The Israeli government is building a wall surrounding the occupied Palestinian territories. It… will eventually run for over 700km—the distance from London to Zurich. The wall is illegal under international law and essentially turns Palestine into the world’s largest open prison.When installing his work, Banksy received mixed responses. Reportedly, as he was packing up his paint, Banksy thanked an elderly Palestinian man who’d told him that his graffiti looked beautiful, to which the man snapped, “We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.” Street art forces the viewer to decide how to read the installation, to navigate the liminality of artistic expression and criminal act. Art on a border wall complicates this further: by tagging such a barrier—an embodied political structure—the artist imbues contrasting political significance, forcing the viewer to move beyond the structure’s base border functionality, to engage in conversation with the wall. Banksy’s interaction with the Palestinian gentleman evidences the crux of this dichotomy: is it better to leave the wall bare so onlookers see the plain concrete structure for its utilitarian purpose, or to elevate the barrier into a canvas, creating a massive symbol of protest? Further down the wall, a sturdy military turret set into the concrete structure was splashed with an assortment of pastel paints like a Jackson Pollock canvas, splatters streaking down to the ground over top of the blue line of paint, still stretching itself across the span of the wall. Through the turret’s window slits far above, an IDF soldier in a battle helmet watched us pick our way along a large drainage culvert filled with volleyball sized stones, rusted metal, and refuse. It smelled like sewage, likely because the .4 square mile Aida refugee camp—which houses more than 5,500 Palestinian refugees—still lacks proper water access and sewage and waste disposal some 60 or more years after it was established for Palestinians displaced from 43 villages in Israel and the West Bank. And so, refuse is discarded in cesspools along the community’s edges abutting the wall. Behind the culvert, the silhouette of a prone figure spanned twenty-eight wall sections—an immense installation that made me feel tiny. Upon closer inspection, mock wall blocks constructed the silhouette—a personified stone blockade. I couldn’t decide whether the mural evidenced the personal nature of the wall, or if the wall lying down or sleeping had some significance lost to me, but the blue paint line stretched across the figure’s entirety, effectively binding the mural to the wall. Standing at the silhouette’s head, we could see the end of the wall a fourth of a mile or so ahead, and decided to walk there to finish it out even though there didn’t look to be much graffiti on the remaining wall. A gigantic mural of the phrase “Open Sesame” spanned twenty-two of the final wall panels, which seemed a fitting end to the structure. Only when I reached the final concrete wall segment did I realize that at some point between the sleeping silhouette and “Open Sesame,” the light blue stripe of paint had also ended, though I’d missed seeing where or how. Though the West Bank barrier is commonly thought of as a concrete wall, in actuality, concrete makes up a mere five percent of the barrier, fortifying the most fraught areas of the border, specifically the border nearest Jerusalem. In the official description by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel (MFA), the other 95 percent consists of a barrier fence that’s “high-tech and [that has] other intruder prevention systems,” which go unspecified. At the end of the barrier wall, intense coils of razor-wire replaced the cement, looping haphazardly, half buried in dead weeds on either side of a dirt IDF-controlled border patrol road extending as far as we could see. By painting on the West Bank wall, Banksy both publicized Israel’s oppression of Palestine and legitimized the wall as canvas, creating space for the thousands of artists who have come after him. Banksy’s visit also turned the wall into a tourist destination, drawing visitors from around the world who then spread word of the wall’s effects. In 2007, Banksy returned to Palestine, opening an art exhibition titled “Santa’s Ghetto Bethlehem,” featuring collaborative work by artists interested in revitalizing West Bank tourism. Banksy added three graffiti installations, one of which was an IDF soldier checking the papers of a donkey (think the Virgin Mary riding a donkey to Bethlehem)—an artwork soon destroyed by Bethlehem locals who found the work too sardonic as the IDF actually requires animals to have papers to cross the border. However, in 2017, artist Taqi Spateen recreated the Banksy donkey on a notable section of the West Bank wall in Bethlehem, and since then, he’s maintained the image anytime it’s been defaced—both, I would venture, as an homage to the impact that Banksy’s graffiti has had on the local tourism industry and to the importance of the image’s critique of Israel’s ongoing border oppression. Around noon, tired and hungry from our two mile trek, which had taken us the better part of the morning, we arrived back to Hebron Road—the main street running through Bethlehem that heads out Checkpoint 300 toward Jerusalem—and found another stenciled Banksy mural: this one of a young, pig-tailed girl, maybe eight years old, in a pink dress, patting down the leg of an IDF soldier who stands, feet spread, hands above his head against the wall so the viewer only sees his back. The soldier’s M16 leans up against the wall. A white bow wraps the girl’s waist. The drab concrete façade under the graffiti looks dirty compared to the olive green military uniform and the light pink dress, which has since faded to a crème color under the sun. Sometime after 2011, the owner of the building constructed a gift shop around the wall, both to monetize access to the artwork, and because other street artists kept tagging the wall, causing concern that this Banksy might be damaged beyond recognition, as has happened to some of his other works. Cutting from Hebron Road to Manger Street, we happened upon another Banksy, painted