Have you ever found yourself adrift, without a clue on how you got there? The blue whale is the largest mammal to have existed on our planet. A small person can fit inside a blue whale heart. In My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor (Clash Books, 2024) Homeless contemplates the messiness of a heart ready to overspill with sadness, a sadness drawn from fathomless wells, deep and lightless as the bottom of the sea. How many fast food containers have already made it to that desolate ocean floor? I spoke with Homeless about the novel.Rebecca Gransden: The novel opens with the memorable scene of a trio of characters in an orange boat adrift in what appears to be the middle of a wide ocean. When did this cast of characters occur to you? Did they and the scenario appear simultaneously or did aspects arise over time?Homeless: It occurred to me very early on. Probably one of the first ideas I had. The image of Daniel (the main character), the sad-looking blue whale & the empty Big Mac container floating in the ocean, lost. Everything was gradually built off that. That kind of sad, hopeless tableau.RG:“Your heart... you want to bury it, right?”Daniel nods.“Beneath the ocean floor?”Daniel nods again.“Okay. And I’m going to help you do that. Well, I mean we. We’re going to help you do that. Me and the sad-looking blue whales back home.” Daniel, the focus of the book, is a character beset by profound troubles. In many ways the book can be viewed as a quest, one taken by Daniel, whether he’s a totally willing participant or not. Did you have a plan for Daniel upon undertaking the novel, and if so, to what degree did you end up adhering to the plan?H: All I knew at the beginning was Daniel was going to be stranded in the ocean & that he was going to use this ultimate misfortune as an opportunity to really examine himself & his choices. The places he “goes” while lost, the things he sees, those were inspired by his past with the sad-looking blue whales, as well as his tumultuous relationship with his ex-girlfriend. RG:My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor. Daniel experiences his own moment of creative inspiration with the book’s title. How did the sentence reveal itself to you, and when did you know it should be the title of the book?H: The title came to me from a song. “The Samurai Code”by Motion City Soundtrack. The lyric was My heart belongs beneath the ocean floor. I remember hearing it for the first time &, like the sappy fat ass I am, immediately thinking, My heart belongs in an Empty Big Mac container buried beneath the ocean floor. That one line was it. It set up a ton for what the book would eventually become—the concept of Daniel lost in the ocean, his mission, the sad-looking blue whales who stalk him. So much came from that one line. Once I knew it’d be his mantra, there was really nothing else the book could be titled.RG: The book is set into parts, with its main threads separated into chapters with recurring titles. What led you to pursue this structure?H: For a book about depression, I wanted people to get a glimpse of what it’s like for people who have to deal with it. Only then did I think readers would kind of understand why Daniel is making such an absurd & drastic choice. I wanted readers to see how it affected his self-esteem. His relationships. So I decided to give some background as to how depression can insidiously work. How it alters your way of thinking. I think—I hope—it makes his journey more justified in a way.RG: The role of McDonald’s is important to Daniel. Throughout the book he views it as a special place, one of respite and comfort. One particular McDonald’s is regarded by him with near ecstatic reverence. What made you select McDonald’s to play this part in the book?H: About half of this book was written in a McDonald’s in Bridgeport, CT. Daniel’s safe place is essentially my safe place. The people who eat there, the slightly chaotic ambiance at times, the dirty tables, the trips there with my father when I was younger. It all feels like home to me, so I feel comfortable working there. When I’m in McDonald’s, it’s like I’m with “my people.” Lower class working stiffs just like me, trying to get a cheap, albeit highly unhealthy, meal. There’s a silent camaraderie there.RG: Daniel is painfully aware of how he is perceived by others. The novel repeatedly makes reference to a look Daniel has possessed for most, if not all, of his life. How do you describe this look and what does it say about Daniel’s interaction with the world?H: Daniel’s “look” in the book is a despondent face he’s not usually aware he’s wearing. It’s the neutral face of a person worn down by years of depression. A co-worker once told me I had a “red light face,” meaning a kind of disgruntled, “keep away from me” look, haha. When you’re depressed, you’re drained, both physically & mentally. So it’s kind of instinctual. You’re going through a lot & you need to protect your energy, what little you have, so you keep people at distance maybe. For their benefit & for yours. It’s an accidental coping mechanism. One that keeps you sane but also, unfortunately at times, pushes people away even when you don’t mean to.RG:They controlled Daniel, the sad-looking blue whales, and as much as it killed him to admit it, although over the years he had gotten used to doing so (not that that made it sting any less), the sad-looking blue whales dictated almost everything he did.Central to the book is Daniel’s relationship to the sad-looking blue whales that accompany him through life. He is caught in a shifting power dynamic, with his interactions moving through a spectrum of emotions and tensions. How do you view the sad-looking blue whales?H: The sad-looking blue whales are depression. Sometimes—a lot of the time—it can feel like depression runs the show. It keeps you from doing things you want to do, it helps you remain stuck in bad patterns. You want more than anything to be “normal,” but you have this really strong outside force constantly fucking with you & your good intentions, your attempts to change. This malevolent energy that drains your battery without your consent, that’s the sad-looking blue whales.RG: But often, scrolling through social media sites and reading posts or status updates, or messaging back and forth with strangers online, Daniel would find that the vast majority of people out there felt scared and hopeless and alone just like him. People, most people, including Daniel, led coddled easy lives. They lived in warm houses with indoor plumbing and went to grocery stores filled with food they didn't have to harvest or kill. If they got sick, modern medicine was usually able to cure it, and if not, at the very least put up a fight. And yet, somehow, everyone was still unhappy or stressed or, most of the time, both. Twenty-one centuries of technological evolution and things had become so much easier yet no one was any happier. But the expectancy to be happy had become greater, and when people couldn’t live up to it, when they couldn’t be as happy as the world and its technology demanded them to, it was damn near fucking lethal. It was no wonder sad-looking blue whales ran the world, although now it made more sense than ever to Daniel why they did.The book reflects a generational ennui, an ambiance difficult to articulate. Daniel’s self-awareness only seems to amplify the acuteness of his difficulties. Has the writing of the book brought any insights to you on this era’s specific challenges?H: I think it just made me more aware that our focus & priorities are askew. Technology seems to be speeding everything up when it seems, to me, more people (myself included) need to be slowing down. The pace of life for a lot of people seems to be accelerating to a breakneck speed, where we’re just focused on destination after destination, goal after goal, without ever appreciating where we currently are. Normally, when Daniel chills out in the book & visits “his McDonald’s,” what happens? The sad-looking blue whales leave him alone. He’s at peace. He’s allowed to just be.RG: Daniel is struggling to write. Are there parallels between Daniel’s experience within the book and your own time writing it? How much, if at all, is your past writerly life reflected in the novel?H: I gave up on this book a third of the way through. Then a kind word from a writer I greatly admire about another book I’d written made me believe in myself enough to maybe give this book another go. I think I used to put too much pressure on my writing in general. How much I did. How good it was. How important it was. Now I’m at a peaceful place where I just do my best & don’t stress over my output. I just show up somewhat consistently & the rest is out of my hands. And with this newer, more laid back approach, I also do get stuck a lot less, creatively speaking.RG: If the sad-looking blue whales can be viewed as a symbolic manifestation of Daniel’s depression, outside of the novel are there animals that represent other emotions or states for you?H: Cats represent nirvana for me. The transcendent state. Not the kick ass band. RG:Flipping through censored page after censored page, Daniel comes across nothing even remotely happy. Nothing hopeful or lighthearted. Just more of the same heartbreak, anxiety, shame, dread and self-hate. Daniel’s heart begins racing. He can feel it panicking as a wave of heat that begins in his head quickly sweeps throughout the entirety of his body, a sensation that instantly forces him to begin sweating, and all of a sudden, it’s like Daniel’s right back outside underneath the blistering sun.What is the role of hope in the book?H: Hope is there. In bits & pieces. Because when you’re depressed that feels like all the hope you’re allowed. Just miserly shards of it. In a way that’s all you need though. Just some kind of small hold to hang onto. So in that way it’s important. I wanted the book, as heavy as the topic was, to still be hopeful & light hearted. I wanted anyone who finishes it to have just that, a shred of hope. If not more.RG: At one point in the book a Basquiat artwork is transformed into a sail for the boat. A theme you address is the nature of art, here raising the question of whether there needs to be a ‘living’ or kinetic component to art in opposition to the emphasis on preservation in a type of hermetically sealed, stagnant state. Later, Daniel exhibits mixed feelings on the matter of sharing his writing with the world. Have you arrived at any conclusions regarding art, or have any new questions arisen on the matter, either inside or outside of your experience writing My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor?H: I think if anything, this book just reaffirmed to me that art is a necessary compulsion. A way for creative people to grow & learn. Some people just have to create, for better & for worse. The thing people can get caught up in, which I still get caught up in, is how your work is received, how many people have read it, & letting the commercial aspect of art taint or ruin this passion you have. Or worse, you begin to devalue yourself or what you created because it doesn’t sell. When I think the more healthy approach is just doing it because you love it, sharing it if you want to, & then wiping your hands clean of whatever those results may be. Because, again, art for many people is a compulsion & they’re going to do it & keep doing it regardless of acclaim or glory, so why let a lack of those things ruin doing something you love, something you need.RG: Could you explain the significance of the concept of appreciation, to Daniel and to the novel as a whole? What do you appreciate about the book?H: There’s always something to appreciate. No matter how shitty things are. The thing you’re appreciating can be big or small, from past, present or future, it doesn’t matter. It’s the act of appreciating that’s important. Finding something good & focusing on it until the crushing fist of sadness lightens its force. The opportunity is always there & readily available. A kind of short cut through a shitty neighborhood that gets you someplace safer. What I appreciate about the book is that it tackles a heavy topic such a depression with levity & humor. I wanted to write a book about depression that wasn’t depressing to read, & I think I did that.RG: Have you ever seen a lightning bug?H: I’m lucky enough to have two beautiful sons. So yes.
What you remember is riding scooters around the cul-de-sac on sun-soaked summer mornings. Me pushing you on our swing set in the backyard. A scruffy white dog lapping up water, its tail wagging. Her blessing the food, pork chops and green beans and cornbread. Running under sprinklers barefoot, tufts of grass tickling our toes. Red and blue and white popsicles staining our tongues. Him lowering the basketball goal in the driveway so you could play. Saturday morning cartoons and chocolate sprinkle donuts. Sunday morning church and lunch at Luby’s. What I remember is always sitting quietly, so very quietly. The all A honor roll. Chewing the insides of my cheeks until they bled. The sound of a hair dryer thrown at the wall. A pair of eyes gone black and vacant. Wondering if Jesus was going to come back anytime soon. Red and blue and white lights flashing in the driveway. Scratchy hotel bedsheets and locked doors. Him calling her crying, begging us to come home. Holding you and telling you that you were going to be okay. Because I knew you would be okay. Because you were far too young to remember.
