David Kuhnlein's books include Bloodletter (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2024), Die Closer to Me (Merigold Independent, 2023), Decay Never Came (Maximus Books, 2023), and his movie reviews are collected in the zine Six Six Six. He co-edited the horror anthology Lizard Brain (tragickal, 2024) and his book of stories Ezra's Head (tragickal) is forthcoming. David is online @princessbl00d and his website is davidkuhnlein.comMikita Brottman, Thirteen Girls(Nine-Banded Books, 2012)Instead of focusing on the criminal act itself, Thirteen Girls steeps us in its aftermath, in the endless expanse that opens up only after the shock wears off. In an expository essay accompanying the book, Brottman acknowledges that her thirst for true crime is not due to the promise of violence but “the lure of peripheral details.” Small black and white polaroids act as portals into each chapter, shuttling us into the absence left behind by the dead girls: A messy bedroom, a white-sheeted figure atop a gurney, a winding country road surrounded by deciduous trees. These blurry figures behave like Proust’s transportive cookies, a couple details are enough to unfurl entire worlds. These vignettes are not told from the perspectives of infamous killers, but from their adjacent, often ignored, survivors: A grieving mother, a nosy neighbor, a child whose father was dating one of the victims. These stories are told in the comedown, after the blood’s been scrubbed. Voices gathered from the shadowed periphery. If a crack in a teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead, as W.H. Auden’s epigraph suggests, imagine where a fatal wound in a young girl might lead. I enjoy a book that pieces itself together slowly, makes me do a bit of work. Books are best when playful, flirtatious. No one wants everything straight away. One publisher who rejected the manuscript said, “these stories are just too stark and unforthcoming to be satisfying…You are left with a sense of ugly contingency and meaninglessness.” In response, Brottman writes the best lines in the book: “In real life there is no payoff, no closure. The truth about dead girls is this: In the end, they are all forgotten.”Joseph McElroy, Hind’s Kidnap (Republished by Dzanc Books, 2021)The first section of Hind’s Kidnap follows Jack Hind, a six foot seven inch man who forgoes his most intimate relationships in order to rekindle the long cooled kidnap of a boy named Hershey Laurel who went missing six or seven years prior. Hind moves nimbly through New York City in a deceptively straightforward narrative. Deceptive because the deeper into the novel we travel, the more beautiful and strange McElroy’s sentences become. Dig deep enough and phrases become fossils — their beauty evoking impressions left behind from previous sentences, phrases, words.You, like Jack, will find clues glimmering everywhere. In the names of characters, for example: Beecher, Ash, Ivy, Laurel, and Wood, it’s easy to read into the organic growth that these names denote. “There was this constant danger of letting things lure you off course just by being themselves.” Statements spoken to Hind double as leads for the reader. Long-legged phrases spider out with multiplicities of meaning. The figure of the “stand-in” is a common thread weaved throughout, the main insistence of this is that Hind was adopted and was raised by his guardian (a replacement of sorts) as opposed to his birth parents. As readers we grapple for a way in, or a way back, as Hind does: “Hind had again found an opening through the now slag-thick, sea-dense, reverend mugginess of the August heat, toward the case’s last, inner darkness where he could prove…he wasn’t nuts and Hershey Laurel existed trapped.”This book is both the pointing finger and the moon, even if sometimes we’re stuck looking at the finger. Try to swivel your head before all that beauty bleeds into the background. If instead this book were made of water, I might submerge my head in it and open my eyes to see every tributary at once, its every bank and tide, rather than stay stranded on the island of a particular passage. Alas. At 600 pages, it might seem as if everything has been said, and yet. Hind’s height, the guardian’s obsessive grammar, sometimes it’s a bit over my head, not unlike a pullup bar that, over time, page by page, I work myself up to. And soon I’ll not only be able to see it, but I’ll be stronger for it. Even if there was never anything there to see, or if this complex way of seeing is impossible. The means, an end in itself. The clue, a reason to keep going.Jimmy Doom, That Fountain Ain’t Gonna Grant Your Wish(Independently Published, 2023)Detroit legend Jimmy Doom graced my very humble reading series at Cafe 1923 a few months back. I met him at the Hamtramck Labor Day festival. He asked about my Misery Tourism T-shirt and we talked about writing. He told me about his Substack, which has been going for nearly three years straight, the only daily fiction Substack in existence. At last count he has over 1300 original stories. Over an NA beer Jimmy tells me that kids these days worry too much about editing, that stories should be written like Ramones songs, fast and hard, you might miss a few notes but so be it. And sure, out of the thousands of stories he’s written some don’t hit as hard. But honestly, most of them hit. And besides, this book is a collection of his best. One page I’m crying, the next laughing. And that was what it was like listening to him read at the cafe. People tearing up at the end of one story, laughing at the beginning of the next. These are powerful character-driven stories about everyday people. Even better, they all take place in Detroit.Jesse Hilson, The Tattletales (Prism Thread Books, 2023)Jesse Hilson’s newest book The Tattletales takes the shape of a western noir. We follow Darryl Winter, a private detective estranged from his kin who unconvincingly says he wants to quit the booze and return to them. He seems content using his job as an excuse to do what he wants, which includes getting a tug job involving a block of wood and some burlap, and spying on his boss’s hot Swedish wife. At the end of both of Hilson’s novels (The Tattletales and Blood Trip), ambiguity abounds. His last pages break bodies past their word count. As cold and satisfying as being on the right end of a gun. Headlights glimmer across the smoking piece. Open roads beckon the shooter. Thankfully, Hilson has hidden a few pieces of the puzzle. Hilson not only publishes genre fiction, but beautiful poetry and delectable criticism. It takes a strong work ethic to read great literature but write genre fiction. The world is just as grateful for Sara Gran and Josh Malerman as it is for their more demanding and difficult counterparts. Sometimes I crave a mental movie. The Tattletales flows clean and easy as a two stroke motor boat on a freshwater river. Hilson’s narrative guides us gently. He’s packed your lunch, but left a couple of bones in the fish. Chew slowly.Babak Lakghomi, South (Dundurn Press, 2023)I finished reading South on an airplane traveling to California last weekend for a friend’s wedding. Reading a book while suspended in the clouds, in that dreamy and tenuous space, can amplify novelistic elements in surprising ways. The main character of South is known as B, who willingly takes a journalistic assignment in the south of an unnamed country. He arrives on a hostile oil rig where no one is forthcoming with information except for one character known as the Assistant Cook, although that title doesn’t correspond to his job. No matter, he quickly goes missing. Several people are possibly executed by the State. If any are lucky enough to resurface, they appear fundamentally changed. In one of B’s dreams, the only witnesses to atrocities have nothing where their mouths should be, and their bowl-shaped heads accumulate soup that they can’t eat until it rots. Lakghomi strikes a match between humor and horror. His stark, surreal language illuminates the mysterious peripheries of our earthly lives. “The leaves of the trees were made of ash and the sun rays were grey.” I enjoyed the parallel of B willingly driving to a place where “everyone is always thirsty” and me vacationing in a state that was actually on fire. When my friend and I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and pointed out the beauty of the fog as it rolled off the hills, that was when we smelled that the fog was not fog but smoke, and we laughed. Riddled with bureaucratic strangleholds and miscommunications, South is indebted to Kafka in the best of ways.Michael Salu, Red Earth(Calamari Archive, 2023)“Let us go home/ where no pain can live.” These are the opening lines of what reveals itself to be an experimental talk show. The creative portion of the text can be read in one sitting. The last section is a process essay in which Salu discusses his Red Earth project, a multimodal experiment. A QR code on the back leads us to its digital components: photography, video, et cetera. His essay traces the feedback loops that tangle themselves between culture, language, and art. Salu also links early AI tech back to Asia and Africa and questions the Western insistence on progress and truth (whatever those things might be). For example, Hollywood, AI, or porn might digitally represent humans without scars, striation, or feelings, which not only has the potential to become a horrifying ideal for ourselves, but also “what we covet (or think we covet).” Red Earth is a page-turner, but not in the typical way of a plot-driven narrative. I honestly felt like I was listening to a talk show, not reading a book, so it came naturally to let the rhythm of Salu’s voice wash over me like sound, the way I do when listening to my non-rewindable radio. I’m a fan of Calamari Archive and its corresponding 5cense blog and Sleepingfish magazine (this is me recommending the press as a whole, other recent favs include Math Class, Marsupial, Divorcer…in addition to this, they’re putting Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric back into print). But with other Calamari titles, I’ve spent more time savoring sentences or pages. Garielle Lutz has labeled the ends of this spectrum as “page-turning” and “page-hugging.” Of course, these are ends of an imaginary spectrum, but Salu has taken a step away from this spectrum entirely. Red Earth is propelled by strong voices (Salu himself says he’s influenced by Dante and epic poetry), rather than by narrative or with a focus on language. We’re haunted by talkative ghosts, who call in to the show to discuss death, history, and violence. “Someone said we live in words,/ but yet with words we chase the indescribable.” Self-annihilating sentences like this mimic the truth-seeking theme of Red Earth, allowing us to momentarily “witness unlit corners of our world ever-present within us.”G. Matthew Mapes, Denaturing Sonnets for Souls Loved by Electricity (Independently Published, 2024)G. Matthew Mapes book of poems Denaturing Sonnets for Souls Loved by Electricity doubles as a grimoire in which enchantment is an end in itself. Like any decent occult knowledge, these poems should be experienced firsthand — do yourself a favor and read them aloud, or even better, find Mapes reading them himself on YouTube. The book’s title is a playful reversal of George Russell’s album Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature. Russell was a music theorist and composer who, according to Mapes, “had a huge influence on 20th century music and music theory.” Alliteration and repetition in Mapes’s work functions similar to the inner voice of Russell’s piano, dashing itself into the hour-long live album. In Mapes’s poem “abandoning the body” he writes, “kneel on a pillow as you portray your accelerant,” the word pour sonically hidden in the word portray. Not once is fire mentioned in the poem, and yet flames are evoked with words such as “extinguished,” “raspberries,” and the phrase “brighter than 1000 vanities.” I feel commanded by this poem, as its adhering recipient, to both pour and portray my accelerant — I’ve always loved the smell of gasoline. Visualizing myself pre self-immolation, Mapes’s spell is cast. Every word haunts hermetically: “I cloud reaction, cryptically.” His poems strike like matches, one after another, in the dark, in devotional renouncement: “I will not community. I limbo.” Yes, we use words to communicate, but Mapes’s art reminds us of language’s darker, more mysterious nature — that of incantation.You can find G. Matthew Mapes on social media to obtain a copy of his book. He is not accepting payment.
Did I ever tell you I saw Elvis Presley, years after they said he was dead? Saw him right after I first moved to town, walking through the parking lot of that run down, barely hanging on truck stop over off of Highway 45, a place called The Hungry Hauler. They said he lived in the nearby woods and would come in on occasion to eat and wash up. They were used to him and wouldn’t make a big deal about it, and didn’t like people who did. He was an old man by then, and moved slow any time he emerged from the wilderness to limp into the dining room. A beard the color of dirty snow hung loose off his face, like it was trying to escape the sour smell of his rotted teeth. The hair on his head was well past his shoulders and he’d wear it in braids like a Comanche. His clothes were rags on rags, a patchwork quilt that he’d wash in their bathroom sink. If you went in at the right time you could see him naked as a newborn, jiggling around and humming his own songs to himself as he worked on cleaning the layers of dirt off his skin. I snuck in there once when he was washing, crept in out of pure curiosity, like a real perv. He was all dangles and stink — there were no sequins. He’d always eat the same thing after his sink bath, waffles and sausage, but would never finish the food on his plate. More than once I was tempted to walk by and sneak a bite just to say I’d shared a meal with the King of Rock n’ Roll, but I never did. And he always paid with cash that was dated before 1977. They even let me see it once, crisp and fresh as the day it was printed. When he left he’d do it without saying goodbye. You could watch him walk back into the woods, not to be seen again for weeks or even months. Sometimes folks new to town would mistake him for Bigfoot when they saw him near a tree clearing or out wandering a deer path.Over the years I hiked every inch of those woods in every direction, looking for him. But I never could find where he was living, never came across evidence of a cook fire, never saw a lean-to built against a small cliff face, or a tarp folded over a branch as a makeshift tent. I followed for miles every creek I could find that he might have used as a water source. I would cup my hands over my ears to try to catch the faintest gasp of him humming to himself out there, maybe even singing.At night I’d sit in the garage with my guitar, playing the same three chords with my two working fingers, strumming them in every order and pattern I could think of, trying to lure him out the way fishermen down at the lake cast their fly baits over the different lilly pads to get the bass to jump out of the water. My wife would come out and sit with me when she’d hear me playing. We’d share one can of beer and talk about our son, laugh with each other about the good old days. Sometimes we’d stay out there so long we’d fall asleep in our lawn chairs, holding hands like a couple of teenagers at the drive-in movies, and we’d wake up in the wee hours and itch the welts swelling over us from the mosquito bites — what a fine feast we made for them — and we’d pat each other’s forearms as if to say it’s time to go up to bed darlin’, and she’d go in first and I’d fold up our chairs, and half the time I’d forget to close the garage, and she’d tell me the next morning that we needed to watch for snakes or rats or bats out there for a few days. I’d say at least the bats will eat all the mosquitos.I thought I saw him once, on one of those nights, as the garage was going down, not Elvis, but our son, our boy, grown into middle age, limping up the drive in rags of his own, probably with a bad back like mine, his own beard hardly sprinkled with gray the way mine was at his age, finally outgrowing the boyish looks he still had when he left, when we told him he wasn’t welcome anymore, because the preacher said we had to cut him out of our lives, to stop enabling him — it’s always the preachers who give you the worst advice — and I ran out, ducked under the closing overhead door, the thing chomping down like a mouth behind me, and I hustled out to meet our son, to tell him I was sorry, that I didn’t know what I was doing back then, that no one ever knows what to do in this life, no matter how much you try to learn, we are all too stupid for how smart we are, and I was ready to jump into his arms, let him cradle me, his old man father who had just moved faster than he’d moved in years, let us fall to the ground in one another’s arms, dizzy and concussed from the blow of this return. But when I got there all I saw were footprints. Or maybe they weren’t even footprints. Just the gravel blown into little divots by the shifting wind of an incoming storm. I had to knock on our door and ring the bell to get Fran to let me in. She came down and asked what had happened, was I getting so old that only one beer and a little nap could get me so out of sorts. I laughed and said maybe I have finally gone senile.This morning Frannie was working in the flower bed in front of our home, planting tulip bulbs, doing her favorite thing, making our dot on the world beautiful. She has said recently she hopes she’s doing exactly this the moment she dies. We are old enough that we have both realized we could die any second of any day, without warning at all. She says she loves the thought of going out like that. I tell her I hate the thought of her being dead. I tell her she can never die, that she must break all the rules and conditions of our existence here and become immortal. Then I tell her I’m going for a hike. She says bring your compass and don’t go too far.I still look for signs of him. Even though I am well aware that no elderly man could survive in these woods for very long, that Elvis has probably been dead for years by now and his bones are likely out here weathering into flaky ashes, his soul gone into flight through the universe, I still look for signs he was here. Maybe I’ll come across a carving he made into a tree. Maybe I’ll stumble over an old stone monument he made, inspired to do so by the stars the same way our ancient cave dwelling ancestors were. Or perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to uncover some notebooks hidden in a tin box under a shelf of rocks, words he never spoke to anyone but himself with pen and page. I wouldn’t read them. It’s not my place. But it would be nice to know they’re there, to find the signs of an old moment when he was here, nearby, living and breathing our shared air. Maybe in that notebook would be an old memory of his, maybe an observation, maybe how he’d walked past a strange old couple’s house one day, that they sat in a cluttered garage together and played notes and sang songs, howling out to someone they’d never find.