on the side of the Saca Souvenir Store, which sells “Fine Jewelry—Genuine Antiquities—Olive Wood Carvings—Souvenirs.” Tagged onto the olive green-gray facade flies a white dove with wings spread, an olive branch in its mouth. In the classic Banksy twist of expectations, the dove wears a flak jacket. Over the bird’s breast, a red sniper sight crisscrosses a central laser dot. Next to the dove, a sign greets visitors: “Welcome to Palestine. Welcome to Bethlehem.” After grabbing falafel from a corner shop, my friend and I hailed a taxi for the two miles back to Checkpoint 300 because we’d seen the Banksy’s we’d come to see. Pulling out onto the street, the young Arab cab driver introduced himself: “My name is Hassan. You?”After introducing ourselves, we asked him about driving. “It is very bad here in Bethlehem,” he said. “No jobs. No agriculture because Israel sends water to Jewish settlements instead of here. Driving taxis is an okay job though because there are many tourists. There were many drivers waiting for you at Checkpoint 300, yes?”We nodded. There had been dozens waiting when we arrived that morning.“Many drivers wait there, but I don’t. Drivers rent their taxi every day from a company and get one tank of gas free, so every day I hope for many trips to make back the rent. It is hard, but it is a job and I am very thankful.”After inquiring where we lived in the U.S., Hassan asked why we were studying in Israel and why we were in the West Bank. “Ah,” he said. “Banksy. Very famous.” After a long pause, Hassan said, “Jerusalem… Is it a big city?” “Wait…” I stammered, “what?”—momentarily confused by the question because the outskirts of Jerusalem are easily visible on the hills beyond the West Bank wall. “It is a big city? I cannot go there, but my grandpa lived in Jerusalem before the separation and tells many stories. What do you like about the city? Is it beautiful?”My friend and I described how much we loved living just outside Jerusalem’s Old City, how walking the crowded alleys felt like being transported hundreds of years into the past, the beauty of the Dome of the Rock. Hassan pressed us for more—Jerusalem’s New City, the urban sprawl, the wide boulevards, the expansive markets. “I sometimes go to the top of a hill and look out at Jerusalem,” Hassan said. “It seems very beautiful. It is my dream to go there someday. Maybe I will get a job in Jerusalem when I am older. No more taxi driving.”I didn’t know what to say other than agreeing that hopefully one day he could. Here I was an American taking a day trip into the West Bank to see art, and he couldn’t visit his grandfather’s city on the other side of the wall. In March of 2017, Banksy returned once more to Bethlehem to open “The Walled Off Hotel,” a functioning nine-room hotel owned by a Palestinian named Wisam Salsaa. The second floor of the hotel contains an art gallery displaying work by renowned or up-and-coming Palestinian artists. The hotel rooms, decorated by Banksy and other artists, run from $60 to $965 a night, and provide views of the West Bank barrier. Salsaa calls it the “hotel with the worst view in the world.” On the walls of the “Banksy Room,” which runs at $265 a night (the cheapest room painted by Banksy himself), a soldier and Palestinian boy engage in a pillow fight and delicately painted feathers explode throughout the background. In another room hangs a framed graffiti image of a Palestinian woman holding a brick as depicted in CNN coverage, yet a layer of glass covers the work, a bullet hole shattering the still. The “Budget Barracks” (the $60 option) are furnished with surplus items from IDF military barracks—concrete walls and floors, thin metal bunk beds, mosquito netting, and barred windows. The hotel lobby itself is open to the public and contains a functional café themed like a colonial British outpost circa 1917, the year Britain announced official support for establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The café walls display homemade slingshots beneath rows of security cameras, as well as various Banksys: Palestinian children scaling heaven’s gate, an industrial bulldozer dozing peaceful homeowners, a portrait of Jesus (with a laser site trained on his forehead) looking upon drones overhead, and a tower turret turned into a carnival-esque merry-go-round for children. In a corner stands a Romanesque bust: nose and mouth covered with a handkerchief, a can of teargas frozen in perpetual spray wending its way around the statue. Every hotel key attaches to a scaled-down concrete panel of the West Bank wall—each six inches tall, heavy and unwieldy. In the FAQ page on the hotel website, in response to “Can I paint the wall?” Banksy writes, “Guests enjoy privileged out of hours access to Wall*Mart next door—the graffiti supplies store which stocks everything you need to make your mark and offers expert local advice and guidance.” After “Is It legal?” Banksy writes, “It’s not not legal. The wall itself remains illegal under international law.” Under “Is It Ethical?” Banksy: “Some people don’t agree with painting the wall and argue anything that trivialises or normalises its existence is a mistake. Then again, others welcome any attention brought to it and the ongoing situation. So in essence—you can paint it, but avoid anything normal or trivial.”In December of 2017, Banksy painted two cherubs near the Walled Off Hotel. Together, the angels work to pull the wall apart with a crowbar, and a slight gap in the wall makes it appear that their concerted effort is working. Hassan pulled the taxi up to Checkpoint 300 where we’d cross back into Israel. “You have seen both the Banksy’s here at the checkpoint? Cut-along-the-line and the chairs?” “We saw the line, but not the chairs,” I said. “Where’s that one?” “The chairs have been damaged, but part is still there,” Hassan said, motioning to a wall section nearly hidden to the left of the border complex, on which were stenciled two black and white wingback armchairs. Between these, a small decorative table supported a single flower pot, behind which stretched an expansive curtained window. We thanked Hassan, paid, and he drove off, leaving us staring at this final Banksy.I