My brother Max told me about Bud Smith. The writer, not the baseball player, the one who’d pitched a no-hitter in his rookie year for the St. Louis Cards.For a brief time, I thought he was the baseball player, who’d pitched a no-hitter in his rookie year—on9/3/01, eight days before fair Seth MacFarlane missed his plane at solemn Boston Logan—for the St. Louis Cards. But he was not him. Who else was he not? Bud Smith was not Indiana Jones*. He was not Jerry Springer, Bud Smith. He was not Josh Hartnett, nor Josh Hartnett’s character, Captain Danny Walker, from the film Pearl Harbor, which my parents brought me to on Christmas Day at CityWalk, in Universal City, CA—not so long before this other Bud pitched his no-no. (Do you think he saw Pearl Harbor in theaters, too? Bud Smith?)Back in the present, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bud Smith. The writer, Bud Smith. The author. Bud Smith. Bud. Smith. I looked up and ordered his novel on Amazon dot com, the book Teenager by Bud Smith. Bill Callahan—Smog himself!—hadblurbed the book. He must have been thrilled about this, Bud Smith. I began talking to him in my sleep, Bud Smith. I asked him, Do you approve of me, Bud Smith? Back in New York City, Bud Smith’s apartment began to quake/shake. He stuck his head out the window and realized it was only his place quake/shaking, not the whole world, nor the city around him. He looked up at the ceiling, and he saw me, and I said, Bud Smith? Who’s asking? asked Bud Smith. I’m Z.H., I told Bud Smith. You’re a floating head, Z.H., said Bud Smith. Amazon dot com said your book’s coming tomorrow, I let Bud Smith know, Your book Teenager? Oh hey that’s nice to hear, Bud Smith replied. I’m sure I’ll like it, I declared to Bud Smith. Let me know if you do, Bud Smith said, Perhaps through more conventional means? My brother Max says you’re the nicest dude, I told Bud Smith. You know Max? He’s a lovely guy, said Bud Smith. If you’re ever in LA, could we have a catch, maybe? I wondered aloud, though I couldn’t hide my jittery excitement from Bud Smith. Catch? Can I think about it? requested Bud Smith.You know, I’m not the baseball player Bud Smith, he added, That young buck who pitched that no-hitter days before—I know, I acknowledged, Trust me, I know. And could you maybe send me a PDF of Work? It’s way out of print. Sure, kid, decided Bud Smith, Why not? I gave him my email, and then I said I’d check back in. Expect my floating head, Bud Smith, I said.I'll await it eagerly. Now if you don’t mind, I must get back to bed—and he turned to his side and fell asleep in an instant, Bud Smith. (Bud.)(Smith.) I did the same.__[*Later on, Bud Smith will tweet about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny being the 2nd best Indiana Jones movie. This will be the only time I disagree with Bud Smith. This will be, as far as I’m aware, the only time Bud Smith has ever been wrong.]
A week before mom’s clinic burned to the ground, my older brother Sam brought home an octopus from the Greek grocery where he worked. After his shift, he had set the octopus on one of the shiny tables in the back and studied it beneath a wash of fluorescent lights. He looked at its hollow head, its body, and its missing eyes. Everything seemed ‘normal’ until he noticed its arms. Sam counted them again and again to be sure. Then he threaded the animal carefully into his backpack and hobbled out of the store to catch his bus.At home he staggered in a hurry toward the bathroom and I followed, certain something was up. I watched while he filled our tub and poured in the salt he’d retrieved from our pantry. He stirred the water with one hand and adjusted the hot and cold with the other, finally tasting a finger he’d dunked into the brine. Satisfied, he lowered the octopus gently into the water and it settled on the bottom. Sam rested his chin over the edge of the tub and waited. Later he slept there, snoring, both arms limp at his sides. I snuck away to the garage. I pulled Dad’s fishing net away from its hook, thinking I would fetch the limp creature from the tub, toss it into a trash bag and dump it into one of the neighbors’ cans. When Sam woke and it was no longer there, I would say he must have revived it. I would tell him that it probably escaped down the drain, that I had read this could happen with them sometimes, however unbelievable. But when I returned to the bathroom, Sam was no longer there. I stared at the octopus beneath the water before I heard a familiar sound behind me––it was Sam’s twisted foot as it dragged across the linoleum floor, followed by his good one coming down in its dull thump. Hissss...thump. Hissss...thump. The kitchen light sparked on overhead as I turned. Sam stood beneath it and rubbed both eyes clear with his large but frail hands. He gave an awful look, trying to figure why I held the garbage bag, dad’s net. Then without a word he shuffled slowly past me and up to our room.Sam slept through the morning and the next couple that followed. No one could wake him. The grocery owner called and our parents offered the excuse they had settled upon. “Well either way, he’s done here...and not sure we’ll hire another of them anytime soon.” He was still talking when dad hung up.A few days later, finally out of bed, Sam demanded to see it but dad told him he’d already buried it in the back. There was a mound of freshly turned soil in the garden but I wasn’t convinced he had. In any case, Sam drove a wooden stake through the ground there and painted the number ‘9’ onto a styrofoam plate he’d asked me to attach to it. Rain would wash the number gone only a few nights later as we slept.“A lot can come from messing with a wish or prayer or whatever you wanna call what your brother was doing with that thing,” mom told me in her car later that week. We were parked at her work, or what was left of it. Mom told dad she wanted to see it for herself and I asked to tag along. The metal parking signs were curled from the heat and letters that once spelled her name had bubbled and peeled away onto the asphalt. News trucks surrounded the blackened rubble while a large group waved signs and droned-on like insects. The news said someone had entered by smashing the front window with a large rock. Then there were kerosene-soaked rags stuffed into the open mouths of gasoline containers––eight in all. “Even if you meant well?” I asked.Mom rolled down her window. The swells of the opposing crowds filled her car as she lit the only cigarette I would ever see her smoke. The way she did it, I was sure it wasn’t her first. “Especially if you did.”
LILING, 66It is not wise to swim so soon after a meal, I know, but I have never experienced anything quite like the sensation of floating in a swimming pool with a full belly, which is—and I didn’t realize this until I lay here pushing my pale legs down into the water, watching them spring back up like ice—in essence, just another pool containing smaller bits of floating flesh. And all this occurring on the deck of a cruise ship floating in the Pacific, Earth’s largest body of water? Well. I may go again tomorrow after lunch.DAN, 37When I get to the pool there’s still some vomit on the surface. I was planning on draining the whole thing at port tomorrow, but Yuri said the guests are complaining, so I need to have it ready by five. Complaining. On a cruise.The lido deck is already closed for cleaning, so I throw Europe ’72 on the system while I search for the treatment protocol in the stack of loose manual sheets in the maintenance closet. When I asked the last guy how much chlorine solution to use for this kind of situation, he said to just blast it. “He’s Gone” comes on. I love this song. It reminds me of my father, the one I never knew but feel close to in this job, in any hard job, really. His image in my mind is always my age.Excuse me, says a small voice that hits me like a big one.A kid stands in the doorway with a bigass Shirley Temple. He’s shirtless and completely bald.I say, What’s going on, boss?Is the pool closed? he says. Kids do this—ask questions they already have answers to. I think it means they just want to talk. I’ve never been good with kids, but if the kid wants to talk, I can do that.Yeah, I say, should be good in a few hours.What’d he eat? he says.What? I say.The guy who ranched, he says.Oh, I say, I don’t know.Well, could you find out? he says.Sure, I say.The kid sucks down his soda as I attach the arm to the skimmer. I catch myself staring at his shiny head. In these situations, it’s best to just assume it’s cancer. “China Cat Sunflower” plays as we walk the pool’s edge to the deep end, where the juice is. I feel suddenly aware that I’m over thirty, working a summer job, listening to The Dead. I’m embarrassed. I don’t even like The Dead that much. I do, but not so much.I use the skimmer to push the water just behind the spill, directing it closer to the edge. Take a look, I say. He hands me his cup and gives me this look like, Don’t drink my friggen Shirley Temple. He lies with his belly on the sun-warmed tile, pulls himself forward till his head is just over the water. His face is solemn as he studies these remnants of a meal: a cream-streaked swirl, oily and orange, bits of unchewed chicken skin, translucent strings of celery spinning slowly outward.It’s beautiful, he says.It really is, I say.Like a galaxy, he says.BENJI, 11I’m taking a shower when Mom and David get back to our cabin. The bathroom door is shut, but I can hear them right on the other side, so I try to be quiet as I wash the shampoo out of my hair, drink some water from the shower head, dry off. I wish this was a tub. I asked David why they can’t have tubs instead, and he said they are too big for the bathrooms, and I said the shower is almost as long as the tub at home, and he said even a few inches longer would mean they couldn’t have as many passengers, and I asked what’s wrong with that, and he said it costs a lot of money to power a cruise ship like this one, to pay the staff, to feed everyone, and he asked if I liked the food and the entertainment and the clean facilities, and when I said I did, he said then I should be grateful that the showers are the size they are. I wish I didn’t ask. I’m quiet, but I’m mad. Well, not mad, just disappointed because David said he’d take me up to the pool after lunch, but that was two hours ago and now they’re fighting, Mom and David, so I probably won’t even get to swim on our last day. Which is today. Technically tomorrow is, but we get back to San Diego around noon, and Mom wants to go to two standup comedy shows in a row tomorrow morning. One of the comedians is a dwarf, David says, like a midget, but he’s got a big personality and he says the wildest stuff when he roasts the crowd. I can tell David wants to get roasted. I hope he does. Mom keeps saying they will be appropriate for me, the shows, but I don’t care if they’re appropriate. I just don’t want to spend my last hours at sea doing something I can do on land. I mean, I can swim on land, but not in a pool out on the open ocean. And I can’t go anywhere on the ship without one of them, not even the buffet, or the arcade, or Kidtopia, which is for five-year-olds. And Mom put our phones in the safe and said she wouldn’t tell us the combination, so we could be more in the moment, present, she kept saying, but somehow David got his phone because he said he had a work emergency, and when I asked him how he knew about the emergency before he checked his phone, he called me a smartass. I turn off the water and just sit on the hard floor of the shower waiting for them to calm down so I can come out and get dressed, but it’s a pretty bad one. The fight. I make a mohawk with my wet hair, then I shake it out, then I do it again, but it doesn’t hold for very long, so I smell all the soaps. I taste the one that smells like pineapple, but it tastes like original soap. I look under the sink for mouthwash, but I can’t find any, just some small bottles of body wash, bath salt … what do you even do with that? Like, to make it drugs … some toilet paper, and a black plastic case with a cutter inside. Like, a nice haircutter. It’s David’s, I think. I see some curly gray hairs caught in the little teeth on the blade. It’s 100% David’s. I wash the cutter in the sink till I can’t find any more of his hairs, don’t worry, I didn’t plug it in yet, I’m not stupid, then I wash the soap taste from my mouth, then I plug in the cutter to see if it works. When I turn it on it shakes my whole body, and my wiener tickles a little bit, and it feels kinda good, kinda weird. It struggles for a second like it’s choking on the water, the cutter, then it runs fast and smooth and vibrates even harder. Then I do something savage. I shave my whole head. I just go for it. My hair falls into the sink in big wet chunks. The thing sounds like it’s eating. Sometimes it stops working, but it’s not broken, you just have to clean out the hair that’s jammed in there and keep going. Mom cuts my hair in the tub at home, or she used to, and she told me that. She always said my hair was so hard to cut. She always said it’s coarse, and I always said just buzz it, and she always said I have no idea how much money people pay to get hair as blonde as mine, and it’s not right to just cut it all off. I finish a pretty good first pass on my head, but there are still a bunch of little strips of hair like when you think you’re done mowing the lawn and you look and see a bunch of little strips of uncut grass you didn’t see before. Even with the cutter buzzing in my ears and through my head, I still hear Mom crying to David. She’s hyperventilating too. David keeps saying, Seriously? Which is rude, and pisses me off, but forreal, I get it. Mom does this when she’s too lazy to make a good argument for why she’s right, or why Dad is delusional, or why David isn’t trying hard enough. It’s a lot. But I think she thinks she needs to do it. I do another pass, then I do one more until the cutter makes the same smooth sound all over my head. When I accidentally go at a different angle, it makes a different sound, because it’s cutting, and I realize that not all hair grows in the same direction, which makes sense, and which I already knew, but I guess I forgot. I turn off the cutter and run my hand over my head, and it’s giving velcro, I love it, and I sweep up all the hair I can with my hands and I throw it in the garbage can that doesn’t have a bag in it. There’s a bunch of shiny square wrappers in there, from condoms, and I wonder if David wears a condom when he sleeps. I look under the sink to see if there are any condoms to see what one would feel like on my wiener, but there’s not. I stand up and look in the mirror for a second, then I do something really savage. I go in Mom’s black zip-up bag sitting by the faucet and get her curvy razor and her mini can of shave gel. I pump some into my hands and rub them together till they’re foaming white, then I make my whole head creamy. Then I start to shave it. Only I’m very careful. I go over every part of my head very slow and I’m soft because my head is a weird shape in the back, like, it feels like there’s nothing between my skull and my hair. I cut myself when I’m curving it around my ear, and I touch where it stings with my fingers, and there’s hella blood, so I press the towel hard on it till it stops. I cut myself again where my hair meets my forehead, but no, there’s barely any blood this time. I double-check my work because it’s hard to see if you missed spots. You have to rub your fingers all over and if it’s not 100% smooth, like, if you feel any scratchy parts, you know you have to do it again, with the shaving cream and everything, just running the whole thing back from the beginning. It’s smooth, so I wash and dry the razor, then I put everything back. I look in the mirror. I look kinda weird, kinda sick. I didn’t know my ears were that big. Mom calls David an asshole really loud, then I hear the door slam, then it’s quiet, then I hear the TV turn on. I open the door. David’s on the bed choosing a show. I ask where’s my mom. He says she left. He doesn’t even look at me, so he doesn’t see my bald head. I ask if I can go swimming. He says to ask my mom and I say, Okay I will, thanks, David! but I’m lying. I put on my trunks and leave the cabin. I think I’ll stop by the bar and get a Shirley Temple before I hit the pool. Yeah, that’ll be good.
Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts.
Brad Kelly is a writer from Detroit, Michigan. In addition to AoD, he has recently published HOUSE OF SLEEP, a work of literary psy-fi, and is currently developing a novel to be released in 2024 and an experimental text investigating the Tarot card-by-card. He is a former Michener Fellow and has been widely published in literary magazines.Kevin Kautzman is a playwright living in St. Paul, Minnesota. His award-winning plays have appeared around the UK and US and are available in print at Broadway Play Publishing. His dark social media comedy MODERATION was adapted for an online release and can be found at moderationplay.com. A past fellow of the Michener Center for Writers and the Playwrights’ Center, he is a co-founder of Bad Mouth Theatre Company.Art of Darkness can be found here, on Patreon, and on Substack.Rebecca Gransden: How would you describe the podcast to someone who is unfamiliar with what you do?Brad Kelly: Art of Darkness is a podcast about the dark side of creativity, hosted by a couple of very online writers and featuring biographical profiles of dead artists. My co-host Kevin and I cover filmmakers, theater-makers, painters, musicians, architects, writers—anybody creative, influential, and dead for longer than a year and a day is our purview. In our Core Episodes, we go through a person’s life, work, and cultural context, taking as much time as we need to tell an artist’s story. Some episodes run over five hours, and we each take turns leading one another through an artist’s life. These thoroughly researched profiles, presented in a conversational way, are the heart of the show.We also host guests to talk further about one of the subjects we’ve covered in Dark Room Episodes, and we run a Zoom book club for our Patreon supporters called Bookends. Additionally, we record an “After Dark” bonus episode for Patreon, for every episode we do. These typically go for 20-30 minutes. If you’re interested in the arts, biography, and history, Art of Darkness might be your show.RG: Does the podcast have a mission or manifesto?BK: Our goal with every Core Episode is to create the go-to piece of online media about our subjects. Kevin Kautzman: One major meta-thread of the show is an interrogation of what drives creativity, and we hope to inspire living artists and creatives by reflecting on the great artists of the past, warts and all. There are a lot of warts.RG: How long has the podcast been in existence, and how have you seen it grow over that time?BK: We released our first episode in February 2021. The show has grown fairly rapidly since then and regularly appears in the Apple Podcasts charts around the world in the Books category. We knew we had something when people started asking to come on the show, which is why we host the Dark Room interview and discussion episodes.KK: Over the past few years, we’ve brought quite a few guests on to help us with our Core Episodes, but we’ve moved away from that as the Core Episodes have gotten longer. Guests can’t always commit four to six hours to a recording, and it’s a lot to ask of someone. So we have the Dark Room for guests who want to come on and discuss Aleister Crowley’s obscene poetry or all things Virginia Woolf.RG: Where did the idea for the podcast come from?BK: We conceived of Art of Darkness during the pandemic. We’d had other podcasts, together and apart, but we’d never quite found our “thing.” Kevin had an interview show called Get This, on which guests would share their enthusiasm about something—a movie, a writer, whatever. In hindsight, that show is not dissimilar from what we do with our Dark Room episodes. After I came on as a guest on one of these episodes—talking about Philip K. Dick or Harold Bloom—the wheels started turning and a few weeks later we had Art of Darkness, and I started to prepare my first episode, on Burroughs.KK: Brad is going to revisit Burroughs early in 2024, since that first episode is woefully short relative to our format now. If you go back and listen to the show from the beginning, you can see how the concept evolved and grew into what it is today.RG: How did you decide upon a title for the podcast?BK: We think people are desperate for earnestness and authenticity, especially online, and we believe there’s an audience for stories that perhaps tell us the most about what creativity actually is. This requires a complete picture of an artist’s life, including the darkness: abuse, drugs, mental illness, violence, war, betrayal, outright murder, sexual angst—the good stuff, in other words.KK: Sturm und Drang. We knew we wanted to explore that angle, thinking maybe we could answer the question “why do artists tend to be so screwed up?” The tortured artist is a cliché for a reason. It’s worth noting too that we don’t wallow in the “dark side,” or suggest living artists cultivate or surrender to theirs, but we give the darkness its fair due when it inevitably arises, and that sets our show apart and provides us with our driving theme.BK: After we had the show concept, we played around with title ideas. We’re both fans of Heart of Darkness, and we opened Season III (2023) with a Core Episode on Joseph Conrad. Just before landing on Art of Darkness, Kevin pitched the name “Heart of Artness,” which we laugh about because it’s so terrible. We have the receipts in WhatsApp.KK: Never go with your first idea. You gotta spitball.RG: Are there any podcasts that influenced or encouraged you to start the project?KK: It’s fair to say the show is influenced by Hardcore History and The Last Podcast on the Left, tho we’re tonally quite different from each of these. We’re both Rogan listeners from way back and dabbled with the idea of podcasting as early as 2011. It only took us a decade to figure it out and make something people seem to want more of. I’m also a big, three decade fan of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which probably won’t surprise listeners. I’m almost always looking for the laugh as we record, because it’s fun and it leavens things. Each of these stories ends the same way: the subject dies, sometimes young, sometimes at their own hand. It gets heavy. On Art of Darkness, we laugh so we don’t cry.I think too we’ve been influenced by various biopics, not least Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters and even something like Walk the Line. Our show is a show, and we try to weave a narrative that’s entertaining and informative or at least not inaccurate. We also have to credit the many biographers whose work we lean on for the core episodes. Without their labor, we would not have a show, and we always note our sources on a given episode. We buy a lot of books.These days too, as the show has matured, we’re more influenced by the idea of “evergreen content” generally, and I know we’re both motivated by the growing catalog and feedback we get from listeners, who binge the show and take away motivation for their own creativity or just enjoy learning about all these great figures we cover. At this moment, we’ve covered 61 core subjects. Our dream is to continue doing this show as long as we can and to have 300 or more core subjects and a massive, high-quality trove of content as a free resource for our contemporaries and posterity. It’s a hell of a project.RG: What episode of the podcast would you recommend to someone who is new to what you do?BK: We take turns leading our core episodes. Kevin prepares to talk about a subject and presents it to me and then I take a turn. Here’s an episode on Edgar Allan Poe, which I led.KK: And here’s an episode I led, on Dante. RG: How do you go about selecting what to feature on each episode?BK: For Season IV, starting in January 2024, we had a retreat at my property in northern Michigan and hashed it out around the campfire. More directly, we come up with a list of subjects largely based on our own instincts about what will make a good subject. We try to cover the artists we love, the artists we think our audience wants to know more about, and sometimes we cover a subject—say Aleister Crowley or John Milton—because we think they are essential to understanding cultural history—they tie many currents together.KK: We’ve yet to argue even once about who would cover a given subject, or “called dibs” or whatever. It all just kind of comes together.RG: If your podcast features guests, how do you go about finding them?BK: Our Dark Room episodes are a shorter format, about an hour, in which we take a closer look at some aspect of a subject we’ve already covered. For a Dark Room episode on Franz Kafka, we hosted Ross Benjamin, the translator of a new English edition of Kafka’s Diaries.We find our guests by being very online, and we frequently reach out to people we want to talk to. Dark Room episodes are a fairly low commitment: ninety minutes between the main episode and the After Dark we do for Patreon, all done via Zoom.RG: If you are a writer, has the podcast impacted your writing life? and conversely, has a writerly disposition influenced the podcast?BK: Kevin is a playwright and I’m a fiction writer. Speaking for myself, I learn a lot about the process from studying a writer like, say, Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson. You learn that they’re human beings, even if tremendously talented. That they struggled. That they were unsure of themselves and imperfect, haunted sometimes. That their triumphs were simultaneous with tragedy. And you see how their talent develops. How they make use of their lives. Also, of course, as the podcast has grown, new opportunities have presented themselves.KK: Doing this podcast, I learned quickly from subjects like Kubrick and Woolf and Cash that you cannot and must not wait around for permission to make your art, or for some ex machina blessed anointing to fall upon your career. You really have to go and get it, make it happen, just do the thing you imagine, and try not to kill anybody or yourself or alienate too many people.Kubrick wrestled money together from a local dentist and neighbors and family, went to California with a small production crew, and nearly killed his actors with insecticide while making his first feature, Fear and Desire, which then helped propel him into a “real” career. If he’d sat around in New York griping about what a racket Hollywood is, he would have not been wrong and we wouldn’t have Barry Lyndon and the rest of his oeuvre. Impossible to imagine but plausible. Artists do the thing.The show directly inspired me to start our theater company here in St. Paul, called Bad Mouth. Through that, we now do an interview podcast and radio show for the Twin Cities arts’ scene, through which we’ve released a number of play readings online. As for Brad and my writerly dispositions affecting the show, I’d say it’s all over what we do. As writers, we’re both obsessed with narrative form and are earnestly interested in all our subjects. There’s a mysterious Venn diagram of interests, aesthetics, humor, sense of history, educational backgrounds, and approach between us that just seems to work. And the fact we both have our own artistic practices and projects prevents us from being passive observers of our subjects. We’re really invested in understanding what drives creative genius, and how it might be harnessed or cultivated.RG: Do you listen to podcasts?KK: Before Art of Darkness, I listened to far more hours of podcasts than I do today. Now, between regular working life, running a theater company, writing my own plays and screenplays, raising a family, and Art of Darkness, I don’t have as much downtime, and when I have it, I usually throw on music or a film.When I do listen to podcasts, it’s often after a search for one of our subjects, to saturate myself further in their life and see what media already exists about them, or I’ll listen to a show one of our guests is on or does. We have our own little heterodox podcast network through the show, which is a fun consequence of making Art of Darkness. I’m the resident extrovert, so I love it.RG: What is the best podcast out there at the moment, the one you are excited for when each new episode drops?KK: We like Weird Studies and were happy to have Phil Ford on to talk about MF DOOM in an episode.We’re also fans of author Aaron Gwyn, who is a frequent guest on our show and who has a notable Substack where he covers Blood Meridian in exhaustive and illuminating detail. Aaron is joining us for our book club this December to talk about that great novel, in light of McCarthy’s passing.RG: What do you dislike about podcasts?KK: We sometimes joke about “vibecasts,” which is our little term for shows that