Wes Blake’s elegiac novella Pineville Trace (The University of Indianapolis’ Etchings Press, 2024) visits the wild places, those untouched stretches of land that somehow survive intact while progress lays out its encroachment in steel and concrete. In short, lyrical chapters the book travels inner and outer byways, gracefully tracking a spiritual road trip. In the pines the sun may not shine, but specters in memory shiver in broken light. I spoke to Wes about the book.Rebecca Gransden: How did the initial idea for Pineville Trace materialize? Wes Blake: The initial idea for Pineville Trace materialized in the summer of 2014 when I was just beginning my MFA at the Bluegrass Writers Studio and was in Lisbon, Portugal for the Disquiet International Literary Program. One of the speakers said to “write about what obsesses you”. And that struck me. I walked along the cobblestone streets of the Barrio Alto neighborhood thinking about what did obsess me. I remembered stories I’d heard about my friend’s great-uncle—a southern revival preacher who started out traveling with an old circus tent from town to town. And hearing firsthand stories from people that knew him about how genuine he could be, how much he impacted the people that knew him, how charismatic he could be, and how fondly they remembered him, stuck with me. There were also allegations of fraud. My idea for the character of Frank Russet was inspired by this type of character. I wanted to write about a character like that, whose real self was a mystery, to find out who they really are. So, over the next three years, I wrote a novel named Antenna about Frank Russet and how he built his life and made a name for himself. I wrote the book to find out who he really was. And I thought his story was done. But in February 2022, I was in Pineville, KY and realized that Frank’s story was not finished. I drove by the city of Pineville and was struck by it: a small town whose quaint houses wound and coiled up along the side of the mountain in an unreal way that looked right out of a dream. I’d never seen another place like it. Then, after seeing a sign for Bell County Forestry Camp—the minimum-security prison I’d researched and written about where Frank Russet had been sentenced for fraud—I found myself following the signs towards it. The signs led me up Pine Mountain. It’s a striking place with so many pine trees that it looks more like the Pacific Northwest than Kentucky. As I approached the minimum-security prison, a car passed by on the other side of the road. It was an old late fifties/early sixties model Buick LeSabre—the same car that Frank Russet drove. It was eerie seeing such a rare car in such an isolated place. In the first novel, Frank had briefly befriended a stray cat that visited the prison. It was only a passing scene. But that would be the beginning of Pineville Trace. RG: Who is Frank Russet, the main focus of the book, to you?WB: I’ve been writing about Frank Russet, off and on, for the last ten years. He started off as a mystery, and in some ways, he remains one. How much of his intention was pure and how much was ambition? Did he start off with good intentions and lose his way? Did he have some measure of real healing power or was it all an act? Frank Russet is torn between the world of the body and the world of the spirit. Like all of us, there are parts of him that are authentic and parts of him that he puts on like a mask in order to make his way in the world. Only, because of his line of work as a revival preacher, this conflict is more dramatic. He’s capable of soaring highs and crushing lows. A person going up on the mountain to find the truth is an old story. For Frank Russet, who he becomes on the mountain reveals who he really is. And who he becomes when he comes down from the mountain, back down into the world, also reveals who he is. I’ve been writing and thinking about Frank Russet for so long that he feels like a real person to me. He feels like a friend.RG: When driving east, before reaching Bell County Forestry Camp, you pass Pineville. The name of the town was what led me to the place. Both in fiction and in real life. I had imagined the house from the first sentence. And I wanted to find a house like it in the real world. I felt it must exist.Place is an essential component of the novella. How do you use invention when it comes to location? What is Frank’s relationship to the environments he travels through?WB: I read this article on Leonardo da Vinci a few years ago that was illuminating. Essentially, da Vinci believed that observation plus imagination equals creativity. You can see how he put this into action with both his “Studies of Water” (astute observation) and his sketches of angels and demons (pure imagination). Both da Vinci’s observation and imagination are so precise, committed, and detailed. So realistic. This combination of observation and imagination is true for how I use invention when it comes to location. I strive to closely observe places and get a sense of their tone. How does a place make you feel? And what aspects of the place make you feel that way and why? We can’t separate ourselves from our environments, and they affect our outer and inner worlds. Our inner landscapes color how we perceive our outer world. I strive to capture this reality in Pineville Trace. Frank is particularly sensitive to environment. He’s more in tune than most people are with how time affects place and how environment is both a mirror and a prophecy for self. RG: Nature and the wild is an important aspect of the book, but central above all imagery is that of the pine trees themselves. A constant presence, whether it be close by or on the periphery, these trees frame the landscape of the novella. How do you view the pines of Pineville Trace?WB: I followed the credo of Donald Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” when writing Pineville Trace. I let my subconscious lead the way. I allowed my intuition and what I had previously written lay the groundwork for what came next. And when I read the book over and again when polishing/editing I realized that many of my obsessions wound up in the book. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with water. I’ve always been obsessed with pines. I’m not sure why. I was close with my grandmother—my mom’s mom who we called Nanny—and, growing up, I would often stay at her house in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. We even lived with her for six months between our move from Rowan County in eastern Kentucky to Lexington. There was a row of pine trees at the back of Nanny’s yard, and as a kid I was always drawn to these pines. Their dark green color, their coolness in summer, their smell, the way they hid you from the world. They made me feel relaxed and safe. I spent a lot of time around those pines when I was young, and I still spend a lot of time around pines. My wife and I have planted thirty-two pines on our rural property in Woodford County, Kentucky. I’m researching mystics, psychics, and energy healers for my new book, and I just read about how someone who can see auras described how all living things have an aura, but trees, in particular, have a large aura—sometimes two feet wide or more—that she can see from far distances. I wonder how she would describe the aura of pines?Frank is haunted by pines and drawn to them. They represent a stubborn resistance to change, refusing to lose their needles while other trees shed their leaves when the seasons change. When the wind blows, a pine’s stillness and quiet contrasts with the sound of other trees whose rustling leaves make louder sounds. Frank seems drawn to the pines in Pineville Trace for reasons he doesn’t fully understand. Their dark green and stoic stance may remind him of the peaceful reality he seeks that has always eluded him.RG: “We’re all gravediggers.”Frank describes, and acts out, a deep emptiness. As his travels progress, this only becomes more pronounced, as echoes of the past catch up to him, however adept he is at staying in motion. The book carries a tension, where it is unclear in which way Frank is pulled; away from the hauntings of his past or towards a daydream of a future. How do you see Frank’s path? WB: Frank has spent a lot of his life as a southern revival preacher charged with providing salvation and healing for many people. His job was to assuage people of their emptiness, to show them the magic of life and its larger meaning and purpose. To revive them. To bring them back to life. And this seems to have taken a toll on him over time. He sought distractions and ways to escape his own feeling of emptiness that remained, and his human flaws only made him feel more empty and false. In his past, Frank spent most of his life moving. Constantly traveling from one town to the next. In Pineville Trace, for the first time, Frank must finally stop moving and face the emptiness in himself that he’s been running from. He must face the guilt over his flawed nature. He gets rid of the shackles of who he needed to be in the past, and all the weight of falling short of that. Anything short of moral perfection and performing miracles would be a failure in his former life. And he happens to be quite a flawed human being. Escaping from a minimum-security prison—in the way that Frank Russet does and in the circumstances that he does—is an existential act. He walks away because he doesn’t want to be the person he had been before. This escape allows him to have a chance at a future with real peace, but it is not an easy escape. His past, his emptiness, his guilt over all the harm he’s caused, plague him. They are deeply carved into his nature. I see Frank Russet’s path as a perilous one because while he is striving to free himself from his past and who he’s been, the ghosts that have always haunted him do not want to release him. RG: A key presence in the book is that of a cat named Buffalo. Animal companions often come to us when most needed, or are associated with a particular time of life. Have there been significant animal bonds in your own history, and, if so, did that feed into Pineville Trace? How do you view the connection between Frank and Buffalo?WB: I’ve always been obsessed with cats. When I was a little kid, I wanted a cat more than anything else. As a small child, I had both a teddy bear and a small Pound Puppy kitten that I slept with. My brother and I always tried to earn the affection of Nanny’s and my aunt Charlotte’s cats. But they were slow to trust us because we were kids chasing them around without much understanding or gentleness. I remember when I was about six, another cat of Nanny’s—a white Persian kitten named Tinker—warmed to me and would jump up in the bed to see me and attack my watch band. It was one of my greatest achievements in life up to that point. My brother wound up being allergic to cats, so we couldn’t get one of our own, but many years later, as an adult, my wife and I have had several cats. We have a calico cat named Pig, and she’s been my nearly constant companion for the last seventeen years. She sleeps in the crook of my left arm most every night, after trying to bite my nose several times. Her Christian name is Lilly, but her personality earned her the name Pig. When I was a little kid, we had a Cairn Terrier named Daisy that I was close with. I had read too many Jack London books, so I tried to have her pull me around on my skateboard while holding her leash like she was a sled-dog and imagining we were in the Klondike. This obviously wasn’t a smart idea, especially on hills. Animals are completely loyal when they choose you. They really do offer unconditional love and friendship in ways that humans often fall short of. All they want is your time and attention, which is such a pure intention. There is something mysterious about cats, and they must be won over. But once you earn their trust, they are reliable. Buffalo is a guide for Frank, and she is a true friend. She is there for him, accepts him for who he is, and Frank doesn’t have to be anything special for her. He only has to be himself. For a lot of his life, he’s been expected to perform miracles, heal people, and live a perfectly moral life. No human being could meet these standards. So, Buffalo, is such a welcome presence for Frank. She has no expectations for him, and she reminds him of the simpleness of life and what really matters. And, in return, Frank is a loyal and dedicated friend to Buffalo.RG: You display the natural elements and the seasons as signifying incremental change, a signpost to an unknown future or destination. I took this to be in strong parallel to Frank’s inner movement, not only his compulsion to keep running, but also his wider struggles. There is a blurring of lines between the exterior and interior that gives the book a dreamlike quality. In terms of character development, what was your approach to Frank and his relationship to the passing of time?WB: The seasons are a reminder for Frank of nature and time’s passing. The seasons remind him of reality and connect him to the nature of time, change, and impermanence. He’s been disconnected from nature, following his own ambition—and the expectations that accompany that—for most of his life, and connecting with the concrete reality of impermanence and change that the seasons reveal can sometimes be terrifying. Like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Frank Russet has awoken from a dream of his own ambition, his own movement, and his own escape.RG: Signs, exits, fields, forests passed. The sun stayed behind clouds. Kentucky became Ohio. The light became gentler. Then headlights. Ohio became Michigan. Frank kept his speed right at the limit.Frank’s actions at first seem illogical and as if he’s possessed by a waking dream. As the story unfolds it slowly surfaces that his chosen path is one that makes emotional sense. His travels take him to liminal environments, where he exists as someone passing through. How does the wider concept of agency and Frank’s relationship with personal autonomy come into play in the book?WB: When Frank walks away from the minimum-security prison on Pine Mountain in eastern Kentucky, he claims his own personal autonomy for the first time. As many people do, Frank has become trapped in the role he’s created for himself. His role just happened to be that of a revival preacher. This role was necessary for him to make a living and place for himself in the world. We all take on these roles and as we age, we may find that the roles don’t align with our true nature, and the nature of Frank’s role as God’s messenger carries more weight than most. So, his experience dramatizes something that many people go through. As an old man in his last days, Leo Tolstoy had a similar epiphany as Frank when he left his home and family. Tolstoy’s letter to his wife explained his decision in words that would ring true for Frank: “I feel that I must retire from the trouble of life. . . I want to recover from the trouble of the world. It is necessary for my soul and my body.” In Pineville Trace Frank, too, is taking control of his life and throwing off the chains of what people expect of him because it is necessary for his soul. Like Tolstoy, he takes control of his life to “recover from the trouble of the world.” Ironically, the trouble of the world from which Frank must recover was also largely created by himself.RG: Frank’s past involvement with organized religion adds extra dimension to the spiritual aspect of his travels. Do you regard Frank’s story as a pilgrimage? What do you view as the role of religion and spirituality in the book?WB: I do feel that Frank’s story is a pilgrimage. He seeks a sacred place, a vision—a dream cabin surrounded by pines—that at first, he only imagines in his mind. Frank wants to experience the reality of the life of the spirit. He wants to break down the false separation between things. As a healer, Frank was always