later learned that originally, within the window, Banksy had pasted a large poster photograph of a snowy mountain foregrounded by a wooded pond—a realistic contrast to his crisp, stenciled cartoon chairs. Yet that day, in the condition in which I saw it, phrases had been scribbled across the gigantic furniture and the alpine landscape photo was long gone, peeled away to expose an empty window frame, filled in with light blue paint.Today though, looking back at the photo I took of that Banksy in 2011, for the first time I notice that whoever painted the window light blue—the Zionists or Palestinians, whoever did it—also streaked their paint roller to or from the west, breaking Banksy’s window frame with a single streak of paint—the origin point, or perhaps the ending point—of the light blue line that I’d lost track of while walking the length of the wall. Across the entirety of the window pane, washed-in with the color of the sky, someone had scrawled brick and mortar lines in dark blue and green—one final window walled into the West Bank barrier. And yet, in the few years since someone painted it, weather has badly faded the paint, wearing away this attempt to block the metaphoric view—a reminder that with time, even the elements themselves tear down our best efforts to wall people in. Sources Consulted:Abo-Salamah, Yazan. Personal Interview. 8/29/19. Al-Ali, Naji. A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji Al-Ali. Verso Books. 2009. “Al-Aqsa Intifada Timeline.” BBC News. 2004. “Aida Camp Profile.” The Applied Research Institute—Jerusalem, The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), and the Azahar Program. 2010. Asi, Yara M. “The Occupied West Bank Since October 7: Movement Restrictions and Collective Punishment.” Arab Center Washington D.C. 2024.“Banksy at the West Bank Barrier.” The Guardian. 2005.“BANKSY Graffiti Bethlehem Tour.” Murad Tours. www.muradtours.com.Baruch, Uzi and Tova Dvorin. “15,000 More Jews in Judea-Samaria in 2014: Jewish Population Over Armistice Lines Close to 400,000 According to the Interior Ministry.” Arutz Sheva 7. Israelnationalnews.com. 2015. Boom, Wilco. “Rutte Walking on Eggs in Israel.” NOS.nl. 2013. Booth, William and Sufian Taha. “A Palestinian’s Daily Commute through an Israeli Checkpoint.” The Washington Post. 2017.Checkpoint 300, 2017: Google Street View. Cohen, Dan. “Repression and Resistance in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp.” Mondoweiss.net. 2014. “Dutch Water Company Terminates Relationship with Mekerot Following Government Advice.” Palestinian BDS National Committee. Bdsmovement.net. 2013. “Ethnic Cleansing.” Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign (SeaMAC). Goldenberg, Suzanne. “Rioting as Sharon Visits Islam Holy Site.” The Guardian. 2000.Gritten, David. “UN Experts Accuse Israel of Sexual Violence and ‘Genocidal Acts’ in Gaza.” BBC. 03/13/2025.Hareuveni, Eyal. Dispossession and Exploitation: Israel’s Policy in the Jordan Valley and Northern Dead Sea. www.btselem.org. 2011. Hass, Amira and Barak Ravid. “Dutch Water Giant Severs Ties With Israeli Water Company Due to Settlements.” Haaretz. 2013. “Israel.” The World Factbook. The Central Intelligence Agency. www.cia.gov. “Israel is strangling the West Bank’s economy.” The Economist. 2023.“‘It Is Important to Call a Genocide a Genocide,’ Consider Suspending Israel’s Credential as UN Member State, Experts Tell Palestinian Rights Committee.” United Nations. 419th Meeting. 10/31/2024. Jones, Sam. “Spray Can Prankster Tackles Israel’s Security Barrier.” The Guardian. 2005. Khalil Safi, Shatha. Personal Interview. 8/29/19. Lazaroff, Tovah. “Why Netanyahu Can’t Finish West Bank Security Barrier.” The Jerusalem Post. 2016. Liddell, Graham. “Gracing the Walls: Saleh from Bethlehem.” Marshallah News. 2014. Liddell, Graham. “In Photos: Bethlehem Remembers Teen Slain by Israeli Forces.” Ma’an New Agency. 2014. Liddell, Graham. “Remembering Saleh: A Life Cut Short.” Ma’an New Agency. 2014. McArdle, Elaine. “Banksy in Bethlehem! Banksy Street Art, Bethlehem, Palestine.” www.thewholeworldisaplayground.com. 2014. “Movement and access update in the West Bank | May 2025.” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 05/27/2025. “Official: Israel Lowers Water Supply to Nablus Villages.” Ma’an News Agency. August 8, 2010. “Palestinians Say Over 1,500 Children Killed by Israel Since 2000.” Haaretz. 2014. Parry, William. Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine. Chicago Review Press. 2011. Quigley, John. “The Lancet and Genocide By ‘Slow Death’ in Gaza.” Arab Center Washington D.C. 07/12/2024. “Red Cross Criticizes Israeli Security Barrier.” BBC. 2004. Reed, Katya. “Bethlehem Checkpoint: Waiting in Line vs. Waiting in Line Under Occupation.” Mondoweiss.net. 2010. Renmar, Taylor. “Banksy Graffiti in Palestine.” The World of Banksy Art. 2012. “Restrictions on Movement.” B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. 2017. Rothchild, Alice. “‘Beautiful Resistance’ in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp.” Mondoweiss.net. 2010. “Rights expert finds ‘reasonable grounds’ genocide is being committed in Gaza.” United Nations: UN News. 03/26/2024. “Saving Lives: Israel’s Security Fence.” Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs PowerPoint. Securityfence.mfa.gov.il. 2000. Sharon, Jeremy. “Despite ostensible ban, tens of thousands of Palestinians working in Israel – report.” The Times of Israel. 2024. Spateen, Taqi. Personal Interview. 8/28/19. “Teenager Dies Following Shooting in Bethlehem.” International Solidarity Movement. 2013. Touq, Toleen. “Key of Return.” Berlin Biennale. 2008. “U.N. Court Rules West Bank Barrier Illegal.” CNN. 2004. “UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war.” United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. 11/14/2024. “Victims of Palestinian Violence and Terrorism since September 2000.” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mfa.gov.il. 2025. “West Bank.” The World Factbook. The Central Intelligence Agency. www.cia.gov. “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’ Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.” Amnesty International. 12/4/2024.
