He nodded and pinched his lips together like he understood but he was thinking about something else.

“I’m going out tonight with Eve again. I ordered you Chinese: orange chicken, your favorite.”

“That’s not my favorite,” I interjected. Dad rolled the baseball down his bent arm and snapped his elbow straight, causing the ball to pop upward into his open hand.

“Don’t lie, Elle.” He repeated the arm-ball movement and asked what was my favorite food.

“Not hungry,” I diverted. He stopped playing with the ball and smiled with a chuckle.

“But when you are—even got you those chopsticks you like.” He clamped his fingers into his thumb like a crab claw and grabbed for pretend dim sum in the air.

“Okaaay.” I rolled my eyes, but only because he was too concentrated on his air chopsticks to notice. At that time, I hadn’t known exactly what Oscar wanted to meet about. I had speculated a multitude of teenage extremes for our meeting in my mind: asking for empathy—although now it would be sympathy—regarding his lie and his father, or telling me he never wants to see me again to protect his lie from outsiders, or the opposite, and he wants something else. I had all of those thoughts and concerns for

Oscar buzzing in my brain, but instead of focusing on Oscar, I had to zoom in on my

Dad’s pretend dim sum. 69

“I was thinking about going in the attic for a bit,” Dad said. “Wanna help me work on—”

“—Dad?” I faced him, narrowing my eyes. I had no energy to play the clichéd single dad with teenage daughter routine, especially when all I could see was Oscar’s round face every time I blinked.

“Okay-okay.” He said, shifting his weight. “You’d really like this one, Elle.” I swiveled on my chair away from Dad and studied the dancing scribbles on my desk.

An hour before I planned to see Oscar I took a shower and washed my hair.

Since we first met, up to that point in time that was the longest we had gone without seeing each other. I was so excited I had trouble putting on my bra. And after I found an acceptable outfit that wasn’t too matchy-matchy, I ran downstairs and out the door without locking it or waiting for my hair to dry.

I had always met Oscar in his grandfather’s garage but he wasn’t there. I tried knocking on the front door, nothing. I cupped my eyes into their windows. There were two packed suitcases in the kitchen, next to the garage door. I sat on the front steps of the house with my arms hugged around my legs.

A little figure, too small to make out other than its giant insect head, emerged down the road. It was Oscar wearing his helmet and pulling the cart. I brushed off my skirt before he could see me do it, and waited for him on the end of the walkway. I was beaming, but something was wrong. He walked past me with his shoulders caved. He was wounded. There was blood. I chased after him into the garage.

In the wagon were torn pieces of dragonfly wrapping and the Ubersuit, which was covered in penetrating layers of filth. He was holding his left hand with his right. On 70 the inner parts of his tender wrists were shards of plastic nailed excruciatingly at an angle and he had a yellow bandana wrapped around the lesion and crusted blood webbed and collected on his tiny fingers. I had thought we destroyed all of the bombs, but my logic for where the bomb came from was outweighed by my concern for O.

“Oh my gosh? Come here.” I reached for his arm but he jerked. “Let me help.”

“No,” he turned so his back was mostly fronting me.

“Don’t be stubborn. I want to help.”

“No you don’t.” He shuffled over to the workbench. I gasped. His words burned the back of my tongue and swirled in my chest.

“Of course I do. Don’t be ridiculous. Let me.”

“All you care about is yourself,” he said in a dark tone I hadn’t recognized other than its absoluteness. “People only care about themselves. It’s true.” Had I done something to warrant that judgment?

“Well, people, Oscar—” I stopped to pull my thoughts back into my mouth “

—don’t treat others they care about like this.” I traced his face for compassion.

“But I don’t care.”

“What?” I stepped toward him. “How can you say that?” My arm and shoulder went numb where he massaged me on the bridge.

He said, “You never meant anything to me.”

“Take it back,” I said. My eyes narrowed and before I knew what I was doing

I grabbed his shirt by the collar and pulled his marshmallow body toward my scowl. 71

“You don’t believe that.” At this proximity, he was less: weightless, expressionless, timeless, but not powerless. Please, take it back.

“I can believe—” his eyes read side to side like he was skimming a script. He turned his eyes away from me. “God, just leave.”

I released him and crossed my arms, and said, “I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true, you’re nothing—”

“—Stop, take that damned helmet off. Face me,” I said.

He flipped the visor shut.

“Goddamn it, Oscar. Seriously?” He walked into the corner portion of the garage where the artificial lights didn’t reach. His body was trembling furiously, and he was tugging at his chest and then he stomped his foot, which stopped his pulling on his loose skin. He slammed his foot on the ground again and his trembling ebbed, then he raised his foot to pound it a third time but whatever demon he was fighting within won, or he just surrendered to his wrath. Like it was gospel, he said: “I only hung around you because my mom felt sorry for you.”

“SHUT UP,” I yelled. My eyes burned. “LIAR.” My voice bounced off the empty garage walls and I felt a twitch in the bridge of my nose.

“Oh. Want to talk lies?” he yelled. He shouted that I was no saint. He yelled that I lied to myself so much I actually believed my lies as real stories about the world. It hadn’t occurred to me—in fact, it wouldn’t occur to me until Psychology 101 freshmen year in college—Oscar was projecting his humiliation and confusion onto me. He shouted that I should repent our relationship because it started from the very beginning 72 with a lie, and no good thing can come from falsehoods. He spoke as if giving a sermon—no matter what I did or said would alter his damned mind.

I hadn’t understood why Oscar was trying so hard to make me want to hate or lash out at him in an ugly way but I couldn’t control the reaction inside:

“You are nothing to me. You—”

“—Finally. Now, leave me,” he said.

I faced the door. How could he be so fatal? How could he be so total and absolute about what we were sharing?

After two seconds he said, “Leave, Eleanor.” That’s all he said in those final moments. The wetness in my eyes condensed, fusing narrow mindedness and selfishness—creating my momentary iron of contempt. The air was heavy, swirled—an iris of a collapsed star—sucking apart every particle, every atom, every connection that had ever existed. Nothing lasts. Aren’t all moments final? I had wanted him to feel exactly what I felt. Without facing him, I said:

“The blonde was prettier than your mom.”

He collapsed and folded into himself onto his knees as in prayer. I even felt the impact of my words, a shockwave of gamma radiation pulsating from my mouth. He raised his hands open-palmed and pushed his glare upward.

“Why?” he pleaded. “Why?” he repeated as if he was asking for all children.