drawn to the raw and true spiritual elements that are often, sadly, on the fringes of organized religion. And in Pineville Trace, he abandons religion entirely to understand and directly experience the spiritual world. Scott Laughlin, writer and co-founder of Disquiet International, talks about how his friend, the poet, Alberto de Lacerda would often say, “This is what I live for: friendship and the things of the spirit.” These are the things that Frank Russet has always wanted to live for, but his obligations from society and organized religion got in the way. Frank’s biblical ancestor would be David. King David, sometimes referred to as God’s favorite, also lived for friendship and the things of the spirit. His close friendship with Jonathan shaped his identity. He was a poet and a musician. As a child, he was a shepherd and felt a close kinship with animals and nature. He was a deeply flawed human being that valued connection, lust, and love, as his relationship with Bathsheba shows. Religious stories are often parables that illustrate spiritual truth. In Pineville Trace, Frank wants to throw off the organized religious framework entirely and experience spiritual truth directly. His journey is as much an inner spiritual journey as it is a physical one. As Frank proceeds on his journey, the illusion of separation between the physical and spiritual world disappears. RG:. He had to look tough. Serious. He considered his khakis, boots, flannel. He wished he had his old suit: pressed black slacks, black suit coat, fine black silk socks, polished black shoes, a bright, starched white button-up shirt, and his silk black tie. In that suit he could convince anyone of anything. Even himself. At least he used to be able to.Clothing is a recurring theme throughout the book. From Frank’s orange prison jumpsuit to later changes of attire, the clothes are more than something to wear but take on the quality of costume, sending out a specific signal or impression. What do these costume changes mean to Frank, and what, if any, significance do they have on a narrative level?WB: In Frank’s previous life as a southern revival preacher, appearances were important. His smart black suit and appearance helped sway his audience into belief. For him, clothes represent both identity and a mask. When he trades out his suit for an orange jumpsuit, he’s made even more aware of the shallowness and unreality of identity and how we present ourselves to the world. But he still struggles to separate himself from his ego. He still longs for the past and that suit represents his peak in life. Even as he struggles to move beyond his ambition and ego, they still hold sway over him. Macbeth’s identity is also represented outwardly by his change from a soldier’s costume to that of a king’s robes. After Macbeth has murdered the former king to secure his place as king, Angus says that Macbeth must feel his “title hang loosely about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief.” Clothing does represent our identity to the outer world, and Frank, like Macbeth, must feel ill at ease in some of the costumes he’s presented to the world. At one point in the book, Frank finds a secondhand suit, a tattered approximation of his former costume. It is a fair representation of his inner state in that moment. RG:Pineville Trace is rich with symbolism. Buffalo shares her name with animals associated with great meaning, the buffalo a ghostly presence in a landscape in which they were once abundant. Later in the book the myth of Spirit Rock is recounted, and water seems to represent psychic as well as physical boundaries to be crossed. Do you regard Frank’s story as in the tradition of the mystic quest? Why does he feel the pull to the outskirts and the fringes?WB: I do see Frank’s story as a mystic quest. Frank is seeking spiritual realities and truths and wants to shatter the illusory barrier between the physical and spiritual world. He’s always been connected to healing and that is what led him to his role in organized religion more than anything else. I’m fascinated by Native American literature and have been influenced by several books over recent years. A book called Black Elk Speaks tells the story of the Oglala Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk and how he struggles to manifest his vision in the physical world to help warn, guide, and protect his people from harm. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko is another fascinating book that haunted me and tells a story of real healing. Larry Brown wrote a concise biography that I loved about a more famous Sioux warrior and visionary Native American mystic, the son of a medicine man, called Crazy Horse: A Life. Crazy Horse was an enigma, and his own family didn’t even understand him. The book describes how Crazy Horse went off in the wilderness alone on his vision quest—a rite of passage for the Lakota called a Hanbleceya (translated as “to pray for a spiritual experience”). It seems that people who seek deeper truths, or have a capacity to sense them, often are pulled to the outskirts and fringes. Even though Frank has lived much of his life in the spotlight, he’s always felt like an outsider and feels most comfortable on the fringes. He stood in the spotlight for years because he felt he must do it to survive. And I feel that he did have a real desire to help people. But that life became hollow, and he felt the need to explore deeper spiritual truths and escape from the expectations of society. On the fringes, he feels free. He feels a kinship with ghostly presences, birds, cats, trees, and wild, forgotten things. For thousands of years the buffalo crossed the Cumberland Gap and humans just followed in their steps, and Frank feels it is a great injustice that they have been largely forgotten. On the fringes, the buffalo are remembered always, and Frank feels most comfortable there.RG: Communication is a theme you return to. Frank’s previous life involved radio, and many of Frank’s concerns involve the signals he sends and receives. Memories appear as if broadcast from a past he is disconnected from but unable to avoid. Figures manifest as ghostly reruns in memory. What was your approach to memory for Pineville Trace?WB: Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, Frank Russet seems unstuck in time. When we think of the reality of time, it seems like it is always linear: past, present, and future. But when you think of how our minds experience time, it is not separate at all. We have thoughts of the past and reactions to them like judgment, desire, sadness, guilt, or joy; observations of the present and the way we feel and think about those observations; and plans, hopes, and fears of the future—along with all the emotions and judgments that come with them. And all of this is happening in the present moment in our minds. All the time. Fiction can illuminate the inner experience more fully than any other medium, and I wanted to explore that reality of the experience of time and how memories function in Frank Russet. I wanted the past and memory to be just as real as the present because that is how our minds often perceive memories. We don’t choose our memories. Our memories choose us. Marcel Proust’s narrator of In Remembrance of Things Past dips a cookie into some tea, takes a bite, and he is transported into the past as his memories overcome him. And that is how we experience memory. I wanted to capture that reality.RG: Do you think about how a reader of Pineville Trace might react to it? WB: Some of the books, stories, and poems that have most impacted me, like Flannery O’ Connor’s Wiseblood, Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, Denis Johnson’s Angels, Christopher Chambers’ Delta 88, Ezra Pound’s translation of Li Po’s “Exile’s Letter,” Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Barry Hannah’s Ray, Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, James Still’s River of Earth, Phillip Roth’s The Dying Animal, Richard Brautigan’s An Unfortunate Woman, Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, James Baker Hall’s Mother on the Other Side of the World, and Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” haunted me long after I read them, for mysterious reasons. They made me recognize and remember important experiences from my own inner and emotional life. The recognition was palpable. They made me feel something. They stayed with me. My goal is for readers to have that kind of experience and reaction with Pineville Trace.RG:. After I drive past the woman smoking in the Range Rover, at the edge of the forestry camp on Pine Mountain, I think about Frank. Think about his life. And his story. About what it adds up to. What it’s about. I say into the recorder: “I always tell the same story. Over and over. It’s the story about getting what you want. And the story about not getting what you want. It’s the only story I know.”In reflection, did Pineville Trace give you what you want? WB: From the conception of the idea for Pineville Trace, through its first draft, multiple drafts of polishing, and final edits, I’ve had a sense of excitement. The experience of creation was charged. The challenge of marrying this weird story to this odd novella-in-flash form was riveting. I loved being able to spend the time with Buffalo and Frank Russet. I got to learn more about who Frank Russet really is. And, even now, it’s exciting for me to introduce Buffalo and Frank to readers. If even one reader experiences a deep recognition of their own inner experience or is haunted by Frank and Buffalo’s journey, then Pineville Trace has given me what I want.
Cammie has a Hermés Birkin pulled up on a resale website. She pushes the blinding screen towards my face across the white tablecloth between us. She’s talked about wanting a Birkin before, but I didn’t really think about it that much. “It’s ostrich leather,” Cammie says, and she pouts. Her raspy voice is hushed over the trepid steakhouse pianist on the baby grand. What does it take in life to become a steakhouse pianist? “It’s an investment piece. Ostrich leather is going to have better resale value than cow leather. But it's much less than crocodile.” The orange pinpricked leather looks like a nest of mosquitos stuck themselves into the smooth hide and had a feast. “How much?” I ask, hesitant as I take a bite of the rare filet alone on the massive plate in front of me.I really don’t like fat. I’ve carved the excess off to the side because I asked the waiter to tell the kitchen to remove any fat after the steak had been grilled, but no one listened. Grease pools across the glassy steakhouse plate.Cammie’s turn to hesitate. She shrugs and glances away. “Nineteen thousand dollars.”God.I choke. When I glance up at Cammie, I can’t breathe.She is beautiful and unimpressed. Her taut cheekbones and the small point of her nose are lit only by the flickering tea candle. Tense wrinkles cast shadows under her eyes.I panic, less at choking, and more at my beautiful, unimpressed, embarrassed girlfriend. I grasp for my napkin. I remember when she would have hidden a laugh in her own napkin instead of watching me cover my mouth, as the chewed, swollen wad of meat rolls up into the back of my throat. I take the wad down again with a desperate gulp of water. Cammie looks away and sighs as I clear my throat. “I’m sorry,” I dab at my mouth with the napkin and glance around. No one at the other tables saw me. . Only Cammie, but she’s the last person who wanted to. “Just chew your food,” she says. She brings the rim of the glass of Sangiovese to her plumped lips that I so want to kiss when I don’t have ice water dripping from my mouth like a blubbering, drooly baby. I watch as she tips the wine back along her tongue, and her eyes look beyond the rim of the glass. She’s not looking at me, but she’s looking at something far behind my shoulder. I get to kiss her, lips sweet with wine, later that night, and she almost smiles at me. “Thank you for dinner,” she whispers, the small point of her nose brushing up to mine. I watch her naked back rising and falling under the plush duvet next to me in bed. She has a small tattoo on her ribcage that she got when she was eighteen of her grandmother’s name in thin cursive. It sinks in the concave skin between two ribs. She wants it removed. I can’t stop looking at handbags. Bong would say That’s so gay. On my walk to the office through Battery Park I spot bags made of saffiano leather, pebbled leather, and calfskin. A few are coated in scales but I doubt that they are real snakeskin, or crocodile. None are ostrich leather with its swollen, plucked pinpoints. This is a universal male experience: to buy your girlfriend or wife the very expensive handbag or jewelry or shoes that she asks for, or to tell her not right now and that you’d consider it closer to Christmas or for her birthday? I think my mother would tell me to marry her first, but two-and-a-half years together was too soon. I think my father would tell me to just keep her happy, look at all I do for your mother but I was bad at that. I made Cammie happy when I broke up with her friend Samantha to date her instead. Sam was bright, but at the bar she could barely order for herself. In our last year at Columbia, Cammie was getting her J.D. I was splitting my time between class, rotations at BNY Mellon, and spending my analyst paycheck on blow in the bathroom of Soho House. She clocked me for what I was: doing what I was supposed to do. Desperate. Stumbling. Too caught up in my own pride. She was calculated. She was going to be such a good lawyer. Had I made her happy since then? I got my MBA. I deleted my blow dealer’s number from my phone. I work seventy-hour weeks to pay for rare steaks and two Soho House memberships, and handbags, and maybe even an engagement ring. I take this elevator to the thirty-sixth floor of my office to put up with my bosses. She is rarely impressed. Neither are my bosses at work, which is what keeps me meeting expectations. Bong says she’s always busting your balls. He says she’s bleeding you dry, man. Bong knocks on my office door at end of day, right before the sun dips below the horizon on the Hudson. He walks in before I can answer. I call him Bong to Cammie and when I told her to never repeat that, I put my finger to her lips, shushing her. She kissed my hand. Her eyessmiled at me. “He’s gotta be the most relaxed motherfucker in IB. I know he doesn’t smoke, but he’s just… disheveled. He went to UCLA anyway.” Cammie told me a few months later after last year’s company holiday party that Bong was a little drunk. He told her he had a Xanax prescription because otherwise, he’d throw himself off the bridge. “Hey,” he says.“I’m finishing up.”“Jason and I are going to get drinks at P.J. Clarke’s. Come with.” I look up from my computer. “Jason?”