***
After that he was different of course. The bones eventually healed but his head never did. No more state fairs, no more jumps. And Cassie was different too. She threw away all those shirts because no one wanted them anymore, especially her. They sold his motorcycles to pay the hospital bills. He would shuffle through neighborhoods, never lifting his feet. Sometimes barely dressed. People whispered in their yards about him until it wasn’t interesting anymore. Finally he took a shotgun into the basement and finished what the crash had begun. The police took most of the mess away, but the blood was still there. Shards of bone were left behind too, some stuck in the ceiling tiles even. I heard my dad screaming into the phone the next day, furious. “Because I would’ve done it myself, Frank, for fuck’s sake!!!” He came out of the kitchen, eyes wet, shaking his head. “That poor girl...’’ They’d let Cassie clean it all up herself because she and Luann couldn’t afford someone else.***
I followed Cassie down to the creek behind the funeral home. She lifted her dress over the tall grass along the bank. The first time I’d seen her in a dress, or a necklace. She took off her shoes and put them on a large rock, then stepped in. She bent down and caught a few tadpoles in her cupped hands. That time of year there were thousands of them. We’d collected them together as little kids. “Lonesome in numbers...” I didn’t know if she was talking to me or the things squiggling around in her hands. She looked up. “It’s something my dad used to say. That there are so many people it can make you lonely sometimes. Like these things...just too many of them to mean anything. C’mere...” She let the tadpoles go and took off her necklace. It was a delicate gold chain with a dull, white pendant shaped like an arrowhead. “Gimme your hand.” She pressed the sharp edge of it against her palm and drew blood. I asked her what it was. “A shark’s tooth. My dad gave it to me.” It didn’t look like any shark’s tooth I’d seen. I gave her my hand. She squeezed hers hard against it and I felt our blood mix. We watched it drip from our hands and disappear into the water. She asked me if it hurt and I shook my head no. I looked at her and saw she was crying. That’s when I knew it wasn’t a shark tooth between our palms; it was bone.***
Chris Dankland: Hi Amy! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Do you feel like your writing as a whole tends toward the melancholic, or does it only show up in certain pieces? Is that feeling something you consciously cultivate and lean into, or does it emerge naturally? Amy DeBellis: I do think it leans towards the melancholic as a whole. (In fact, it’s like the Tower of Pisa with how much it leans…) I’m trying to think of a piece I’ve written in the last couple of years that doesn’t have that darkness, and I’m coming up short. Even humorous pieces (“Upgrade” in HAD, for example, or “Persistence” in Roi Fainéant) have elements of darkness in them—it’s just that that darkness isn’t played straight the way it is in the majority of my writing. Yeah, it’s in everything. It emerges naturally. I love beautiful things—for me, in many ways, the written word is the ultimate form of beauty—but I also believe you can’t have beauty without something to contrast it. That discordant note. That, to quote Donna Tartt, “little speck of rot”. Except for me it’s a little bit more than a speck. CD: To me, your stories often feel physically heavy. Sometimes I get a weird image when I read your work of a stone sinking in water. You are very good at embodying emotion and describing it in a tactile way. Your stories feel like they live in the body: grief shows up as fatigue, sorrow has weight, dread feels like muscle tension. Is this a conscious part of your craft, this physical translation of emotional states? AD: I love the image of the stone! And that’s a huge compliment, that my writing could give you this mental image. I’ve always believed that the body is the seat of memory. There’s this wonderful Stephen King quote: “Art consists of the persistence of memory.” So the body and art are inextricably linked, being as they are both holders and representations of memory. And since the present runs continuously into the past, almost everything not held by the future is already a memory. I personally feel emotions very strongly, so no, it’s not really conscious that this comes across in my work. I mean, of course I try to choose the best descriptors for a feeling of dread, but the translation of emotional states to the physical—I believe it’s the most powerful way to get across emotion to a reader who might not have experienced the same thing that’s happening in the story. Let’s say there is a story about a grieving widow. Not everyone knows what it’s like to have lost a husband, or even to have lost a close family member, but everyone knows the feeling of grief. Describing it as a physical sensation is a way to bring the reader into their body (not their mind, where they’re thinking Oh but I was never a grieving widow) and force them to feel the emotions of the piece. CD: I feel like the three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows’ are all stuck in a depressive rut at the beginning of the book. The characters are isolated in the sense that they are always wearing some sort of mask around most people. They don’t feel a real human connection with others, and this only starts to change near the end of the book when the characters meet.For most of the book, each character seems trapped in their own depressive logic, their own sealed inner monologue. Was it challenging to bring them out of that headspace and allow for genuine human contact?AD: It was a bit difficult, but it was also really fun. I massively enjoyed describing each character from the viewpoint of the others—it allowed me to view them from the outside looking in, for once. I am not one of those writers (no shade to them though) who says that their characters are speaking to them in their head. But for the scene where they all meet—particularly the second one where they’re all together—I kind of just let the words flow. My characters took the reins more than ever before. I truly had no idea what Janet was going to say when [redacted]*, for example. Or when Gemma figured out that [redacted]*. It was truly magical seeing their personalities come alive on the page. *I am keeping everyone safe from spoilers. CD: I feel that climate change is mostly unstoppable. I have little to no hope that humans will solve this problem, and I believe that things are only going to continue to get worse from here on. Humans are survivors, but I think that the Earth in which humans will have to live, 200 or 300 years from now, will be so degraded that it won’t be all that different from hell. I don’t feel hope for the future, in the long run. The existential threat of climate change is a worry hanging over the heads of all three main characters in ‘All Our Tomorrows.’ How do you personally feel about climate change?AD: Sadly, I agree with you. I think we’ve all seen over the past few years that even if humans could solve this problem, we wouldn’t want to. And by “we” I mean the people who run the world, the CEOs of megacorporations, the billionaires who wreak the most environmental damage. It’s my opinion that they are almost uniformly psychopathic in their behavior and their lack of empathy. No normal person would want to do the things they’ve had to do in order to gain their position—and I believe that if a normal person did find themselves with that much power, they wouldn’t remain normal for very long. On the one hand, I truly enjoy my laptop, and my phone that allows me to contact my friends overseas. And parasite-free, running water. And medicine! But I also believe that our modern way of life is an aberration, a blip, almost a wrinkle in the way things are designed to be on earth. We are not entitled to live this way, it is not sustainable, and we are paying the price. People forget that for the overwhelming majority of human history, we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. The Neolithic Revolution (when humans first began to farm) happened only ten thousand tears ago, which is around 3% of the time Homo sapiens have existed. And the Industrial Revolution, which gave us our industrial capitalism and modern infrastructure and nearly everything we feel entitled to as a part of “regular life,” happened so recently that only about 0.08% of human history has occurred after that. It’s mindblowing that we’ve caused so much damage to our planet in such a tiny fraction of time.And that 0.08% is what we think of as normal. Our own lives are so short in comparison that, looking back along the eight or so generations that have lived since the Industrial Revolution, it really does seem like it’s been forever. There’s a part in All Our Tomorrows where one of the main characters is thinking about the spiral drawing that’s mean to represent all the eras on earth — something like this, but colorful. Most of it is blue and green. Only the very newest end of the spiral is a different color. To quote my book, that’s “the Anthropocene, a slice so tiny you could easily miss it, a fingernail sliver of rust-covered gray. If you zoomed in enough you could see minuscule buildings, cars, an airplane, all hovering precariously just at the edge. To Anna it looked as though anyone standing on that edge was about to fall off into nothing, into the timeless black that surrounded the spiral.”I fear I’ve gone into a bit of a raving tangent, but I’ll wipe the froth off my mouth, do some deep breathing, and attempt to answer your question more succinctly: I don’t feel hope for the future in the long run, either. Climate change is multi-pronged, as it gives rise not only to fires and floods but also ancient pathogens thawing out of permafrost, mosquito and tick-borne diseases moving further and further across the globe, and so many other things we simply aren’t prepared for. CD: In a past interview, you mentioned that you were “gearing for a not-so happy ending” with ‘All Our Tomorrows’ but ultimately felt like the novel needed a more hopeful ending because you didn’t want the book to “leave readers feeling like the novel was a bunch of pointless doom—we get enough of that from social media and the news.”Are you concerned that readers will misread the darkness in your work as nihilism? How do you feel about nihilism? What do you hope that readers are left with after reading ‘All Our Tomorrows?’AD: I’m not really concerned that they’ll misread the darkness in my work as nihilism. If they do, I don’t mind. I would probably mind if I branded myself as some kind of “Hope Coach,” but thankfully that is not a direction I have gone in. One of the phrases you used earlier to describe the feelings my work gave you—“claustrophobic doom”—made me smile. I love claustrophobic doom! (Writing about it, not feeling it.) But I don’t think that all of life is claustrophobic doom. Existence is multifaceted, and I choose to bring attention to the darker parts of it. They’re a lot more fun to write about, for one thing. But I also see a lot of toxic positivity everywhere. You get demonetized on social media if your content is too depressing, which admittedly makes sense from a branding point of view. But at the same time, I don’t agree with phrases like: Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, then it’s not the end. It has its uses during a panic attack, I suppose, but on the whole that phrase never made sense to me. Like, what if someone is dying of a horrible disease? What—are you saying that things will be okay in the end because of the sweet relief of death? Well, okay, I guess that’s one way to think about it, but I don’t think that’s what that particular phrase is going for…The most popular type of nihilism seems to be that life is meaningless and has no value, nothing you do matters, and there is no point to anything (and, I can’t help reading this into it—that you may as well just shuffle yourself off this mortal coil sooner rather than later). Honestly, I think those nihilists are overthinking it. I don’t like to burden my small monkey brain with the overall meaning of life. Like, yeah, duh. Nobody knows the meaning of life. Maybe there is none. Where I