“Everything you asked, everything … ” He closed his fingers into his palms and clenched his jaw. Without releasing the red in his jaw he hissed something dark, only loud enough for those involved, so I couldn’t make it out. I toe-stepped away. He chanted in muttered 73 tongue-speak, and every so often he would surface just long enough to curse things I wish

I hadn’t heard—things I promised myself I’d never repeat.

He drooped and rocked in ritual and wiped his bloodied hands across his sweaty face in tribal patterns. He was making rhythmic slurpy noises and kneaded his blood-stained hands into his bushy hair and the thorny strains received a mess of rage and confusion and blood. He kneaded and kneaded and muttered and when he removed his hands they were wiped clean and he was silent, motionless. His sticky hair bunched against his forehead in a matted crown carrying all of the sins between father and son.

Maybe part of me wanted him to react differently. More typical, stereotypical.

More angelical, or more the reverse. Maybe I wanted him to push or hit me, and yell and slam the garage door in my face, and tell me what a self-centered bitch I was. Maybe part of me—the part that wanted to accept his philosophy of absolutes and continue to deny the nature of ambivalence—wanted to have a real reason to rebuke him instead of feeling weak with him.

I ran out of the garage and left the door open behind me and headed west. I ran and ran and ran, away from him, past the posted Sold property sign. I ran over the rolling hills, through Odonata, chasing the horizon. I ran until body-acid flicked into my eyes. Until my legs squirted napalm. Until I tasted blood and vomit on the back of my throat.

Then I pushed even further: past the city-limit bridge, past the present, past the no-road orchards and dry creeks, and further still, through our olive orchard, up and up and the Coastals. Not just up the coastals, to the top. 74

Inevitably, I collapsed and small puffs of dirt escaped under my exhausted body. On the rim of the Coastals, I looked down on the entire brittle town of Odonata and from up there it was so small I could cover the whole city with my hand. It wouldn’t have taken much: heavy rains, improper drainage, poor foundations, and a sinkhole could open up and devour everything. No orchards. No sawmill. No Oscar. Nothing. Everything lasts forever if you have nothing to start with. So, which was the lie? Everything or nothing?

* * *

It was in spring that I started to lose pieces of him. Details like the image of his face or the way his voice sounded or how his cheeks moved when he laughed fell into the cracks of my brain. I lost pieces of meaning around our activities. Memories, whenever I forced them, would always be relatively warped like the rows of an orchard on the side of a freeway when you’re in a sports car.

I came home after Astronomy Club one day in May, and sitting on my bed was a UPS box the size of an airplane black box. There was no return address. Inside was

Oscar’s Ubersuit Helmet. No note or letter, nothing but helmet. I heaved it into my arms and studied it. Etched into the brass: a perfect dragonfly on the upper crown portion of the helmet in one continuous line.

The EOD he had scribbled on the tape in blue sharpie was smeared from sweat and the bandage flaked inward. Something was carved into the helmet, buried below the tape. 75

Speared deep: Ellie Oscar’s Dragonfly. I reread it: Ellie. Oscar’s. Dragonfly.

Now, even back then I knew that it wasn’t necessarily world shattering or epiphanic, but it has always stuck with me, thick to my ribs, nourishing me. I find I often read it over and over and over, and I trace my hand into the impression. I continuously, thoroughly, religiously overlap my fingers into the depression, and knead my body heat into the carved letters until the metal radiates energy back, and the perception in my hand melts— interlocking with his.

I closed my eyes and burrowed my nose into the cushioned back of the helmet. I inhaled him, extracting everything: greasy bacon strips and crepes, kosher dill pickles and the American Spirit. I consumed the preserved. Forking and knifing every piece allowed me to ingest everything and appreciate the funsize things in life. That is what time does to events: time is the brine of memories—pickling the significant— removing the impurities and leaving the raw. It’s our choice, no one else’s, to allow time to be a good thing or not. So, which is the truth and which is the lie? Good or bad? The truth is that it really doesn’t matter, and the lie is that we have to pick one.

When I reflect on that summer and fall with Oscar, the first thing that burns in me isn’t the Ubersuit or detonations or even the defusions, nope. This is what explodes inside: The Chilean Miners buried alive. For seventeen days they had remained alone in the dark and separated from their loved ones. The surreal footage of the miners being lifted out of the drilled emergency route was celebrated by everyone, and after all those catastrophes with tsunamis and earthquakes, we all needed this. If those miners could do it, so could anyone. This news is our world. 76

But the real meaning in the buried miners ordeal was truthfully never in the conclusion as they were raised from that tomb. No, it was earlier, in that first image of the miners underground: shirtless and smiling bodies grouped around the camera with interconnected arms and faces so wide you could see all the way into them and sense something vibrant and immortal emanating there.

That is how I feel about relationships now, but here is the thing: someday it will change—build upon itself. Push against itself. Layer and fuse itself. Hydrogen fusing into helium, helium into carbon, the building blocks of life on a long enough spectrum evolving stellar energy into love. Love into a nebulous cloud of recycled dust afloat in space—waiting—until one day it clumps and begins anew. I get it now, and just because

I understand this doesn’t mean you’ll be lost, no—you will always be with me, preserved.

I scrolled Pandora for stellar instrumental music and slipped into the brass exoskeleton. It was heavy and I had trouble breathing, so I swam to my window and crawled out onto the top of my desk with my legs dangling, and I started to breathe the open air. The feedback in my speakers crackled, splitting the skin behind my ears and I felt my new self wiggle up and out of that split. I was bobbing my head side to side and my winged-crown glowed. A surge of energy pumped through my arms and they vibrated, bzzing.

Oscar was wrong: there aren’t just two types of people. There are people who don’t create bombs. Oscar was one. Good things shared will always live. I dig it, I chirped in my head so it sounded like his voice more than my own. I rolled the volume to full blast and lifted, humming into the static. I hope I still fly around in his heart. And above all else, I hope he knows he always buzzes in me, dragonfly into dragonfly. 77

The Nature of Light

1

Of course we started having problems once people discovered the condemned bridge. On the night of the incident, we were all huddled around the station's television— watching the Tonight Show—and shootin’ the bull about our Giants winning the National

League pennant that evening against the Cubs (this is how we always start this story now).

Before going on patrol we always sipped our coffee out of our summer softball league mugs. And we’d fork generous helpings of cobbler one of our wives made. That season’s fruit crops hadn’t been good to us, and none of our wives baked us any sweets, so one of us always grabbed a pastry tray from our Safeway. 78

And we would tell stories during the commercials over our coffee and cobbler. Mark and Luke had newborns so they were sharing the traditions they were going to create around Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and various fairies (like the tooth and mud pie ones). After Carson’s monologue, John read us our horoscope then we headed out on patrol (like we’ve done a billion times).