“Junior director.” “I’ve never met him. P.J. Clarke’s?”I lean back in my seat. Bong is on the fritz: his hair is more disheveled, his shirt is more crumpled, but his eyes are wide open like saucers. “You’re freaking me out.” “We need to talk,” Bong says. “With Jason?” I stand up from the desk and start to pack my stuff. “Yes,” says Bong. “Get your shit together.”We take the elevator down from the thirty-sixth floor to solid ground and walk to P.J. Clarke’s in complete silence. I think that Cammie wouldn’t touch a place like P.J. Clarke’s. She’d be embarrassed to know that I’d even stepped inside. She would scoff at the checkered tablecloths and paper menus with crosswords for children printed on the back. “Why are we here?”Bong walks me over to the bar where Jason is sitting. I’d seen him around the office and we’d spoken once or twice in passing. He is younger and baby-faced. His Brooks Brothers sport coat is tossed over the seat next to him, presumably for me to sit at. He’s got a leather messenger bag by his seat, his phone face down on the bar next to a bottle of Bud Light.He stands up from the pleather barstool, stone faced, and claps me on the back. “Is this an intervention?” I ask. I feel like I could chew the tension between the three of us. Bong and Jason sit down and I follow. “We need you not to yell,” says Bong. They were very diplomatic about it all. The situation was laid out as dull as a boardroom meeting. There was no needful reason to yell because they were right. Why P.J. Clarke’s? Because no one at P.J. Clarke’s knew us if I did yell. This was a good strategy on their behalf, but P.J. Clarke’s was not where I wanted my relationship with Cammie to end. Jason pulled up screenshots on his phone of Cammie’s Hinge. The first photo was a selfie that she had posted on her Instagram. Her lips were just healed, and they were pursed slightly around her teeth, the angle of the phone camera low enough that her eyes looked down on you in disdain. Camilla, 28. From Bethesda, Maryland, but lives in our apartment in Murray Hill. Associate, of Counsel. Columbia graduate. Capricorn. Figuring out her dating goals. Her other photos were of her and her girlfriends at Le Bain, at her sister’s wedding in a lavender bridesmaid’s gown that she had desperately hated, and a photo I had taken of her pinching the stem of an espresso martini glass at a Soho House party. She was in an oversized blazer cut down to her chest, staring down the camera like she could kill it. A fact about her that surprises people? She wanted to become a nun until high school. Give her travel tips for… Portofino, where we had talked about traveling for our three-year anniversary. A green flag for her? Spontaneity. And I knew all of this about her. But this wasn’t for me to care about anymore. Cammie had answered one of Jason’s prompts: I’m looking for… the best Sazerac in Manhattan, Jason had answered. Cammie said she loved the one at Apothéke in Chinatown, why didn’t the two of them meet up after work this week? Jason said “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” after every sentence.He couldn’t have been more sorry. He was sniffling and couldn’t make eye contact. He had no idea she was Cammie, as in, my girlfriend Cammie. She had no idea he worked in my office. He was right. He found her Instagram, checked her tagged photos, and recognized the photos I’d tagged her in. He asked Bong if Cammie and I were dating.“I looked at him like what the fuck are you talking about?” Bong said, hushed. “Like, of course, you’re dating. You’ve been dating for-fucking-ever. Good luck prying her out of your arms. How’d you even get this idea of going out with her? And then he showed me his conversation with her on Hinge, and I was, like, oh shit.”“I’m sorry if you didn’t want to know,” said Jason. “I’m sorry. I unmatched with her. Immediately. Never got drinks. She doesn’t know I’ve told you, or anyone. I’m sorry.” I’ve been staring at Jason’s open phone, cast aside on the dull wood bar. The screenshots of Cammie’s Hinge profile glow, then dim as the phone just sits while Jason and Bong stare at me in desperation. They fill the air with apologies. They wanted to do the right thing. They wanted me to say something. They are terrified. Finally, the phone screen turns to black, and Cammie’s taut cheekbones and pointed nose and eyes are gone. And it was all very diplomatic, and very fast. I hear myself tell Jason “Thank you. I have nothing against you. You did the right thing, and I respect that.” I hear myself ask Bong if we can leave. I am watching myself being diplomatic and calm from behind my eyes, where complete numbness sits heavy in my chest. A cinderblock. A hydraulic press. Cammie lying on top of me in bed. I swing my coat over my shoulders and clap Jason on the back. Bong rushes out of P.J. Clarke’s behind me. “You gonna be okay, man?” I keep walking. “Hey,” Bong yells behind me. “Hey! You’re not gonna kill her, are you?” I stop. I watch myself turn towards him and hear myself say “I’m not that kind of guy. I just need to go home.”“You’re not gonna kill yourself?”“I thought you were gonna do that.”“What?”It’s been a year and a half and I haven’t spoken to Cammie. I haven’t seen Bong. Or Jason, or the thirty-sixth floor. That doesn’t matter to me, and I don’t care about them. On my walk to the coop, the summer squall of cicadas hisses in the maple trees, from the gutters on the roof, wherever the hard-shelled bugs are screaming and fucking and dying. My boots are covered in shit and dirt. Everything smells like hot shit and dirt: earthy, putrid, sour. I went to the Governor’s Ball one time and it smells worse than the portable toilets used by thousands of sweaty office job workers rolling on molly. The trepid tittering of the ostriches reaches a fever pitch as I unlock the collapsing coop door and seven bowing, writhing, growling birds teeter outside into the sunlight. They rasp and cluck. Their taut faces and thin, pale necks ebb and bounce as they stick their faces into the brown grass and feast. Their bird eyes roll in the sockets with wrinkles collecting underneath them. They are dumb, savage creatures. I check on the incubator with ten bulbous ostrich eggs baking inside. It barely needs to be turned on in the summer heat of Arkansas. I got here with four monogrammed suitcases that still sit on the floor where my mattress is, in the apartment above the garage. I had walked into JFK and thought I’d go visit my parents in Chapel Hill. By the time I got to Charlotte I thought I’d kill myself. The flight to Little Rock was three gates from where I landed. No one asked questions, and I’m happy they didn’t.But that doesn’t matter to me, now. I’ve got four acres, paid for in cash. I bought eight African black-necked ostrich chicks from a wildlife farm I tracked down in Eureka for $250 a bird. The man who sold them to me didn’t tell me his name. He had a silver knob pierced in his eyebrow and the top of his head was bald; strings of long, white hair tangled around his sunburnt shoulders. The 2017 Toyota Tacoma I got off a used car lot was $19,250. A Birkin, I thought to myself, and a bird. I took P.J. home as a puppy in it. My neighbor’s golden lab had puppies and I picked one up. That was the only time I’ve seen them in a year and a half because they asked if I was from animal control. They were suspicious of me. I told them no.I push through another door that separates the coop from storage. The hides, strung up to dry, flutter in the drafty breeze. They are ghastly, pale, amorphous spreads, like maps, every follicle a pinpoint. This was the first ostrich I’d skinned of the eight chicks. She was a sweet bird. She never growled at me, or tried to kick me like some of the other birds did. She didn’t put up a fight. I sliced her open. I strung her up. I plucked her feathers to sell wholesale, each bone begging to stay in her skin. I watched myself butcher her, all diplomatic and fast and about it. Of course it was gross and at one point I threw up in the dry grass outside, where the other birds trot over to inspect the vomit. I let them be. P.J. herded them away. I let the birds distract me. The process of mopping up the blood, carving off the fat, plucking and cleaning and fleshing and cleaning and tanning and scrubbing and salting and tanning and wringing the leather out is excessive for a handbag. I have the bag designed in my head. I haven’t thought about how I’d get it to Cammie yet, or where she is or who she’s with. I don’t want to think about this. She hasn’t found me, or at least hasn’t tried to. I care for the birds, really. When I sell the bird’s eggs at a farmer’s market, I get comments that I’m different, that I can’t be from around here, where was I from? How’d I get to ostrich farming in Arkansas? Did I have a family nearby, a wife? And I smile. I watch myself tell these well-meaning locals It was a long time coming. Something God had planned for me. But that doesn’t matter. None of it does. It’s just me and the birds, now.
The sun rises late in the morning, creeping above the treeline like the encroaching fingers of some lethargic yet sinister god of anti-democratic thought. It’s hard not to feel like the entire world is turning against me. I lean against the kitchen’s marble countertop and remind myself the sunlight isn’t the enemy. The natural world knows right and wrong. If only the same could be said for man.Above my head, I hear my wife Barbra rise, the soft creak of wood, the exhale of bed springs. Even the good guys have to get their hands dirty. My battlefield is one of disinformation, a smoke screen behind which the truth can safely nestle like a slightly moist bird. My job, my marriage, even my name, all of it is a lie. This is what service requires. The work is thankless. And my legacy? Only the satisfaction of a job well done. That, and a media empire of best-selling novels, Hollywood blockbusters, video games, and a permanent place in America’s heart. But at what cost? Here comes my wife, padding down the stairs, wrapped in her bathrobe, our dog Alvin behind her. “Is the coffee ready?” Barbra asks.Strong men do what is necessary. “Sorry, I forgot.”The lie bites at my throat like a KGB Black Russian Terrier, specialty guard dog of the Soviet state, famous for their ferocity and loyalty. I never forget the coffee – but Sam Meadows does. Sam is an insurance agent. He owns a boat and fly fishes and supports the Rams. I know everything about Sam: how he eats, how he sleeps, how he shits, how he calls for more toilet paper from the can while he’s shitting. But I’m not Sam Meadows.My secret is that I am Tom Clancy, award winning author and, more importantly, Patriot.I knew things were headed downhill when Obama won a second term, and was soon proven right when that turncoat Snowden was allowed to pilfer the womb of America’s intelligence and deliver the child straight into Russia’s supple embrace. That was the final straw. The country was falling apart. No hero would save us, and so my hand was forced – I faked my death and went undercover. I am the beachhead for America’s heart and mind. The mission is simple: live a clean and godly life. Like a red, white, or blue blood cell, I treat the infection from inside. Tom Clancy was too well-known, too highly regarded, asked to go onto too many talk shows, hailed as being too prophetic and successful and smart and popular and moral and just too powerful of a person for this kind of assignment. And so I gave it all up and became Sam Meadows. All for this country that I love.I pull into the office at 7:48. It takes me exactly four minutes to park and walk into the office. Another seven to get coffee from the cramped box of a kitchen. When I’d first started at Meadows Insurance, I’d thought for certain that the building had been built intentionally small, some Chinese architect awash in socialist propaganda, convinced that folk just love to trip over one another, cheek to cheek. Turns out it was built by some fella from Maryland, and the smallness of the kitchen is a cost-saving measure, less piping, less expense. A reasonable decision, but Tom Clancy’s used to big kitchens, kitchens the size of states with their own economy and carbon footprint. The boss shows up at 8:12. Were Eddie Marrow not such a stupid man, I’d assume him to be an agent of a foreign government. He trundles through the door, tie askance, glasses smudged. However cramped the kitchen feels, it’s nothing to the suffocating aura of incompetence that he brings with him, part of that wider breed of man that’s weakened this country. Working under him is its own special form of hell. But what better place to stage my war than in the enemy’s camp?“Oh, Mark,” Eddie says as he passes my desk. “Did you have a chance to look over the Burgeons’ account?”“Not yet,” I say and bite my tongue. I want to tell him that I’ve got better things to do than look at his little insurance problems. But my cover demands I keep silent.“It’s been more than a week since it came in. Did you have questions?”“No questions.”“So you’ll do it today?”Eddie Marrow looks like a worm stuffed into human clothes and taught some crude approximation of our god-given tongue. Slimy, tiny eyes behind frames too big for his face. “I’ll take a look at it,” I say, suppressing my distaste. Eddie stands there blinking. “Do you need help with some other cases?”No amount of training can keep my face from flushing. The impudence to suggest that I need his help. Perhaps it’s time to reassess whether he’s an agent after all. Who else would goad me into breaking cover so brazenly?“I’ll look at the Burgeons’ account today,” I say and look down at my screen, hands shaking with the desire to choke the life out of him. I could, too. Older, I may be, but none of the fighting spirit’s left me – I’m as strong as I was at twenty-five. Eddie stands there, looking at me. Perhaps he’s calculating whether it’s safe to push me further. Finally, he turns without another word and goes into his office. One day we’ll have it out, me and him. But not today.
***
I watch as my husband leaves for work. He pulls out of the driveway, hits the mailbox with the side view mirror, and drives away oblivious. Perhaps the hardest part of my mission is smiling through all my husband’s faults. Even our dog, Alvin, seems to feel it. He lets out a whine of embarrassment and I scratch his head to reassure him. Self-important Sam; so confident when he knows so little, even about his own wife. But he’s a good man. And if there’s one thing I’m qualified to determine, it’s the quality of a man – after all, I was one of the best. I may answer to Barbra Meadows, but the truth is that I am Tom Clancy, writer of military fiction so real it may as well be history. And often it is history, future history that has yet to be written, except it was written by me.Make no mistake - there are forces that seek to warp our world, and it is only my constant vigil that keeps them at bay. When some vagabond begs for a dollar outside the supermarket, when the weedy clerk at the check-out counter only offers a paper bag instead of plastic, when a supposed American company allows the enemy to hang their rainbow flag in store windows like conquering huns - these are assaults upon the national soul. It is my duty to drag these sinners into the Colosseum of verbal combat and metaphorically wring the life from their godless necks. They can call me all the names they like (psycho, Karen, that loud and bitchy bitch) but none of it will dissuade me from my mission. When Sam gets home, we eat dinner, watch the news and then head to bed. But Sam has other ideas – he wants his favorite thing. At the foot of our bed, he pulls his shirt off slowly, trying to titillate me with his flabby body and pasty skin. When he mounts me, I can smell our dinner on his breath. Were I not committed to my mission, I’d show Sam exactly how a man’s supposed to use his penis, but I lay there and pretend to enjoy it. When he finally rolls off, breathing heavily, I tell him it was good and he nods without replying. I don’t mind his incompetence. Bad sex has its own righteousness, especially between a husband and wife. And, really, his delusion keeps my identity all the safer. He’d never suspect it’s Tom Clancy he’s making clumsy love to.
***
The old man and woman wake up a few hours apart and go about their day. I watch from the floor, scratching my ear, waiting for one of them to serve me my kibble. Some would be surprised that Tom Clancy eats dog food three meals a day, but in truth I’ve developed a taste for it. It was a delicate operation, breaking into the Louisville Pet Orphanage, stuffing myself into an admittedly uncomfortable kennel, and waiting for the man and woman to arrive. I’d orchestrated the whole thing, of course, their actions as predictable as amateur insurgents. When I stood on my hind legs and barked, I already knew who the good boy was, just as I’d known I’d be heading home an adopted pup. And now, with the perfect cover, I can save this country, one fire hydrant at a time.