don’t agree with nihilism is that life has no value. I happen to like being alive, for the most part. There is so much beauty to be found in life. There’s beauty in pursuing creative activities, in spending time with loved ones, in listening to your favorite music, in eating good food. I don’t care if it’s meaningless—I still enjoy it. And hey, maybe it’s all meaningless in the end, since we don’t live forever, and you and everyone you know will eventually die…but honestly, I think immortality would be so much worse. It’s the ephemerality of life that makes it so precious. (And, going back to the psychopathic billionaires, this is something that the most powerful people on the planet seem to have forgotten. I truly believe they can’t enjoy small pleasures anymore. They want to rule the world and live forever because they can no longer appreciate things that would make the dopamine and serotonin receptors in a normal, healthy brain light up.) Towards the end of All Our Tomorrows, it was a bit of a challenge to keep the story realistic but also have it not be totally depressing. The ending of Janet’s last chapter, as well as the ending of Gemma’s last chapter (which is literally the last sentence of the book) is probably my most clear and straightforward answer to the question that snakes through the manuscript, which is essentially “What are we supposed to do about all this anxiety, all this uncertainty, all this pain?”So, to answer your question, I want readers to come away from All Our Tomorrows with a sense of hope, with the knowledge that they can do something—even if it’s just something for themselves, and not something that saves the world, because that’s impossible—but something. Whether that’s spending time with family, or doing something creative you enjoy, or being with the person you love. Something that has meaning, and purpose, and value. And that is what makes my book incompatible with nihilism. Order 'All Our Tomorrows' here.***
In the middle of the night, when I’m sure he really is asleep, I creep to the bathroom. I close the door quietly, flick on the lights, and examine every inch of my body. I have to use a hand mirror for the more hidden spots, but after a while, I conclude that my skin is SL-29 free. For now, at least. My mouth tastes rank, like I’ve been licking the floor and my own armpits. I go back to bed and try to sleep but my dreams are hallucinogenic, liquid, slipping through my brain like slick poisoned water.***
Monday morning. Subway car rattling uptown, my sleep-blurred eyes, that odd gnawing hunger that always comes with not getting enough sleep. I brushed my teeth before leaving—alone, this time; my husband goes to work an hour later than I do—but my breath is stale inside my mask. I’m one of the few who still wear them, and my husband would be ashamed of me if he saw, ashamed and angry enough to shout, but he’s not here right now. Just a few other early-morning commuters, still mostly mired in the fog of recollected dreams, who couldn’t clearly give two fucks about my mask. Across from my seat, there’s an ad: “One night with Venus, a lifetime of SL-29.” Next to the bubbly words is a cartoon of an embarrassed man, face covered in red spots. I wonder how many people will catch the centuries-old reference to syphilis. When the subway gets to my stop, I stand up and walk past the sign, glancing at it one last time. Now that I’m closer, I can see the vandalism I would’ve caught earlier if the vandal had the presence of mind to use a Sharpie instead of a pencil. The word Venus has been crossed out in thin, barely-visible graphite. And above it, scratched deep into the shiny plastic, as if he could already tell that the pencil wasn’t going to be sufficiently discernible: A WHORE.***
As soon as I sit down at my desk, the fogginess leaves me. It’s a sudden, destabilizing rush, like coming down out of the clouds on an airplane at night. Suddenly you’re seeing civilization spread out below you in all of its greedy, multiplied glory: city lights glittering like insect shells, spangling clear across the globe like earthbound stars. At least my resting bitch face comes in handy today. I’m left in peace as I boot up my monitor, open my email, scroll through my new tasks for the day. I don’t actually read any of it. Instead, I’m thinking of my husband. His way of saying “Only with you” when I ask him to do something he doesn’t really want to do—clean the bathroom, sign petitions, scrub the crusted stovetop. It’s true that there’s some romance in the teamwork, in both of us bettering our living space side by side. Once, we made eye contact over our flooded bathroom floor, flashed each other twin grossed-out grins: We’re in this together.The way he promised, using almost the same language, that he’d always be mine. It was just after he proposed, and he was holding my hands carefully. Like they were birds, hollow-boned and nervous, that might at any moment fly away. Most men make a big deal out of a woman being theirs and only theirs, but my husband seemed to find the idea of him being mine equally scintillating. At the time, I found it touching. Now I wonder if it was something he read online. One of those tricks guaranteed to lower the female guard. I think of my husband’s wide, toothy, childish smile. His complexion is so pale that even his teeth, which are actually fairly white, look yellow. Soon the spots will cover his entire face, astonishingly bright on his skin—not melting into one another like confluent smallpox, but just barely managing not to touch. So that each spot preserves its own perfect roundness. Almost as though it’s intentional. I once saw an interview where a doctor squinted at a patient’s face and pronounced them “the most perfect circles I have ever seen in nature.” He even took photographs, and other people measured the circles, confirmed that they were indeed mathematically perfect. “The good news is it’s not fatal,” the doctor said as he concluded the interview. “The bad news is it’s not fatal,” I muttered to myself, watching, because the suicides were rising by then and have continued to increase ever since. What the fuck do I do now?I check my