don’t really have a driving concept and consist of vain chit chat, gossip, and maybe some cul-de-sac politics. Who has time for these, and how many such shows can the Internet sustain? You can feel the series of tubes sag under the flab of all this chatter and pseudo-political kayfabe.Art of Darkness is vehemently not a vibecast. I also really dislike overproduced podcasts of the NPR style, where everything is squished together and there’s not a second of downtime, or any sustained authenticity. The beauty of the podcast format is that it doesn’t need to be heavily edited. It can be rough, and an antidote to overproduced, agenda-driven corporate media.There’s an audience for the real, raw thing. There’s an audience that wants to listen to six unedited hours about the life of Aleister Crowley, with all the umms and uhhs and occasional mispronunciations. That isn’t to say your audio quality should be garbage if you can help it. But you don’t need to labor over editing to stitch a “tight” Frankenstein episode in order to satisfy an audience, with perfect diction and all the verbal fumbles smoothed out.I also get annoyed at how astroturfed social media and the Internet writ large seem to be—a capricious nerd’s Hellraiser box that makes very little sense in terms of who the algorithm picks up and signal boosts and who stays in the digital dark. Little things, like Twitter/X deboosting threads with links, can be pretty aggravating, as can mysterious plateaus of reach on social media, never mind outright censorship. Those platforms are certainly not “organic,” and if they’re the “town square” the town square is a carnivalesque hall of mirrors. There is far more hands-on moderation happening on these platforms than I think most people imagine, as well as obvious pay-to-play, which we don’t do (in terms of advertising, paying for clicks, whatever). All that said, we’re thrilled with the audience we have and we’re sure it will grow over time as we press on and release more episodes.I also have to say that podcasts as a whole are a massive net positive for free expression and “the little guy.” We’re just two obscure Midwestern writers who had an idea and some consumer-grade equipment and computers, and now we have devoted listeners all around the world. We’ve made real friends and authentic connections through the show, both with guests and our audience. It’s genuinely pretty cool and would have been unthinkable twenty-five years ago. I suppose maybe we could have done this as a cable access show in the 90s, but it’s hard to imagine how that would look and sound. Party on, Brad.RG: Is there a podcast that doesn’t exist, but you wish did?KK: I wish David Lynch had a podcast, but I’m also glad he doesn’t. He needs to be making films and another season of Twin Peaks. Please, Lord, give us another season of Twin Peaks.RG: For techheads, which single item of kit do you consider essential for the production of the podcast, and what would you say are the basics needed for those new to podcasting?BK: A real microphone, not just whatever is on your computer. We use Blue Yetis, and there are a lot of good, reasonably-priced USB mics. You need a good internet connection, and you need audio editing software like Audacity.KK: I do the audio engineering for Art of Darkness. A proper mic is essential. Our formula is:1. Blue Yeti microphones with boom arms and pop screens.2. Ethernet connections, not WiFi.3. Zoom, which has an outstanding noise gate. We each record, so there’s a backup if there’s an issue.4. Audacity for post-production, with some special sauce.5. WordPress for hosting and distribution via RSS.6. A Mac Studio, which is optional really. You can do all this on a decent laptop, tho it’ll take you a bit longer to do the work in Audacity.7. Brad edits the punched-up audio into the video file and posts to YouTube.I typically post an episode within 20 minutes of recording. You really don’t need much to produce a professional-sounding podcast, which is part of the charm.I will say too: if you’re going on a podcast as a guest, do the bare minimum and get a Blue Yeti with a boom arm and a pop screen, and find a way to connect your computer directly to Ethernet. It’ll cost you maybe $150 and more or less last forever. The hosts and audience will thank you.RG: If someone would like to support independent podcasts, what are the best ways to do this?BK: The podcasts will usually tell you. For us, it’s our Patreon. Subscribers not only materially support the show, but they get a bunch of extras for the money, including the bonus “After Dark” episodes and book club access. Maybe the most important thing you can do to support an independent podcast you like is to simply tell people about it and share links. Don’t be shy. If you love an indie podcast, share it with the people in your life who you think might appreciate it. That’s how media spreads and gets more support. It costs nothing to share a show and consciously signal-boost truly independent media.RG: Looking back on the podcast, are there favorite episodes, episodes that stand out to you, or episodes that didn’t go as you would’ve liked?KK: The Kubrick episode was something of a breakthrough for us, when we realized we could stretch toward upwards of three hours and still not exhaust a biography, and our audience would come with us. As for episodes that had issues, I’d moved some cables around and mistakenly recorded into my webcam microphone when we did our Disney episode, which was extremely aggravating to discover after the fact. I punched up the audio as best I could, and it’s listenable, but that haunts me. Always triple check your settings before you record.RG: What are your plans for the future?BK: We’ll continue to release roughly two Core Episodes and two or three Dark Room episodes each month for the foreseeable future, and run our book club for Patreon. We also have a second live show in development, which will take place in Detroit sometime in the back half of 2024. We hope to do more live shows and more exclusive content for Patreon as that audience grows.KK: If the show grows enough to support it, I’d love to do a proper tour and really figure out our live show format. We’ll keep grinding and see how it goes. Art of Darkness could theoretically go on forever, because artists keep dying like everybody else. We’ve said on the air that if one of us dies unexpectedly, the other needs to find a new co-host and go on, after a respectful hiatus of a few months. And wait a full year and a day to do the episode about the unexpectedly dead co-host. BK: That’s the rule.Art of Darkness can be found here, on Patreon, and on Substack.
Last month, Robert Ladlo was accidentally promoted at work. He’d been standing in the empty head office, glancing around covetously when one of the new employees asked if he’d be taking over for the boss who was away exploring concerns about early onset dementia. Ladlo said yes. When everyone began treating Ladlo as if he were the new boss, it became true.Ladlo took this stroke of luck as divine right, a fated ascent. Over the next few weeks, he began to stir the pot just to see if anyone would stop him. Once, he spat his gum into the bushes in the courtyard even though a trash can was right beside him. He farted in the elevator, blamed it on a stranger, and everyone believed him. When he autographed a napkin and gave it to a barista, she blushed and said thanks. Ladlo began internalizing that if he acted with enough conviction, people wouldn’t question him or challenge his destiny.When the old boss returned to announce her official retirement, she assumed that higher-ups had Ladlo filling in. She left him with her blessing as he basked in the slotted sun that streamed through the blinds in his new permanent office.
***
Robert Ladlo brought his rise to autogenic glory home with him and began frequently boasting about his success to his husband, João. But Ladlo’s office-related-pot-stirring soon reached their home too. João’s expression slid from pride down through dubiousness and landed somewhere near disgust when he chatted with Edna, a mutual friend who was also now one of Ladlo’s subordinates.One evening, the couple idled on their apartment’s balcony, listening to thunder murmur in the distance. João sat unusually far from Ladlo, and eventually, he set down the copy of A História Trágica do Doutor Fausto. He turned to regard his husband.“Berto,” said João. “I don’t know how else you’ll listen unless I just say it, all of it, right out. First, I am so proud of your hard work. Second. Second, amor, you’re being—and I think a few people would agree with me on this—a big fat jerk. You never used to be like this. What happened?”Ladlo blinked. He crossed his arms over his chest. “I am not a jerk.”“I see your new aura. And I’ve talked with our friend, Edna. You have been stirring the pot, no? And for what purpose—to show that you can?”Ladlo doubled down. “You have to take what you want in this life. You of all people know that. You picked up, left your home country, put yourself through university here, and took. That’s how you conjured success.”“No, that is where you are wrong. Taking is not the same thing as creating. I built my architecture firm—well, metaphorically. We work from a rented space. Oh, you know what I mean—I created something that wasn’t there before, and I’m still indebted to everyone who helped me get here. Plus, I once experienced this too, this ego. After I designed the national aviary and I got to be a bit of a star at the opening gala, I got—well—a big head and all puffed up. And what I’m sensing around you now is a noxious poison cloud, Berto. I can barely come close. Soon, I worry, it will poison you and its effect will be permanent.”Ladlo’s expression collapsed. “Do you really see me that way? As a contaminant?”“Wait here,” said João. He stood and kissed Ladlo on the forehead, coughed, and went inside.When João returned, he handed Ladlo a wriggling fish. It looked to be a salmon in its spawning phase, but instead of being powered by life, Ladlo saw a 9-volt battery inside its mouth. Ladlo raised an eyebrow at his husband.“You have to take it to the address printed on the tail. It’s a different experience for everyone, so I cannot say what you should expect, but they’ll tell you what to do.”“The Warehouse of Contentment,” Ladlo read from the tail. “I take it there and they will cure me of being a big fat jerk and dispel this noxious cloud I have around me?”“I hope so, amor.”
***
Ladlo’s GPS indicated that the Warehouse of Contentment was that enormous building in the distance, but on the road in front of him was a gate and security booth that prevented him from entering. He slowed the car and pulled up to the window.It slid open.“Good evening, I’m The Fisherman. How can I assist you?”“Fisherperson, you mean,” said Ladlo.“I haven’t gotten the okay to change my job title yet, but I’m thinking something like Reelcaster, Lineleader, Luredangler, or maybe Chumchucker? Anyway, what can I do you for? Do you have a fish with you?”The spawning phase salmon lay wriggling on the passenger seat. Ladlo handed it over.The Fisherman said she’d be right back.Ladlo saw the back door of the booth open. The Fisherman emerged. She held Ladlo’s fish in one hand and steered a kick-pedal scooter with the other, heading in the direction of the warehouse.Fifteen minutes later, she returned in the same manner, except instead of holding the fish, she held a small cardboard box.“Your bosses should look into a more efficient mode of transportation. A golf cart, or a conveyor belt even,” said Ladlo after the Fisherman returned to the window.“That’s why it’s called fishing, not catching.”“What?”The Fisherman didn’t respond. Instead, she opened the box and pulled out a handheld mirror. It was the cheap plastic-backed kind that could be bought at a dollar store. She handed it to Ladlo.Ladlo took the mirror, looked it over, looked at his reflection, looked it over again. Ladlo asked if it was a magic mirror. The Fisherman laughed, called Ladlo silly, and said that magic doesn’t exist.“How is this going to fix my problem?” said Ladlo. “And don’t you even want to hear my circumstances?”“We got them from the fish.”“It was my husband’s fish.”“But you brought it here.”“I—”“I’m sorry, there is a car waiting behind you. And remember, I’m just The Fisherman, I don’t have any answers to give you.”Not knowing what else to do, Ladlo pulled forward until the lane U-turned toward the exit, which led him back to the road.At home, Ladlo showed the mirror to João who looked it over and had no advice to offer other than that Ladlo should carry it with him and wait and see.