Yesterday in ceramics class Prof Woodstock did a demo of red glazes while telling us an old Chinese legend. Once there was an emperor who demanded a red glazed pot. The royal potter fired pot after pot, but could not get any of them to fire red. So the emperor sentenced him to death. The potter’s daughter was so upset she jumped in the fired kiln, and when they opened it all the pots were glazed red with her blood. Prof Woodstock said as a feminist she wasn’t thrilled with the story, but it showed the difficulty of producing a red glaze wasn’t just specific to dumb Americans. I was sipping vodka from my water bottle and swooned a bit over the open kiln, my face flushed red from my buzz and the heat. Prof Woodstock sent me home to sleep it off; she was cool like that, which was fine because my main focus in school was to make metal art. Prof Steelhead told me making metal art was not recommended as it appeared I did not have the disposition to withstand working close to the fire for extended periods of time and lifting welded metal sculpture was challenging for even the most vigorous athletic builds. Prof Steelhead made work similar in style to Richard Serra, and since Richard Serra was famous, no one cared about Steelhead’s art. It wasn’t shown in blue chip galleries in Chelsea, or at International Art Fairs like the Venice Biennale. Instead Steelhead’s rusted walls of steel littered meadows in Vermont, where cows were forced to walk the long way around these industrial barriers when looking for a lost calf.Of course I didn’t listen to Steelhead. He should have gone West and bought a depressed town to reconstruct if he wanted to be a dictator like Heizer or Judd, but since he was slowly creaking out his tenure at a liberal Arts College in New England, no one listened to Steelhead. Plus the college had the metal workshop outfitted with cranes and there were techs and other students to assist, so I don’t know why he was picking on me, aside from my slight build and nervous disposition. Truthfully I was terrified of fire, but that was exactly why I wanted to make metal art to begin with—not to face my fears—but for the surges of Norepinephrine that coursed through my body when I thought I was on the precipice of death. I finished a twelve-pack of Bud cans before class, crushing the tin cans in my fist each time I polished one off just to psych myself up. Although it calmed my anxiety, I was now staggering when I walked. I told myself not to walk in front of Steelhead and to stay on the other side of the fire from him when the techs did the demo of the molten steel pour. Ten of us arrived at class and Steelhead gave us shovels to dig out trenches as molds that would be filled with the molten steel during the demo. I dug a hole the shape of my body, like the artist Ana Mendieta who performed in the landscape—lying naked on sand, against trees, in gardens, then covering herself with earth—but mine was a hole. No body. It was a hollow, like the voids in the lava post-Vesuvius. Maybe it could be a memorial to Ana Mendieta, who was now without a body as her body broke and died when she was pushed out the window by her drunk lover, the artist Carl Andre. Without witnesses, he claimed it wasn’t him, and I know from drunken blackouts that maybe he did it and didn’t remember. Maybe it was psychic survival to keep that night dark. Now I was feeling sad about Ana Mendieta. What a fucking way to die, drunk and fighting with your drunken lover, soon to be your murderer, whose work would still be going to Venice and Paris and every MOMA retrospective in every country around the world, while your body decayed and disappeared, leaving a void deep in the ground where you were buried. It’s all very poetic except for the part where she was pushed.When I finished digging my body-shaped hole, I was dizzy from the exertion in the sun. I leaned on my shovel to prop me up. Steelhead took my shovel out from under me and gave me an “I told you so” look and I glared at him, batting my eyelashes to confuse him. My sweat smelled like barley and hops as it poured out under my armpits. I didn’t care if he smelled it, he was a drinker too; I could see it in his watery eyes in the morning class. He was blurred and hung over and pissed about Richard Serra.Steelhead told us all to stand back from our holes. Multiple techs in heavy Kevlar suits with helmets like they were headed to Mars picked up a trough that glowed fiery red with molten steel. They carried the trough to the holes and one by one filled the horse shoe shaped hole, the hole shaped like a pitchfork, the hole shaped like Carl Andre’s steel floor tiles. They carried the red molten metal to me, its liquid silver sloshing, and started to fill the hole shaped like my body. The heat from the molten steel overtook me. I was drunk and hot. If only I could sit down for a minute. I’ll just sit on my heels, I thought, and staggered backward. As I pitched forward, I tried to catch my balance. I could hear screaming as I fell into the molten metal.I was at a party and it was late. Someone was shooting up in the corner and nodding out with the needle still in his arm. A couple was fighting about art and finances, and being a bad lover, and being a drunk, and you are a drunk, and the woman said she was leaving and leaving for good, and she was looking out the window shouting to her friend to wait, and the man ran to her. He was enraged. He almost had his hands on her, and I was right there, right in between them. I stuck out my foot.The man fell and hit his head on the iron baseboard heater. He was knocked unconscious. Maybe he was dead. The woman screamed. She checked his pulse. “He’s dead!” she yelled, “Call an ambulance! He’s dead!” You’re welcome, I thought. I saw there was a fire in the kitchen sink, so I ran to put it out. I turned on the water, but whiskey flowed out, accelerating the flames. I grabbed a bottle of water and threw it on the growing fire, but it was vodka. Now the flames were consuming the cabinets and the stove. The utensil drawer dripped silver, the toaster melted, the refrigerator buckled in on itself. I ran from the room, but I was drunk and lurching. The man wasn’t dead. He was back on his feet and his face was so red it looked like he was going to pop. He was coming for me. “No! No! Get away from me!” I yelled as I ran out of the apartment, down the stairwell, into the street. He was chasing me, he had one of his steel floor tiles in his hands raised over his head. He was going to pummel me with his metal art. He was gaining on me, and I was tired of running. I stopped and turned to him. “Go ahead, kill me fast, I have a weak stomach for this type of thing,” and he raised the steel plate and crashed it down on my head. There was the clanging boing of a gong. Two men were dragging me by my elbows up to a Chinese emperor sitting on his throne. The emperor was drinking from a jug and I could smell the alcohol on his breath. At his feet was a pile of ceramic shards from broken jugs. My hands were tied behind my back and I was dragging my legs. Next to the emperor was the biggest kiln I’d ever seen in my life, with a bonfire of stacked wood burning underneath. Under the lid I could see rows of jugs waiting to be glazed and fired. “Get in if you want to save your father,” said the emperor, pointing behind me. I turned around and my father was nodding his head. “They will kill me if you don’t get in,” said my father, his eyes locking on mine. “My blood will be on your hands,” he said.I nodded my head as if I understood, and the two men released my arms. I stepped forward toward the kiln. “Save your motherfucking self!” I screamed as I ran out the door to the right of the kiln. I was running back and forth. I was in some inner courtyard and couldn’t find my way out. The two men cornered me and one of them raised his double-edged sword, the edges glinting, and I stuck out my neck, “Fine, do it, it’s better than burning to death,” I said as I heard the swish of the sword cut the air in half.I was outside my childhood home and I heard my mother’s voice. I thought my mother died two years ago of cancer, but she was in the kitchen calling my name. I ran to the kitchen. I couldn’t believe she was there, washing dessert spoons in the sink. “Sweetie, you need to stop drinking. It’s killing you. I love you and I don’t want you to die. I should have protected you more as kid.” She handed me a spoon and a bowl of ice cream. I fell into her skirt. It was my mother and I started to cry. I was crying and the bowl of ice cream was melting and I was crying and melting and crying and melting and they were pulling me out of the body shaped hole. I was still alive but all my clothes had burned off. My skin shone silver. I had a coating of steel. I looked like the tin man’s wife. Steelhead fell in love with me on the spot. He tried to hand me a can of beer to cool me off, but I deflected it with my wrist like Wonder Woman, and when the can touched my skin it instantly turned to liquid metal and poured into a puddle by my feet. Steelhead said we could make beautiful art together but I told him he was too old for me and I had a whole life to lead. He wouldn’t be able to keep up and I couldn’t be with a drinker. It would be a risk to my newly sober self. As I walked away the noon sun was so bright it glared off every side of my metal body. I heated up to the temperature of the sun itself. I was walking radiance. I could feel Steelhead’s watery eyes on me as I poured into the light.
I was gonna be a salesman. I took an elevator up to the third floor and followed signs taped to the walls with directional arrows and Trajectory Marketing Demo printed on them. They led to an office with an open door. There were guys with hair gelled, cut, buzzed, or combed into all different shapes wearing oversized suits and ties, the kind that’d only been worn to funerals. My hair was shaggy again and I was wearing my beat-up Christmas slippers, Nike sweatpants, and my Arc’teryx fleece riddled with cigarette burns like I was some weird spotted animal. I just wanted to make Dad and my stepmom Paula proud since I got put on academic suspension from college for the semester and was back living at home. That was why I found and circled an ad in the paper for a demonstration with Trajectory Marketing at 7PM Wednesday. It said I could make a grand a week. If I made a grand a week I wouldn’t have to steal or borrow money from Dad ever again.So I was at the office building in SoNo. I didn’t get high before because I wanted to do right. Be good. Get a job. Turn my life around. I walked to a table. There were two dozen boxes of donuts from Dunk’s. I chose a double chocolate frosted donut, took a seat, and ate the donut. The windows of the office looked out onto The Sound. The sunset was Pepto Bismal pink and DayQuil orange. A beautiful omen. I swear to God the Gladiator soundtrack was playing softly from somewhere. Donuts, over-the-counter omen sunsets, the prospect of fortune. Sometimes life spoils us.The guy in charge had a chinstrap that looked like it was holding his hair on his head. Chinstrap Man told everyone to take a seat. We sat down and got quiet. He pushed a button on the stereo on his desk. The Gladiator soundtrack stopped playing softly in the background, confirming that it really was playing. Chinstrap Man smiled. He shook a set of keys in front of us once we all sat down and he smiled some more.“Do you know what these are?” Chinstrap Man asked us.“Keys?” someone said.“Not just any keys.” Chinstrap Man jingled them around like we were a bunch of babies fascinated by them. “Keys, to an M3.”I couldn’t tell what kind of keys they were. They were definitely keys though.“They could be yours,” he told to us. “If you hustle the way I hustle, you can have keys to an M3 too.”Some of the guys sitting around smiled and whispered to each other, excited about the possibility of M3s.“What do you fellas know about knives?” Chinstrap Man asked us.“They cut stuff,” someone said.“Not all knives cut stuff with surgical precision though.” Chinstrap Man clasped his hands together.The kid next to me was picking his nose. He picked it and smiled when he was supposed to smile while Chinstrap Man said things we were supposed to smile at. I smiled at the things we were supposed to smile at too, but also watched the guy picking his nose until Chinstrap Man took a cutting board out from under a tableclothed table. He dumped a bunch of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies on the table. He took out a knife block full of knives and a Stop & Shop bag full of fruits and vegetables.“What do you know about SliceWorks knives?” he asked us.“They’re the best around,” someone said.“Ding, ding, ding. What’s your name, young man?” Chinstrap Man asked him.“Michael,” the guy said.“Michael, you’re a smart man.” Chinstrap Man threw Michael a quarter. Then he threw Michael a penny and motioned for him to go up there.“Take these scissors and cut that penny in half. Put the quarter in your pocket. Consider it a down payment on that M3 you’re gonna be driving.” Chinstrap Man handed Michael a pair of scissors from the knife block.Michael smiled a nervous smile while he was trying to do it, but the scissors cut the penny right in half. Did that shit for him. Michael even said it. “They did that shit for me.”Chinstrap Man high-fived Michael. Some people clapped. I clapped a little too. I watched the dude picking his nose again until he finally got what he was digging for. He tasted it and it must’ve not tasted the way it was supposed to taste because he made a frown and pushed the booger onto the back of the seat in front of him. At that point, I figured it might be okay to be high in the Trajectory Marketing demo. I walked to the bathroom, took the green time-release coating off the OC 80 so all the time was mine, crushed the bone white pill and a little piece of a Xanax bar up on the toilet paper dispenser, snorted it, and walked back into the demo. It was the last 80 I was gonna do. It was always the last 80. All of them. The first. Second. Hundredth. However many. They were all the last. In the twelve step meetings I quit going to, they say one is too many and a thousand is never enough and they say addiction is a progressive disease. It eats me up inside to know they might know me better than I know myself.I sat back down in the demo and I smiled. Everything was gonna be alright. Chinstrap Man was telling us how we’d be selling knives to family and friends on commission. No hourly rate. I pictured myself in Aunt Deb’s apartment in Cornwall, sitting at her dining room table with the knife block on display and a pile of change I’d cut to smithereens while she chain-smoked Marlboro Lights and ashed into a carnival glass ashtray filled with hundreds of butts and she’d tell me in her cigarette-carved voice I didn’t need to do any of that sales pitch bullshit and she’d buy whatever her dear nephew was selling.I thought about all the Oxys I’d be doing in my M3. The last Oxys. I picked at this scab that had once been a pimple long ago, but had scabbed over a few times. I picked at it and smiled and chuckled when everyone smiled and chuckled at Chinstrap Man even though I wasn’t listening to a word he was saying anymore. Chinstrap Man hit play on a stereo. The song by “Bodies” by Drowning Pool started. The lead singer screamed and heavy metal guitars screeched. Chinstrap Man sliced tomatoes, celery stalks, and heads of lettuce with incredible speed. Debris flew everywhere. The chain from his chain wallet swung back and forth against his dress slacks as he chopped. People cheered. I smiled and laughed, enjoying it like everyone else. I must’ve nodded because when I came to, Chinstrap Man was standing in front of me with a meat cleaver in his hand. Drowning Pool had been turned down so it was only playing lightly. Everyone was turned around staring at me.“Are we boring you?” Chinstrap Man said to me. “Buddy, your face is bleeding.”He held the shiny meat cleaver up to my face so I could see myself. I was bleeding a long thin streak of blood from my forehead down to my chin from the opened scab. I also had chocolate frosting on the corners of my mouth.“Why don’t you go get cleaned up and catch us at the next demo in April?” He gave me a little pat on the shoulder and left his hand there with a tightening grip like he was ready to escort me out if needed.Everyone stared at me. The guy who had been picking his nose was back to picking his nose while staring at me too. I got up and walked to the door. Chinstrap Man restarted the Drowning Pool song as I walked out.On the drive home, I pretended I was Chinstrap Man. I morphed into him like it was The Matrix. His chinstrap became mine. Dad’s Subaru Forrester became a BMW M3 with a forest of New Car Scent Little Trees dangling from the rearview. Standard turned to stick. I suddenly knew how to drive stick. The chain from my chain wallet rested on the driver’s seat. I hit a hundred on a straightaway on I-95 until the steering wheel shook and I remembered I was in the Forrester. I took my hands off the wheel, outstretching my arms like I was Jesus on the cross. In April, I would rise from the dead. In April, I’d turn my life around. In April, I’d call Mom and my stepdad Pat who kicked me out of their house senior year of high school and I’d tell them I had a business proposition for them and crunch across their shell driveway with the knife block cradled in my arms. In April, I’d show them my M3, my chinstrap, my chain wallet full of cash. In April, I’d show them the surgical precision of the blades. The ease at which I could cut up a big old pile of change.