We’re eating chocolate cake for Ronni's bday after work. At a table in the hay barn that serves as my boss’s office. It’s me, Ronni the team lead, my boss, and her two teenage daughters who barback/take out garbage. I’m covered in mud from the waist down because my boss’s youngest daughter took an ill-advised shortcut with the golf cart during a garbage run. So I went out and helped, lifting the back and pushing forward while she gassed it.‘You’re buying him a new pair of pants,’ my boss says, eyebrows up.‘Okayeeee, jeez,’ says her daughter.She’s been crying a little, on account of the embarrassment as well as her sister’s accusations of being stupid. I’d told her multiple times not to worry about it.Ronni puts her feet up on a chair and spreads her legs to ‘air her balls out’ under her skort. She’s wearing a bday girl sash and tiara. She takes a bite of cake with an anguished look and says, ‘Man I feel like a bag of smashed assholes.’ This is her main line, the smashed assholes. A whole sack of them, battered and stinking, amassed from various asses and collected in a single sack as a sign of some greater pain. 'I made out like a bandit though. I knew if I let people know it was muh berfday and had my titties out a little, they'd tip me more.’ She takes a last bite of cake and sets the fork on her plate.I ask my boss's older daughter how her boyfriend’s doing. I met him recently. Bit of a dopey fellow, handshake like someone handing you an oven mitt and all that. 'What’s his name,' I say. 'Ricky?''No it's Walter. He's fine, I guess. I broke up with him tho and he started crying. He's always crying, I literally think maybe he’s gay.''Oh man, I liked him. Seemed like a nice fella. You don't like him anymore.''No he's gross. And his mom saw my texts and started texting me all this angry shit.'My boss says, 'He does have some hygiene issues but he’s a good kid.''He’s literally gay and he stinks,' says her daughter.I eat some more cake. Looking up at the window, high in the barn. A rectangle of bright blue sky. Like something in a video game I’d yet to unlock. The next map, if only I’d the tools. I start thinking about my elderly friend in town, the gunsmith. Hadn’t seen him in a while. He’s like the first character you meet before you go off, in search of other maps. I remember how he described getting into guns/gunsmithing when he was younger. He said he got his first .410 and it was ‘off to the races’––a phrase which I’d heard before many times but only then, and ever since, truly enjoyed and understood, realizing the meaning, to be off to the races, not stuck at the beginning line, somehow already a loser.‘I can’t believe you lifted that thing,’ says my boss. ‘Thank you so much. And again, [her daughter] is gonna buy you new pants.’I look down at the mud, all over my pants and boots. ‘You think these are done?’My boss’s daughters laugh.Ronni says, ‘Hell yeah they’re done, looks like you buttfucked a hippo, son.’The boss's younger daughter is looking at crowns on Amazon. She won runner up in the Ms. [town they're from] beauty pageant and didn't like the crown they'd supplied. 'What about this one,' says the beauty queen, showing her sister, who wrinkles her face, shaking her head. The beauty queen turns her phone to me and asks what I think.Staring at the crown, which has 536 reviews, I say, 'The only way to truly get a crown is to slay the queen currently wearing it. To strike her down. Bring terror to her court.'My boss laughs.Ronni says Jesus, taking her feet down off the chair with a grunt, then says if I want a ride home we have to get going.
Jesus is condemned to deathMark is desperate to be crucified. He’s been acting especially pious this week. Smacking his cheeks to make them look ruddy and hallow. Doing push-ups before rehearsal. Crafting his body into a canvas for suffering. The other boys and Julie volunteered to be Roman soldiers. Cardboard swords clash dully. I should have tried out for Pilate. One scene then done. But my reputation isn’t good enough to condemn Jesus to death. I miss months of masses in a row. Crucify Him! rings out from the class. The trial seems rigged. I feel for Jesus even if Mark’s a giant prick. Jesus takes up his CrossThe soldiers get into it. They’re allowed to jostle and there is a moment when their roughhousing feels like it will overflow. Spill into actual violence. An overt shove. A tug on Mark’s thin toga. A rambunctious smack across his defenseless skin. The acting feels dangerous. A mask slipping to reveal a jagged scar. The congregation holds its collective breath. Most eyes get lost in the stained-glass kaleidoscopes that twist the morning light into prisms of color. It’s like the awkward reports on the nightly news. Global warming. Meth/opioid epidemic. We pray it will pass. Survive till the football scores. Jesus falls the first timeGolden chalices catch the light. The girls’ primary-colored cloaks flutter behind Mark’s staggers. They wail like raucous ghosts. Sometimes snorting into laughter. Mark’s really dragging this out. Juicing his time in the spotlight. He falls. The sound booms in the quiet church. Ricocheting off the vaulted ceiling. I jump in my seat. The sound of violence feels dangerous in a place I’m only allowed to stand, sit, and kneel in. Where control is strictly enforced. Mark stays down. The soldiers push him. Tug at his arms. Red beads of wax slide down the eternal candle. The crucifix hovers. Watching. Waiting.Jesus meets his MotherCough. Cough. Stifled laugh. The crowd shifts in their seats as Vikki’s hand lingers on Mark’s face and then slide down the length of his partially exposed chest. The leader announces the station. The crowd responds: Have Mercy On Us! The words fill the nearly empty church. The chorus spreads like a flood through my upper body. Vikki and Mark don’t break eye contact. The public suffering activates something. The being watched by the audience makes their bodies tingle with desire. The leader pushes the narrative forward. Breaks the young lovers apart. We try to remember this is very serious. Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the crossThe procession approaches me. I’m pulled from the wooden pew and forced at cardboard sword point to pick up the back end of the cross. Its Styrofoam. Weighs less than the air. It’s more like a texture in my hands than a burden. In rehearsal I felt like a reluctant ally. An unlikely side hero in this story. But in front of the crowd, I turn into an accomplice. Another force pushing Jesus toward his inevitable ending. I strain my face. Flex my arms and shoulders into a garish struggle. Showing the crowd this is no picnic for me too. Veronica wipes the face of JesusRosita dabs at Mark’s face with a Dollar General wet wipe. Vikki stares daggers at her as she moistens his skin. Her touch is so tender. Light and humane. I don’t understand how someone could feel jealousy toward it. I forget my role. Find myself in a dream where hands as gentle as these press into me. Make the tiny electric sparkles under my skin flare and then settle. Feel my pores. I sense the tautness of my skin and how the pathways in my body connect like a waterway. HAVE MERCY ON US! Sucks me back into my performance. Jesus falls for the second timeMark really sells the fall. Spreading himself across the red carpet. Pulsating agony. I try not to look directly at him. The altar sneaks up on the procession. A green and gold cloth hangs off its skeletal frame. The site of the encroaching crucifixion. It’s like a tractor beam. What if we all just stopped? I could drop this cross. Walk out of the church. The soldiers could cast down their fake swords. Mark could put on a shirt. The crowd could go home. Why didn’t Jesus run? Is it a son’s responsibility to sacrifice his body for his family? Jesus meets the women of JerusalemWails, wailing, wailed. The warble rises and falls. A flutter of reds, blues, yellows and greens heave with inconsequential grief. All we own is our pain. It is ours to cart around. To mold into a story of self-suffering. Mark draws a cross in the air before the girls and the hunger of their suffering intensifies. It’s unclear if he is blessing or forgiving them. If we are freed from our suffering would there be anything left? Life might become boring quick. Purpose is easier to create and easier to achieve when we’re pushing a boulder up a petrified hill. Jesus falls for the third timeWe get it. Mark’s suffering. His body heaves on the ground. His ribs push through his skin. I’m unsure of what to do with my hands. The faster he gets to his feet the faster the suffering continues. Stay down. I’m a shadow of this fallen figure. No longer a person but an outline of a body on the floor. An idea which I can fill my own body with. Should I have been Jesus? Instead of floating behind him, unsure of what to do. I could fill my soul with divine guidance. Let a higher purpose guide my life. Jesus is stripped of his garmentsMark’s skin looks translucent under the altar’s bright lights. His arms are slender. Veins run blue down his forearms. A complex root system spreading in the shallows of his body. It’s difficult imagining his body as temporary. As something separate from his eternal being. Flesh and bone and blood is the centerpiece of our sacrifice. The physicality, the realness of him makes the backs of my legs tingle. A horror spasm slithers down my legs. I shift my weight between feet. Time feels urgent. My skin becomes aware of a taught string stretching from this moment to a wooden coffin. Jesus is nailed to the CrossThe soldiers’ faces hang heavy with purpose. Their movements precise. Mark is stretched open. His body splayed wide for the audience. The splotchy homemade cross is pitiful under the looming crucifix above him. His acting quaint next to Jesus’ carved suffering. A soldier holds his hammer and spike above Mark’s wrist, checks the lectern, and swings. A hollow ping rings from the sound system. I choke on my breath. The soldier moves to the other wrist. The next ping slips inside my body and ricochets around. He kneels with his tools. I close my eyes. Waiting for the final strike. Jesus dies on the crossDuring rehearsal we held ice cubes in our hands to simulate Jesus’ pain. I didn’t feel it then. The cold felt funny. The wet was simply wiped away. Watching Mark on the cross, I feel the sting of the ice in my palms. He’s stoic. Only wears the pain in his furrowed expression. His chest heaves. The final breaths become deeper, more exaggerated. And then silence. Or very shallow, near silence. Tiny signs of life escape him. A small sip of oxygen. A slight quiver through his finger. The church goes quiet. Holds its breath in solidarity. Prays in thanks. Jesus is taken down from the crossA limp body doesn’t cooperate. Feels like moving a mattress. Except its Mark. I remind myself that he’s still alive. We cover him with a white sheet. He becomes an outline under the thin layer of cloth. The shape of his body a ghostly terrain which dips and curves like a gentle mountain range. I imagine it’s a relief to no longer be looked at. I stare at the still form. The end of the pain. Relief spreads slowly from my fingers. Pushes up my arms like a tremble. Thank god it’s over. But now what? Where do we go?Jesus is laid in the tombApparently, we go to the basement. They just announced there’s Jell-O salad and Maid Rites. Mark doesn’t move. Everyone starts for the stairs. We walk past his body, quiet as a shiver. I pack away the performance inside myself. Breathe easier now it is over. No embarrassments. No impression at all. After eating I go upstairs. The sheet is empty. The lights are dark. Jesus stares down at me hard. I put the sheet over my head. A kid on Halloween. Breath deep into the fabric. Feel the memory of ice in my palms. Taste the air leaving my lungs.