wrists and forearms again. I fight the urge to march to the bathroom and strip down in a stall, twist until my body is covered in sweat and I’ve pulled a muscle in my back from trying to see every inch of my skin. I can’t panic. Panic won’t make any of this any better. According to the guidelines, the disease is 80% transmissible before any spots appear—that’s why we need expensive SL-29 STD tests, rather than a simple strip search. But once a spot has appeared, that person’s transmission rate climbs to 100%. Anyone they have intercourse with will get the disease too. And once a spot has appeared on someone you’ve been having sex with, you have forty-eight hours to see whether they’ve infected you during their asymptomatic phase. Forty-eight hours from last night. I just need to make it till Tuesday night, and I’ll know. For better or worse. And then I can…then I can…At this point my brain stops. Like a webpage that won’t load. I simply can’t think of what I’m going to do after the forty-eight hours is up. Almost with relief, I recognize another problem: I can’t know how long that spot has been there. Was it there the day before yesterday? I can’t be sure—I barely glanced at my husband all day on Saturday, preferring instead to read and separate myself from him and his video games, the way he cursed at the screen whenever he made a mistake. A flat red spot hiding behind his bangs would have been easy to miss. And of course there’s the question of how he got it. Where he got it. Who gave it to him. Only with you. I feel like I’m breathing through a rolled-up piece of paper. A hollow plastic cylinder. A straw. The ad from the subway flashes back into my mind. The slogan, the humiliated cartoon man, the crossed-out Venus. And then that other word, etched into the plastic, with such determination and fury, like a scar. Earlier, I thought of the vandal as a man. Now I no longer do.***
My husband gets home an hour after me. His bangs are perfectly in place, and he’s smiling: his teeth the color of weak chamomile tea, his lips stretched and rubbery. “I got your favorite,” he says, holding aloft some bags from the nearby Korean restaurant. “Excited?”I blink at him. Does he think that he can use bibimbap and glass noodles to, what, bribe me to stay with him? That, supposing I’m clean, I’ll willingly let him infect me so that we can be scarlet-lettered together? Ha. Only with you, babe, right? Red circles clustering on our faces and then trailing down across our bodies, so bright we can’t cover them even with the thickest foundation. Maybe he’s even dreaming that I’ll come with him to live in one of the communities where the SL-29 social outcasts live as shut-ins: spending their worst days soaking in cool water, spending all the other days hiding behind thick curtains. Only venturing outside in the darkness, like suicidal, hideous vampires. I almost laugh at the idea. He takes my sardonic grin as a sign of pleasure. “I knew you’d be! It’s always better when it’s a surprise, right?”“Oh yeah, definitely,” I say, trying not to let the sarcasm seep too deeply into my voice. “Surprises are always better.” Only twenty-four more hours to go, I think. And it’s now that I decide. If I don’t have any spots on my body by tomorrow night, I’ll get out. I’ll tell everyone the truth and leave him to pick up the pieces by himself. It doesn’t matter that I can’t divorce him—I’ll run. And if I do have a spot on my body by tomorrow night….But the thought of that turns my guts into snakes. It makes my head so heavy that that I have to bow over, gripping it in my hands, and the next thing I hear from my husband, coming close and speaking in a voice that I could swear is more fearful than it ought to be: “Is everything okay?”In bed, he reaches for me. “Sorry, babe, not tonight,” I say, trying to sound as regretful as possible. “My stomach’s cramping…I think it’s from eating too much spicy food.”“But you love spicy food.” His hand is on my waist, stroking gently but insistently. I fight the urge to jerk away from him. “Yeah, but I’m not used to it anymore. We haven’t gotten from that place in a while. Or any of my favorite restaurants, for that matter,” I add, unable to keep the resentment out of my voice. “We’ve mostly just been eating the bland American food you seem to constantly crave.” In the silence that follows this, I hold my breath, letting it live high and shallow in my nostrils and the tops of my lungs. But, finally: “Huh, okay.” I can hear the shrug in his voice. I never rebuff his sexual advances unless I’m on my period or have a migraine, but he just moves to the other side of the bed. My body relaxes in relief. At the same time my mind spirals, trying to determine whether he’s given up so easily because he knows he already infected me last week, or because he thinks he’ll have another chance tomorrow.I want to ask Who was she? Was she hot? Did she refuse a test, or did you just not care enough to even ask for one?I want to ask Was it worth a lifetime of spots marring your whole body? Flesh pepperoni peeking out all over your cheese-curd-colored skin, skin the color of milk gone sour, skin like that of a corpse just before it stiffens and turns blue?But I don’t want to make him angry. Ever since the Domestic Violence shelters have all been closed down. Ever since the Domestic Assault hotline has been disconnected. Ever since calling the cops on your husband is the quickest way to get yourself dragged down to the station for “inciting the violence” yourself. Ever since new, privately funded studies came out showing that women are indeed the more emotional sex and that their manipulation can easily be used to paint good men as “abusive.” Ever since no-fault divorce was eliminated. Ever since. Ever since. Ever since. Ever since the dawn of fucking time because men have always been physically stronger than women and always will be.***