THE MAN SITTING ON MY COUCH HAS OBTAINED HIS ALLIGATOR HARVEST PERMITYes, it’s true! We haven’t fucked yet but soon you’ll be crouched in the greased dark of a velvet panhandle midnight, your rifle pointed squarely in the center of an alligator’s long flat head, between the ridges of its eyes. The animal’s body looks like a topographic map, bone-hard hills and valleys laid over with skin too tough for bullets at anything but close range. “Alligators are really hard to kill,” you say, and I want to give the curve of your ear one long lick as you turn your face from mine. We might need this to stay metaphorical. Someone could get hurt. But look at your baby face. There’s something else there, soft, like a creamy reptilian underbelly, sweetly speckled. It’s alligators all the way down, isn’t it? So, it’s too easy but I’ll say it anyway—this is an old story, the oldest, and maybe I’ve run out of ways to describe it with something lighter than brute force: Pull out my insides, stuff me, hang me up on your wall. I’ll be your prize carcass.MY FIRST PAINTING!I seduced you the first time with an erotic cartoon of Fred Flintstone and I’m not ready to stop. An Epstein documentary played soft and low on the TV, and I used red crayon on an envelope from the hospital. Fred’s penis was deformed because I’m not a very good artist. You didn’t mind. Here, now, acrylics have been splashed, washed out with water, the blue of the sky and the sea erratic and changing as I ran out of paint on my brush. I say this is you and me and you look hard and say, “I see it! I see us!” And you do. Two tiny flecks of paint, dark spots in the vast, uneven ocean. What you can’t see is us touching each other under the water in the painting, like we did in real life. A storm was coming in from the east that day, fat slate clouds on a mission, steady and sure.CHANCEL LAMPWe are on Floor Bed, which is all of the pillows on the couch dragged to the floor so we can really stretch out, roll around, get lazy for hours. On Floor Bed, we do everything—we make each other laugh there, we fuck there, we wipe taco innards from each other’s lips there. “Thank you for letting me be myself,” you say. No one has ever said a sentence like that to me in my life–trimeter, lilting—is it dactylic, even, in gratitude? I think about the light at church that couldn’t go out and how I am in love with you and I don’t need to tell you. I’m lit up whether anyone can see it or not. OKAY, BUT—BUT,I do tell you I love you. You say it back. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I’m way too old for this! It’s always been: what else do you call having a lot of sex and struggling with the ugly little tumor your personalities make together and going out to dinner most nights? But I didn’t know the tenderness I could feel like a toothache when I watch you do ordinary things, like imperfectly wrap the perfect, longed-for gift or run your fingers through your hair as you introduce your mother or crouch down in the weeds and spray something illegal to fry the roaches, thick as thumbs, that pool at the stone base of my apartment—and how long are we happy? By which I mean: how long are we walking through the pines with sunlight on our shoulders, how long are we frying potatoes in olive oil and rosemary and putting on mud masks from the same tub before bed, how long are we knotted together at the knees and reading books in that little apartment, Spanish Moss blowing greenly and slick against the window?NOT LONG ENOUGHWe sit crying on a park bench. A woman stops in front of us. She has short white hair and complex lines of embroidery run around the collar of her electric blue tunic. A cross, starkly bodiless, hangs heavy and wooden between her breasts. She tells us to open our hands. Dumb and obedient in our suffering, we do, and she throws her fist back, then pitches it forward, over and over. “I’m throwing blessings,” she says. My heart is yelping like a kicked dog!HOW IS THE PIECE OF MY HEART?Is she in your pocket, is she in your wallet, do you leave her on a shelf when you go out? Do you forget about her? Do you bury her out back under the magnolia tree? When you open the fridge and she’s back again, drinking your Topo Chico, are you mad? Do you throw her in the trash with the matching mugs you bought us? When you can’t get rid of her, do you take her out to breakfast? Do you put little black sunglasses and a little black beanie on her because it’s sunny but cold? Do you hold her hand and watch the wood storks crowd at the lakeshore? Do you blow raspberries above her belly button? Do you nap together? When she has bad dreams do you put her head in your lap? Do you cry for the first time in years, curled against her, while she rubs your back? Do you pick her up and put her on the counter and kiss her? Do you tell her you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re doing? Does she know that the future is a black hole and it will swallow you? When you reach for your gun in the night, do you point it at her? Do you tell her you’re leaving—to New York, to West Africa, to Ukraine? When you fuck other women do you crush her beneath your bodies because she won’t shut the fuck up? And do you think you’ll ever give her back? MEAT/HEADA hemiplegic migraine lays me down in the early hours of the afternoon, insistent and urgent as you once were. Close the blinds. I want to see you naked. You always spoke like the desire almost hurt and there is hurt in me now and numbness spreads through the fingers of my left hand making them useless, one by one. At the very end of us you slept on the bed against the window and bullets of rain grayed the palms through the glass. You breathed steady and I made tea and read. If I try to read now the oil slick of pain above my eye will become a house fire. When it was time to go to the party, I woke you and you started, your body coiled and dewy with hangover sweat. And now the numbness reaches my wrist, and no frantic shaking brings the feeling back. I understood you then and I understand you now—the way that history acted on us, the shock of a fist to the gut—and anyway you are elsewhere and transformed, all meat. But there were days when the sun came in through the blinds and made us golden, when we made love after the protest, when we thought we might change the world because we were changing each other. So what if now I’m alone and half of me can’t feel a thing and the other half is delirious, effulgent, with pain? I can blind myself with a pillow, raise my hands, throw the sheet off and expose a breast. I can say the price is fair.AND LIKE GOD, I’LL FORGIVE YOU TOOI go for walks. A man with a red beard makes me laugh and takes me on bike rides through the forest. We weave down the trail, now in shadow, now in light. The sun sets on the long drive to the airport and I marvel at the stretch of wildflowers—yellow, blue, purple—carpeting the median strip. I say little prayers at night and two gifts you’ve never seen—a hanging wooden heron and a voluptuous philodendron—watch over me in my bed, the bed that you’re not in. Red snapper blackens in a pan and the sound of a distant saxophone, played poorly, haltingly, drifts into my kitchen. I read. I write. I work. I make plans. I get things I’ve always wanted. And maybe I’ve seen you for the very last time, your back in a black cotton t-shirt moving farther and farther away into the haze of a wet north Florida winter until you could have been anyone. Or maybe one day when the azaleas again blaze hot pink outside my front door, you’ll knock. And like God I’ll say: Come on in, prodigal, lover boy, mercenary, imp. Sit down. What a long road you took. Let me take off your boots. You talk. I’ll listen.
I was cruising down I-70 aimed at Lawrence, Kansas when I got the email offering me a regular feature here at X-R-A-Y – part of a new “Recommends” series inviting me to draw on the deep backlog of reviews I’d already contributed to Goodreads, and pair them with new pieces exclusive to this site. Naturally I was flattered, and accepted right away from my fake-fancy hotel in the heart of the KU campus, already thinking about the pleasant symmetry of the timing. That is, I was in Kansas for the Inside the Castle 10th anniversary celebration, and as fate would have it, the inaugural title I’d attempted to write about back when I first started doing this some three years ago, was none other than Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker from that very same small press. And as you’ll see from the next two paragraphs, which comprise that original review in its entirety, I do very much mean “attempted to.”I can't say with certainty that I read every single word of Smut-Maker, but it wasn't for lack of trying. This is not a work that you absorb so much as one that you defeat. With text that squirms across the page in constantly shifting sizes, configurations, and directions, against power-clashing, technicolored background combinations that often seem chosen intentionally to make the eyes bleed, this psychotic, psychedelic drama demands you fight for every page turn. Though it bills itself as a play in 72 acts, and all of the dialogue is dutifully bracketed by quotation marks, it's hard to imagine how it would be performed save by a group of maybe a half-dozen or so actors on a bare stage talking over each other all at once (just to be clear, I would absolutely go see this play). The best I can do for potential touchstones would be to liken it to the nauseating, spiraling, stream-of-altered-consciousness passages in Hubert Selby, tossed into a centrifuge with some of Mark Z. Danielewski's wilder formalist notions – but even that description feels forced.There are characters – I'm pretty sure – or at least references to names that could be characters. The titular Smut-Maker, for one, as well as a number of "Boys" who seem to be involved in various violent and/or sexual relations with one another. Wittgenstein, Bolaño, Sun Ra, detectives, and the author himself come in and out of focus as well. It's pretty much impossible to parse, but parsing it's not really the point. If you swim around in it long enough, little snippets of comedy and pathos, absurdity and wisdom, will start to bob to the surface around you, and by the time you're done, you may well want to flip right back to the beginning and start again. For this is also a work you could read 100 times and still never read the same way twice – like a Choose Your Own Adventure through Hell, where no matter what page you keep your finger on, you’re never getting out alive.I don’t mind telling you, I had no idea what I was getting into with this book. If memory serves, I bought it because it sounded sexy and it was on some kind of sale – but looking back now, I’m not sure I could have chosen a more perfect entrée into both the Inside the Castle oeuvre, or to my review practice in general. Smut-Maker was so emphatically different from any other book I’d read up to that point (that House of Leaves comp is downright mortifying to me now), that I might well mark it as a personal milestone – an indelible leap forward in my understanding of what books can do and be. Inside the Castle honcho John Trefry talks a lot about the importance of texts as physical objects, and as I reread Smut-Maker last week by the light of my office window, watching the garish ombré of each page ripple and morph between hues whenever the sun slipped in or out of a passing cloud, listening to my own brain chemistry crackle and fizz as it interacted with Corrao’s bubbling phraseological soup – “the rhizomatic labyrinth of mirrored buildings”; “subways looped into a Mobius strip”; “the world is not the same as it was a month ago”; “I’d rather just not know what I’m looking at” – I felt like I was finally starting to understand what that means.Of course, Trefry and Corrao would both be quick to affirm what I surmised three years ago – that “understanding” is not the point of reading Smut-Maker, or most any of the now-50-strong corpus published under Inside the Castle’s black diamond sigil; that anyone who does the work of engaging with such “experimental” texts (a reductive catchall term they both find frustrating and tend to avoid) will inevitably end up reading and interpreting them differently, and that the very premise of “understanding” them is a wrongheaded approach (indeed, they both said as much during a roundtable discussion on Joe Bielecki’s indispensable indie lit podcast Writing the Rapids, which I listened to en route to the event). These books are decidedly not puzzles to be solved, but rather environments in which to play.Also part of that illuminating episode was Inside the Castle regular Mike Kleine, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Lawrence, and whose short novel Third World Magicks acts as something of an ideal counterweight to Corrao’s psychochromatics. It’s easily the most straightforward narrative I’ve encountered among the now-ten Inside the Castle titles I’ve read, and yet every bit as much in tune with the press’s enigmatic ethos.Third World Magicks is what you might call deceptively simple. Kleine’s prose zips along with the matter-of-fact ratatat of technical writing or court reporting, whether he’s describing the work lives of indie music journalists in part one, or island-dwelling construction cultists in part two (these two parts are, somewhat mysteriously, separated by an author-mandated two-week waiting period). Without giving too much away – and truly, much of the pleasure of reading Third World Magicks is derived from its inveigling sense of mystery – I think it’s fair to describe it as being about both the conversation, and the conflict between language and art, and the perhaps inherent impossibility of expressing either one via the other. It evokes nothing quite so much as that old, unsourceable quotation – “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – stretching that adage to its outermost shores from one end, before stranding it atop its innermost promontory at the other.Speaking as someone who put in a solid and committed three years as a music journalist for my local alt-weekly (shouts to Athens’ Flagpole Magazine), regularly attending two and three shows a week, transcribing dozens of staticky interviews conducted on my Motorola flip-phone, and reviewing countless albums for what worked out to, on average, about $25 a week plus cover charges and the occasional free drink, believe me when I say that Kleine’s depiction of the gig is hilariously well-realized. From working on “an exhaustive 100 songs of the decade list” and describing an artist’s live set as “truly something to experience before you die,” to the competitive name-dropping and the militant resistance to being impressed, or even surprised by new music for fear of being seen as not in the know, the trials and tribulations of blank zizou hit as hard as an Abul Mogard Farfisa drone, such that by the time she finds herself having a full-on, out-of-body, psychedelic experience, transcending time and space deep in the balm of that (phenomenal, look him up) artist’s “loud and enormous” sound, the idea of her translating her thoughts to paper feels completely absurd – an absurdity that is, necessarily, mirrored in Kleine’s own ekphrastic rendering of her mind’s ear.It’s that interior disconnect that Third World Magicks gets at most effectively, with regards to both its music writers in part one, and the dedicated, communal followers of black magician in part two (I’ve made a conscious decision to say as little about part two as possible here – much like the white cube at its center, it’s not particularly useful to describe – but rest assured it is worth that two-week wait). I recalled strongly my own eventual burnout with music writing – the creeping dissatisfaction I felt as I tried to bridge