MICHAEL SEYMOUR INSOMNIAC by Michael Seymour Blake
…
TANKERS by Mackenzie Moore
I thought my grief would come out like my mother dumps out her purse.
If you’ve ever seen that woman turn over her tote bag, it’s like the Niagara of tidbits. You need a poncho just to block the crumbs. Everything comes spilling out into a big old pile: Armani lipstick that costs more than my phone bill; floss picks, Altoids, crinkled napkins with phone numbers of networking colleagues; one wooden “eco spork” used, but wiped clean on one of the aforementioned crinkled napkins.
It’s an absolute mess but my god what a sight to see.
That’s not what happened. I did not dump. I did not turn out my pockets. I partitioned — sectioning off the sadness like an oil tanker. I remember learning in grade school about how those massive ships don’t sink when they hit ice — they just seal off the flooded compartment, and re-distribute the weight. Capitalism and Midwest values have a way of encouraging one to cordon off the wound and deal with it later, in the privacy of loneliness.
I redistributed by lying on the knotty wooden floor of my apartment most nights, letting the sadness settle — like waiting for the foam to burn off a beer poured too quickly. In the quiet darkness, I let the cataclysmic waves wash over me. Once the sloshing stopped, I stood up.
Sometimes the system failed, and things came leaking out. I could make you a map of all the unfortunate corners of New York where my grief boiled over: the “stamps only” line at the Cooper Union post office; under the ancient hand dryers of 721 Broadway; the Staten Island ferry as it docked in Battery Park; crumbling corners of my ex’s Astoria apartment.
The blindsiding waves eventually grew less frequent. I stopped grieving on a daily basis. Or at least, I made it less obvious, especially to myself. But even so, the ghost of something, much to be desired, still lingers. Perhaps it’s just the ache for a specific feeling — one of turning yourself completely inside out. Of dumping out the dusty corners and making sure the light hits them, at least to acknowledge they exist.
I WAS SO READY TO BE ENDURED: A REVIEW OF LAURA THEOBALD’S SALAD DAYS by Evan Williams
Laura Theobald opens her new collection Salad Days with an epigraph from Antony and Cleopatra. Fitting. This book is an acerbic wedding, rejoicing in the union of our worst impulses and their natural consequences. Everyone is dressed to celebrate, except we’re alone. So, so alone.
To be forthright, I had no idea what to make of Salad Days initially. I read the epigraph and thought, “Ah, destructive love, imperial curiosity.” I read the index, where I found the book split into seven spectacularly-titled sections: Waves of Confusion, Art for the Afterlife, Moon Unit, Future Moods, Double Fantasy, Sour Times, and Infinite Sadness. I read the book a section a day.
In the first line of the first poem I encountered a “you” and felt safe in the embrace of what I first guessed to be love poems. Then there’s this line, from Fish Poem, that goes like “I was so ready to be endured.” It’s here that I became pretty sure these were not love poems, but anti-love poems, which are as loving as love poems because they are not breakup poems. And, because they are not breakup poems, they imply a hanging on; this realization made me afraid.
I was afraid because I was settled into and inseparable from a book, to quote from Art Poem, so totally “invested in a life of destruction.” I bailed on my plan to read the book section by section, started over at the beginning, then read the whole thing in a sitting. It’s a whirlwind, I suggest you do the same if you’re able.
The narrator’s desire to impose themselves, to be endured, is never really directed at an agent to do the enduring beyond an implicit “you,” and so the narrator has allowed themselves a space to be endured by everything, starting with the “you” of these poems. What’s clear though, is that imposition is synonymous in the text with expenditure; imposing the self is to offer oneself up for annihilation, and it’s sort of thrilling. It comes through in the structure of every line, none of which close with end punctuation, and so always leave off waiting for another line to carry them. Most, if not all, of the poems read like couplets where any line can be the first half and any line can be the second. Even those poems with an odd number of lines give this impression, articulating subtly the possibility of devastation by asking formally: what if the second line to my couplet never shows up to build on my suggestion?