Now it always depends who is doing the telling, but we’ve always felt since we, the four horsemen, were part of the official investigation that the real story begins with the mayor of Odonata, Judge Jonas Lamb. The younger of us—who hadn’t witnessed Jasmine’s Gift firsthand—say it started well after her car crash. We’ve heard some of the old-tradition ranchers in Paskenta County take the story all the way back four years prior to when our government made us question everything with the Challenger

Shuttle incident. Trust lost and replaced with soul-sucking doubt because of untested o- rings and the “go fever” culture of science.

In our minds, that night on the bridge rolls continuously into everything else like streams into rivers, but we’d be foolish to allow (unreliable) memory to muck with our truth. Is it real truth or truthfully real? There is a difference (we all know this). How you bend and what you choose to give power to decides how you perceive, well, everything.

* * *

The narrow bridge had no railings and often trucks hauling almonds or olives or walnuts would have to pass each other on the bridge. Immigrant orchard pickers had 79 campaigned and gained support—even from the Paskenta people—for restoration of the bridge. Instead Mayor Jonas decided to close the road official-like and condemn it. All orchard workers would have to travel around.

Mayor Jonas owned some 2000 acres of Paskenta county land, inherited through his cowboy lineage. The bridge was just north of his acreage and was the primary access point to the Paskenta tribe reservation. Closing the road would allow Jonas to sell off his land in pieces to build new access across the river.

We all arrived at the same time: Mark and John in patrol car #3, Luke and

Matt in the station Bronco. Kids liked to play a game of chicken in their cars over the condemned bridge. Always turnout right (your right, always), but not too right, or else.

We thought at first what happened was something like ^. An ’89 black Camaro was parked at an angle on the nature-side of the bridge with both car doors wide. Mark and

Luke noticed a trail to puddle of blood. There was music blasting from the dark under the bridge.

The vehicle, a Land Cruiser, was right side up in the river. That’s what the movies always get wrong in car crash scenes—nothing’s really ever motionless or silent after death. Movies like to muck with truth and reality, so they add what we all hope to see in tragedy. Most of the time, outside of the movies, the vehicle is barely dented or just scrunched a little in the front, and almost always right side up. Just like this one.

Madonna’s Like A Prayer was blaring from inside the vehicle. The water had flowed level with the door mirrors creating odd angles with the current that danced our flashlights around like a disco ball. We radioed dispatch. Bill-the-Thrill Martinez, captain of the fire department arrived with his crew. 80

The commotion brought Mayor Judge Jonas and his wife. The Paskenta chieftain, Gabriel, and what we all guessed were his inner council, came in their Toyota pickups—this made us uneasy. We didn’t want any more trouble. Luke and John, who were standing closest to the Paskenta people, stepped back toward the rest of us. Jonas kept asking us if it was confirmed to be a Land Cruiser, and if anyone was found inside.

The Land Cruiser’s headlights illuminated the water around the vehicle like a halo.

“My God. What’s that?” we heard a first responder shout.

We ran to the edge of the bridge, and shined our lights downward. Slithering into the darkness, away from the Land Cruiser, was an animal with a shiny, glowing tail and the head of a lion.

“It’s carrying something. Something’s in its mouth,” we heard people shouting from below.

“Where? Where?” we all called back.

“It’s white. It's a calf,” people yelled.

“No, noo. It’s a lamb,” a Paskenta woman corrected.

“Let me see,” Jonas demanded. He pushed through us to the front of the bridge. “Jesus Christ,” he shouted. “Save her, it’s taking her away.”

“Who?” we asked. It drifted downstream. We lost sight of it.

We heard a scream: a female roar in the dark, a sound so filled with ambivalence it slowed every one of us solid. The Paskenta chieftain held his three center

fingers of his left hand up to the darkness down river. We had felt like teenagers again, because in our minds, after glancing the chimera with the banshee scream, we knew what

we were dealing with but no one wanted to say its name aloud: Shasta. 81

2

Despite what anyone tells you, there has only been one true sighting of Shasta, and that's from Thrill. When Bill Martinez first came to the States as a young man, before he earned his place in our community, he had worked the seasonal orchards around

Northern California. Naturally he'd sleep in the orchards, like they all do. Bill woke to one of his compadres being mauled by the shadows. Bill tried prying the mountain lion off the man, but everything—knives, even, bullets—bounced right off its furred armor.

So Bill, always up for a thrill, leaped onto the lion. It rose, and he rode the beast like a horse to the top of the Coastals.

He had roped his arms around the lion’s tail and stuffed it in his throat, biting the tip clean off. Bill said the chunk of flesh from the tail electrified his marrow and sparked into a solid piece of copper in his mouth (he said it was a symbol for greatness to come). Bill became a folk celebrity for that. Hell, even got the name he so much adores, and he married into the Ellers a year later (after hero-banging all the local hotties). And

Bill was accepted into a firefighter position a few years later. Many years later, he looped the copper into a necklace and gave it to his daughter as proof of the sublime.

Of course we don't completely believe Thrill, but being a good storyteller has its weight. What we had known: there was a very large mountain lion that traveled seasonally between the Coastal Ranges and Sierra Nevada Mountains. This cat had been spotted and livestock was carried off every year. Late at night, so late it was always more early, we’d get woken to Shasta's call, a scream that flipped you inside out and stayed heavy in your lower gut. One particular year, people started becoming food. Nobody, not 82 even us, the four horsemen of the Odonata High varsity football team who had led our town to three division championships, wanted to be out at night. Luke and Matt and John told their younger dirt-biked brothers to be home before dark or Shasta will get you. We were the Odonata Wildcats, so naturally, our mascot got a new name.

At school, Mark snuck up on underclassmen in the showers and grabbed the back of their necks tightly, and he'd hiss: "Too slow, Shasta gotcha." He would never do it to any Paskenta, as they were known by our town to have a higher rate of disease and

STDs. Our parents told us all the stories. We tried to not touch any of them, or share anything with them, to avoid getting cold sores or herpes. We always wiped down everything they might have touched. A lot of Mexicans weren’t as judicial in their relations so we took to taking the hands-off approach with them as well. There were enough blonds and redheads to make the rounds with anyway.