that last sliver of impassable distance between the art made by others, and my own latent creative impulse; to close the gap between all our lonely, disparate consciousnesses and somehow express my true self. blank zizou goes so far as to imagine making her own impossible music whilst drifting spaghettified inside of Abul Mogard’s, but no matter how many shows you write about, it’s still not the same as being in the band. And no matter how much brilliant art you make, it’s still not the same as telling people exactly how you feel. I could sit here and write whole essays about similar experiences I’ve had, standing in a packed house for hours with my eyes closed while fiery pillars of Fennesz or cosmic waves of Sunn O))) swept me up into the great beyond. But until you hear it yourself, you won’t know. And even when you do, it won’t be the same. Not for you. Not for anyone.I would estimate that for most people, each half of Third World Magicks could be read comfortably in under an hour, but fighting that impulse at the sentence level are a number of typographical tics (no capital letters, the use of ampersands in place of the letters “and” even when they appear within other words, a book-long commitment to vestigial k’s like the one in the titular Magicks) as well as a parade of ludicrous character names and a handful of science terms that, even upon looking them up, you may still not possess the tools to fully grasp (I certainly didn’t). With all these deliberately cryptic artistic choices pinging your brain like a cell tower, conspiring in their refusal to let you settle into complacency, the resultant sensation is akin to one of those NBA drills where a player attempts to get to his spots and get up his shots while two or three coaches throw extra basketballs at him without warning. Every time you think you’re in a rhythm with Third World Magicks, Kleine tosses a reverse footnote at your head or a sheet of pointillist punctuation at your ribs and makes you readjust on the fly. He keeps you moving, and it’s a joy to be moved.The Inside the Castle 10th anniversary was an oft-indescribable joy as well. Twenty-some-odd people from all walks of literary life – writers, reviewers, teachers, translators, booksellers, avid fans, local friends, and a couple of very cute cats – gathered in an unfinished little barn on the prairie for two days of readings and electronic noise. I expected to be the furthest traveler, coming all the way from Georgia, but visitors from Massachusetts, and Idaho at least gave me a run for my money – a testament to the cult-like, summoning gravity of Trefry’s vision. The chiggers were fierce. The lightning was multipronged and cycloramic. The breakfast-for-dinner was better than anything I saw at my fake-fancy hotel. But more than that, everyone was simply lovely – kind, and open, and thrilled to be there meeting other weirdos like themselves – putting names to faces – bridging our gaps. I wouldn’t claim to “understand” everything I heard across that magical weekend - from the warpfield poetics of Candace Wuehle and Madison McCartha to the generative philosophical would-you-rathers of Kyle Booten to the bleeding edged linguistic produnovas of Grant Maierhofer and Trefry himself - but I felt honored and privileged to hear every bit of it, and to carry it home with me, and to now pass it along to you. Compared to my time in the music writing trenches, I definitely felt like I’d found some of that connection that evaded me during all those mind-blowing shows I’d covered alone. When enough writers get together to share in their work, you all start to feel like part of the band. Even criticism can elevate toward the realms of art.Trefry himself is an ardent supporter of book reviewing as not only a service to the small press community, but as a vital part of any writing practice, as evidenced by quotes like “nothing has clarified my intentions and expectations about literature more,” “everyone should do it,” and my personal favorite, “if you’re writing a book review as though it’s not your work, you’re doing it wrong.” I’ve tried to approach my reviews with this level of care since that first, labored attempt to describe Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker to the world, and Trefry and Kleine have likewise put their money where their mouths are with Third World Magicks, going so far as to include several reviews of the book at the end of the narrative proper, almost as a kind of ellipsis – a nod to the ongoing discourse in which Inside the Castle and its readers are mindfully participating. Take it from someone who knows. Indie rock is doing just fine. But indie lit still needs all the reviews it can get.In wrapping up this edition of X-R-A-Y Recommends, allow me to paraphrase a popular conceit from my music writing days: these guys are your favorite writer’s favorite writers. Corrao, Kleine, and Trefry may never be bestsellers, but they’ve got cred coming out of their ears. They write pareidolic. They write klangfarbenmelodie. And I love their work for the same reasons I still seek out strange and unfamiliar music every day – for the pleasure of new words, new ideas, new ways of feeling and being surprised. As strange and beguiling as Inside the Castle texts can be, they are, in fact, for everyone. Enjoying them is not about being smart enough to figure them out, but rather finding curiosity and excitement in the incomplete spaces of your own unknowing; letting them live, and breathe, and work on you, quite possibly for the rest of your life; coming back to them again and again, with the understanding that they’re no more static than you are; that they’ll change right along with you, and the chemicals in your brain, and the light outside your window; that no matter how many times you read them, they’ll still be different every time.
My boss is a dog and today is the dog’s birthday.Okay, not really. I like to say that my boss is a dog, but it’s just one of those things you say to make it easier, you know? But it is her birthday.The dog’s name is Patatina, which is Italian for little potato. The dog’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi, are Italian. I’m from India or at least my grandparents are. And Patatina is a Papillon.(Patatina can also mean pussy. In case you were wondering.)Here: Lake Oswego, 15 minutes from downtown Portland but several income brackets removed. Me in my shitbox 1998 Volvo with a busted window and no license plate because it keeps failing the Oregon emissions test; I park around the back of the garage of the Bianchi’s nine-bedroom mansion so none of the neighbors get scared by my car. Pat is in the garage. She does a few happy loops when she sees me, leaving a circular trail of piss in her wake. It’s nice to have someone who’s always excited to see you.My job, basically, is to hang out with Patatina. Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi are too rich and busy to watch her – he owns a firm that creates value for shareholders and she runs a blog on how to practice yoga in a God-honoring way – and Patatina is too much of a free spirit/biter for doggy daycare so I get twelve dollars an hour to play dog nanny. Take her for walks, you know, throw the ball for her, sit on the couch with her and cuddle, pick up her shit. Sometimes when I’m walking Patatina next to a busy street and she shits and I have to pick it up, I imagine that I’m in one of the cars passing by and I’m seeing something about myself that I can’t from the inside, only I have to imagine what it is.Pat isn’t really my boss. I guess we’re more like coworkers. I use a treat to lure Patatina into the back of my car. She knows the routine and settles right in and starts gnawing on the seatbelt. I put the address in Waze even though I mostly know where I’m going. Halfway there, I get an ad for Burger King; “Buy A Bacon Cheeseburger,” it instructs me, and covers the map so I miss my turn. At red lights, I watch Patatina in the rearview mirror to make sure she isn’t eating my carpet or seizing or anything. She’s cute, I guess, the way a stuffed animal is. She has those plumey Papillon ears that little kids love to touch without asking. She’s either descended from four generations of Sicilian show dogs, or a rescue, depending on whether it’s someone from the Women’s Ministry or the Animal Protection Alliance asking Mrs. Bianchi. Today she’s four years old.Patatina, not Mrs. Bianchi.While the groomer washes Patatina, I wander through the Target next door. I get a text from Xiaowei: good morning baby :) and then three red hearts. I send her back four red hearts then use Mrs. Bianchi’s credit card to buy trail mix for me and a pack of doggy salmon chews for her. Patatina, not Mrs. Bianchi.When I pick Patatina up she has pink bows clipped to both her ears. “For her birthday,” says the groomer, scratching Pat on the under part of her chin. Pat closes her eyes and puts on a face that suggests she’s approaching climax and the groomer says aww. I give her a salmon chew and load Patatina back into my car. Pat’s party isn’t until four, which means we have a couple hours to kill. Usually I’d take her to the dog park or for a walk by the river, but Mrs. Bianchi wants her pretty and good-smelling for the party so I don’t want to risk getting her dirty. Instead, we kill time at an artisan pet store. A man in a dirty black sweatshirt with a garbage bag slung over one shoulder paces back and forth in front on the sidewalk screaming garbled obscenities at me and Pat but I ignore him. Inside, I examine bags of dry dog food that cost more per pound than the chicken I buy at Safeway and ask the clerk if they sell hamsters. The clerk, an attractive green-haired person, shakes their head.“We don’t sell any live animals,” they say. “It’s inhumane.” Outside, the man has begun repeatedly slamming his head into the glass wall of the store with a dull thung, thung, thung like a mallet on a held gong. “Okay,” I say to the cashier, disappointed. I wanted to look at hamsters. The cashier tells Patatina to sit and gives her a milk bone even though she doesn’t. Patatina’s birthday party is nautical themed though the nearest ocean is hundreds of miles away and I don’t think she’s ever so much as shit on a seashell. The party was gonna be an intimate thing, Mrs. Bianchi told me, real piccolo affair, just the family and the neighbors and about three dozen of Patatina’s closest well-wishers. Two white tents have been set up in the Bianchi’s sloping lake-side backyard and silent caterers mill around slinging canapes. I accept a beetroot and walnut blini shaped like a dog bone. I can’t relax, though; I’m on duty. This party is a warzone and my weapon is a metal dish. The Bianchis didn’t get shortlisted for the 2023 Lake Oswego Excellence in Lawn Care Award by accident; whenever I see Patatina squat, it’s my sworn duty to get the dish under her and catch whatever excrement emerges before it can hit the ground. If I miss, the consequences to both the Bianchi’s Bermudagrass and my time-and-a-half party pay could be dire.Navy SEALs aren’t under this much pressure.After my fourth trip inside to flush I return outside to find Patatina’s head vanished into my backpack to the general amusement of the guests. I yank her back by the collar and find that she’s gotten into the trail mix. Cashews and raisins and M&Ms rain from her jaws and she tilts her head back like a duck, snapping her teeth as she tries to funnel as much gorp down her gullet as possible. “Stupid fucking dog,” I mutter. Patatina licks me on the nose and I get a whiff of macadamia nut. One of the caterers laughs at me. A little later on, Mrs. Bianchi finds me to say hi. “Dhivya,” she purrs. She wraps me in a hug and kisses me on both cheeks, taking care to avoid the dish in my hand. Mrs. Bianchi is tall and old-lady fit, sinewy and tan like a piece of beef jerky. She’s in company mode, which means she’s actually talking to me and also about 500% more Italian than usual. Mrs. Bianchi talks like Mario whenever her friends come around. She used to hide her accent until Mrs. Tyndall, the wife of some retired Blazers benchwarmer, said she thought it made her sound continental and now Mrs. Bianchi rolls her Rs like politicians roll logs and talks about her childhood spent stamping grapes in Genoa every chance she can get. “I hope-a Patatina didn’t give you too much-a trouble,” she says. “Oh, you know Pat,” I say vaguely and she laughs like I said something very funny, like, yeah, I do know Pat, that darn dog, always getting up to capers etc.By six p.m., Patatina has wearied of begging trophy wives for hors d'oeuvres and retired inside so I am honorably discharged and Venmoed $150 for my service. Inspired by both the knowledge that Xiaowei is at home waiting for me and the three glasses of champagne I snuck from the party, I treat red lights like stop signs and make it home in record time. Xiaowei and I share a studio apartment downtown above a Korean restaurant. It can get cramped and it always smells like bibimbap but it’s air-conditioned and plus I don’t really mind the bibimbap thing. I find Xiaowei sitting on the sunken in part of our mattress, painting her toenails white. “Hi, baby,” she says. Xiaowei and I have been dating for two years. She has a tattoo of a heart next to her eye and kind of a lot of lip filler but I like the way it looks. I tell her about the party and when her toenails are dry we have sex, just the one time, because she has work soon and doesn’t want to get sweaty.Xiaowei is the first girl I’ve ever been sure I loved.When we’re done, I eat an edible and lounge in bed and scroll through Twitter and watch Xiaowei put on her work makeup.“I might order Mexican for dinner,” I tell her.“Mm,” says Xiaowei, who’s doing her eyeliner and can’t move her face too much. That’s when I get the phone call. I roll my eyes when I see the caller ID and pick up on the third ring. “Hello Mrs. Bianchi,” I say.“Dhivya,” she says. Her accent is about as Italian as mine so the party must have ended. “We just left the veterinary urgent care with Patatina.”“Oh shit,” I say. Xiaowei, now applying glue to a false eyelash, pauses. “Sorry, I mean, oh no, what happened?”“Patatina was throwing up and throwing up. And then she tried to stand up and she couldn’t.”“Oh shit,” I say again. “Jesus.” Xiaowei shoots me a look but I ignore her. “She gonna be okay?”“Well she has to stay overnight but the vet thinks yes,” says Mrs. Bianchi. “It was lucky, Marco went to get a hammer from the garage and noticed Patatina wasn’t well. The vet says it’s lucky we got her here so soon.”“Thank God,” I say. Xiaowei relaxes, turns back to the mirror, raises the eyelash to her eye and begins to fit it in place. “Do they know what happened?”“Yes,” said Mrs. Bianchi. “They gave her some hydrogen peroxide to make her throw up and they found all sorts of things in her stomach. Raisins, macadamia nuts, chocolate candy. All sorts of things that are toxic to dogs. The vet said it was like she had eaten a bag of trail mix.”Ah.“And Clara Tyndall,” Mrs. Bianchi continues, not bothering to hide the anger in her voice anymore, “told me about a thing she saw at Patatina’s party. Do you know what?” I don’t but Mrs. Bianchi doesn’t wait for an answer. “She saw Patatina eating trail mix out of your backpack while you were not watching her although you were being paid to do just that. And she also said she saw you drinking a glass of champagne while, again, on the clock.”My eyes are focused on Xiaowei, who’s moved on to her other eye. She dabs eyelash glue on the band of the lash with the practiced hand of an Old Master.“Well? Do you have anything to say to that?” Mrs. Bianchi asks me. “I had three glasses of champagne. Not one.”