The existence of a Neural Correlate of Consciousness that persists after the administration of anesthesia is such anathema to the established position taken by physicians of the modern age that publication of any supporting data has been effectively relegated to the annals of pseudoscience. This is despite the clear and alarming implications of not one but several studies attempting to chronicle the experience of the Fugue. As a man of science I at first balked, predictably: if overwhelming and conclusive evidence is rejected by the likes of Nature and Science than I as an individual bear no responsibility for its dissemination. However, I have since been prevailed upon: the public is not directly responsible for the systemic biases inherent in the academic standards that deceive them. If they are indeed active participants at all, it is indirectly. If their eyes have been blinded, and indeed even if it is through their own actions and mechanisms, it is not through any fault of their own. The public may be an agent in the dynamic, but assumptions have been made on the collective level that on the individual level are unwarranted: you, dear reader, may have done nothing wrong and still be subject to implications of the decisions of your peers. Perhaps this is not the case at all, and you will read this publication with a laugh and a sneer. But if, upon finding it here, you feel naught but surprise and betrayal, know that this is for you. That the anesthetics touted and trumpeted as groundbreaking medical technology, come at a cost that is well hidden, but that I, active in their development, am suited to deconstruct. One thing I would like to make clear from the outset is that I fully appreciate the massive societal-level benefits imparted by the development of modern anesthetics: hundreds of thousands of life-saving surgical procedures are performed daily worldwide, and this scale of medical intervention improving the lives of millions of people would simply not be possible without them. It is no overstatement to say that our human ability to self-repair our own physiology has been instrumental in allowing us to control the tide of our own evolution as a species. I am thus fully aware of the implications of my own research into the persistence of consciousness into the anesthetized state. It is only because I have seen with my own eyes and proven with incontrovertible data the agonizing states induced and never recalled consciously in fully anesthetized surgical patients that I took up the obligation of raising social awareness for this most sensitive issue of public interest. Given this knowledge, it is still not imminently clear which is the most optimal course for setting policy or making individual decisions regarding surgical procedures – the vast majority of which, including technically “elective” procedures, are done for sound and necessary medical reasons and cannot be forgone without drastic health consequences up to and including death. Some fairly straightforward implications, however, include ones for surgery done for purely aesthetic reasons, as well as implications on health decisions underscoring the importance of maintaining physical health through lifestyle to pre-empt the need for eventual surgery altogether. The more interesting and difficult cases are ones in which surgery has already been medically advised, but would involve inducing extreme pain in a phi network that will not be able to communicate this either during or after the experience, but would fail to provide ongoing active consent were they able.Ultimately, the NCC in question has no means of exercising their legal rights, bodily autonomy [sic], or freedom of choice, and no recourse to protect or represent their own interests. While this matter warrants legal and not just clinical expertise and consultation, there does seem to be a precedent for the protection of conscious entities not reliant on their integrated personhood – Cleever vs. the state of California and Scober vs. the State of Indiana can be here referred to, albeit the relevance of a criminal punishment in cases of insanity or incompetence may supersede the relevance of any protections relevant due to Markovian or causal independence. Because these NCCs have no way of prosecuting such a case, protections would need to be implemented on their behalf – as is already done in cases of abortion and life support of comatose or vegetative individuals. It is my firm belief that this direction should be explored by libertarian and other relevant ideological organizations and think tanks, and I will gladly offer my guidance for them to do so should they request it.
In the months since The Visitation there have been ceaseless efforts by the Department of Defense, including within my own division at DARPA, to develop strategies to either obliterate and neutralize the foreign Entities, or (in my own research lab) to counteract or mitigate the seemingly inevitable effects they have on human observers. Thus far, efforts to kill or immobilize these foreign agents have been largely unsuccessful, and this is due mostly to the lack of techniques for localizing and targeting them in ways that circumvent the need for soldiers or others to perceive them. The use of infrared goggles to attack in darkness at night did not prevent the known psychotogenic effects and suicidality in any significant way, and efforts to secure video-surveillance triggered munitions and drones has likewise been unsuccessful due to the lack of known distinguishing features that can be used to identify the targets from other warm bodies such as humans. After the third accidental death, of a toddler, with no confirmed hits on the Beings, the program for automated gunfire and drones to wipe them out was put on hold until better identifiers, whether visual or other, can be found. Our own techniques are less risky, and while they would not eliminate the threats, they show real promise in limiting the severity of reactions to them, which in normal cases range from debilitating to cataclysmic. So far over 15% of the population has succumbed, most of whom die too soon to be assessed or treated, and many of whom kill others before they go. The few we have been able to bring in for consultation are generally useless as they have been reduced to incoherence and frenetic oscillation of their mood, goals, and speech. Others still retreat inwards, becoming near-motionless, affectless, and catatonic. Analysis of brain tissue of those affected post-mortem offered another potential avenue of research, however it proved difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about any neurological effects as the timescale between the initial exposure and death is usually on the order of hours to days, generally too short to allow for clear atrophy, gliosis or synaptogenesis. Our findings based on this approach were therefore inconclusive, although they did allow us to rule out gross tissue damage such as cerebral infarction, ischemia, edema, or encephalopathy - bearing witness to the Beings does not appear to cause stroke, fluid build-up, or tissue swelling. Fortunately there remains one final and quite promising research opportunity left to pursue: a very small subset of people, somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5%, appear to be largely immune to the ill effects that beset those who look upon the Beings. So far we have only been able to examine one such individual, a thirteen-year-old girl. Two others are rumored to be under study by labs in Atlanta (CDC containment facility) and an old university in Tokyo, however, these reports remain unconfirmed, as currently all televised news media has been cut off and radio reports are intermittent and have limited geographical range. Some of these limitations in media and communication are inadvertent inevitabilities, while others are necessary enforced precautions to limit the spread of images containing the Beings. Electronic communications ofany kind, as well as access to electronic databases, are theoretically still accessible tohigh-level government and military officials, which includes myself, as well as persons withsome other very limited essential roles. However, maintaining an internetconnection has itself been intermittent due to outages, electric grid failure, the near-impossibilityof any maintenance of the system, and general chaos. This means that while we were able to run tests for many genetic markers on our subject, we have so far been completely unable to compare the results to those of other individuals with similar immunity, and analysis of the sequenced regions without such comparators could not suggest a pattern, as absent any polymorphisms or normal inter-individual differences, her genome appeared unremarkable. We do suspect that other similar cases can be found locally, however the obvious limitations on communication and safe mobility make any form of coordination or selection of potential subjects untenable for the time being. We are, however, grateful for the opportunity that has been presented us, and so far we have diligently made use of every means at our disposal to uncover what biological, neurological, psychological and/or soteriological defense mechanisms are at work, and how they might be co-opted or replicated in the general population, or at least in the servicemen responsible for deploying lethal force to rid our society of the Beings. Our primary base in Arlington has been out of commission since two weeks after the Visitation, the satellite research facility in Virginia Beach has connection to generator-powered electricity and well water, as well as stable architectural foundations and a primary lab space that is several feet underground, all of which makes for ideal research conditions given the larger global circumstances. It is equipped with a physical reference database consisting of decades of published scientific research across multiple disciplines, as well as cable internet, although this connection has so far only worked briefly and on two occasions, the latter of which was unsuccessful in connecting with any other labs or military bases. As mentioned previously, the facility is also limited in terms of the diagnostic instrumentation and other medical research equipment on hand. One of the newer DARPA employees, Major Chambers, an army psychiatrist recruited just a week prior to the Visitation and with no combat zone experience whatsoever, has adamantly insisted since we acquired our test subject that he can perform vital and informative assessments on her neurological and psychological functioning using verbal and cognitive tests alone. While I remained skeptical, his initial interview with the subject was the first time I had heard her speak openly about her witness of the Beings, and I reluctantly acknowledged that our options are currently narrow and granted him full license for any non-invasive tests he might want to run, provided there was negligible physical risk. Several days ago he presented me with some of the subject’s color pencil drawings of the Entities, of which she claims to have seen three. The drawings are quite skilled for a child of her age with no artistic training, but still rudimentary compared to what might have been accomplished by, say, a police sketch artist. It is also of course an open question how much of the drawings’ poor detail was due to an amateur’s lack of skill, and how much was due to the impossibility of conveying an incomprehensible horror whose visual presentation itself may not be standardized between different perceivers. The first of her drawings features a rotund gray thing with six long, spidery legs bent about halfway up. It features a ring-like raised ridge around the middle of its corpus, like Saturn. Its top is dotted with several protruding bumps, also gray, but darker. It has no discernable face. She calls this one Calye, though she would not say if it told her that name or if she gave the name to it herself. The second also has spindly insect-like legs, but an elongated, brown corpus. The subject mentioned that the color she used was “not quite right” but that she couldn’t find “what the real one would be”. It was ambiguous whether she meant that the color spectrum of the Beings was outside the spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths typically visible to the human eye or simply that the 32 ct. Crayola colored pencil set provided her was insufficient. The last of the Entities she drew was perhaps the most intriguing, as rather than possessing legs it appeared to hover midair, and the lighter imprint of the coloration (which was sky blue with a touch of green) made it cloud-like. However, when asked if it did hover, or fly, the subject merely furrowed her brow in that way that children do when posed with a tough riddle, and answered, “I mean, sort of.” This being was also interesting because it was the only one which appeared to possess a face, or at least, several rounded circles resembling a single large, compound eye. When asked if she knew whether it was an eye, or if it ever seemed to look at her, or blink, however, the subject replied in the negative. There appears to be no harm or risk from viewing the drawings themselves, which speaks to the non-transferability of supernatural visual perceptual experiences and the inevitable loss of information at various points along the pipeline of basic sensation, integrated perception, cognitive and emotional processing, and repackaging for communication purposes using either the verbal or visual medium. Additionally, the colored pencil set she was given contained two missing colors (aqua green and light orange), one (violet red) which was broken into two pieces, as well as several others that were quite dull. Artistic tools are not, remember, a category of equipment necessarily kept on hand in either a secret military base or a secret research facility. Psychosocial interview and debriefing by the scientist about the Beings as well as any relevant background of the subject previously mentioned also proved at least partly fruitful as they revealed the following: -encounters with the Beings was somewhat disturbing or at least puzzling -when she saw the first one she found herself staring involuntarily, as one might a trainwreck, despite some slight discomfort akin to, but not exactly like, staring at the brightness of the sun. She also acknowledged, of her own initiative, that at least part of her fascination with these creatures stemmed not from the direct effect their forms had on her psyche, but from her prior knowledge that what she was witnessing were sights that had drove many others, including her own father and brother, into madness (immediate suicide and attempted attack on her mother with a knife, leading to a bystander shooting him, respectively). These reactions also provide further evidence against the origin of this type of relative immunity having any genetic component, barring the possibility of a de novo mutation, which the limited chromosomal regions on which we performed genetic sequencing fail to fully rule out. Medical history revealed no major medical conditions, disabilities, past surgeries or injuries, and psychiatric