***
Later in the workweek, Ladlo was washing his hands when he caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He shook the water from his hands and pulled the handheld mirror from his satchel. He held it near the large mirror until he could see himself from several angles. Then he understood how he could unstir the pot.What he was lacking was self-awareness.Ladlo tested his theory when the shorter of the two Tonys came into his office. Ladlo held out the mirror to where he could catch his own expression with a sideways glance. After Ladlo explained what he was doing, Short Tony got on with his question. Ladlo noticed that the mirror was reflecting a beam of sunlight down onto Tony’s papers, so he adjusted the beam away. How self-aware of him. And when Ladlo saw that his face was growing harsh and critical in response to Short Tony saying something less than competent, Ladlo knew to change his expression.Then it hit him: this sort of awareness was too limited. He could see the front of Short Tony’s face, and with the mirror, he could glimpse his own profile, but he could not see Tony’s profile. Surely there would be micro-expressions he was missing. This made him worry he was limiting his access to observation and thus thwarting his capacity for total self-awareness. After work, Ladlo went and bought three more cheap plastic mirrors. They came in neon colors.
***
As he navigated his day-to-day life with two mirrors in each hand, Ladlo understandably ran into some difficulties with doors, utensils, and gestures—and, well—most daily activities. But worse was the continued lack of angles; there were points of view that were still hidden from him.Determined that self-awareness would be his, Ladlo bought dozens of colorful mirrors and he linked them together using duct tape and wire until what he held became wing-like. Mirrors atop mirrors, all angled in slightly different directions, branching from his two arms and curving toward the front so they enveloped whomever Ladlo was talking to.When Ladlo met with the head of another department, and several times he bonked and jostled the poor woman with his spread and reflective plastic feathers, he decided to re-work the self-awareness thing again. She was irritated with him; he could see it from a dozen angles. Ladlo also saw that his own face was not apologetic, that is until he and his reflections adjusted their expressions. Still, the whole thing was a nuisance because he had to constantly set down one of the wings to use a pen and he couldn’t use them at all while typing. This caused him both blind spots and exasperation.Ladlo went into the storage unit below his apartment and found the boxes they had been storing for João’s nephew. From one of the boxes labeled Sports Stuff, Ladlo pulled out a pair of American football shoulder pads. He attached his colorful mirrors to the skeletal plastic. He was so busy sitting on the concrete outside the storage unit, using more tape and wire and other supports, and adjusting the angles of the mirrors, and being so totally focused on being one hundred percent self-aware that it got very late. He finally set the wings aside until morning and went to join his husband in bed, but João was already asleep.
***
Ladlo arrived at work wearing his new wings and as he rode the elevator, he appreciated the metaphor of rising to new heights—perhaps to ultra-cognizance, maybe even enlightenment. He thought that this just might be the peak of self-awareness. He did a tap dance glide out of the elevator and that’s when he was caught. His right wing hadn’t cleared the elevator when the door closed. Some sort of mechanical sensor was completely un-self-aware and utterly unengaged at the exact moment he needed it to sense him.The elevator began to descend, hailed by someone below and Ladlo let out little yelps of panic. He face-planted with a whump, but then the elevator stopped. His wing was wedged between the inner roof of the elevator and his floor’s floor. Ladlo could neither stand nor wriggle out of the shoulder pads, so he remained there on his belly on the ground.The intern had seen all this from his desk and was holding out his phone, presumably recording. Soon all of Ladlo’s subordinates gathered and stood looking down at Ladlo.Ladlo could see every one of their faces in his bent left wing and after he finished yelling and swearing at those faces, he began to cry.Ladlo saw his former friend Edna make a phone call, but still, no one moved to help him.He lay there for a long time and then a sob caught in his throat as he heard the stairwell door bang open behind him. It was his husband. In his wing, two dozen Joãos appeared, each of them holding a toolbox. In his head, Ladlo fought hard to find the right words as all of the Joãos began to pry him free.
Wouldn’t it be good if I could for a moment close my eyes and find myself in a new scenery where nature plots towards a personal renaissance, a scenery in which I would be able to switch off this painful backlog of asymmetry in my life; lack of funds and lack of kindness, and lack of this and lack of that, lack of that mesmerizing color of the sky like in a Vermeer painting, or any sky of any painting or any sky on earth under which I can walk free from tormenting clouds of thought that make me a prisoner and a punisher pressing me to provide solutions that I don’t have. I can only be responsible for my own actions; but then again, that is the problem. Actions can have devastating, dramatic repercussions even with best intentions, even with love and because of love. Gallantry buried with bare hands, puzzle pieces that won’t fit anymore in a puzzle that was once immaculate.Wouldn’t it be good if for a moment I could be a seed buried into new soil where the grass is freshly cut, and the water masks the green with delight and lucidity or perhaps I could be given a new chance and become a little cloud over your tears or a birdhouse for the little warrior that is you who got its wings halved in its attempt to fly through ferocious winds.
The first day at Triassic Land, my Spinosaurus tail got torn off in the door of my dead grandad’s old Camry. I left home because I was sick of Mom babying me. I was single. Grown up. I was like a twenty-four-year-old boo-boo she wouldn’t let heal. I’d typed up a fake acceptance letter and showed it to her a month ago. Told her I was starting at Central Michigan University’s summer business program early and that a buddy I used to play video games with had a room. She gave me a hundred dollars, a kiss on the cheek, and said she was proud.I could see all the coasters I’d grown up riding over the barbed-wire security fence. Mad Meteor, Cretaceous Coroner, Chicxulub Impactor—Quivering Timbers had always been my favorite though. No loops, but the wood shook your head like a speed bag. It held all that thrill without any worry of slipping through the harness and falling into the inevitable. I was considering how long it would take to hit the ground when a giant red Silverado pulled up next to me.“Well guy,” the old driver said, hobbling out of his 4x4 chariot, “that tail’s dangling like a dingleberry.” He looked like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino if Clint Eastwood had been addicted to Diet Coke. When he squinted, he looked older instead of meaner. “I—”“I’ll fix y’up don’t worry. I should’ave some duct tape…somewhere ‘n here.” He heaved his duffel bag out and dropped it on the cracked pavement like a treasure.“It’s really okay, I’ll fix it later,” I said.He pulled out some duct tape and shoved it in my face like a trophy.“Only’ll be a minute and you’ll thank me,” he said.It was easier to let him do it in the end. Last thing I wanted was a fight with a geriatric Dirty Harry on my first day. When he was finished, he slapped my pleather ass and fondled the Camry to stand back up.“Name’s Pat. You Gordy’s replacement?” I’d seen it on the news with Mom one morning. Mom’d said, How is anyone supposed to feel safe anymore? and I’d said, you can do that for a living? The posting online had read: Dinosaurs wanted! 12/hr + meals!“Yeah. I’m Mortimer.” “Jordan?”“Mor-tih-mur!” He reached out and squeezed my hand, like he was trying to juice me.“Or Mort. Either’s fine.” I’ve never had a good talking voice either. I mumble or I feel like I’m yelling.“Suit yerself,” Pat nodded towards the park, “Welp, we don’t want to keep the ‘missus’ waitin’ do we?” His back bent under the weight of his tool bag. I thought to offer help, but I could tell Pat had that old man syndrome where he didn’t let anyone help him, even if it meant he was going to hurt himself.
***
I remember taking photos with Sal the Spinosaurus as a kid. There was a photograph I’d left at home of me crossing my legs thinking it made me look cool only to realize I looked like I had to piss, Mom oblivious, grandad tight-lipped because of his broken teeth, my older brother and his perfect smile. Besides those memories, I knew next to nothing about being a dinosaur. They’d given me no training, just the rule that I couldn’t let people see me with the suit off, which was fine. I was a solid 5, on a good day. On a bad day? Captain Neckbeard. Sal the Spinosaurus suited me.There was a yellowed, stained fridge in the break room with a picture of someone’s family and shitty motivational posters. Plastic employee of the week plaques littered one wall, each staff member holding up some gift card to Chili’s or Olive Garden. I saw a man with my outfit, the Spinosaurus head roaring under his arm. He didn’t smile. When I saw Pat on my route, I asked him if that was Gordy.“Scalies used to be able to get away with stuff. Pouncing on people. Gnawing on their bags. People came here to feel something. To get an experience. Now you so much as tap someone with yer tail and you’ll get a bunch of lawyers bearing down on us, again.” A hammer jangled at Pat’s side like a big iron, sweat collecting in the wrinkles of his gray uniform and forehead.“Guy, the world’s gone soft.”Someone next us on the Pterodactyl Terror Shot screamed—a bungee type thing over the pond filled with swan boats in the middle of the park. You sign a contract for “liability” sake and pay extra for it. I’d never done it, but I’d watched my brother launch over the pond. Saw the worry on mom’s face as he soared.“So you fix things?” I asked Pat, really quiet and real close, my plastic teeth scraping his waxy ear. I waved at kids like I’d seen people do on the floats for the 4th of July parade back home. “Fix things? Guy!” He swatted at my maw. “If you’re being simple about it, sure, but I notice things. Things no one else notices.” In front of us, a little girl tugged her dad’s arm. Mad Meteor careened in a corkscrew above.“Some stupid soccer mom bust the turnstile? My job. Plank hanging low on a coaster? My job. The freezer in the Dippin’ Dots cart overheats? My job. If there’s too much shit for me to do? I tell the ne'er do wells mannin’ the rides what needs fixin’. And customer-staff relations? Oh, I track that too Martin.”“Um, what’s—it’s Mortimer—”“Yup, I’ve been around long enough to know how people are. See her?” he pointed at the little girl and the two men holding her hands. “She’s only been listening to her uncle and her dad hates that.”“How do you know they’re brothers?”“What else would they be?”I didn’t respond.“Them three come here a lot, yeah. The girl loves it when yuh scalies fall over. Saw Gordy faceplant last year and that little girl laughed so hard she almost gave me an ulcer.” I could fall. Did it all the time. Tripping over nothing. Hesitating whenever I rounded a corner or stopped at a 4-way. I was an expert at making mistakes for no good reason, and now I had one.I ran out in front of the family and stumbled into a trash can. Melted ice cream and soiled paper bowls full of crusty chili like dry blood spilled all over the baked concrete. The men glared. The little girl shrieked. For some reason the Peanuts theme song was playing over the speakers. “Stupid stupid! Isn’t he stupid?”“Come on Olivia,” one man said.“We don’t call people stupid,” said the other. He whispered, “...in front of them.” I remembered how I felt when I was a kid. How I knew there was someone in the suit but how it was more fun to imagine something else was making them stomp and roar and make their way through the world.“Stupid, stuuuupid!” The girl pointed.I wriggled on the ground until the girl’s giggles were out of earshot, then stood up, cotton candy stuck to my mesh eye holes so it was hard to see. Pat came over and wiped it off. “You’re a natch-u-ral Mikey!” Everything is a bit when you’re wearing a dinosaur suit. No matter what stupid shit I did, someone would want me.