In the end, I don’t even have to wait forty-eight hours. The spot is there on the back of my knee when I go to the bathroom the next morning, peeking out at me like a knowing eye. I stare at it like I’m waiting for it to wink. Heat unfurls across my body—a panicked rush of blood, a silent roar. My vision goes black at the corners, as though smoke is closing in, and I curl forward over my knees, muffling my wail in my hands. A crazy idea flashes through my mind: cut my leg off. But that wouldn’t work, not even if I took it off at the hip. The disease has already spread throughout my body. It’s like mold: glimpsing a little bit on the surface only means that the roots have long since claimed what’s underneath. There’s no stopping it now. The panic gives me tunnel vision, and I’m standing up now, staring into the bathroom mirror, staring at my face which is now unblemished but which will soon—who can say how soon—show a spot. Maybe with me, the disease will creep upwards. My husband’s will progress downwards, and mine will follow the reverse course. We’ll fit together perfectly.I turn the shower on full blast and scream into a towel. Swallowed up by the terrycloth, it’s more vibration than sound, and it shudders through me, shakes my arms and legs until I’m a trembling strand in the corner of the bathroom, looking towards the door with wild eyes, praying he didn’t hear anything. Because…because…Why? Why the fuck not?To get my answer, as I always have, I need the clarity that comes with pain. So I step into the shower. I gasp; the cold is a physical force, ripping the air from my lungs. Needles of icy water rain down on me, shocking, splintering me into a million particles like television static. A numb buzzing in my brain. Pain, pain, pain—And then, clarity. I slam the shower closed, panting and trembling. The facts are simple, clear as ice as they march out before me: He fucked someone recently. He got SL-29 from her. He returned home. By now he’s sure, by now he must be sure, that he is infected. He hasn’t told me. I’m infected too. Probably from when we fucked on Thursday or Friday. I’m in the same boat as him. We’re in this together. But it’s not a boat I’ve joined willingly. It’s a boat he’s dragged me into, without my knowledge or consent, a boat that could bind us together for a lifetime. If he were more possessive, I’d even suspect he’s done this deliberately, binding me to him so I can never escape. But he’s not like that. He’s never been possessive. And he loves himself far too much to ever destroy his appearance just to have me by his side for the rest of our lives. I clench my fists on the shower wall and get myself back to the row of facts. Okay: yes, I am infected too. I skip to the next one before my legs can start shaking again, quickly, onto the next fact: he needs to be punished. My husband can do so much to me. He can cheat on me. He can put his hands on me as many times as he wants—smack me across the face for speaking in the wrong tone of voice, pinch my lip between his sharp nails as a punishment for accidentally stepping on his foot—as long as there are fewer than two witnesses. He can stop me from voting. He can even impregnate me and force me to keep the baby (although what other option would I even have? a coat hanger? a handful of toxic weeds?). Although, in his defense, he has never done that last. He doesn’t want children either. It was one of the things we agreed on at the very beginning, one of the things that bound us together in a world where other couples were constantly fighting and breaking up over the issue. We simply looked at each other and said, “Nope.” Smirking, like we were in on some grand inside joke. A secret held like a jewel between the two of us. Funny how it’s always the wives who are paraded like a spectacle for bringing the Scarlet Spots into their homes. Sluts infecting their unsuspecting husbands. Funny how it’s never, ever the other way around. I think again of the ad on the subway. The original saying was One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury: a phrase intended to sway young men away from prostitutes, because syphilis was treated with mercury in those days. But what about the phrases to sway young women away from the Johns who would later pass that disfiguring disease onto them? Those phrases did not exist. They never do.I step out of the shower stall, run the shower hot for a few minutes, and then emerge from the bathroom. Using my weakest voice, I tell my husband I’m coming down with a cold. “I just took a steaming hot shower,” I say mournfully. “I think I’ll take it easy in bed today.”He gives me a sympathetic nod and tells me to feel better. Before he leaves, I notice another spot, just below his chin. He turns away from me quickly, not wanting me to see. I want to tell him that I already know. But that would ruin the surprise. And surprises are always best, aren’t they, love?***
As soon as I hear the elevator doors close in the hallway, I fly into action. I have to get everything set up perfectly by the time he comes home. As I walk to first one hardware shop and then the next, and then a chemist’s shop, and then a kitchen-wares shop, I try to let my thoughts wander. But they don’t want to wander. They keep coming around to tonight’s plan, like a fierce, certain arrow. And I smile. I keep smiling even as I’m aware of that spot on the back of my knee, that barely perceptible itch. What’ll happen tonight, what I’ll turn my husband into…it’s almost enough to make the infection worth it. Almost. I spend the rest of the day setting things up. He’s only got two red spots, but I can add a few more: early ones, surprise ones. Maybe I’ll take some things away, too. I think again of why I didn’t want to make him angry when we lay in bed that night. Yes, on the whole, men have always been physically stronger than women and always will be. But that’s assuming no other factors have been introduced to alter the equation. And a sedated man bound to a bed, tied in five-point restraints like they use at the hospitals for hysterical women—well, all his strength will be useless. As useless as the nipples on his chest. Maybe I’ll start with those. No one’s coming to help him. After all, the Domestic Assault hotline has been disconnected. Tonight it’s his body on the bed. And—finally—my choice.$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″
Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.
–Sparrow