assessment ruled out any serious mental health conditions or history of trauma (prior to the death of her father and witnessing the death of her brother, which given the current societal circumstances are not outside the norm). Her beliefs regarding the supernatural prior to the Visitation, as well as her thoughts about or speculations on (or even knowledge of) the Beings were also probed. While she had not previously been religious or very superstitious (occasionally mixing up “potions” with friends or pretending to be witches, which all sounded relatively normal for her age) she did seem to have atypical attitudes to the Beings, including speculation, despite the trauma and devastation that had directly and indirectly affected her, that they carried a certain message that it was important to decode. When asked for further details on what this message was, however, she merely shrugged and said she didn’t know. “I think a lot more people are going to die, and I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it either, even though I know you’re trying.” is what she is recorded as having said, to which Chambers doing the interview replied, “You’re right, we are trying.” and nothing more. Various visual and cognitive tests were also performed by Chambers. While her vision was normal at 20/20 and she did not suffer from astigmatism or colorblindness, some tests of visual processing did render abnormal results including slower visual processing (less proficiency at detecting changes in rapidly switching images which showed added and then removed black dots on a white background, as well as movement of these dots to slightly different locations - an ingenious test designed for this purpose by Chambers himself, but based closely enough off of existing psychometric assessments to ensure the ability to form judgements and comparisons with the general population). While she was sometimes able to detect these changes, her accuracy was two standard deviations below the norm, despite her above-average intelligence.With a slower “frame rate” of changes to the layout and positioning of thesedots, her accuracy improved significantly and was within normal range. When administered aWechsler adult intelligence test rather than the Stanford-Binet children’s test (both tests have both children’s and adult versions) it was noted that her performance on Raven’s Matrix Reasoning was also well below two full standard deviations lower than average. Low performance on this test means her ability to predict the expected form of a symbol associated with several other previous symbols which together demonstrate a clear pattern with no a priori description was severely impaired. Her scores on picture arrangement and picture completion were also below normal, but only by one standard deviation. These tests assess for ability to make sense of discrete scenes that can be arranged into a coherent story, and ability to make sense of isolated images with missing features by adding these missing details. Lastly, her answers to the Rorschach inkblot test were highly irregular, not in a way suggesting psychological problems or trauma, but rather in interpretations of ambiguous imagery that take on highly specific, nuanced, and uncommon situations, events, and combinations of objects, such as two cardboard cutouts of South America being held in the cloven hooves of a ram standing on its hind legs. These answers were always given after a lengthy, deliberative pause, but with an air of complete certainty. Taken together, these results point to a general pattern of non-standard conceptual frameworks for visual input. Rather than seeing a few lines in the general shape of a chair as a chair with a missing line or two, for instance, the subject would see half of an oddly shaped horse or a chipped coffee cup with curves missing. Inability to predict the next abstract figure of a sequence, as in Raven’s Matrices, points to the formation of incorrect visual expectations and inability to recognize visual patterns. Trouble noticing changes in the patterns of dots on a screen points to lack of sequential organization in visual construction. Our working hypothesis is that the combination and interaction of these deficits decrease the subject’s ability to process the sheer horror of the Beings. It does this by interfering with the neural impulses of the brain regions responsible for object and scene level construction along the ascending pathways before they can reach the brain regions responsible for semantic-psychological level interpretations, existential terror, horror at the very nature of existence, and unfounded homicidal rage.changing dot patterns Raven’s test matrixpicture arrangement testRorschach test cardsdrawing completion testOur motivations for elucidating these mechanisms are twofold: to provide potential assessmenttests available to the public to determine how likely it is that they are among the unsusceptible population (although we will proceed with this objective with extreme caution, if at all, ascognitive and psychological tests are unreliable, especially when self-administered, and anydefinitive causal relationship currently remains theoretical) and to use the information collectedto attempt to induce a similar protection or immunity in previously vulnerable (normal) persons.Currently two different strategies to this end are already underway. The first involves theconstruction of a kind of physical distortion barrier, namely, protective lenses which cantheoretically be manufactured, at least on small scales, for the use of select test populations,mainly the military troops tasked with elimination of the threat. The construction of thesegoggles will not be trivial and will require a complicated system of optic distortion combingartificial time delay/choppy or lagging video feed and certain image processing tools designed tocompress or alter visual information in carefully specified ways, such as by inducing graininess, jitter, or watershed effects to split whole objects (such as the Entities) into collections of discrete parts. The use of this technique has not been tested and there is no way of guaranteeing it willwork without testing it directly. However, existing strategies are virtually nonexistent and include trying to quickly look away or shut one’s eyes if a soldier hears the approach of, orglimpses, a Being, which is both ineffective (it generally does not prevent them witnessing it andall subsequent effects) but also almost completely prevents them from actually killing theseBeings, which is the entire point of all their existing missions. The second strategy is lessstraightforward and involves psychological and therapeutic interventions, either as a prophylacticmechanism for those likely to encounter the Entities (again, mostly soldiers - civilians are ofteninadvertently exposed as well, but any targeted training of them remains unfeasible under currentcircumstances and they are advised to simply seek shelter and remain hidden and secluded) or to limit post-exposure effects. Thetherapeutic techniques involve visual training with the use of video feedback, in a setup similarto Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), as well as to existing videofeedback military training. Another option which could be applied both prophylactically and incases of catatonic or disturbed but contained/restrained persons recently exposed to the Beings isthe use of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques to actively reprocess the trauma ofexposure to the Beings in ways that are more aligned with the less harmful, chunked or distorted processing that our subject experiences naturally.One final cautionary note remains: while we have not been able to maintain steady contact witheither the Atlanta lab or the Tokyo lab and do not know much of any information about subjectsalleged to be similar, yet another similar subject has been rumored of in Mumbai, and this person(a man in his thirties with a wife and children) was said to be completely immune to the Entities,for several weeks, and became convinced that he was a deity whose duty it was to encounter anddocument them. He was said to have witnessed and photographed tens of such creatures as hesought them out intentionally, like a storm chaser. And then, it is rumored, he came across oneand went mad, just as everyone else, and slaughtered his family. This tragic case (which onceagain, is unconfirmed by any reputable source, but was told to me by two people independently, both members of the US military) raises a concerning issue, namely, that even the type ofimmunity that we and others have documented may not be a complete immunity. It seems possible, and in fact very likely, that there exists at least one and possibly multiple variants ofBeing which still affect even the lucky few who resemble our subject. What to make of thisinformation Chambers and I are unsure. His suggestion, which does seem plausible, is that thereare alternative visual pathways that are utilized by alternative types of visual processing andscene construction, and that there are vulnerabilities that exist aside from the one that is currentlyknown.
It’s election season! Of course, it’s always election season now. And for anyone young enough to not remember life before the internet, it’s pretty much always been election season, and maybe always will be. The very idea of it being a discreet “season,” separate from some other stretch of time in which elections are not happening or being talked about, likely makes little sense. I’m actually a few months older than current Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance (a first for me), and even I can only vaguely recall the pre-infinite-screaming-doomscroll-chyron version of our American Democracy in action. What’s more, the further we get from that simpler time, the easier it becomes to question my own memory of it. Were things ever actually better than they are now, or was I just younger and less cynical, with more future ahead of me to feel optimistic about? Were candidates actually more genuine and respectful toward the institutions of which they were vying to be a part, or were we just more susceptible to accepting biased official narratives as fact? Were things ever actually simpler, or did we just know less?Today, implicit bias is a given. There is so much information not just available to us, but thrust upon us daily, and so many avenues down which we may pursue it further according to our own personal tastes and prejudices, that even if a truly objective news source did somehow exist in the world, it would be all but impossible to identify it. And though we have certainly seen a fracturing within my lifetime of not just information or “the news,” but of reality itself, such that political leaders and those who cover them are no longer operating in good faith, or even from a shared understanding of the issues, we’ve also reached a place where it feels like most people know that too, and it doesn’t change a damn thing. As one of the authors I’m discussing here today – David Leo Rice – has posited for a while now, the zeitgeisty notion that we can somehow escape the matrix is not a particularly useful one. The systems within which we live – vague enormities like society, identity, and reality – do not have meaningful exteriors; only waveforms we might surf; permutations we might engage. When even the once-unifying concept of common sense no longer has a common definition, there is no out; only through.Enter Joey Truman.If you told me that the original draft of Truman’s Etiquette was a single typewriter scroll delivered in a shoebox along with some scribbled-on diner napkins, bodega receipts, and NYC subway maps, I’d absolutely believe you. Truman’s terse, incisive prose reads unfakably off the cuff (likely of a thrift store corduroy jacket), and yet still feels as lived-in as a Lower East Side squat. In this loosely organized catalog of personal anecdotes and common social situations – each appended with numbered directions for, yes, proper etiquette in same – he nimbly identifies the cracks in our foundations – the infrastructural niceties that we’re letting crumble in the name of technological advancement and capitalism run amok – and sets about duct-taping, and plastering, and slapdash painting over them as fast as he can manage. This slim volume had me laughing out loud with both its seemingly simple observations about 21st century humanity, and its palpable impatience at having to explain such seemingly simple observations to anyone.Covering everything from waiting rooms to crowded bars; cohabitating to co-parenting; dinner parties to book events (in between many, many screeds on common subway courtesy) Truman possesses a lowkey, DFW-esque gift for breaking down monolithic ideas about modern society into their most basic, component parts, such that they look so quaint and manageable that you’ll find yourself scratching your head in disbelief that no one’s ever quite addressed them in this way before. And more than that even, it feels as though he’s almost doing it by accident; like he’s not “writing” so much as just thinking on the page, and allowing us to watch as he dissects his daily routines – those of a proudly working-class small fish making his way in a big pond life – with a charmingly grumpy sincerity, and more honest-to-goodness heart than I’ve found in just about anything else I’ve read this year. With short, punchy chapters full of humor and ideas, Etiquette is a great book to read in those in-between moments, because every time you look up, you’ll see some way to apply its lessons right in front of you. It could just as easily be titled Don’t Be an Asshole: And Here’s How! Maybe take it on the subway.Alright. I know what some of you might be thinking. “Hey. Wait a minute. Isn’t Joey Truman a Whiskey Tit author? And didn’t they publish this Fitzgerald guy’s book too? What the heck? Who’s feeding us biased opinions now?” And you’re not wrong. Etiquette was, in fact, the first book I ever read from what is now my beloved small press home, and the above two paragraphs constitute the first review I wrote, at least in part, in hopes of introducing myself to them while shopping my own debut novel Troll. Guilty as charged. Now, none of that is to say I didn’t mean what I wrote, or that I don’t stand by it, because I absolutely did and do. I love Joey’s work. I probably wouldn’t make that Wallace comparison again today, but that’s more a product of my growth as a reader and reviewer than any kind of intentional deception or disingenuous flattery (knowing Joey, he’d probably prefer I hadn’t made it to begin with). But more than anything, I love that Joey doesn’t give a shit what I think. Or you. Or anyone. Just about any writer you talk to has a spiel about how they don’t care if they ever get famous – how they do it for the love, or the craft, or because they simply can’t do without – but deep down, I think most of us harbor at least small, quiet dreams of more traditional success. I’m not sure Joey does though.Having grown up in the DIY punk scene of Wyoming, Truman understands better than most what it means to have no audience, and no income, and just keep at it no matter