It was all games with Shasta when we were together, or if we were safe in our homes, but if any of us were alone outside or had to walk from our cars to houses, especially at night, then there wasn't a single person that wasn't peeking over their neck with the same exact chant: not me, Shasta. Please, not me. Some of us don't think it was

Shasta or even a lion who had attacked people, but an unseen rabid bear. People are funny like that: two completely irrelevant events that just happened to share the same space or time, and bingo. Somehow in people’s hard, wooden skulls people make connections of meaning. Emotions tend to puppet logic, yet knowing this won’t help you, even when it’s your strings being toyed.

So, the town started poaching for lions. It was a valley-wide predator cleansing. The Paskenta called it a spiritual holocaust and the inner council isolated 83 themselves to their reservation. Not a single pelt had a chewed tail or was the size of a horse, so Shasta lived on in the shadows—growing in us. But time cuts the string emotions tie on logic (this can make the weak-minded their most vulnerable). Ten years removed, some of us started to forget all about Shasta until that incident with Jasmine on the bridge. Despite what anyone tells you, there has only been one real sighting of Shasta.

3

The Land Cruiser belonged to a Jasmine Whitehorn, sixteen-year-old. Her mother, Anita Whitehorn, was full-blood Paskenta. A body was never recovered, so

Bidwell and Paskenta county divers were sent all the way down the river to the Valley

Delta near Sacramento, where all our rivers fed. The Camaro was Johnny Fish Jr.’s, a seventeen-year-old senior (Matt’s nephew), but his best friend, Clifton Moore, had the car key.

We found a video camera in Johnny’s car. Evidence. Cliff and Johnny and

Jasmine were all on the video, together. They looked like they had a great time. We know that’s too general to describe the contents of the video, but describing the details leaves a stickiness all over and your feet burn, as if walking on asphalt in August. We know generalizations are melting more than expanding. It's simple telling 101: in the specific you unlock the universal. But we’re hoping by being intentionally general and vague people will catch the decency of our telling (and respect those involved). 84

Johnny is having trouble getting hard. Cliff is doing all the work on Jasmine.

She is flexible—sixteen, timeless. Cliff calls Johnny a fag for just sitting there. Then Cliff says: “at least play with her titties, Fish.”

Fish bends back and says: "Fuck you."

We tried, Jasmine laughs. Johnny pulls up his pants and gets out of his car, and starts walking across the bridge (all off camera). Jasmine says: what a fucking pussy.

She’s only wearing socks, perfect tits—nipples firm and tiny, like a pencil eraser or a white lie. She hops into her Land Cruiser. Let's really make him a man, she laughs.

Jasmine turns her headlights to full and takes off, pounding her car horn seven times and shouting like she’s on a roller coaster. The camera is still on the back seat of the Camaro where Cliff is sitting. Cliff is adjusting himself and smoking dope. Madonna’s “Like a

Prayer” is fading in the background. That’s it: video just cuts.

If that video ever found light, people who just don’t understand could wash out those boys’ futures. Jasmine was dead—nothing could change that. Depending on how you measure blame, it was all really just an accident. No one was asking hard questions. Those boys were destined for more than what Odonata offered. Cliff had been a star pitcher all is life. Johnny was going to be the next Jack Nicklaus. Everyone thought it. We all had decided to destroy the tape.

Johnny was spooked silent. He had no cuts or bruises. Cliff, on the other side, had a whole complete story ready for us: Jasmine’s lights and speed got the jump on a lion crossing the bridge with a lamb in its mouth. Jasmine swerved. That’s it—it all came down to a turn of a steering wheel. 85

4

Three days after the bridge incident, the crane equipment and crew to lift the

Land Cruiser arrived from the Bay Area. Jonas had asked us personally not to use businesses from the bay because of the gays, but this was out of our hands. We were all talking about the World Series starting that Saturday between our Giants and the Oakland

A’s. Chitchat transitioned to the tooth and mud pie fairy, since John’s toddler just experienced his first mud pie magic. None us had remembered where our fairy traditions had begun, but our parents always did it—so we did too. How the game is played: the young ones go out into nature and collect nature things to make a nature mud pie. Design matters, Mark said. A story needs to be displayed, Luke responded.

After the child is finished he places his mud pie in an oven and goes back outside and plays like kids do. The mud fairy can smell the dessert baking dry, so she sneaks into the oven and eats the pie. If the child is good, mud fairy leaves him a special gift. If the child isn’t good, the parent tells the child she needs to play a different game.

The crane operator, a man with a belly so large it was like he never got rid of anything he had absorbed, was standing near us. This man was—off-centered—on the edge of the bridge with his thumb up in the air and one eye closed downward, as if he was measuring something private. He turned his head and wiped the sweat streaming off his Giants hat with the back of an encyclopedia (volume M) he had under his armpit. We were caught staring. The crane operator dropped his thumb from the sky. It’s the most important part of the whole process, he told us. Light bends as it enters the water and manipulates it. Slows it down. Makes things look or appear where they aren’t. 86

“You must correct for it,” he said. “Something we all deal with. It’s the nature of light.”

The nature of lite? we repeated.

“Exactly,” he spat. “Everything's illusion.” The crane operator said every year since he was old enough to kill another man he had spent one calendar cycle going through one book in his encyclopedia. We were all huddled around him tightly. Without us asking aloud he answered what we were all thinking: “After I finish Z, I’ll just start a new collection.” He made a continuous circle motion with his hand. We weren’t sure how to respond to the encyclopedia hobby, so Luke changed the topic by sharing the story of the mud fairy.

“What’s the metaphor?” the crane operator asked. “Your mud pie fairy story?

What do you tell your kids when they start asking questions?” he asked all of us. John wanted to know what he had meant by the metaphor but Matt interrupted—

“—No point, man. It’s just a fun game. Just a damn good story,” Mark answered. But none of us really believed what Mark said, even though it would have been our response too. There always needs to be more than just a damn good story.

Doesn’t there?

The crane operator said if he had kids he’d never allow them to pretend to live in a world of magic. It’s already difficult coming to terms with—let alone explaining—a world of contradictions, so no need for magic was his motto. He said, “A world without magic respects the natural flow and motion of things, it’s like calculus or ambivalence,” he said.

Definitely ambivalence, we affirmed. 87

John had walked over to the crane and slapped his hand on its door, looking the crane operator straight-faced. “This is a mud fairy. Look it up in your smart book, under magic,” John said, giving the crane operator the finger. We all laughed, even the crane operator.