***
Home feels different when you get back after a new job, and my studio apartment in Mt. Pleasant didn’t feel like much of a home to begin with. I had a lawn chair in front of the TV, a mattress I’d spent an hour contorting to fit in the Camry for the drive from the west side, a bunch of Faygo varieties in the vegetable tray of the fridge, and a series of Stouffer's frozen casseroles.It didn't make any sense why the city I was in was called Mt. Pleasant either. There aren’t any real mountains in Michigan, and all the best parts, all the big lakes were about as far away as they could be. The only water in walking distance was a tiny stream behind my apartment complex flanked by two golf courses and a strip mall containing a Subway, a Family Fare, and a pole-dancing studio. The walls of the apartment were thin, but sometimes that made life more exciting. Guessing that banging sound next door gave me something else to do besides playing Halo and watching Jurassic Park—you gotta enmesh yourself in your life in the character, or at least, that’s what people like Daniel Day Lewis do, right? He’s a good actor, I’d heard. It was a small space, but that was okay. Too much space and you start to feel like you should have more stuff, or even moreso, someone to share that space with.After I’d get back every day, I’d shed my suit and drape it on the lawn chair in the living room. I’d crack open a cold Red Pop Faygo and sit down. Boot up my Xbox. My brother always gave me shit for the living room lawn chair at Mom’s house. I say having cupholders is important, and I couldn’t afford a full-ass recliner on a dino salary.During the first few weeks Mom texted me a lot. Eventually, because she kept asking the same questions, I started calling her instead of texting back.“Hey.”“So, how'd today go?”“It went fine.”“...and?”“That’s it. Nothing to report.”“The apartment okay?”“It’s alright. Kinda small, but you know, I like that.”“How’re classes?”“Couldn’t tell you Mom. Still feeling them out.”“Are you looking for a job? You know your brother says he has a job in a warehouse over there he could get you, right?”“I know Mom.”“I’m just saying, it pays good.”“I’ll figure it out.”“I know. I know. I just hate, y’know, seeing you…y’know.”That’s how most of our conversations went. Tip-toeing around each other until either of us had the stomach to bear our grievances, then backing down anyway. Our family was easy that way. Life was easier that way.
***
By the end of the first month, I was the Mickey Fucking Mouse of dinosaurs, stalking people on all fours, bobbing my floppy muzzle like a bird. I became a skilled practitioner of Cretaceous Cardio, started looking at myself naked in the busted bathroom mirror, watching those little love handles I’d earned doing nothing with my life and dating no one melt away. Even better, they announced a year-round initiative. They’d have a winter carnival in the off months and build an event space to make up lost revenue from the Gordy incident. I’d have a stable gig where I didn’t have to man a register and put on a face. No one would have to see my crooked smile. My yellow teeth.Once my routes became ritual, I realized everything at Triassic from when I was a kid was still there. The horses-dressed-as-ankylosaurs. The viking-boat-turned-megalodon. A random Harley Davidson they still had on display, because why not. The park proved that time doesn’t actually change everything like Mom was telling me more and more every year. I kept pictures saved of every ride for when I was ready to tell her what I was really doing in Mt. Pleasant. Once I’d proven I could make it here on my own. Maybe, once I’d found someone to share the apartment with.Besides Pat, none of the other staff talked to me, so I didn’t talk to them. From the conversations I overheard in the break room or behind the rides, they treated the place like it was just a stepping stone on the way to their next big thing. As if everyone can have the next big thing. You know what was a big thing? Dinosaurs. To be a dinosaur is to embrace nostalgia for a time we can’t be sure even existed the way we imagine. What’s wrong with that? With Pat’s tips about regulars, and late nights watching every dinosaur movie I could get my hands on, I started pulling five-star reviews. I broke in the hard plastic of the claws. Figured out how to piss without taking it off. By June, the break room was littered with pictures of Sal the Spinosaurus holding Chili’s and Olive Garden gift cards. People asked why I kept the suit on. “You don’t get anywhere without some extra commitment,” I said. Pat had told me that one day.There was this one girl though. She started the month after me. A new “scalie” called Rachel Raptor. I told Mom about her over the phone. Told her Rachel was in a class on entrepreneurship, or whatever business classes were called.Rachel and I weren’t supposed to be in the same place at the same time, but sometimes we’d cross paths in front of Coroner, right under the loop. I studied her. Waited for her to say something. She didn’t walk with the weight of her life in each step like I did. She didn’t hesitate before she did anything. She was gentle to the concrete and knelt down to let kids pet her. I wondered what she looked like underneath. I hoped she hadn’t noticed me watching. Whenever people notice me looking at them, I feel like I’ve been shot. Like one of those dreams where you’re naked and you don’t know how you ended up where or why you even are.
***
Mom called to offer a trip to Florida my brother and his fiancé were going on. I held the phone to my ear while I was playing Halo, some kid shouting about how gay I was in the background. Telling me to touch grass. That I probably had no bitches.“I don’t like the beach, Mom.”“What are you doing instead?”“I told you, I’m in the campus cafeteria.” I wondered what the most convincing job was. Burrito wrapper? Sandwich crafter? Everything seemed perfectly menial.“The warehouse job pays pretty good Mort. I could talk to your broth—”“I’m good at this and I’m paid enough Mom.”“I know…what about that girl?”“I’ll keep you updated. I’m going to ask her to get coffee soon.”
***
By the middle of sweat-bucket-summer, the park had spent a lot of money prepping for the new winter initiative, but numbers were down. They made some cuts to the maintenance team. Pat was busy trying to figure out what was wrong with the bolts in Quivering Timbers, whining about how he used to have a whole army of guys with tools at his disposal. I looked up at him from the ground, waiting for some other guests to walk by me. I liked watching him when I could. There’s something about a guy fixing a massive roller coaster that seems divine. The knowledge of what bolt to use, the deftness with a wrench or a drill. I dreamed of the day someone would witness me like that.Pat was asking me for a socket wrench when I heard a group of high-school kids staring at me and whispering evil teenager type shit to each other. I didn’t know what the fuck a socket wrench looked like. Just another thing I felt like I should have learned before Grandad died. I looked through the duffel bag, hoping some manly instinct would kick in. I heard the teenagers hee-haw from behind. “Losersaurus Rex,” one shouted standing in line for the Mammoth Ears.“Pervert.” another said. Despite being far shorter, squatter, and, from what I understood, better at the job than Gordy, people occasionally thought I was the same guy. Some creep. A prehistoric peeper.Pat ignored me asking him what the wrench looked like, climbed down the coaster stairs, and stuck his hand in the duffel bag.“Don’t worry Mort, most of em’ probably won’t stop sucking their mom’s teet till they’re thirty. I tell you, when I was a teenager I wasn’t hanging out at a theme park. I was in a war.” Pat shook his head, patted his hammer on his hip, “I could make an accident happen to em y’know. Rig a ride to go a little too fast when they get on.” He winked.That’s when I felt something hit my back. I’d stopped wearing anything but underwear underneath to cool off; I could feel things better that way anyway. Whatever hit me was damp. Cold. Smelled like the color blue. They’d thrown a fucking slushie at me.I stood still, boiling in my suit. Literally and metaphorically. The ice packs under my armpits had gone lukewarm. I turned to face the teens, careful to maintain my signature Spinosaurus poise; me, Poiseasaurus Rex. I saw a bush the same green-brown as my suit between the teenagers and the corner of the Mammoth Ear stand as an opportunity. All my time spent watching dinosaur movies, being patient playing Halo, listening to Pat and practicing—I had a skill. I could get payback.While the teenagers were ogling some girls coming from the waterpark, I huddled behind the bush. Waited for about three minutes. I was Saunasaurus Rex stalking his prey. When they came up to order, I sprang out and swatted at them with my rubber arms. One fell over so hard it looked like he might have shattered his elbow. He started crying. I squeezed the sound box from Ebay I’d programmed with roar sounds—a fucking steal for $10 plus shipping—over and over, standing above him making eye contact through the mesh in my mouth.The teenager reeled back to punch me, but instead he started crying. I looked back at Pat heh-heh-heh-ing and wheezing, one crooked, hairy thumb up. They ran away. I thought I would feel better.What I hadn’t noticed was the American dream-type family behind the teenagers. One with a girl and a boy and two parents that looked like they ran together at 5 in the morning before work and posted pictures of the sunrise.One of the kids, the little boy, was crying. Scared. Blonde bowl cut like I’d had. Chunky fingers despite the rest of him being a fucking twig. Looks like he’d get bullied. Like he’d play trumpet in middle school and get so angry he can’t hit high notes like the rest of the boys that he’d smash the instrument into his bed post and make his mom pay $200 to fix the rental.I tried to play stupid and ran into a wall. Being stupid’s only funny because I shouldn’t be stupid. A dinosaur should have some instinct that defends against stupidity. Some feeling of where to go and what not to do. An instinct for a successful life. No one wants someone who can’t decide what to do. The kid kept sobbing and the parents pulled him away, looking at everything but me. When I looked back, Pat shrugged. It was as good a time as any to cool down, so I went to the break room to swap out the ice packs. On the way back, I watched the ticketers at the turnstile. Saw the look of death on their faces. One swiped on their phone. I’d thought about getting on a dating app, but that meant I needed pictures. Maybe the suit would be a funny gag.When I pried the screen door open, Rachel Raptor—the girl who played her—was at the lunch table. I still had a little bit of adrenaline left from my ambush, so I sat next to her. She had this short purple hair and freckles I’d never seen on anyone before. She shifted a seat away and put the bottom half of her costume between her and me.She was drawing a cow skull adorned with snapdragons, like the one’s mom kept in her garden. Little flowers I’d spent time sticking my pudgy fingers in, imagining them coming to life. I’d make fire-breathing noises and tell mom each dragon bulb’s name, which ones was mom, dad, and the kids. I’d fabricated a whole family. A comfortable family. “Snapdragons! Right?” I blurted out, forgetting to breathe.She jumped.“Um, yeah. That’s right?”“I’m Mortimer.” I stuck out my hand.“Nice to meet you?” she didn’t grab it.Questions, right, I thought. Grandad always told me to ask questions. People are supposed to enjoy talking about themselves.“So are you doing skulls to say you’re not afraid of death or something?” I tried to mask how I’d forgotten to breathe. I did my best to stay still. To be still was to be stoic. Prehistoically-inclined.“Uh, no. I just think cow skulls are cool.”“They are pretty cool.” I caught my reflection in a mirror, stared at the inhuman eyes. My floppy mouth. Rachel stopped drawing.“So you’re…” she asked, pointing at the employee of the week pictures adorning the walls.“That’s me, yeah.” For the first time since I’d arrived, I wasn’t proud of the pictures.“You really never take off the suit, do you?”“I heard about this thing called method acting. Daniel-Day Lewis did it for—”“Yeah, I know about that. Everyone on set called him an asshole.” She looked at the door across from us for a few seconds. I felt like I was talking to an alien and no one had given me the briefing on first-contact engagement.“Do you uh, what do you do?” I asked.“I’m in art school.”“That’s cool.”“What do you do? Outside of here?”“Uhhh…well I….” I couldn’t tell her I played video games. That was too unimpressive. I thought about telling her I played music, but then she might ask to hear something. Maybe writing?“Sooo, I actually have a specific question for you. Maybe it’s a little personal.”I leaned in, terrified and excited to answer a question. Smelled her coconut shampoo. Felt too close to her. Leaned back.“I’ve got an assignment. Like an art project. I’ve gotta ask people what they’re in awe of and draw something inspired by it.”“Oh. That’s cool.”“Honestly, since you’re a total stranger,” I ground my teeth at the word stranger, “I think this is more interesting. Everyone else here is giving me normal answers.”“Well. I dunno. The ankylosaurus-horses. Pretty cool right?”“No no no, anywhere else but here. Like, you’ve never seen something or thought of someone and you just go, wow?” I thought about the last time I was home, driving on the S-shaped highway that cuts through the city, coming back from the mall movie theater to see Zombieland 2. I’d been swimming through that post-movie existentialism, blasting the jazzy theme song to Halo: ODST, pretending I was in a destroyed civilization, the one living person left behind, a hoard of invading aliens oblivious to me in the camry, swerving left and right with one hand on the wheel like I actually knew what I was doing. I got chills thinking about it. Or maybe that was just my sweat getting cold. I wondered if I smelled.“I really don’t know. Guess I never thought about it.” I said.“That’s kind of sad. I mean—sorry,’ her mouth hung open, “Uh, you should do something! Go somewhere. Everyone should have something.”I thought I was doing something. I had gone somewhere. Bumfuck nowhere.“I’ll let you know when I think of something,” I said. “Cool.” She shrugged.I’d never been so disappointed in myself that I wanted to cry before. I stood up, swapped my ice packs out for the new ones, stashed the sweaty ones next to Pat's brown bag in the fridge, and walked towards the door before Rachel had a chance to leave first. Moments like this were why I kept the suit on.