what. He knows what he’s about. He lives his principles hard. And somehow, he still finds time to write like a busted fire hydrant. Etiquette is only one of nearly a dozen projects he’s published with Whiskey Tit, and that’s on top of his long-running SubStack Screed City. The dude legitimately can’t turn it off. And his bullshit-free brand of conviction can feel cleansing amidst the barking of the 21st century attention carnival. It’s not that he’s unbiased. It’s that he’s all bias. Which in the end, kind of amounts to the same thing. One gets the sense he’s not trying to convince you of anything except to think for yourself.As for me, if I write about a book, it’s pretty much always because I want you to read it. I won’t deny a partiality toward Whiskey Tit, or a propensity toward reviewing kindly the work of people I know and like, but I’ve never written anything I didn’t believe, or couldn’t back up if push came to shove. Indie Lit is a community, and not a huge one. Nothing is automatically tit for tat – ask anyone you like about that – but we’re all out here hustling in very similar boats, and there is unquestionably an incentive to be our own rising tide. Indie publishers do yeoperson’s work on infinitesimal margins. Every book they take on is a bet against the Big 5 house. A surprise sensation on the order of B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space or Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke can single-handedly keep a small press afloat, and all of us would love to be that for both our benefactors and our peers. As such, praise tends to be effusive, and truly uncharitable reviews are rare – generally reserved for books whose hype and/or financial backing are perceived as being undeserved, if not disqualifying toward the “indie” label altogether. All of which is to say, if I don’t like a book, I tend to just not write about it. As with our modern political climate, things can be simplistically binary in this regard, and there exists an ongoing discourse as to whether or not that’s a problem – the “praise or ignore” debate. If indie lit really is a community (as we so often claim), or an underground artistic movement of merit (as we hope to be seen), then how can we expect to be taken seriously when we’re not willing to provide each other, and our readers, with meaningful, nuanced critique? How will any of us become better writers – or even understand the ways in which we might need to – if we only ever talk about how great we all are? These are fair questions, to which I can see both sides. As an author, I’m practically a poster child for this conundrum. Having written a novel that courts controversy on every page, I fully braced for and expected some sort of negative feedback upon publication. I would, frankly, have welcomed the chance to engage. But a year-and-a-half later, I’ve yet to read a bad word about it. Another thing most any writer will tell you is that they want to “start conversations,” but again, just as with our us vs. them, all or nothing politics, honest, open-minded debate can be hard to come by.As a reviewer, on the other hand, I totally get it. Writing negative reviews is no fun (and just as much work as writing positive ones), especially when it comes to books barely anyone’s reading in the first place. If that makes me biased, then I guess to a degree, I’m biased. There’s a reason this column is called “Recommends”.Likewise, my fellow Whiskey Tit author Dan Hoyt wears his political biases right on his sleeve. His new novel Shit List is both an unapologetically broad, and line-item specific evisceration of the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Through barely-disguised caricatures of the whole unseemly cabal, as well as a kooky supporting cast that includes a clear stand-in for LeBron James, a hapless stand-in for that stand-in, and a guitar goddess turned unwitting cult leader, Hoyt attacks that tumultuous stretch of recent history like a man in the throes of an apoplectic trance (in NBA parlance, you might say he was writing lights out).Evoking nothing quite so much as the cockeyed absurdity of the great Tom Robbins, Hoyt’s characters pinball madly around Cleveland and DC, their disparate stories periodically pinging against one another by way of that adorable little critter on the book’s cover: a Whitehead’s Pygmy Squirrel that elicits intense bouts of empathetic shame and remorse in any person it comes near. As the grotesque President Kukla and his satirical (but again, only barely) sycophants work feverishly to seal borders, separate families, and repeal healthcare laws, the book slowly but steadily reconstructs the relentless dread of its era – that low-simmering, “oh God, what now?” nausea that accompanied each new day – until even the funniest one-liners stop being funny.And that’s the real power of Shit List. It may start off feeling a little goofy – a little immature even – but as it piles on the infuriating headlines, it reveals itself to be a honey-coated bear trap; an unhinged SNL sketch that drags on for months, until all the players have broken, and everyone just wants to go home. It’s not so much about parodying Trump as it is about the Trump Presidency marking the death of parody. No matter how many pointed jabs Hoyt takes at the Donald’s limited grasp of the NBA rulebook, or the Bible, or the English language, he never quite breaks through to a joke that feels outsized or over the top – a gag that goes “too far”. It’s all just a little too believable to laugh at, and that’s kind of the point. For Gen X’ers like Hoyt, and millennials like myself, who’ve relied on detached snark and “Tweeting through it” for decades to manage our political ennui, Shit List demands that we examine ourselves, and the world we’re leaving to future generations, more deeply. To ask what it says about us if we decide, as a country, to run this particular experiment back. Sure, it’s ok to let through an incredulous, inappropriate chuckle from time to time – we all have to stay sane somehow – but at the dawn of this still-young century, where events that happened as recently as last week can already start to feel fungible, and the powers that be are constantly working to revise and shape “the narrative” – wrestling for that 51% controlling interest in our fractured, shared reality – Hoyt refuses to let us forget a single, despicable detail.It’s hard to know how the extreme specificity of Shit List will play in another 10-20 years. So much has happened since that puts those first 100 days to shame, and even much of that has already been spun, spoonfed, compartmentalized, and forgotten by the endless churn of the 24-hour news cycle. For God’s sakes, the man was nearly assassinated twice in the last 100 days and we’ve already almost completely stopped talking about it. So if you’re having a hard time this election season laughing to keep from crying like Dan, or screaming on street corners like Joey, then perhaps your best bet is to step through the looking glass with the aforementioned David Leo Rice, and his revelatory The Berlin Wall (also from Whiskey Tit).Rice notably remarked in an interview he gave to this very site a few months ago, that he has always endeavored to “be a genre” unto himself, and speaking as someone who’s read most of his work and written fairly extensively about it, I feel pretty comfortable coming right out and saying that The Berlin Wall is both his most expansive, and most accessible novel to date. Zooming out from the spooky small towns that populate his previous books, this latest finds Rice operating on an international scale, vacuuming up whole countries like a late-stage Katamari and folding them back in on themselves in service of his cycloramic grand design. Indeed, The Berlin Wall could easily have swallowed up all 3,000 words of this article too, such is its ambitious, omnivorous scope, but to nutshell, in Rice’s alternate-timeline Europe, the non-italicized Berlin Wall is a living entity whose disparate chunks (including Uta, one of several rotating narrators) are working their way across the continent in hopes of reassembly. Whether their intention is to usher Europe into a newly divided era, or return it to an old one, is somehow beside the point. They simply feel drawn toward the accretion of solidity. Meanwhile, a wayward young man named Gyorgi is burrowing deeper by the day into a burgeoning eugenicist putsch (led first by a kind of method-acting troll demagogue, Ragnar, and later by the shapeshifting, teleporting, semi-corporeal figure of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik), in search of his own version of the comfortingly concrete. Concurrent to these, we also get Anika, a history professor descending into a kind of self-imposed Bavarian nostalgia cocoon as she attempts to rewrite German history so convincingly that she effectively alters German reality. Lars Von Trier also makes a brief, memorable appearance. This book is nuts y’all.With the fascism creep of the past decade clearly top of mind, Rice sets out to fasten signifiers to a whole host of ominous vagaries – to give form and shape to these nascent dangers in our midst, and in so doing, better map their ongoing self-sustenance. For regardless of all the reprehensible thoughts we read passing through the minds of his wandering players, with the exception of Breivik (who, despite his being a real person – or perhaps even because of it – behaves here more as the avatar of an idea than a functional character), none of them ever feels exactly evil – only lost, or compromised – and Rice finds a powerful empathy for all of them within the nexus of larger forces they’re simply trying to react to and survive. It’s a case not so much of the characters serving the plot as the characters being the plot – each of them a cog within wheels turning predestined, but which we still desperately hope to see them find a way to break.Rice’s nonjudgmental rendering of Gyorgi in particular, with his hardcoded longing for a traditional masculinity the world no longer values as it once did – the ways in which leaders like Ragnar and Breivik prey on reasonable insecurities felt by many men in the 21st century, only to insidiously slow-walk them toward a darker radicalization – make for some of The Berlin Wall’s most moving insights. There are passages wherein Gyorgi despairs at his physical and intellectual limitations, and his more existential lack of purpose, that feel near-universal in their human relatability, and when he joins a mob of Ragnar faithful in chanting “All hail the absolute!” it drives home exactly what such movements offer people, and what all of the book’s characters are ostensibly looking for: clarity, simplicity, certainty in a time of constant upheaval and complex change. Despite the Eurocentrism of the narrative, it’s impossible not to see in Gyorgi, and his persistent suspicion that he is operating entirely within the framework of some kind of globalized VR game, the scores of people emboldened into storming the U.S. capitol four years ago, only to be abandoned, dumbfounded, by their perceived leader as their fever broke and they were met with real world consequences on the other side; shocked that anything they’d done might actually matter.This breakdown between physical and virtual spaces, and the stratification of our shared reality, are themes Rice has explored throughout much of his previous work (most notably in his seminal essay “Long Live the Heroic Pervert” – maybe my single favorite piece of writing to yet emerge from this now half-cooked decade), but where the heroes of Angel House and The New House make their way toward enlightenment or ascension, the cast of The Berlin Wall seems harder pressed to find any path outside its deepening rabbit holes and rising seawalls. Tonally, the book can often feel like a psychedelic come-up – all rippling roots and skin and Déjà vu – that just refuses to peak. One gets the sense of being in the midst of something that hasn’t quite happened yet, and possibly never will. It sometimes takes characters hours to cross entire countries by car, while others walk for full days only to end up right where they started, their paths in physical space outlined behind them as though they were traipsing through Jell-O mold. As our existence becomes less concrete and more permeable, Rice’s writing grows ever less constrained by conventional narrative structure. At times, the book feels like it’s editing itself right in your hands.With both the plot, and Europe, fast folding in on themselves, Rice nimbly weaves together the threads in his tightening web of homegrown semiotics – the hard and soft illuminati, the Black Forest and the taiga, the Iron Curtain and the Living Wall – every piece encroaching inward like Birnam Wood on their own inexorable timelines until, with one deft final pull of his drawstrings, he cinches everything up tight – a surrealist cat’s cradle of past and future collapsed into a single, perpetual present. No matter how far Uta travels, one gets the sense she’ll someday return, in one form or another. No matter how beautifully winners like Anika and the Chancellor write their latest revisionist history books, papering over the past only dooms us to repeat it. “The communal forgetting that it’s happened before mingling with the communal hope that, soon enough, it’ll all be alright.”And so it’s election season. Still, forever, and always. There have been times in recent years when I felt certain that the rhetoric couldn’t get any uglier, the divisions any starker, the stakes any higher, but to hear the candidates and their most vocal opponents and supporters tell it, that never quite ends up being the case. Each election of my lifetime has been “the most consequential election of our lifetimes.” Each President we’ve ever elected has, for roughly half of us, spelled certain and irreversible doom. And yet, here we are, doing it all again. I’m not here to tell you who to vote for (though anyone who’s read literally anything I’ve ever written can likely guess my thoughts). I’m just here to tell you what to read to get through it. I may be biased toward Whiskey Tit, but that doesn’t mean our books don’t rock, or that I don’t rep other presses I love every bit as hard (anyone who’s read literally anything I’ve ever written knows that too). The indie lit review economy might be a little insular and self-congratulatory, but through the process of writing this article I think I’ve talked myself into being more mindful of that going forward. After all, at the level I, and the authors I write about, are all hustling on, pretty much all press is good press; all engagement is good engagement. And the kinda sad, but mostly common sensical truth of the matter is, everyone’s trying to sell you something here in late-stage capitalist America, pretty much all the time. All any of us can do is to take a cue from Dan Hoyt, Joey Truman, and David Leo Rice – to try to understand our own biases, and ride our chosen waves. Whether that means tuning in, dropping out, or burrowing on through to the other (which is also maybe the same) side. To quote Rice one last time, we can but hope that “The future will not resemble the present forever.”