Mayor Jonas and The Paskenta Chief were at the bridge as the vehicle was raised from the water. The Paskenta said Jasmine’s spirit couldn’t be at peace until all the motion around her death was at rest. We don’t like to talk of bad luck or omens. We hadn’t won three football division championships in the early 80s’ without respecting superstition. The sun was sinking below the Coastals. The car was lifted into the low light, blinding us.

We heard the crane operator shout, and he let out a deep belly laugh. He popped his head out of the little crane door and yelled down to us.

“You won’t believe it. There’s a metaphor somewhere in this.”

“Where? Where?” John asked, squinting and leaning over the bridge’s edge.

“Where?”

On the back bumper of Jasmine’s Land Cruiser were two bumper stickers:

Yoga Is Life and Go Oakland A’s. We would have thought nothing more of it if the

Paskenta Chief didn’t mention that business with bad luck and curses, but since he had mentioned it and since our Giants were playing Oakland for the World Series, we had a serious dilemma on our hands.

Back at the department the next day, we were working during Game 1 of the

World Series. Yogis from a Goddess Temple in the Sierra Nevada Mountains kept calling and leaving messages that they wanted to speak with the investigator in charge of 88

Jasmine’s case. It was important that we settled all discrepancies surrounding Jasmine’s incident as swiftly as we could. The game was about to start and we had it on silent.

We preferred to watch games on mute, because it brings us back to feeling like players again. It’s pure playing a game—any game. Under the lights of the playing field, no darkness, everything just is. No real thought happens, no filter or morals, nothing enters but the motion of things, and being part of a larger moment doesn’t enter into that light. In the lights, no dark, everything is. It’s our issue with sports commentary and John Madden (same with Hollywood). Just give us the motion of things, and we’ll come to terms with the rest after the game on our own.

The county forensics unit was cataloging the items in the Land Cruiser. We called in Cliff to see if he had anything more he could give us.

Cliff: Some of what I said didn’t really happen.

Us: We understand.

Cliff: But it’s all truthful—that you have to believe. No bullshit.

We all nodded without saying a word.

Cliff: I wasn’t drinking. I had said I was and I wasn’t. Caught myself up emotionally in telling you guys what I saw. Just started to add things that felt right or something the typical teenager would be doing. I was completely sober. Scout’s honor.

Hindsight 20/20, of course we see the conflict of interest, but at the time none of us thought it was odd Jonas was both mayor and primary owner of our local newspaper, The Daily Tomahawk. Jonas had kept all news of the incident out of the paper for as long as he could. Said he had wanted us to get the story straight. 89

He was very helpful in that respect: always calling us—asking what he could do to help with the investigation, or if we had anything important to release. Mayor Jonas had gone public that he was going to pay to have the bridge completely rebuilt with his own money as soon, and fast, as possible. We all had flashes of the “go fever” of NASA.

In the trunk of the Land Cruiser, there was a marble carving—an amateur art sculpture of a geometric tube, like an SUV tire. A chunk was missing in the ten to twelve o’clock slot of the circled sculpture, as if someone had taken a bite out of it. Chiseled on the inside of the marble rim: Step inside yourself. And on the outside was: WWJD. The marble artwork had taken three grown men to remove from the back of the vehicle. There was also a duffle bag with clothes and a cashier’s check. The check was soggy and nearly unreadable, but we could make out the name on the account: Jonas Lamb.

Over the next three days, the Giants would lose the first two games of the

World Series, and Jonas would lose all his money to his wife after she discovered everything she needed to between her husband and Anita. All Jonas would have to his name would be his inherited property. We couldn’t help but feel something, even if he was still well off with all his land. That’s just how we bend.

5

All of us were at the station and we had felt pretty good that the news with

Jonas was out, because we were certain that would wash away any curse. But the Chief,

Gabriel, sat motionless at the station waiting to see the marble sculpture. He had claimed

Jasmine’s spirit was trapped in it. We made him sit there all week. 90

Game 3 of the World Series was starting within the hour. We really needed to win. A group of yogis came into the station from their backwoods retreat. The yogis claimed to be Jasmine’s spiritual family. That’s when we knew Game 3 wasn’t going to end well. We called Jonas to the station.

All of us, the yogis, Jonas, and even Gabriel, all stood our distance from each other. Jonas was in his bathrobe, and his hair was all over his face. Jonas let all of us know that he was taking Jasmine’s sculpture.

Yogis: That's not what Jaz would have wanted. You’re missing J’s message.

Us: What would Jaz want?

Yogis: Not want, do.

Gabriel: What would J do? WWJD?

Yogis: Exactly.

The yogis passed around these little copper bracelets that looked like replicas of Jasmine’s marble sculpture. The bracelets had the chiseled WWJD on the outside and the step inside yourself chiseled on the inside. “Insane,” Jonas yelled at no one particular.

“I will do what I want. I don’t care what Jasmine or you or you or you want.”

The ground trembled. The walls bent side to side. On the pregame coverage of the Giants game everyone scattered, covering his or her head. But it was on mute, so we didn’t know what they were saying.

We snapped toward Jonas: “What have you done?”

Jonas’ eyes were wide—pupils so large you could reach into them and wipe your finger against his guilt. “I killed her. I should’ve rebuilt the bridge sooner,” Jonas shouted. 91

Right after Jonas had confessed to us, the shaking of the walls subsided (we know). Gabriel put the three center fingers of his left hand up to the air and chanted in native. One of the yogis, Rayasha, went over to Jonas and gave him one of those giant monk hugs with the whole body. Jonas wiped his face and laughed to himself. “I’ve been saying it for years, this is God’s punishment for the gays and HIV and AIDs.” He reached out and into the television. No one had said anything about providence or judgment, and it bothered all of us that Jonas would be so obtuse.

Rayasha said, “It’s not proven HIV causes AIDS.”

“Denialist!” Jonas jumped up. We must have had the same look in our eyes as

Rayasha because Jonas started to yell and scream denialists at all of our faces in rabid.

How dare him. Did we deny Jasmine? Did we deny Shasta?

“If anything, we deny you,” we shouted in unison. He stripped off his robe.

Jonas’ body was covered with curly red hair and his fat extremities were pale. Blue veins snaked all over his albino bear-body—coiling against his skin. He walked out of the station and onto the train tracks without saying another damned thing. It was all very surreal, even in the folds of our memory, but it just makes the telling that much more honest because it actually happened.

We’ve never, personally, seen Jonas after that. He stepped down as mayor and

Thrill was elected as interim mayor, which pleased us all. Jonas had donated all his property to the Paskenta people, and Gabriel had said Jonas wiped his hands clean with that gesture. The Paskenta people said they would build their casino on the acquired land.