***
Approaching fall, the park was getting slower. This was normal, Pat told me, like how the dips and peaks of climate change are normal. I spent my free time thinking of something to tell Rachel. Something that would show her I wasn’t just a loser in a suit. I wasn’t artsy. I considered the few times I’d gone camping with my family, watching a storm roll over Lake Michigan from the height of a dune, the view looking down from my first skyscraper in Chicago, the first time I’d nailed a trumpet solo. They all felt too normal or too lame for me to be in awe of. I avoided the break room so that I wouldn’t bump into her before I had the answer. But, when I stopped running into her under Coroner’s loop, I asked Pat if he’d seen her lately.“The weird one with the purple hair? Guy she no-call no-showed twice. No surprise there. No one wants to work any more.”
***
Pat was wrong about the normal dip in park numbers. We were tanking. Management sent an email with the subject line: “WHAT CAN YOU DO TO SAVE THE DINOSAURS?”. It seemed that no amount of good reviews could make up for the worry that staff, that people like me, might be a total creep like Gordy. Not in the age of internet memes and Twitter.Pat and I spent more time by the central pond. He said he’d planted fish in it fifteen years ago to give himself something to do on lunch break.“Ain’t got no mercury poisonin’ in them like the big lakes neither.” All I knew about mercury was that it’s the stuff that they put in thermometers. Did someone dump a bunch of thermometers in the great lakes? People call things like that accidents all the time. Like they’re pretending it isn’t anyone’s fault. But you have to try hard to fuck something up that bad. I suspected a conspiracy somewhere, like how people said Obama turned the frogs gay.“So why are you actually here, Mort?” “I don’t know. I like it. I’m good at it.”“That’s right.” I watched him catch a couple bluegills, or at least, that’s what he called them. I didn’t think their gills looked blue. I never understood catch-and-release. It seemed cruel, especially in a place like this. As if the fish stuck in the theme park pond hadn’t had enough. As if they weren’t doing the best they could with the pond they were stuck in.
***
I stuck with Pat by the pond instead of my routes after the third round of layoffs. A bunch of empty swan boats where normal people who loved each other used to fill up bobbled. Pat had a bouquet of pink work orders tucked in his belt. “Guy, hasn’t been this bad since a guy’s safety belt came loose on Chix—, Chic… Chaclub, oh fuck whatever it’s called.”“Chicxulub?”“Yeah, that one.”He spat on the ground.“You know what Mort? You could be Donald Duck. Go on down to Florida and make them Disney bucks, but you’re here. Doing work that matters in a place that people forgot was good to them.”“I’m too old for Disney Pat.”“Guy, too old like the ocean’s too blue.”“What?”“I was younger ‘n you in ‘n Vietnam.”“I know.”Next to us, one of the few mothers left and her two sons were petting an Ankylosaurus-horse while the handler explained how their tails were clubs. One kid reached for the horse’s exposed leg and his mom yanked him so hard the kid dropped his Dippin’ Dots. He watched them melt. The mom said, “I told you to be careful!” and they walked away, her son reaching back towards his coveted, disposable plastic bowl. The kid started crying. His brother looked up at the sun stupidly. It was Sal’s time to shine.I ran to the ice cream stand and got some more. I stomped over and handed him the cup, holding on with both of my stubby plastic claws. His mom went, “Oh that’s not necessary. Oh, thank you so much.” I pretended to gobble the ice cream the boy had dropped like a predator gnashing at its prey, shoving my face into the concrete and smashing my roar button over and over, like pressing harder would make it sound any different.The kid stopped crying. He pointed and looked at his mom while his older brother fried his eyeballs in the sun. The younger one looked like he had something important to say, like he’d just had an epiphany.Maybe that was it—that look on that kid’s face. The way you can fabricate a good memory out of nothing for someone. That was the closest I’d ever come to being in awe of anything.
***
In early fall—that fake fall where you know it’s going to get muggy and shitty again but you try to enjoy the little time you have left anyway, hoping this time it will be different—Pat was fixing the Chicxulub Impactor, arguing with himself about how to pronounce it. The asteroid that was supposed to smash into the plastic-mold crater was broken. It was going too fast. Crashing into the crater with a real force over and over again. No safety breaks.“What happened to the guy who’s harness came off on the coaster?”“Splat,” Pat said, not taking his eyes off the electric panel.“I mean what happened to the park? When did things get better?”“I ever tell you the story about the kid in the rice patty, Mort?”“What?” “We were up in Da Nang.” Pat leaned against a fake stone wall with plastic vines hanging down, wiping the sweat from his stubble with an already-dirty rag. I knew how these war stories went. Those memories had swelled up inside Grandad until he was bloated with them. Told me all about it on his deathbed. Dead friends. Dead kids. Dead dreams. He sent my grandmother a letter and told her to start finding someone else because he didn’t think he’d survive.“Little kid missing half his hair comes up to us asking for candy every single day while we’re working on a bridge over a patty. Even has this little pet monkey who follows him around. Asks if he can sit with us in the jeep.” Pat turned and smacked the meteor so hard it fell off the metal spring. I reached down and picked the plastic rock up as he talked. It was heavier than I expected.“One day, kid walks up and says his monkey has a present for us. Has this thing wrapped in flimsy paper. I thought it was a gift.” Pat took the asteroid out of my hand, held it up to the sun like an offering. “Turns out, it’s one of our grenades. I threw it back in the kid’s direction. Didn’t mean to. Just instinct.” He twisted the asteroid back on the pole. Every problem I had seemed infinitely small. I imagined a young version of Pat. Him and a wife swigging Diet Coke in their kitchen dancing to oldies. Them in a swan boat.“That’s fucked up.”“Guy, that ain’t the worst that happened. Wanna know what’s really funny?”I knew that wasn’t really a question.“The monkey got away. Not a scratch on ‘em.” Pat laughed, and whacked the asteroid again for good measure. That fixed it. We sat there and watched it, the fate of the dinosaurs playing over and over again the way it always had, like a cautionary tale told too many times to mean anything anymore.
***
When I was a kid, my birthday being in early September was good because it’s pretty far from Christmas and I’d get gifts in the middle of the year-ish. Now I was just excited for Labor Day. Despite me not responding to her for a few weeks, Mom had sent me a Visa gift card. We called. She asked about Rachel and I told her she was gone and she’d said something in that Mom voice that made me feel like a boy in the worst way possible. I put on the button-up Mom had gotten me. Took out all the pins and needles knowing I’d never be able to fold it back the way it came. I’d lost weight so the clothes didn’t fit me right. I tried to tuck the shirt in, but it made me look like an old man or one of those churchy kids you knew would turn out to be a sicko one day. I went to the coffee shop I’d planned on going to with Rachel, hoping that I might see her. Argue for why our shared vocation was something deserving of awe.When I got there, the coffee shop was busy. There was a line with people who had the money for good-fitted clothes and who knew how to wear them, but no Rachel. I thought about leaving, but I pictured someone noticing me leaving after walking in—like someone would see a squirrely guy who can’t decide what to do and go what’s his problem?I ordered a mocha latte because I knew mocha means chocolate. I sat down in a cubby. When a woman walked into the cubby, I felt like I was intruding on her space, so I moved to the bar against the wall where people usually set up their laptops, next to a little library. I grabbed a book about dinosaurs—Triassic infected the whole town. There was a chapter listing alternative theories to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs: an ice age, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, all perfectly reasonable things to stop something from living to its full potential. I wondered, who would I hold onto if the world ended like that tomorrow? What would I do? I looked at everyone in the coffee shop. The smiles. The focus. The contentment and normality they exuded. How comfortable they were in their own skin.Rachel hadn’t even been her real name.