On their first night alone together, Anne Cowan has gas, and is the type of modern woman to announce this mid-noir, center candlelight, right as Robert is pushing aside their T-bones. Tonight they’re Clean Plate Rangers, having tested each other’s manners—wrong knife, tines up, napkins on the table—but zilch, he’s certain, could have girded him for this.“What would you like me to do about that?”“Nothing, I guess,” she says, “unless you have something. Do you have anything? Phazyme?”They’re at the El Dorado Bed & Breakfast halfway between Carthage and Sedalia. This alone required some finagling, a detailed fabrication about a meeting Robert had in the area, and even still, it had to be on Anne’s terms. A hotel, for instance, was out of the question, but she’d supposed it’d be all right if it were a B&B, and all right so long as he made steak dinner in the bulking onsite oven, and if they discussed their future over wine, and agreed, if things felt natural, it would be all right to spend the night together, in each other’s arms.“No, I don’t.”The room is cramped with enormous tan furniture that can’t come apart nor be lifted, has been here forever, and will stay just as long. A mismatched bedroom set is mixed in with the couch and dining area, so they are as much in the chamber of coition as they are in the kitchen. A ceiling fan is fast over them and turned as bright as it can go, lighting the dumplings of skin beneath her sockets and the start of a unibrow. Her brown velvet dress matches the throw pillows, and soon, she could be between them, if things go all right.“Can you go down and ask?”“Down?”“Yeah,” she says. “The front desk might have some.”It’s a frivolous mission already, made more fabulous still considering that Robert does have Phazyme tucked in the side pocket of his messenger bag, where he keeps his wallet and pictures of Susan and the boys. He fusses for a moment, deciding whether to put back on his shoes, which require a production to tie, and he’s already gotten comfortable. Plus, El Dorado is carpeted all the way down, thick blue to every baseboard and over each stair. He opens the door to leave.“No shoes?”“I’ll just be fast,” he says.“Do you have a key?”“You’ll be here, won’t you?”“In case I’m indisposed when you get back.”He goes to the dresser where he’s placed the key and holds it up to her before sliding it into a front pocket, then leaves. To his right, a single mother and her children are trying to get into Room 4, but struggling with the key. The little daughter in blush overalls looks at him with credulous misery, and being the generous man he is, Robert walks over to help.“Let me get this for you, ma’am.”“It’s not ‘ma’am,’ it’s ‘miss,’” says the boy, who’s older than the girl, and wearing a too-large hat.“Quiet, James,” she says. Then, “Thank you,” to Robert.The boy’s got on his stinkface, and when the door comes open, pushes his sister in first then throws a big, green purse at her. The mother is too tired for patience or gratitude, nods at Robert and shuts him out. Through three inches of original oak, he can hear the squeals of the girl at the cruelty of brotherhood and the crash and bang of flung objects.He takes to the stairs, which threaten a spill when his socks slip on the carpeting. It feels as though there are infinite other carpets beneath it, filled with lint and accidents, dead with beetles and dust mites. At the bottom, beside a tower of ice-blue luggage, a mastiff puppy sleeps on a bath towel beside a dish of water. There isn’t much of a lobby—just a desk in the hallway—and no one is manning the counter. There’s no bell to ring, and once one minute passes, Robert considers going back upstairs and telling Anne he checked, he asked, and she’s out of luck. But without the Phazyme, she might not be all right, may not want to move forward or finish the wine, and he’s not sure when his next chance will be to see her overnight. Keeping waiting, he stares at a poorly composed still life of a gray bagel on a checkered blanket beside a tub of Kraft cream cheese, (two times the size of the bagel), and a plate of anchovies. It is signed Kojak. As Robert’s hope is failing, he hears the desk clerk’s voice in the next room: “I’ll be with you in a minute!”When the next minute passes and she still isn’t with him, and what felt like a miracle begins to act like something he’s dreamt, Robert follows the voice into the next room—the dining room—to find she had not been talking to him at all, but rather three supermodels sitting with their forearms on the tablecloth, and whispering to each other around an ewer of carnations. All three look up at the same time, and beam in a way that the room fills with daylight, then dims again to the glare of exposed lamp bulbs and extraordinary silence.“Hello,” he says. “Have you seen the clerk?”“Nice socks,” says the one with the blond bob.“Come sit,” says another.“Guys,” the third whispers, “what are you doing?”“What?” asks the first. “He could be here for the convention.”“What convention?” he asks, then again, “Have you seen her? Has she been in here?”“Come on,” the second one says again, patting the chair beside her.Robert goes to it and sits there, putting a napkin quickly over his lap, where he fears at the slightest suggestion, blood will flow and all life and comfort will be destroyed.“I only have a minute,” he says. “I need to ask the clerk something.”“Are you here to see Dr. Eadburg?”The one beside him slides her wine past the carnations. He takes a drink and gives it back. Behind them, a fireplace with a grand, white mantel is lined with porcelain lambs and foals. There is a patriotic urn on the end with a newspaper clipping framed above it. An orange map of Missouri is glassed-in above a peacock chair in the corner.“Never heard of him,” he says.The three look at each other and take a sip as if making a pact.“Okay,” the first one says. “We’ll tell you.”“That’s all right. I don’t mind.”“It’s important that you know,” says the second. “You’ll find out anyway. Dr. Eadburg is a prophet of God.”“Is that right?”“And we’re his wives,” says the third, “or we will be, in Heaven. He selected us three out of everybody in the world.”“I wonder why,” says Robert. “So, the prophet is right here in El Dorado?”“He’s at El Dorado.”“What do you mean ‘at’?”“He’s being wrongfully held at the correctional facility,” says the second, “for one hundred and seventy years.”“Oh, I see,” says Robert. “So, he’s a rapist and murderer?”“How could you say that?” asks the third. “Dr. Eadburg’s mind is God’s mind. His body is God’s body. His schmunt is God’s schmunt. He writes to us. He writes about the snake of Heaven. He loves us, and even if you hate him, he loves you, too. Even you. He’s your prophet. Even you.”“His schmunt is whose what?”“All his outcomes are blessings.”“Him in jail?” Robert asks.The second one laughs with anger. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” in singsong. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know who you’re talking about or who you’re talking to.”“We’ll finally meet tomorrow,” says the first.“You’re going to the jail?”“It’s the circumstances,” she says. “We can’t change the circumstances but we don’t have to accept them.”“Can’t he change the circumstances if he’s so God?”“You have such a rude way of talking,” says the third one. “No wonder you’re here alone.”The front desk clerk comes in from the kitchen, which, with its doors open, smells up the room with dust and bullion. Though perhaps not Eadburg’s cuppa, she’s nothing to laugh at in an empire waist top, crocheted at the neckline, where her clavicle fades under fat. She’s semi-blond, too, and would be blonder if she bathed, as her hair is parted down the middle and combed into two slick flaps on the sides of her head, shining dark. Her forehead sparkles with grease. She holds reheated frittatas and blackberry scones.“This is all we had,” she says. “I hope it’s enough.”Behind her shoulder, another still life is hung. On a red, one-dimensional table lacking the proper parallelograms, two ugly fruits are painted—perhaps mangos—crooked and parted, and appear as a doublet of pelletal breasts. Kojak tried using coffee to stain the background, causing the paper to ripple and scrunch.“What’s in the eggs?” the second one asks.“Rabbit and leeks.”They stick up their chins.“You think that’s gross, sweetheart?” Robert asks. “Wait until you see the prophet’s ding-dong.”The first one spits her wine on the tablecloth, tries to stand, but is too frail, appears to have something wrong with her hip, and lands back in her seat with a yelp.“Can I get you something, Mr. Dunn?” the clerk asks.“Phazyme?”All three brides go sage with nausea.“Right away.”
***
Upstairs, Anne has found Robert’s Phazyme as well as the photos of his kids, and is standing by the bed, leaning on the frame, flicking through them. She isn’t mad, but wants to meet them, thinks they’re “adorable,” that they remind her of her nephews in Salt Lake whose mother was in the hospital all the time with valve disease. Robert says yes, okay, that she can meet them, but first, he needs to know she’s serious, that she’s starting to fall in love, and he lays her bare-ass on the Bargello quilt, has sex with her in an ill way that requires little motion or participation on the woman end, and doesn’t think about Susan or the boys, who are all over the state tonight at sleepovers and other forms of suffering. Gall-slow and knocking, it is the same act as usual—all the culture sucked out of it, all the pageantry—with just the noise of slapping testicles on perineum in a beating extraction.