(We think it's too easy to end the story here so we continue a little further. If

it’s too easy, it’s not real—to the extent it probably never really happened.) 92

6

Jasmine had been a high school junior. Everything had happened a few months before the holidays. Her ascension in our community was inevitable looking back. Orchard pickers and drunken Paskenta have died on the bridge before, but this was different. After all, Jasmine was—now—one of us. The Berlin Wall just came down and science couldn’t even get a group of Americans in space without something going wrong.

NASA was getting ready to launch a telescope in space that was so good at seeing light and the bend of time that scientists had claimed it could reach back and see all the way to the start of it all.

The world got so big it had turned its sight out, into the black womb of space.

Our town needed to feel connected to something larger than ourselves, of course, but it had to be something that we felt in control of. Because once you start relying on other people who haven’t earned their place, they start strapping you to a rocket and trusting your life to unreliable rubber rings the size of jewelry.

People visited the bridge, leaving flowers and notes for Jasmine. Even people who didn't hear of Jasmine until after her crash came to the bridge to say their peace.

These people shared their thoughts on Jasmine's life. A few fanatics took the whole thing extreme, dressing in Lion or Lamb costumes. The fanatics drenched their heads in lamb’s blood, and carried pickets that read: She Gave Herself So We Can Be The Light. Some of the signs read: She Gave Herself So We Can Be In The Light. For people who had claimed to have the only—true—direct communication with Jasmine’s spirit, they couldn't get their story bent straight. 93

The yogis set up a small camp next to the bridge, and they handed out the copper WWJD bracelets and bumper stickers. They even held those exercise classes where your wife thinks she’s working out, but all they really ever did was sit on tarps and breathe heavy, humming in ritual. People shared stories of Jasmine: how she was such a leader, and how she led our varsity basketball team to the state championship (even though she never played sports, and was homeschooled).

Everyone always has that memory of that one girl they had in their third or fourth grade class that was always smart, but really quiet—and somehow you don’t remember exactly what happened to her. Well, in our stories, that’s always Jasmine. For some of us, Jasmine represented a family member: our daughter, our little sis. But for all of us, Jasmine represented the best of Odonata—the best in us.

The Sunday before Halloween, we had a candlelight vigil for Jasmine at the bridge. It was also the day we finally were able to secure Jasmine’s marble statue to its frame at the entrance of the nature-side of the bridge. The yogis had these candle lamps that they wrote messages on, for Jasmine. The yogis passed around a single torch, which they had used to light all of their individual candle lamps. Once lit, the hot air filled the paper lamps, lifting them into the sky. The illusion of the lights drifting on an ascending river of air wasn’t lost on us.

Some of us had plastic bowls that we used to float the candles down the river.

We had imagined all the candles coming together and forming a lake of fire that flowed all the way from the rivers of Odonata to the open ocean. People might mistake one floating candle for a piece of trash, but a lake of fire—people will ask hard questions.

"My God. What is it?" people would ask, as the flames spread over the pacific. 94

"That’s Odonata. That’s us," our booming voice would answer back from the fire.

We stood in front of the statue just in case anyone was going to try to make a scene or create drama by defacing it during our ceremony. We all had a moment of silence with Jasmine. Not moving. Not thinking. And in our moment of silence, that's when we had heard it . . . Everyone had the same reaction. From our perspective, we couldn’t tell if people were smiling, or grimacing, and we’ve all now decided it was smiling.

Everyone who wasn’t there always wants to know what was actually heard, or who said what, like it really matters. The truth is: nobody said nothing, even put it down on the public record, so there’s no more confusion. Yet we all heard it the same. What was heard aloud was heavy debris, probably an uprooted tree that had slammed into the bridge supports and it rattled. The metal screamed under the tension. It was in that high- pitched metal-roar that we—collectively—heard it, from within: What Would Jasmine

Do?

We all filed off the bridge together. Everyone helped everyone. Gabriel grabbed the necessary equipment. The yogi leaders, Rayasha and his partner, carried a few Paskenta elders to safety.

The following week, our local daily, The Paskenta Tomahawk, was renamed

The Odonata Chronicles, and its first big headliner: “Our Hometown Hero.” The picture was a close-up of Jasmine’s statue, and all of us, with our batons readied, are standing in front. 95

We got so much pie and cobbler and baked goodies sent to the station for that recognition in the photo, and for a while after—before people started to forget the seriousness of the matter—whenever we’d go on patrol people would stop and wave.

People actually stopped and really greeted us with whole arm waves, not just the obligatory hand or finger wave. Hell, even got special care from our better halves. Stories bounced around the station about how wives were role-playing their fantasies about being taken by Greek Gods.

Luke brought in an outfit his wife wanted him to wear home. Leather straps and a gold spray-painted chest plate with molded abs. The costume also had a giant hammer prop with thunderbolts spelling out God of Thunder. Luke told us his wife wanted him to bust into the bedroom wielding the hammer and shout: "Here comes the rolling thunder." He asked us if we were taking it too far.

“That’s the metaphor,” John yelled from the break room.

Mark, without covering the cobbler in his mouth, answered: “We’re using

Roman Gods now?”

And we all laughed, some at John, some at Mark, some just to be part of it all.

That’s the truth of this story, yet it never really happened exactly like that. Us, the four horsemen, we aren't men of science. Quite frankly the whole enterprise of being matter-of-fact is revolting to those who see a natural progression and motion to things, like us. But right when you think you have your life preferences skinned and cleaned, a predator like Shasta follows that scent into your camp.

And then you kinda start wishing you had a really big telescope floating in space, just to point into your camp and look far enough back into the past to watch it all 96 happen from the beginning with no filter, raw, to see how it all really unfolded. See how things really bent. But that’s not the case: everything is filtered—bending the perceived.

Even telescopes: some scientist has to tell us the story of what we are seeing. We just need to always remember to stick our thumb up and measure the illusion for ourselves.

(This is where most people nowadays end the story. We once did—it makes sense but it isn’t the true ending. That's still happening.)

7

After Christmas and into the New Year, the frequency of stories about Shasta and Jasmine’s Gift submerged. We did overhear at a Wildcat varsity basketball game a few boys from the visiting team sharing Jasmine’s Gift. The boys ended the story:

“Jasmine absorbed all the bad and wrongdoing of our city and it turned her into a wild beast, where she would have to cruise the land for the rest of her days with all our sin electrifying her copper tail.” John elbowed us all in the ribs with a stupid grin painted on his face.