***
The nail in the coffin for Triassic was the kid that died on Timbers, just an hour before closing on one of the last days we were going to keep the coasters open. Right when it was getting cool enough for me to stop wearing ice packs. After one of the guys running the coaster saw the bloody body in the cab, he called the ambulance. From what I could overhear, it was a plank that had been dangling too low. Our boss sent a group text saying we can’t talk to anyone, not that I wanted to, reminding us of the NDA we signed. They also mentioned the winter festival was on hold indefinitely. I went back to the swan pond and found Pat fishing like I thought I would. Nothing we could do but wait for the paramedics to get here and pronounce the kid dead. To pronounce the park dead.“I’m a damn good repairman, but I’m not God,” he said. The few guests on the other side were being shooed away, confused and complaining that they’d paid for their tickets, that they’d planned these couple days months in advance, just to bring their families here. “Management cutting my team killed that kid. Not me.”By the time the paramedics had left and the few remaining customers had been ushered out, it was getting dark. The inside of the park looked like a level in a video game without any NPCs walking around. Triassic was going to be one of those abandoned places you see on TruTV with a poorly reenacted story about that kid who died haunting it, or something like that. “You afraid Pat?”“Afraid of living long enough I want to die, maybe.”We could see the reflection of Coroner and Timbers in the pond. It was beautiful. Like two contorted snake-fish water dinosaur things in a mating ritual. I think Rachel would have dug that. I wished she were here so I could tell her about it. She’d probably noticed already, but it’d be something to say.“You ever thought about building one of your own?” I asked. It was a stupid question but anything not about the dead kid was better than nothing.“My own what, Mort?”“Roller coaster.”“Haven’t,” he said. Then he gulped. The coasters wriggled in the pond water. “Fixing things is a helluva lot different than building them.”“It’s getting cold,” I said.“Starting to think I should have worn a suit like you right now,” Pat said, laughed, then coughed.“I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself, Pat.”“Well, guy, I don’t know either. Guess I could do something with the old swingset in my backyard now.”“You have grandkids?”“No.”I stared.“Guy! Something wrong with a grown man having a swingset?”“No. I guess not.”“You could help me fix it up if yuh want.”“Not good with my hands,” I said, flopping my pleather arms.“Just need someone to hammer nails.”“I’d probably break it.”“I’ll pay you a fair wage.”How? I thought, but I didn’t say it.“I’m going to the top of Timbers,” he said. You wanna come?”“Not really.”“Gonna pussy out the last time you could ever do this? Regret’s a bitch Mortimer, trust me.”“Fine.”I followed Pat to the Timbers entrance, to the open air and narrow stairs bolted along the coaster’s track. There was a sign that said “AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY”. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was trespassing.“You gunna keep gawking at me or are you gunna grow some dino-gonads to match yer skin?”I followed him to the stairs.“Told you you wasn’t a loser.” He grinned.Our weight bent the steps. I kept my muzzle pointed up. The costume broke the wind for me mostly, but I could see Pat’s arms shaking as he grasped the splintered handrail. He looked brittle for the first time since I’d met him in the parking lot.When we reached the top Pat was squinting so hard it seemed like the creases would stick together. We sat in the two-by-four box at the top of the first peak, the highest peak, the Triassic Park flag waving wicked beside them. A cartoon version of Sal—of me—flailing next to us. Pat sat down so his legs hung over the side, the swan boats swirling below. It almost looked like they were alive, celebrating their freedom. I pointed my snout at Pat and waited for him to say something, but nothing came out besides guttural sighs and the occasional “yup” or “guy”. I mulled over options for conversation until a question busted out of me like an alien.“You ever been in awe of anything Pat?” I said it so stupidly. Pat didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if he heard me or not. “I mean, have you ever seen something and just gone, like, wow, this is impossible and I can’t explain wh—”“I heard yuh.” Pat looked up, almost shocked, smiling. “Whaddabout this view, eh?” Before us was a sea of trees that surrounded the park grounds. Blinking lights above Chicxulub and Coroner. Headlamps from the final cars blinking through the slants of the trees all around the park. In the corner of my eye, I caught a stray dog pissing on a tree.“Gotta be honest with you Mort.”“What?”“The kid and the monkey,” Pat’s face was a rock, “there was no damn monkey.” He took the hammer off his belt and started tapping it on a loose nail sticking out of the wood posts, then hammering it. He kept hammering after the nail had all but disappeared into the dry, rotted wood. “I just shot that kid cuz he scared me.”We just heard the wind for a while.“It’s a nice view, yeah,” I said. In twilight, the cracks in the parking lot looked like a face. Like it was watching and waiting for us to realize something together. I stood up and crossed my arms. Uncrossed them. Crossed them again. Stared at the plunge down.“Welp.” Pat slapped his knees and groaned as he stood back up. “S’pose it’s time to retire.” He looked at the water below too. The sun dipping behind a cloud was making it harder to see the reflections.“So you’ll come around to help with the swingset?” he asked.“Sure,” I said.I turned and walked down the stairs expecting him to follow me. I heard his tools jangling, then nothing. I didn’t look back. I was too worried he wouldn’t be there. On the way down the steps, I imagined holding Rachel’s hand. When I reached the turnstiles, I stopped. Looked around. Took off the suit and draped it over a ticketing station. I walked back to the camry in nothing but my underwear, keys jangling in my hand. I texted mom that I was coming home. I got in the car, and pretended Rachel was in the passenger seat. Told her everything I was in awe of.
Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles book podcasts and youtubers.Nathan is an aries who spends his time avoiding real life responsibilities with literary fiction and foreign films, having existential crises in dressing rooms, and drinking too much coffee. Hailing from Los Angeles, he currently lives in Korea where he tries to embody Joan Didion by day and Eve Babitz by night. His novella, Adolescence Leaves explores loss and love in memories of a relationship ripped apart between Los Angeles and Tokyo. You can find Nathan on Instagram or Youtube. Or at any of the links here.Rebecca Gransden: How would you describe the channel to someone who is unfamiliar with what you do?Nathan Truong: Tiny bags, big brain books, cold brews, and clubbing.RG: Does the channel have a mission or manifesto?NT: I make it known that: “I read because reading is sexy, and if you’re not reading, you’re not sexy.” I demand you pick up a book.RG: How long has the channel been in existence, and how have you seen it grow over that time?NT: The channel is a little over a year old now heading to year two in March 2024. Growth has been gradual, and it has been such an incredible experience discovering different booktubers. In the lit fic niche, everyone is so kind, smart, and wonderful. I’ve made such incredible friendships that I felt I’ve been missing my entire bookish life.RG: Where did the idea for the channel come from?NT: I originally started the channel because I never had a physical place or person to talk books with. Reading is such a solitary act, but when you come out of it, you desperately want to connect because the world that you encompassed yourself in after however many pages has ended. There is a reaching. So, I reached out online and it’s been incredible to talk about books with so many people now.RG: How did you decide upon a title for the channel?NT: I wanted alliteration out of the channel name with my own. Something easy, something simple. RG: Are there any channels that influenced or encouraged you to start the project?NT: I have to pay thanks to @rebeccaeatsbooks for giving me the jumpstart in starting booktube. She only filmed from her phone and I thought, why not? I also have to thank @cjreads for showing me the lit fic world and allowing myself to find a personal brand within how I wanted to present books and myself.My last thanks goes to @whatpageareyouon for his review of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for speaking so thoughtfully of the book when I had no one around me to talk to about it. His video appeared first in the Youtube search engine and validated a lot of feelings I had about the book. It also made me realize Youtube as a space to talk about books.RG: Which of your videos would you recommend to someone who is new to what you do?NT: It would have to be the Book Recommendation Tag Video as it’s a pretty good look at some of the books I read if you’re curious about my reading tastes.Another good video is this LA Vlog capturing bits and bobs of Sula, Breasts and Eggs, and my general life and vibe. It’s short, non-committal. So, a very good appetizer to the channel.RG: How do you go about selecting what to feature on each video?NT: I’m in the camp of long-form content, so whatever I have as backlog footage, I try to piece together to make a 30-40 minute video that is somewhat coherent. Otherwise, if there’s a specific book I want to feature, I will do a singular vlog on the book.RG: If your channel features guests, how do you go about finding them?NT: Location location location! I had the chance to meet Modern Ajumma (@yenasung) when I was home in LA because we live quite close to each other. And I had the chance to meet @bibliosophie because she lives in New York and I was there when I was on vacation. Meeting booktubers in person has been such a pleasure and I hope to meet many more in the near future.RG: If you are a writer, has the channel impacted your writing life? and conversely, has a writerly disposition influenced the channel?NT: I am indeed a writer! The books I read for the channel have lent an eye into what kind of fiction I want to create and has helped me with my proofreading and edits. What to keep, what to cut. Naturally, more reading calls for better writing.In the near future, I want to feature more writing/reading vlogs because, whether I like it or not, I’m a brand. And the brand has got to be branding!RG: Do you watch videos about books?NT: Being part of booktube ultimately means involving yourself in the worlds of other booktubers. It’s community I’m after. Watching booktube has also put incredible books on my never-ending tbr.RG: What do you dislike about book videos?NT: Hot Take: I HATE when people read the back of books (though I am sometimes guilty of this) but I don’t care for the synopses of books. I’d rather hear how a booktuber emotionally resonates with the book. The mood, the vibe, what it reminds them of. I think those emotional ties with the book are what connects me a lot better with the video and the book.RG: Who is your dream guest?NT: I hope to feature more casual chit chats with booktubers with Youtube Lives or Zoom calls. Would love to have a fireside chat with @alsopato about books, movies, music, etc.RG: Is there a theme, subject or book you are burning to cover?NT: I’m hoping to do a Clarice Lispector tier list video as I am a Lispector stan. We worship her!RG: Is there a lit channel that doesn’t exist, but you wish did?NT: I love watching vlogs. Combining the everyday with lit fic is something I want to see more of in the booktube-sphere. RG: Is there a lit channel that exists, but you wish didn’t?NT: The lit fic niche is so small. There are so many other genres of fiction that get a lot of love, but lit fic is incredibly important in how we navigate through the world and interlink our lives with others. We need more lit fic stans.RG: For techheads, which single item of kit do you consider essential for the production of the channel, and what would you say are the basics needed for those new to videos?NT: I think the big question is always camera-centric. The channel started out with an iPhone 12 Mini and is now filmed with an iPhone 13 Pro Max. In my opinion, Apple is the best in terms of sound, video, and stabilization for daytime and nighttime filming.RG: If someone would like to support independent creators, what are the best ways to do this?NT: The best way to support is to connect. You can do this with a comment, a follow, a like, a share. Because the booktube community is so interlinked, we’re all bound to be talking of each other, bouncing ideas back and forth, and, essentially, reading the same books.RG: Looking back on the channel, are there favorite videos, videos that stand out to you, or videos that didn’t go as you would’ve liked?NT: Yes, I play favorites. Everything is a work in progress, but I do consider "we just want to make our mistakes" vlog a shift in the way I read books and read a bit closer to the text by the line of life. The video is mostly about Parade by Rachel Cusk, but also about Heti's recent Alphabetical Diaries, and how autofiction is working between the two.Another video that I cherish a lot is my All Fours | Miranda July vlog. It's a special book with special times that capture the whimsy of the entire book. It's who I am.RG: What are your plans for the future?NT: More books, more coffee, more clubbing, and more honest, open, and compelling conversations around books. And I demand there be more sexy readers.RG: If you liked that, you may also like this. Are there any lit channels on a similar wavelength to your own that you would recommend to a viewer who appreciates what you do?NT: The best influencers are your friends. So check out all my friends. Love them as much as I do.@kiranreader@thelefthandedreader6632@benjaminjournal@soireadthisbook@TheBarandtheBookcase@batumanslittleidiot@MatthewSciarappa@katsfieldnotes@DogEaredMusings@pleasuresofthetext@Grandpasbookclub@rebareads@benreadsgood@TheDiscoKingOfficial@lucyrutherford@nadsluvs2read@noorsbookshelf@jameskatie@savidgereadsnathan’s nook can be found on YouTube.
I thought I knew what hot was. Humidity I could swallow. The wings of dead fish flies going translucent in the sun. Sprinkles melting off my ice cream cone the second I walk out of the shop. There is no ice cream here. There are plenty of dead things, but they are not stiff and quiet. They buzz. Shake. Scream. If I think about them for too long they’re all I can see. All I can hear. I like to imagine it’s a particularly exotic vacation. A desired hot — one I spent money on and rolled up all my clothes into small balls for.Before, vacations felt like something being done to me. It didn’t matter if I filled every hour with an activity, pinballing from tasting room to walking tour to theater, or if I sprawled on a towel and tried to doze. The time away had the texture, rough and abrasive, of an exfoliating mitt. I never knew what it would reveal in me. My last vacation ruined me.