Matthew Kinlin: In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Death states to Max von Sydow as the medieval knight: “Most people think neither of death nor nothingness.” Your new collection of stories, Red Flags(House of Vlad, 2024), offers characters the opportunity to think about their own deaths as experienced, often occurring in gruesome and funny ways. What motivated you to write about this confrontation with death and non-existence?Charlene Elsby: Hello, Matthew! It’s funny I should hear from you just now, which I’ll explain in just a moment. But first the answer to your question. I was at home when the Facebook group for the neighbourhood started showing up in my notifications, as a woman had been hit and dragged at the intersection outside my apartment. Now I’ve always been a little taken aback at how we’re all able to go about our lives, given that death threatens us nearly constantly. And it reminded me of a pamphlet that I was given at a palliative care house when we were watching my stepmother pass. For a couple of weeks we were there nearly constantly, my father sleeping in a chair next to her bed, and I going home nights and returning in the day to bring food and allow him time to go home to bathe. The pamphlet told us that we should not expect our loved ones to have any new or profound thoughts or insights as they approach the other side–and that while we often expect this of the dying, it is unfair to impose upon them like that. Thus I wrote the first story of the book, and the other seven following the same general theme.Now it’s interesting that you should bring this up now, as I’ve just awoken in my chair and, in that space between sleep and waking, I saw my stepmother’s head in what turned out to be a scarf bunched around a hanger on the drying rack. A psychic told me three months ago that there was a woman with short, curly hair watching over me, and I believed that it was her. When she passed, I used to have dreams that she was calling me from farther and farther distances away, until one day she appeared in full opacity, to tell me that she was fine. Those dreams completely ended after that final encounter, so it was strange to be thinking of this when you wrote to me.Does the air seem to have a strange scent where you are?MK: There are some strange coincidences in what you have just described. As we are speaking, there is a thunderstorm. It is the first one in a long time. This week has been unusually hot for England in September, I assume due to the climate crisis. It was really hot this week and that changed today to an intense heaviness and a charged smell in the air, some atmospheric tension. I can hear thunder breaking. I am staying at my boyfriend’s family home today and as I got out my laptop, his mother’s scarf fell off the end of the couch. I have been having vivid dreams over the last few weeks but they are hard to recall. It’s emotional to hear about the dreams of your stepmother calling you and her then telling you she was OK. Do you believe in coincidences? The narrator of your story “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” states: “I was supposed to be here.” Are the most trivial of details, such as a crease in a scarf, part of some predestination? I’m also thinking of the initial name for August Strindberg’s Occult Diary, which was Strange Coincidences and Inexplicable Events. Today’s date is Saturday 21st September. When I look at Strindberg’s diaries, he writes on September 19th, 1896: “Letter from Hedlund about the Cyclone in Paris… The night after this a storm broke out at midnight and lasted until 2.” He writes nothing again until September 23rd. Strindberg often seems to link scarves and death. He writes: “In the morning when I awoke I saw Harriet life-size dead on my sofa. She had a white scarf across her mouth; in a white blouse with a black skirt.” Like yourself, he saw a human face in a scarf: “On Tuesday 28 April in the morning I saw a skull (made of my scarf and petit Larousse).” Finally, he writes, “A woman by the stream when we were about to leave: she had a scarf over her head but a light band across her forehead with a red circle and a half moon; looked like a blood stain.” Upon reading this, I thought of the photograph of yourself in Red Flags, completely covered in blood.CE: I do believe in strange coincidences. I believe we are supposed to be here, discussing scarves beneath Magritte’s The Lovers II. I bought the print after seeing it in Belgium and according to the curator’s note at the museum, the people in Magritte’s paintings are covered in cloth because they are dead, and one of the people in this painting is his mother.That same journey, I happened by accident upon the portrait of Strindberg by Edvard Munch in the Museum De Reede in Antwerp. I recognized it immediately from the cover of the Penguin translation of Inferno and From an Occult Diary I used to carry around as a teen. But never before had I noticed the spelling error in Strindberg’s name–and it’s because it wasn’t there. At some point, the error in the lithograph was corrected but in person, there it was, or rather, there it wasn’t–a missing R. I’d like to know where that symbol has gone. Does a missing R mean anything to you?The blood has been there since Hexis, Matthew. I filmed a reading and put the screenshot on Youtube. A still from that video was already used on the cover of Excuse Me Mag. This is another still that Brian took from my Instagram. The blood is still there, Matthew. Get it off, get it off, get it off. Do you have a scarf I could borrow to wipe it away, or are your scarves woven with death in the fibres?The coincidences increase in frequency the closer to our fate we become.MK: I can feel these coincidences intensify as we speak. I have the same Penguin edition with the same Munch cover. This week, I have been watching over and over a scene from a 1980 TV movie of Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven about a man whose dreams can distort past and present reality. In this scene he is put under hypnosis and told to have a dream about a horse once he hears a specific word. The word is Antwerp.I keep thinking about the dream you had. I keep thinking how red flags are technically the same as red scarves. Maybe all scarves are woven with death.The missing letter R has meaning to me. When I was a teenager, a dog in Mallorca tore my hand open. There was blood then too, Charlene. When I think of R, I hear the growling sound of the dog. I think the nurse in Romeo and Juliet (two dead lovers) calls the letter R, “the dog’s name.” When I look in Strindberg’s diaries, he puts dog, horse and Munch all together in two lines on 21st February, 1896: “The carnassial tooth = the horse’s hoof fell after much noise during the night. The dog in Munch’s yard.”His next line is: “The magic whip in Luxembourg.” I’m starting to feel afraid. Are we being punished by some unknown daemon? In your story “A Little More Spontaneous”, the narrator states: “Fate is laughing at me.” What is this conspiracy? Are we being whipped? I’ve just found out that the first German and Portuguese editions of Le Guin’s novel translate as Die Geißel des Himmels and O flagelo dos céus, which literally means: “the scourge [or whip] of heaven”. The second edition translates as: “the other side of the dream”. Maybe the dead live on the other side of our dreams.CE: I refuse to dream of a horse. I won’t have it! All that sobbing. The coachman will continue to beat the horse as soon as you let go of its neck. It’s all in the unseen.You’re right that we are being whipped, and I think maybe it’s because I’ve been missing something. I have always supported the concept of an other side that is the unseen aspect of the visible / conceivable. But the way in which someone or something appears in a dream is another form of presentation. If that’s where the dead are, it would explain a lot. A lot of a lot.In the dream, there is some other form of action in which we are not engaged. And by that I mean that while we act, the action is passive, and I seem to have no control over what is occurring or what it is that I do. If consciousness is the realm of activity and there is another realm where the activity is passive, then that explains how death as the ceasing of action finds its place on the other ends of dreams. But what if we pulled the cord?(I think we have to.)MK: I’m afraid again, to pull the cord. It would be like unravelling the thread of a scarf and I am not sure where we would end up. Where the scarf ends or the air begins? There’s so many molecules in heaven. I remember finding a paperback copy of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata in a second-hand shop as a teenager. It filled my mind with a strange green fog.Nietzsche wandering from his residence to the Piazza Carlo Alberto on 3rd January 1889. It was here he saw the horse being whipped. It was inside this elegant square that his mind unravelled in red threads. Is consciousness a square or a circle? Only a few months before Nietzsche met his pale horse of Death, he started writing letters to Strindberg in the winter of 1888. Nietzsche wrote to him, “I believe that I have become familiar with more evil and more questionable worlds of thought than anyone else, but only because it lies in my nature to love what lies apart.” What is this land of exile where death dances with madness? What is this realm where activity is passive? I am trapped inside my dreams. I have dreams of the dead too, like you told me before. In the dream, I am by the sea. I have never lived by the sea. But in the dream of the dead, there is always water. Where are we floating to? In your story “A Little More Spontaneous”, you write, “Being a dead person was as free as it gets.” A person at the moment of death. It’s like waiting to fall asleep; we are unable to pinpoint the moment when the sea sweeps us away. I wonder how it felt when the azure sky came crashing down in Turin. CE: If consciousness were going to be any shape, it would be a sphere, but I can’t help but wonder at the next step that goes beyond our three-dimensional representation of perfection. You know that the code for all that is, is contained within the ratio of the diameter to the radius, and that the “heavens” as they were called (Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc.) are embodiments of the equidistance from centre that defines material perfection. The human head approximates their shape as best it can and tries to reach those other spheres in the skies, sitting atop the human body as it does. I’m tired of this emaciated notion of causality that puts all precedence in the past. The future is as much a cause of the present as anything that’s happened before, and it is what chains us and confines us in all present actions. The threat of it drowns us in limitations and contrives to bury us in limitations–the fact that it does not exist is not a limit to its power. We must instead conclude that what does not exist is a primary and immediate cause of all that is. Have you read By the Open Sea? I’ve just opened it to a random page that makes me concerned for you: “He slept badly in spite of all his attempts to regulate his dreams by strong auto-suggestions before falling asleep. Sometimes he awoke from a dream that he was a bell-buoy, drifting and drifting in search of a shore on which he could be thrown. And in his sleep he had pressed close against the bedstead, so as to feel the contact of some object, even if it were an inanimate one.”It seems very lonely.MK: I’ve not read By the Open Sea but will do so. Strindberg is a strikingly lonely figure. I think about The Ghost Sonata where spirits appear in bright daylight. My dreams are lonely realms. I think Deleuze spoke about the aim of his teachings was to reconcile ourselves with our own solitude. The open sea brings me back to Bergman and to the opening of the interview where a man meets Death, which brings me back to Red Flags. Consciousness encounters non-existence for a few fleeting moments which are like an eternity upon Death’s oceanic cloak, the endless crashing of waves upon a stone beach. In this interview, we have come upon the following possible points:
1. The dead exist on the other side of dreams.2. Death, like dreaming consciousness, as a form of passive activity.3. Death, like the future, as a form of non-existence acting on the present.4. Death corrupts the metaphysical rules of causality.