“Now, that’s a real metaphor,” John said. But we disagreed.

Our wives told us a few gals from their Wednesday night bingo games tell the story where Jasmine rides the current through all the rivers that connects our valley water to the ocean on the backs of sea turtles. And she lives free in the open with other beautiful mermaids and sea nymphs and fairies of our youth. It’s her right of passage, they say, because she leaped into the darkness, sacrificing everything for us. 97

We still see Jasmine’s sticker from time to time, sun-bleached on bumpers and windows. Occasionally we’ll run into someone wearing the WWJD bracelet. We still go to work the same and hunt on the weekends. We still eat our second helpings of dessert at the station and sip our coffee out of our softball league mugs. We still go back out on patrol after Carson delivers his monologue and John reads us our horoscopes. That’s real life … Our American life. The dynamic circle of behavior loops. Extraordinary events are just that, so we don’t expect to hit the jackpot again. For us, for Odonata, that was it.

So in all our downtime we had at work—since no one was really committing any crimes—we got to thinking. Why not tell our story to the world. Share our insights, our follies. Our truths. Us. We struggled finding an ending to our story, and thinking about the ending made us struggle to find where to really start the telling. How do you end a story that never ends?

Don’t even ask us about the title. Luke was pissed we didn’t like his title,

“Step Inside Yourself.” Matt was pissed no one grasped his title, “How to Tell a True

Contemporary Tragedy.” John suggested having no title, and Mark was painfully indifferent to every suggestion.

John stressed we needed to have a moral or message in the story. Something that makes people really think and say, “That’s the real deep stuff. That’s the metaphor.”

We asked him why and he had shrugged and walked out of the room. An hour later John came back with an encyclopedia book and said from the threshold of the station entrance,

“Goddamned Mud Fairy. That’s why.”

Mark had tried to tell us the story with his perception of the moral, or deeper meaning, but by the time he got to the statue ceremony scene he forgot where he was 98 going, and he kept stuttering back on the earthquake scene until he finally just wrapped it up with: “So, that’s why you always donate to the needy.”

"Wait, what? So it’s Jonas’ story?" we asked. And Mark said he lost his train- of-thought.

“That’s the metaphor,” John sang when Mark answered. “Could really be anywhere. Might as well be there.” Matt said it was the Paskenta people’s story. Luke is torn between Jasmine and Shasta. John said it was always ours.

Once we started presenting the story with our value filter and events as morals—like they were supposed to always be that way in the moment they happened—it changed the events to these little beautiful grotesque packages we could give out at dinner parties, like cheap fortune cookies. And like fortune cookies, people created their own little games around them. We’ve always liked attaching in bed or between the sheets after someone reads their fortune cookie (but only in your head in mixed company). So, after dishing out one of our value-filtered moral cookies about Jasmine, someone other than the teller say’s "W—" Everyone else finishes, "—WJD " (even in mixed company).

It would be wrong for us to say that packaging the story up was a bad thing, but it would be more fictitious to deny it too, because for those who weren’t there, the little ones who listen to us do the telling that weren’t there to put all the pieces together themselves, someday they’ll be doing all the telling.

In Odonata you’re given responsibility and accountability values from your young parents. After high school most kids stay local working on ranches or orchards.

They roll into having their own kids, and they pass on responsibility stories they were 99 given, not experiences, because they never had that true gestation time to transition and live and find their own voices. So in the end it's all just stories inside of stories. Inside.

Our story was rejected. Everywhere we sent our story for publication: rejected. Our town’s voice wanted weight in the world, but the world came back and said it was already carrying enough, send something original. What’s more original than real life? It was new to us. Repetition, predictability: to the world this is banality and lifelessness. To us, predictability gives shape to a world of abstractions.

Nonfiction editors of magazines told us our story read more like a work of fiction. Literary fiction editors told us they didn’t find anything particularly illuminating about our story, but to keep sending work. We heard it all: work on your syntax and grammar, too many representational characters with no substance, too much plot and not enough story.

“That's the metaphor,” John shouted from the bathroom stall when the rejection notes piled. Something novel was missing, and we all knew that. Self-awareness isn’t intelligence, but often feels like it should be. What's shitty about insight is it's just that, so when you share it, it's actually something else entirely, not much different than hunting or sex. Yes, that’s it: it’s the difference between what you’ll do in private, and what you’ll do when no one is around—Step inside.

So, the manuscript rests in Matt’s desk, unchanged. The story moves around the town through its people, and for us, that’s good enough. Most of us will never leave

Northern California. We will pop up and push back down in the same soil all our lives.

So we don’t need the world to tell us we have weight. 100

In fact, it has always been the other way around: the world needs all of us little typical nothing-original towns around because collectively we are what gives weight to everything else. No dark without its opposite. It’s the nature of light when everything we see is an illusion. It took us getting rejected by everyone else to hear that scream of meaning.

We played with changing a few minor details in our story to add flare, but once one thing was re-imagined it was hard to see where the imaginary kissed reality.

Once you start changing the order of things in the world of your telling, you start changing how that world is seen outside of your telling. Change how people see and you change what they see, like the nature of light.

We mucked with the specifics—changing things that had no business being twisted. Sometimes we tell people we drink our coffee black, steaming from our thermos.

Luke and Mark think this description makes us more serious and therefore more believable. John and Matt agree we should say we drink loose-leaf tea from mugs with quotes printed on the side, to make us distinguished.

We can't remember now if Jasmine was really listening to Madonna or if we just said she was. Mark and John said it was actually Nirvana and Luke thought it

Classical Opera, or was that what we wanted to change it to for deeper meaning? The difference matters. Trust us. What would you change it to in your telling? (Your answer shows us how you bend.)

Mark said we should have included the real ending to the videotape we found in the car, and if we described the details instead of agreeable sounding generalizations we would somehow get it out to the world and make it more real. None of us wanted to 101 entertain the belief that human nature is truthfully that sharp and vertical. Or that the world as a whole just wanted to sniff death, and hope it discovered a new smell of decay that it hasn’t before in some high-brow vision and aim of fine literary art.

Back at the station—in front of everyone—we’d always say we couldn’t go back and watch the video anyway since we destroyed it. At home, when our wives were out thrifting or picking from yard sales or playing bingo, we’d watch our hidden copies of the home video in our garage workshops. We knew we all had copies, but nobody said nothing. We all knew because whenever the video was mentioned someone would add a new detail to the video that only could be known from multiple, recent viewings.