***
D runs the paddle brush down one side of her hair and then the other. She presses argan oil into each side until it’s a glossy, nutty brown that reminds me of the wood inlays of my dad’s old car. The heat protectant goes on as a spray. The straightener sizzles as D runs it down her hair.D is soft textures and shiny surfaces — thigh-high suede boots, slinky paisley skirt — except for her earrings, two waning moons whose points cut into her rosy cheeks when she turns her head. Her rings glint in the low light and she shrugs on a canvas blazer. "I've never done this," she says, her dark eyes glancing down as she drags her finger over the thread that keeps the blazer’s pockets shut. "I've been saving it for now."I want her to break it. I want her to mar her smooth lines of her own volition. “Do it,” I whisper. She doesn’t hear me.She rips the pocket open and smiles. “That’s it for now!” she says. “I’ll be going live again from the top of the Duomo later today, so make sure your notifications are on!”I put my phone away. I open up the album I’ve made of screenshots from her Lives, in which I can see different corners of her apartment. I soothe myself with what now looks familiar: the skylight, stamped into the sloping roof above her bed; the once-white enamel hotplate that is her only kitchen appliance; the wardrobe cabinet distinguishable from the storage cabinet by the candy-colored Anthropologie table runner that hangs down it. These wisps of knowledge give structure to the scenes I invent for when I confront her. I will be adult about it, thoughtful. I’ll bring over food that doesn’t have to be heated up. An abundance of cold dips. Baba ganoush, maybe. She served it once when her friends from America came to visit. I scroll to the screenshots from that dinner, see heaps of pallid mush on daisy plates she brought over in one of her five giant duffels when she moved from London to Milan. She’d wrapped them on a Live, swaddling them in wide-legged twill trousers that looked too thin to be effective cushioning. I watched her stack them, one on top of the other, oblivious to how easily they break.
***
I’ve come to Italy to see D. I’ve followed her since last year, when Paul stopped fucking me in order to fuck her. She moved here six months ago. I held out till now to come, though I put a flight tracker on as soon as she announced the move. Two hours to get to Gatwick, a two-hour flight to Malpensa, a 40-minute bus drive down flat, gray roads papered with flat, gray billboards in front of flat, gray buildings. Five hours of travel and an hour of milling around in the airport, avoiding the food court and swiping £180 eye serums across the patch of skin above my mask and underneath my glasses. Six hours, maybe, in total. Six hours is nothing. I’m used to American distances. I’ve driven that long to saw through thick steak and push it around a plate in a chain restaurant — a neutral place my parents’ and grandparents’ propriety wouldn’t let them scream in — before turning around and driving home.
***
Paul didn’t tell me her name but I found her easily enough. I told myself I wouldn’t look him up after he told me he didn’t want to be with me anymore, but I got around that by looking up his friends, and I saw her tagged in a poorly-framed shot someone on his rugby team had posted of the team and their various hangers-on at a pub in Camden. She was standing in front of big foggy windows and was the best dressed of anyone present, wearing an embroidered denim Free People suit. She had mussed lips and a red chin I recognized as courtesy of Paul’s beard burn. It looked different on her complexion than it did on mine, but I could tell, and two weeks later, it was confirmed by a video his school friend posted of a gallery opening in Shoreditch, where Paul’s hand, pale and finely scarred like old vellum, rested on the back of her delicate neck. The two of them stood in front of an oil painting of drying laundry strung across a dusty balcony in Andalucia. Their bodies stayed touching from shoulders to hip until the camera panned away.
***
I started watching D’s get-ready-with-me Lives. I followed her antique shopping. Her trips to poetry readings in members’ clubs where her friends read unstructured pieces about fertility treatments. Sometimes I saw Paul, glowing like he’d been professionally lit, smiling the half-smile he prefers because it hides his small teeth. Then D went dark for an entire month. Nothing new came up, no matter how often I refreshed, and I worried she’d blocked me. I started checking on her from the account I manage for the gallery I work for. She reappeared there a few weeks later, announcing her move to Italy. She’d stream to us as she walked to Pilates, to therapy, to the Italian lessons she was taking to “reconnect with her heritage.” She walked everywhere. I told the gallery I needed to work remotely for health reasons. I watched her in bed, blinds drawn, my phone growing hot in my hand.
***
I get dressed for the Duomo from the top down. Tortoiseshell sunglasses. My thick blue sweater and loose brown corduroys, though little of my outfit will be visible under my coat. When I get the notification that D’s gone live again, this time from the Cathedral’s entrance, I slip on brown Chelsea boots and walk to the elevator, where I tap through Stories as I get sucked down to the lobby.
***
I want thousands of people to witness every moment of my life and I want those moments to be perfect tableaux of wealth and good taste, each carousel soaked in contentment: hand-thrown pottery in cornflower blues transitioning to a rainy city street strewn with streetlamp light transitioning to me in a billowy blouse, open-mouthed and laughing. I want the people who witness me living well to be famous in their own chosen careers, blue-ticked and beautiful. I want to see and be seen at London Fashion Week and go straight to Milan Fashion Week after having RSVP’d no to New York Fashion Week because I needed some time to rest, some time to nest, some time to walk barefoot over the underfloor heating of my three-story townhouse where I host parties and serve artisanal bread and eight kinds of cheese to people who don’t eat.I want to be the one they all watch.
***
I thought the shift in the tone of D’s Lives meant Paul had dumped her when she moved. I would still see her one day, I knew, but my daydreams of our time together changed. I’d be magnanimous, the hatchet fully buried, and invite her to aperitivos. We’d sit across a small metal table and our voices would rise with every round, until we’d be walking down a cobblestone road with our arms around each other, laughing at stories about the man who didn’t love us, wrapping ourselves in solidarity.Then Paul posted from Milan. (I’d seen this upon checking his profile a few weeks into sleeping with a man who was in the ensemble of the Oklahoma! revival, when I thought I was over Paul and wanted to confirm that hypothesis. I should have known better. You can only ever get over a man with a better one, and this one shouted “Yee-haw!” in an American accent when he came.) Paul had said he was too busy to go to Paris with me when the gallery sent me to cover the first international show of an Irish artist they’d signed. The artist cross-stitched portraits of male politicians in drag, and I stood in front of them, alone, pouring drinks for the balding would-be buyers and the waifs that accompanied them. While D wasn’t in his pictures from his trip to Milan, he posted a story at the natural wine bar I knew was D’s favorite. In it, a dismembered female hand poured opaque pink wine from a labelless bottle.
***
I’m climbing to the top of the Duomo. I saw in D’s Live that she and the German girl she’s been hanging out with since she moved are sitting on the roof, answering questions from her followers and showing them the view.The roof isn’t as corded-off as I thought it would be. Nothing could be that high and that gothically depressive in America without chin-high fences to discourage jumpers. The Madonnina, gold-leafed and gleaming, is looking up into her crown of stairs, as if she’s already interceding on behalf of the faithful swarming her.On my phone, D is talking into the camera about how this is her first time at the top of the Cathedral even though she’s lived here for months. “We didn’t go to bed until four but we weren’t going to miss this,” she says. “We pre-bought the tickets!”In front of me, D and her friend are sitting atop a marble ledge in the wan winter sun, D’s face tilted down into her front camera. They’re framed between columns capped with gargoyles. It looks like they’re floating between graves. I make my way over to them.Two little kids in puffy jackets dart in front of me and line up behind one of the slats that make up the roof. They climb up it, then scoot down gingerly, half a foot at a time, before scampering back into line to do it again. I close out of D’s Live and watch as a little girl in a toggle-front coat and a fan of dark hair lands at the bottom of the slide. Her shoes thwack against the marble and she waves in my direction. I turn and see, between D and me, a woman sitting against a column. She has a scarf tucked around her face and over the shape of a bun. She’s not encouraging the girl’s fun but she’s not discouraging it, either. On another day, D and I could have laughed at how cute these little European kids and their little European grandmother are, how much joy there is to go around; we could have taken turns on the makeshift slide, inching towards the saw-toothed city below. Today, here, now, on the roof, I open my camera and start filming as I walk closer to D. “Remember to put the 1st of March in your diary,” I hear D say. “I’m going to the season premiere of The Mandalorian and I’m bringing you all with me!”“Did I ever tell you how I gave my first handjob to Star Wars?” the German girl says.“You’re so lucky I just turned off Live,” says D. “Otherwise your DMs would be absolutely flooded with filth.”The girls start laughing and I’m there, I’m right next to them, the sun is shining and we’re all laughing at the joke, and I go up to D and her friend and stick out my hand to introduce myself.“Hello!” I say, already laughing.D squints at me. “Do I know you?” she asks politely. I take off my sunglasses and D’s face goes slack. “Hi, D.”“Shit!” she says. I wait for her to calm down.“This is Paul’s crazy ex,” she says to her friend. She turns back to me. “Why are you here?” she asks, shirking away from where I’m standing.I didn’t think D would recognize me. I follow her, but she doesn’t follow me. She has hundreds of thousands of followers and Paul deleted the two pictures he’d had up of us after he left me. I thought I’d have to explain to her who I was, tell her details about Paul — the acne scars scattered across his shoulders in pencil-eraser pink — for her to believe me.This isn’t how I wanted it to begin. I can hear the kids screaming and I want to start over. “I just—” I start, stammering a bit.“Have you not bothered me enough?” D says. She turns to the German girl. Her cheeks go pallid under her bronzer and her eyes rake across the people behind us, all of whom are consumed in their own moments of communion with the church or with their cameras. “She’s the one who messaged me saying that Paul was cheating on me, who called me 15 times a day until I changed my number.”My stomach starts to roil. I was meant to have the upper hand here. I breathe deep, counting one, two, three. I pitch my voice low: “I only want to talk. I thought you should know—”“Wait, this is the freak who sent copies of your nudes to your house?” asks the German, stepping closer to me.Ever since Paul had left his Google profile logged into my work laptop, I reviewed his emails with my morning coffee. In August, D sent him a series of shots from her vacation in Biarritz. I’d simply printed them out and sent them to the address I found on his Amazon receipt for a women's rash guard. I did write “slut” across them before sending, but considering the content, that seemed irrefutable.“Yes! I literally moved to get away from her!” D’s arm flails between us. “You emailed my mum and told her I was sleeping with my primary school teacher!” “Okay, but—” I say, reaching out to D.D scrambles farther back on the marble ledge. There’s not much space left, and she loses her balance. As she falls backwards, her legs fly up in a tangle of knees. She looks graceful even now, windmilling into nothing. “Jesus fucking Christ!” shouts the German, running to D. “Get the fuck away from us!” she screams at me, her loose blonde hair sparkling in the light. “Aiuto! Aiuto!”It’s all gone wrong. I don’t want D to die, not really; it would get her out of Paul’s life but it wouldn’t get me back in. I run to the ledge, German girl’s imperatives ignored. I see her there, balanced on a thin ledge, centimeters away from a catastrophic fall. The city below her looks tiny, the people too petite to be real.I reach my hand down to where the German girl has already been reaching. My arms are longer, and I’m stronger, and together, we haul D up one fistful of fabric at a time, fishermen bringing in the catch. D’s feet touch the ground and I try to pull her towards me. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”“Go to hell,” she spits.And so I do. The hallowed ground yawns open and swallows me down, depositing me in a slump at the gates of hell. When I can bear looking upwards, I find the gates’ inscription: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. It would make for a good caption, I think. Back on earth, on the roof of the Duomo under a blue-flame sky, my phone clatters onto the slanted marble where I just stood, still recording.
I saw a sign for stump removal and found myself wishing I had a stump that needed removing.Or, more exactly, I wished that should I ever have a stump that needed removing I’d see a sign like that one. Or, put yet another way, I wished that in my life I could see the things I need to see right when I need to see them. Not before, and not after.