What is the solitude of death? I think of the stars above the sea, globes of fire that as you say, mirror the imperfect human head. Archimedes writing On the Sphere and Cylinder, which mirrors the human head and trunk. Cicero cleaning away the overgrown bushes on his tomb. Every equation is like a grave. Where are the stars leading? In Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly, Karin explains: “The door opened, but the god was a spider.”One door at the end of a corridor. What do you see?CE: I see a fire, and I trust it. It is unlike the fires that consume materiality, that burn us. This fire consumes the psyche, and relieves it of our bodies. It is contained in the room where I left it and the only flame that hasn’t yet disappointed me.Go for a walk?MK: I will trust the fire too, for it is like a mirror or an ocean. I am walking beside you. With burnt hands, Strindberg writes: “Seven roses, Seven fires and a white dove.” Any final thoughts?CE: Just that we might summon the doctor, as did the Strindberg of June 1908: “Dreadful days! So dreadful, that I shall cease to describe them! Pray God simply to be allowed to die! away from this horrible bodily and spiritual pain!”Doctor summoned.Exeunt.Order 'Red Flags' by Charlene Elsby here
You wouldn’t guess it looking at me now, but I had a pretty ordinary childhood and early adulthood. My parents weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. I grew up in one of those suburbs where every house is a variation of four basic designs. I went to a state school for college and took out student loans. I got a job in a satellite city which had nothing to do with what I studied in university. Along the way, I had several more or less serious relationships which, by the time I was twenty six, made me rethink my definition of love.Anyways, all of that changed, kind of got lost in terms of my identity, when I became a mining camp in South America.I should explain.I did one of those DNA/ancestry tests and found out, along with the fact I’m not even a little bit Irish, that my body contained a very scarce earth mineral. I didn’t know anything about the mineral at the time. For legal reasons I can’t tell you what it was. All I can say is you probably interact with it every day. It is used to make a very small but essential component in a technology you could certainly live without, but with a markedly lower quality of life.So I found out I was largely Scottish (what?!) and I also contained this random mineral and I needed to cut back on sugars because I’m genetically predisposed to diabetes, but I got on with my life. I stopped eating cereal for breakfast and the movie Braveheart hit somewhat different, but other than that, no big deal. Except I started to get these letters and emails with offers to buy the mineral rights to my body. I ignored them at first, because it seemed like a ridiculous premise, but then the mayor showed up at my door.“James!” he said. “May I call you Jim?”“It’s the same number of syllables, but sure.”“Jim, I’d like to talk to you about a little proposition.”I could see where this was going. “Sir—”“Now hold on a second. I want to ask you to sell your mineral rights to the city. Opening a mine in your body would be a big thing for our town. It’d mean jobs for a lot of people and growth for our struggling businesses. Not to mention, it would help me out a great deal in the upcoming election, and then I’d be in a position to help you.”I could see the reasoning. It weighed kind of heavy on me. But I also didn’t want to be mined, didn’t know what I would be after the process, so I politely refused.“Jim,” he said, “I am so disappointed in you.”So they filed a petition for eminent domain to obtain the rights to mine this rare essential mineral from my body, and they won. They had vastly better lawyers. In retrospect, I like to imagine my lawyers, by comparison, as hand-puppets who are comically bungling the legal process. A flurry of felt and misplaced documents while the tall one flapped, “I thought you were supposed to file the grievance for harassment of our client”, and the short one would respond, “Harassment? You’re the biggest ass I know!” Sorry, I harbor a lot of resentment from the experience.We lost in court. I couldn’t stop it. And even though I was opposed to it, there was a kind of wild exuberance in those early days. Hungrily, they used pressured water to blow off my top soil, revealing rich veins of ore for the drills and bulldozers to excavate. They carved great pits in me ringed by long ramps for trucks to haul out the essential minerals from my body. They used blast charges to break up the larger rocks and expose deeper deposits.Everybody made money, and not just the people directly profiting on my scarce earth mineral. The local university received a nice endowment and brought in some of the top minds in engineering. A wife of one of the big-wigs in the mining company was a former ballerina, I think, so her husband helped build an opera house near downtown. This whole new arts district sprung up after that with nice restaurants and boutique stores and increasingly expensive art galleries that locals couldn’t afford. After a few years, I could sense the city’s feeling about the mine, and me, had shifted. I would be at a party in the backyard of a small old house, the kind of house realtors now described as “craftsman” when they listed them for 3x their old value, and somebody would say something. About how the city had lost some of its charm, or how a lot of the poorer (if I’m being honest, minority) residents were being priced out of their homes and businesses by all the affluent (white) newcomers. Who were always referred to as Californians, even if they weren’t. Somebody would mention that they have a friend who’s a doctor and their friend had told them they were seeing more and more children born with heart defects and they think it was from the runoff at the mine.And then people would remember that I kinda sorta am the mine (people would sometimes forget because by then I wore a lot of baggier clothes to hide my scarred landscape). They’d apologize and do the whole, “That’s just what I heard,” thing.And I would say to them, “No, I get it. I agree! But there’s nothing I can do.”There would be an awkward feeling at the party after that. The taste of the local craft beer would be less hoppy. I’d make some excuse to leave early, and then I made excuses to not go in the first place. And then I stopped getting invited to things at all, which I told myself was what I wanted.At that point I was in my early thirties, still paying off the student loans, and the city had grown out and then surrounded our satellite (not a little bit fueled by the mine). The scandal with the runoff and the heart defects briefly made national headlines. A question actually got asked about it at one of the Democratic national debates—I really liked what Elizabeth Warren had to say (sigh). There was a protest at me for a couple of weeks, if you can imagine how that feels. And then they closed the mine and sold my mineral rights to a firm out of China. I had some suspicions, had seen a lot of new faces in and around the mine, and then the mayor confirmed it.“Jim,” he said, “The city council, the city planner, the railroad commission…well, we all talked about it and we think the best thing we can do for the city is move on from the mine.”I didn’t know what to say at first. And when I did, I thought better of it.You might disagree, but I’ve learned from past relationships that when someone says they’re leaving you (or, in this case, that you’re leaving them) it’s pretty pointless to argue and can only lead to hurt feelings. You ask what you did wrong, what you could have done better, and find out she doesn’t like how passive you are. And when you say you were just trying to go with the flow, she asks why, in finger quotes, “going with the flow”, means that every evening y’all get dinner delivered and watch Netflix/HBO/Disney+. You suddenly have to revise everything about yourself and your relationship, because you always appreciated those evenings settling in on the couch with her, coming home from a job you didn’t fully understand.So I didn’t make a fuss about it. I left this city my essential mineral had helped build, and the Chinese firm placed me in a narrow valley which had been carved by glaciers over many millennia. The glaciers were all gone now, but the mountains remained, and a river ran between them which emptied into the sea through a Pacific port city (I can’t remember the name. I never had a chance to visit). It was rather stunning and for a while, as they brought in the mining equipment and built sheds and a refinery out of aluminum siding, cinder block dormitories and outhouses for the miners, brought in modular housing for management, as miles of pipes were laid to bring up water from the river—Forgive me, where was I?So they placed me in this valley carved by glaciers, and while the camp was being built, I got to hike the hills, go up into the mountains. I’d look down at the mining camp, look down the valley at the local village, the adobe and rust colored buildings, the green and yellow fields being farmed. I would turn to my security contractor—one or more would always accompany me—and I would point and ask if we could visit. And they would shake their heads. Just to eat, I would gesture. No, no, they would shake their heads.Still, it was a nice break, rather joyful being up there, the smell of the earth. But once the work got started, I didn’t get out much again. My experience as a mine had been different when I was located outside a major city. I would watch the trucks go in and out of me. As each new pit was dug I could feel the detritus, the tailings, moved and dumped into the last disused pit inside me. But there was so much I hadn’t seen which I had been kind of oblivious to as I was locked in my day-to-day or sat at home, scrolling Instagram, ordering food for delivery.There at the mining camp, there wasn’t any hiding it, that rough work reopening the mine. The filled pits were dug out again. Dams were carved into me and filled with the runoff and debris, the water variably a metallic yellow or azure blue. Great mounds of tailings were set around me. When the wind came through the camp it would create a cloud of dirt and gravel which would hang at the level of your mouth and eyes until it rolled down the valley, following the river.At night local diggers would mine with picks and shovels and buckets. They built these shacks or set up tents at the periphery of me and dug down, made rough mine shafts into my fingers and toes. I wouldn’t feel it while they dug during the night, but in the morning there was tingling in my extremities. Even though I didn’t tell anyone, couldn’t tell anyone, didn’t speak the language, I watched as more and more uniformed men with guns showed up around the camp.I think I knew what was going to happen.And then everything did.The security forces cracked down on the local diggers. The locals protested and blocked the roads into the mines. More security forces and the military came in to break up the protests. The protesters threw rocks. The military had guns. The roads were cleared, but costs had gone up and output had diminished. The company cut staff, denied raises. The miners went on strike. The local diggers continued to dig, but had to take greater risks. There were accidents. Some diggers lit tires on fire to try to break up some rock. They were poisoned by the smoke and nearly died. The strike was broken by the government with some concessions made for raises, but corners were cut at the mine. Farmers complained that some of their cattle died after drinking at a nearby stream. The company trucked in water. I saw all that coming. I didn’t expect the flood.I don’t know what I could have done. Even if I knew, I didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t have much of a chance to learn. The miners had enough of their work from the day to eat with me in the canteen. There was a security contractor I nicknamed Kurt, and some evenings he would sit down with me and play cards while he worked on a fifth of vodka or rum. And I would try to talk to him, but he didn’t really say anything. Therefore, ‘Kurt’.Still, when the dam failed and the tailings flooded down into the river, and the river flooded the village downstream, it was my dam. It was my inattention to detail, my callousness, my attempt to cut corners, maybe knowing that if the dam broke, it wouldn’t have to be me who paid for it. Because I didn’t want to pay so much for it, for the lifestyle I’d had growing up in the states that I didn’t think, or really didn’t care, to live without. So it was my dirt and debris and polluted water, flooding that village and killing those 17 people.I think they were mostly the very old or the very young.The company paid those families the cost of a life, about 120k, and they built for the villagers a brand new village. And the mining continued, until at some point there wasn’t any more me left to mine. It actually took going past that point. It took the cave-in of my left cheek, for my lungs to collapse, and finally a dip in the stock market, an inevitable tragedy experienced by a few after several tragedies of the many, before the mining actually stopped.Nobody told me it would happen. It didn’t happen all at once.At first the equipment left, and then some days later the workers, and then the security personnel. I was empty for a while, there in that great valley carved by glaciers, amid the slanted cinderblock buildings. But then armed rebels came in and claimed me. They brought in local diggers who surveyed my last ribs, talked about mining into the spine of me. They shook their heads. The rebels pointed their AK-47s and then the diggers tried for months.They tried, painfully, and the rebels became increasingly quarrelsome with the diggers and each other, until the winter/summer rains came and they quit the mine, went off to raid the local villages once more for supplies, and then go north. It rained and rained. I waited for something to happen. I watched the muddy road that ran up to me and tried my best to stay dry. And then an old woman, definitely a local, came and she placed flowers against the heart of me, and she got down on her knees, there in the mud, and she prayed. I am sure she was grieving the death of a digger, but the way I felt, I was a thing to be grieved too, and not totally for myself, for the death of the mine too, and all the potential that I had carried so deeply.What I’d become, I don’t know how to put it into words. I had been beautiful once. I know that isn’t attractive for a man to say about himself. But I look back at old pictures of me, and I really was something to look at, even though I didn’t know it at the time.I’d stopped looking at myself in the mirror a long time ago. I think I disassociated from my body. I think it was something I needed to do or else I would have lost it. But for once I took a look at myself. Everything that had been done in the mine was written into my skin and muscle, fat and bone. What hadn’t been excavated was mostly debris. There were these rivulets of waste running off my abdomen, pooling around my hip bones.But more than that, people had died in me. I was a crime scene. I was a cemetary. I had been gutted and fished and swallowed up, time and again. I had been displaced, not only my being, but also the various parts of me, across the world. I didn’t know how to talk to people anymore, because—let’s say that you ask me about the weather—I don’t know if you mean the weather here or at my elbow, my left shin, behind my right ear. I stammer. My fluency—let me try to get this right—my ability to speak and to talk about myself and my place in the world and all of the things going on in it.I’m sorry. Please forgive me.I really meant to say something just then, but I can’t tell you now what it was. There’s so much to it, and so little left of me.So I watched the woman pray in the mud, and I tried to pray with her. She crossed herself and then got up and then she walked away.And so I got up, and nobody tried to stop me, and I used every last dollar and sol that I had hidden away, and I went home, back to the U.S. It took a long time, and there was some hard going along the way, but I finally came home, and I found the city had prospered. It had shaken off its roots as a mining town, and it was now this beautiful gem of a city, but the mayor had lost his seat (which I was happy to see). Where my mine had been was now a golf course and a shopping complex.I was getting a coffee with a friend there just the other day. We spent the afternoon catching up; she’d recently gotten engaged and I was so happy for her I didn’t really go into my stuff. It was late November and she asked if we could talk and shop. We were in a store, I won’t tell you which, but I had this undeniable feeling a certain product contained a very small part of me. I picked it up; I turned it over. I looked at the price. I tried to calculate how much it would cost to buy back everything, all of me, to pay for all of the damage to everyone and everything. The math was beyond my imagination.So I put it back. I can’t really afford to be frivolous right now. I’m still paying off my student loans.