Nevertheless, a few years later, a college kid who wasn’t even from Odonata, wrote a whole story about Jasmine’s crash, with all the gory sexy details, completely made up. And us, the four horsemen, as characters, aren't even in it! Published (John always says that’s the metaphor after hearing this).

Here’s the thing. Why we never released the tape: it didn’t just cut right before the crash. Are you kidding us? Step inside yourself. This is what happened: Cliff didn’t flinch. After Jasmine’s Land Cruiser slipped off the edge, he collected his things, even went through her purse. Tucked in his shirt as he dressed. Then he just walked home. We couldn’t believe it and we were witness. Why would other people believe it?

It keeps us turning at night: that something is alive and moving within a man’s nature that allows him to just tuck in his shirt and walk home after witnessing something like that. We have nightmares: we get home after a night shift and our wives have been killed. Luke and John’s are always murdered in the kitchen or laundry areas, real messy- like. Mark’s is in the bath with razorblades. Matt’s is sleeping pills, no real clean up. 102

We move around their motionless bodies and get ready for bed (like we’ve done it a billion times). We just go to sleep in our nightmare and wake up on the bridge standing on all fours covered in blood, and we start to scream. Then we wake inside that wake back in our real beds with our real wives and little children wrapped around us so late it’s more early (John has yet to say “that’s the metaphor” after we discuss this, and we all think maybe, just maybe, that—in itself—is the metaphor, but we can’t all agree).

At a Super Bowl party at Bill Martinez’ that season (everyone invited showed up, including Rayasha with his partner, and Gabriel), a tall Hispanic teen, was trying to impress us men by saying how much he upholds the law and whenever he is stuck between a rock and a hard place he just asks himself: WWJD.

“WWJD saved me,” the kid said and we raised our Sierra Nevada Pale Ale’s a little higher, but like the problem with most people, he kept talking: “What Would Jonas

Do?”

JONAS? We all blurted.

Bill, always over anyone's limit, cursed the boy first for the confusion and third for mentioning our former mayor. A commercial came on and Bill stumbled toward the pisser, mumbling in Mexican.

The commercial was for an American Express card: two comedians try and get to the Super Bowl. One uses American Express and enjoys the pleasures of life while the comedian using the other guys' card has trouble getting into the big game. The last scene of the commercial is a shot of the two comedians cheering together at the Super

Bowl, and it's suggested the man with the American Express helped the other man get there. The screen fades out with slogan: don’t leave home without it. 103

Three of the wives stepped in and told the boy everything about Jasmine and her gift to us (minus our Thor costumes), and you know what that kid said? Why should I care? Everybody turned at the kid and one of us muted the television. That kid’s response is what’s wrong with just about everything flowing too fast.

What was so hard to understand? We all just stood there, with our finger foods and little paper plates and plastic cupped beer, hoping for a good answer from someone, anyone. Maybe that’s why the free range ranchers wrap the story all the way back to the

Challenger explosion—bypassing the Berlin Wall dismantling. Someday we might have to take the story back further, ride the current right past the moon landing and world wars and even our nation’s civil one . . . Drift somewhere between Jefferson and Moses, because if we don’t anchor down somewhere, our history will be washed away, like it was never there. What Would Jasmine Do?

“You might understand it but you don’t get it,” a woman said under her breath. Everybody swayed and stared downward without talking. The foam from our beers was spread so thin it only stuck to the edges where the liquid leached plastic.

Bill shuffled into the living room holding an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

"What's wrong?" Bill asked all of us. We all were still pillared there quiet and concerned- like with our eyes searching each other’s faces. "What did I miss? God, please, no—" Bill held out his hands like he was trying to keep his balance. His small eyes snapped at the game. The Niner’s were still crushing the Broncos. "—Goddamnit … You fellas got me.”

The tension in his neck relaxed. Bill grabbed the television remote and the audio was unmuted. 104

And then the wives resumed the blender for pina coladas and we all grabbed another round of grilled wings. And our Niner’s gave nature and her damned earthquakes the middle finger by creaming those Broncos, becoming World Champions (Insert John’s line here).

After the game we all sat on Bill’s back porch that overlooked the Coastals, just us men—even the yogis and Paskenta fellas stayed after the game. But it was completely black, so we were all huddled around the bug zapping light. The light illuminated everyone in the same gross neon blue. Hot puffs of exhaust coiled up and out of us into the moist February cold.

We had a bottle of Bourbon amongst us, and we shot the shit about all kinds of hunting. We used our fingers on the fogged porch windows to paint out our stories. We never erased the previous man’s wall sketch. Instead it felt more natural to just add to it, and we repurposed the shapes or objects for our own telling. Some of us reenacted situations we’ve encountered with drunk drivers, or shitty attitude teenagers while on patrol. We took turns playing ourselves, or the perps, and some of us even played each other. Rayasha’s impression of Luke’s lisp was gold. One man shared, then another man shared, then another—by building up and connecting ideas in the previous story to his experience. And after awhile of shootin’ the bull, it was hard to see the lines between us.

The more we pretended to be our real selves through playing, and acting out our true-life stories, the harder we laughed. And did we laugh.

We even talked about doing a hunt, all of us men together, but it was probably just Bourbon banter. If we always did what we said we’d do when drinking, 105 then we probably wouldn’t know the difference between Scotch and Bourbon, and we come full circle—step inside yourself.

Gabriel and his son acted out the chief’s hunt for Shasta ten years prior. He had run out of bullets shooting at the copper-tailed lion point-blank, missing every damned one. Shasta, played by the chief’s son, lunged at the chief after throating a horrendous lion scream. You could tell they've rehearsed this many times, which we all secretly despised (and respected). And you could tell it was real because there was no filter, no moral pushing or finger wagging. No bullshit. The story was just given to us, filled with all the contradictions and wet things of life, and sat in each of us alone and private-like, especially the ending:

So, Gab, not one for fear, had pulled out his hunter’s knife on Shasta (he handed one of us the bottle of Bourbon after taking a gulp and used his cigar as a knife prop). He too, gave into his nature, and he lunged at the cougar. But his foot caught an above ground root and he tripped. He knocked himself right out, then and there, only to wake a few hours later with slobber and fur rubbed all over his chest and face. Gab said the next day he traded his rifle for a compound bow and a week after that traded the bow for a fishing pole. We all spun toward John at the same time (unrehearsed) and chanted,

“That’s the metaphor.”

We laughed so hard we all probably pissed ourselves. We passed around the bottle of Bourbon, and none of us—not even by accident—made a move to wipe off the lip of the bottle before slamming it down our throats, not even once.

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