“Hilarious,” she says, and then tells me I’m fired.I allot myself four days of feeling bad for/about myself and spend the first two stoned out of my mind playing video games and the second two wandering around in various parks, also stoned out of my mind. The fifth day I log into Indeed and apply for every job that pays at least fourteen dollars an hour and only get medium stoned.I apply as a gas station attendant, a line cook, a budtender, and a cashier at 7/11, and a bus driver even though I don’t have a CDL. Xiaowei tells me she might be able to get me an interview as a barback at her club but I don’t think she means it. I ask if she wants to get lunch with me at the food carts but she says no, she has to get waxed, so I drive down to the waterfront and eat my Chicken Nanban sando alone, sans the occasional passing biker and a probably homeless woman passed out on the grass a few yards from me. It’s a beautiful day; the sky is paint-sample blue and the Willamette River is dotted with sailboats. I’d figured that the one good part about getting fired would be that I’d be able to spend time with Xiaowei outside of the overlapping hour or two a day we got when I was done with work and she hadn’t started. But she seems pissed at me. I’m not sure why.I might know why.I guess I should tell you why.The CliffNotes version: the last time I was unemployed, I cheated on Xiaowei. It wasn’t that cut and dry, obviously. It wasn’t like I lost my job and thought to myself, Man, this sucks. I better go cheat on my girlfriend about it. It just kind of happened. I’d been working as a busser at a French restaurant downtown and failed a drug test. My manager, who I had done coke with during work hours on no less than a dozen separate occasions, told me that he was sorry but there was really nothing he could do. It didn’t matter if he meant it.Xiaowei, who I’d been with for about a year at that point, could tell I was feeling down so she invited me to come to work with her, which you might be thinking doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun but one thing I haven’t mentioned is that Xiaowei is a stripper. So going to work with her meant I got to watch my girlfriend and half a dozen other assorted hot girls waltz around naked, and occasionally she’d bring me a whiskey sour or give me a free lap dance. Basically I got to be the king of the strip club.Except that night there was this Seattle tech-bro type guy sitting right next to me who made it very clear that he was interested in Xiaowei. Four-fifties-in-her-G-string-before-she even-took-her-top-off kind of interested, I mean. So she did this thing where she kind of crouched down facing away from him and put her ass cheeks on his chest, and he was rubbing on her ass and handing her twenties, and I was pretending like I couldn’t see them even though like I said I was sitting right fucking next to him. And he was talking to her, saying all this stupid Pretty Woman shit, like I can get you out of here and You’re way too good for a place like this and Have you ever been to Vernazza? And actually it was that last one that got to me. Vernazza is this Michelin-star restaurant over in Southeast where they make the mozzarella right in front of you. Xiaowei’s always wanted to go but I’ve never had the money to take her. All I could think about was Xiaowei on a beautiful romantic candlelit date at Vernazza with this dickhead, both of them all dressed up, playing footsie under the table, maybe. And that was so much worse than her having her ass on his chest.By the end of the night I was majorly pissed in both the American and British senses and Xiaowei and I got into a shouting match on our walk to her car. I told her that she was basically as good as cheating on me and she told me that that “cheating” was what was paying our rent because, in case I forgot, I did not have a job currently, and I told her that if she cared that much about money we could drive over to the Motel 6 on 82nd and find her her own pimp right now. And Xiaowei told me to fuck off. And so I did.I fucked off to my buddy Max’s apartment for the night to cool down. And his friend was there, some red-headed girl with the kind of face you forget while you’re looking at it. And then Max went to bed.You know what happened next.When we were done, I went outside to smoke a cigarette and I called Xiaowei. I’d had a few more drinks after arriving at Max’s and I barely remember what I said, to be honest. I think I said I was sorry. I think I told her I didn’t know why I did it and that I didn’t know what I’d do if I lost her. I think I cried. I think I said something about Vernazza.I know I told her I loved her.Which wasn’t a big deal in and of itself, honestly. I’d been telling Xiaowei I loved her for a couple months by that point.That was just the first time I meant it.I got the job watching Patatina a week and a half later, which I think went a long way toward smoothing things over with Xiaowei, though it took a long time for her to trust me again. At the interview, I told the Bianchi’s that I’d had a dog growing up, a ferrety terrier mix named Lucy. She was big and scruffy, like the kind of dog you’d see in an apocalypse movie digging through the trash after the bombs have gone off and everyone’s dead except Will Smith. When I was 15 I went on a run with her after she ate dinner and her stomach felt like a balloon afterward. The vet told us that it was gastric torsion and that surgery would be fifty-five hundred dollars, and there was a sixty percent chance it wouldn’t work anyway. I’d actually started to cry a little bit by the time I was done with the story which I was really embarrassed about at the time but ended up getting me the job. Mrs. Bianchi told me that she could tell that I really loved Lucy and that she hoped I’d love Patatina the same way. I return the other half of my sandwich to its box and walk up to the sleeping woman. She’s wearing a ratty pink pajama set and up close, I can see the tinfoil clutched in her hand even in sleep, like she’s so scared someone might try and take it from her it’s become instinct to hold onto it as tightly as possible at all times. I watch her chest until I’m satisfied she’s breathing, then leave the sandwich box next to her and walk back to my car.It’s nearly one p.m. but the call wakes me up; I’ve begun adapting to Xiaowei’s schedule, which means late nights and later mornings. Early afternoons, really.“Turn that off,” Xiaowei groans from next to me.“It’s not an alarm,” I mumble, sitting up to accept the call. “Hello?”“We have a bit of a situation,” says Mrs. Bianchi without preamble.I yawn. “You fired me,” I remind her. “I know,” Mrs. Bianchi says, and I can picture her rolling her eyes. A strict botox regimen keeps most of her face petrified so this ordinary movement becomes extraordinary on her; it’s like watching a whirlpool in a still lake. “I know, and this would just be a one-off, one-day thing. But we could use you. We could use your discretion. Five hundred dollars?”“For just one day?”“Yes.”I tilt my head from side to side until my neck cracks. “Six-fifty?”Mrs. Bianchi sighs.By the time I’ve gotten dressed and pulled up to the Bianchi’s house, it’s two. I park behind the garage like always and head into the house, an enormous structure of white squares that resembles an angular cloud. The main floor is basically one enormous room, shiny white kitchen and living room and dining room all in one.Patatina is curled up on a leather ottoman but scrambles up when she sees me and runs in circles around my feet, yipping and pissing all the while. Something’s definitely up; neither of us is usually allowed in the house.Ms. Bianchi stands by a polished marble island in the kitchen sector. She’s dressed in a mauve-colored lounge set and holds one hand to her head like she’s nursing a headache. “Hello Dhivya,” she says.“Hello Mrs. Bianchi,” I say, trying to sound dignified, which is difficult while fielding an eight-pound dog who seems to want to lick every inch of your sneakers. I get down on one knee like I’m proposing and Patatina hops up so her front paws are on my bent knee and her face is almost level with mine. Her tongue is out in an expression of vacant ecstasy; I scratch her behind the ears.Mrs. Bianchi sighs. “So, you know Big Sexy,” she says, which would be an incomprehensible question if I didn’t know Big Sexy.“Of course,” I say. Big Sexy is the terrible chihuahua owned by Josh, the terrible crypto-zillionaire California transplant who lives next door to the Bianchis. He’s chased off so many Amazon delivery drivers that Jeff Bezos probably knows him by name. He’s got absolutely no training and free run of the neighborhood. Big Sexy, not Josh.Actually, Josh too.“Well, it seems Patatina has also become acquainted with Big Sexy recently,” says Mrs. Bianchi, grimacing. She gestures towards Pat, who’s still perched on my knee. I notice now that there’s a new roundness to her stomach, a slight distension of her nipples. Pat wags her tail. Maybe she can tell we’re talking about her. “And Patatina,” Mrs. Bianchi continues, “cannot have puppies. I am secretary of the Portland branch of the Animal Protection Agency. I hosted the Spay and Neuter banquet last year. I gave a speech on the importance of pet population control. And I absolutely cannot be seen taking her to get a — a late-term spay. I am a chairwoman of the Lake Oswego Women's Ministry. I co-chaired the Northwest Oregon Pro-Life Dance-A-Thon just last week. They’d eviscerate me.” “Over a dog abortion?”“Late-term spay,” she snaps. “And yes. Last year it came to light that Naomi Zweig’s Persian Max was actually a Maxine, but by that time she was already a month along. Clara Tyndall saw her taking her to the vet, and…” Mrs. Bianchi shakes her head. “I still have nightmares about the Facebook callout posts,” she says. She looks so miserable that it’s hard not to feel bad for her but I manage anyway.“So that’s why we need you,” Mrs. Bianchi continues. “I’ve gotten the appointment with the vet all set up, and everything is paid for. You just need to bring her in, sit in the waiting room while they do the operation, and then bring her back here. Two hours, max.”Patatina licks me on the nose.I put the vet’s address into Waze even though I mostly know where I’m going. Halfway there, I get an ad for Burger King. “Buy Two Bacon Cheeseburgers,” it instructs me. The ad covers the map but I make my turn anyway. I get a text from Xiaowei: Goodluck with the dog abortion lol. See you tn. Xiaowei’s got a rare night off and has agreed to spend the evening hanging out. Nothing crazy, just takeout and maybe a movie. Completely unremarkable except it’s the first time she’s agreed to spend any real time with me in the two weeks since I lost my job. At a red light, I heart react her message and send back Can’t wait!I park in front of the vet's office and bring in Patatina, who’s excitedly wriggling at the end of her leash like a landed fish.I don’t know if she’s too dumb to know that she’s at the vet or if she does and she’s too dumb to care. The receptionist calls Pat’s name and we follow her through the door behind the front desk into an examination room. It’s dingy and smells like cat. The vet, a woman with smooth gray hair pulled into a low ponytail, enters a moment after we do, clipboard in hand. Patatina rushes to greet her.“Yes, yes,” the vet says to Pat, who’s trying to climb up her leg. “Hello to you too.” She smiles at me. “You must be Patatina’s Mom,” she says. “Sure,” I say.The vet writes something on her clipboard. “And we’re getting spayed today, correct?” I dislike her use of “we” but say yes. The vet nods. “I do feel I should tell you,” she says. “We don’t commonly spay dogs while they’re pregnant because it can be very distressing for the dog. They don’t understand what happened, why they lost the litter—any of that. They can get very depressed.”“Ah,” I say. I twist one of my earrings.“I just wanted you to know that,” says the vet.I sit in the waiting room while they spay Patatina and page through a huge encyclopedia of horse breeds that looks like it's meant for children. The woman next to me holds a pet carrier in her lap. An electric green iguana sits coiled inside.“He has a cold,” the woman tells me. Her micro-bangs are slightly crooked. The iguana sneezes.An hour passes, then two. I go for a walk, skirting the large homeless encampment set up in a vacant lot next to the vet’s office. A handmade sign nailed to a tree among the tents reads “IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW.” I find a coffee shop and buy an Ube coconut milk latte that costs seven dollars, not including tip. I spill a little on my shirt and the stain it leaves is purple.At three hours, I start to worry. I return to the vet’s office and ask the receptionist if everything is alright, and she assures me it is.“Patatina’s out of surgery,” she tells me. “The vet just wants to observe her for a little while, make sure she comes out of the anesthesia okay.” I text Xiaowei and tell her I might be a little late, then return to my horse encyclopedia.A half hour later, just as I’ve finished admiring a picture of an Orlov Trotter, the door behind the desk opens and a young East Asian man in blue scrubs emerges with Patatina trailing on a leash behind him. She looks slightly dazed but still manages a slow tail wag when she sees me. The man hands me a manilla folder and a small bottle of pills.“She did great,” he tells me. “You’ll need to watch her pretty closely tonight, and tomorrow. Keep her up and moving around, if you can, to help her recover from the anesthesia, but don’t overexert her.” He gestures to the bottle of pills. “Half of one every three hours or so. She’ll be in a lot of pain. There’s more aftercare instructions in the folder.” I nod and lead Patatina out to my car. She’s moving much slower than usual and needs help climbing in. She sighs and stretches out on the seat and immediately closes her eyes; no seatbelt gnawing for her tonight. I get in the driver's seat, twist open the pill bottle, and dry swallow two. It’s nearly eight when I pull back into the Bianchi’s driveway and lead Patatina inside. I was just expecting Mrs. Bianchi, but Mr. Bianchi—a handsome man with hair that always looks like he’s just got back from the barber—is here too. He’s dressed in a well-tailored three-piece suit; Mrs. Bianchi wears an ankle-length silver dress, and her hair is arranged in a complicated updo. They’re obviously dressed to go out, or maybe they’re just getting in.“Hello, Dhivya,” says Mrs. Bianchi. Mr. Bianchi nods at me.“Hi,” I say. Patatina doesn’t move toward her owners, just stands next to me and yawns. I hand Mrs. Bianchi the folder and the bottle of pills. “The surgery went fine. All the information is in the folder. The vet said you need to watch her pretty closely tonight, but she should be okay after that.”“Oh,” says Mrs. Bianchi. “Well, we were actually just about to head out to the 2023 Lake Oswego Excellence in Lawn Care Awards Ceremony. So if you could stay for a few more hours, keep an eye on her, that would be great.”“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t.”“What?” says Mrs. Bianchi. “Why not?”“I have a, um, prior engagement.”Mrs. Bianchi stares at me for a moment, then turns and says something to her husband, too quietly for me to hear. He nods, and she turns back to me. “We’ll pay you one hundred extra,” Mrs. Bianchi says.I think about Xiaowei. “I really can’t.”Mrs. Bianchi purses her lips. “Three hundred extra. Nine-fifty total.”That’s my half of rent, and then some. I swallow. I put my hands in my pockets. I scrunch and unscrunch my toes in my shoes. I think about Xiaowei waiting for me, about our plans for tonight. Barely plans, really. Barely anything. I could take her out to dinner. I could use part of the money and take her out on a real date. I could even take her to Vernazza.“Yeah,” I say to her. “Okay.”Mrs. Bianchi, not Xiaowei.