As the book builds on itself, the scale of the destruction in which it’s invested grows exponentially. We’re taken from the kitchen with its tomatoes and potatoes and fish, its ass and diamonds and islands and onions, to the sun and the empire, the clouds and the earth. In the transition there’s the rapidity of the narrator’s dissolution, and there is the exponentially growing scale of destruction won from each successive annihilation. Every time we are made to feel small, we make ourselves that much bigger so our destruction might be noticed.
And we are made to feel small. We are made to feel subject to—subject to another, subject to an empire, subject to the sun, subject to the cancer of both.
The crescendoing scope given over to the agent of our annihilation begins in Flowering Poem, where Theobald writes, “When you wake up you will think of me/But when you die you will think of something else.” It’s a brilliant couplet. The offer of the self (to be endured, that is being endured) to close the first line, then the turn toward a vague something else to close the second enacts precisely the sort of treachery of which every line in this book is wary. Then along comes Empire Poem to say: “You were my favorite empire/You had a voice like when the sun is setting.” Here’s the imperial curiosity. To be thought of when another wakes, to be dismissed when they go to sleep—it calls to mind the idea that the sun never set on the British Empire; if we seek to feel part of the empire’s light, we know already it will run away from us to shine somewhere else. Yet, the narrator speaks to the overarching sentiment of the book, saying, “I would like more time to look at the sun/The sun is totally without pretense/Shining its cancer onto everyone.” There’s almost an appreciation. Recalling the thesis of Potato Poem, “It happens fast/Like anything that is terrible,” it’s difficult not to believe that because we are here dying so slowly, being weaned drip by drip by drip of the selves we impose, maybe it’s not terrible, maybe it’s even lovely.
What’s being done, it’s all destruction. “It’s like lighting a match in a world with no wind/And you have to put the fire someplace/And where are you going to put the fire/And there is no place to put the fire.”
The collection concedes, those of us invested in this form of self-destruction concede, finally, with flair. “Yes yes yes everything is beautiful/with an expiration date.” Though, whether we’re meant to take our repose in the idea that living for destruction must come to an end, or that being endured without being destroyed can only go on for so long, I don’t know. And again, I am afraid.
SUN IS MISSING by Kion You
The Korean rice weevil is a felicitous insect, bent on one simple task: scaling my bedroom walls. Tonight I see three but sometimes there are as many as ten. The thrill must be similar to that of free solo climbing, but when the weevil falls it gets back up and tries again—the hard-shelled advantage.
After dinner I lie in bed, which is a mat on the ground. One weevil wordlessly falls onto my blanket. It lands on its back and its legs flail like a pit of eels. After gathering itself, the weevil plants its left anterior leg onto the blanket and uses it as a fulcrum, spinning its body counterclockwise in an attempt to pop itself back up. After exhaustive study (entire days in bed) I have concluded that this exercise is successful fifty percent of the time.
I sweep my room and round up a decadent gray pile of cuticle flakes, pubic hairs, dried boogers, and chip crumbs. I scrape bug corpses from cobwebs in corners: weevils, flies, moths, spiders, mosquitos, and one black fuzzy caterpillar. While sifting detritus onto paper towels, another weevil falls, one that has climbed only to the point where the linoleum flooring meets the wallpaper (approximately one inch off the ground). I flip this one back onto its feet, anticipating a stronger performance in its next go-round.
A nightly ritual: spraying mosquito repellent onto every shelf, behind every drawer, even out the window. I lay in wait for a lone mosquito to venture out into the open, hacking its last, but nothing happens. Both weevils are still spinning on their backs. As I insert my earplugs and turn off the light I know the mosquitos will soon be buzzing around my head, talking in tinnitus.
+
I take out my earplugs to make sure the screeching is real, and my phone says it is 3:30AM. There are three courses of action: try to go back to sleep and hide my limbs under my blanket, reach for the insect spray by my bed and spray blindly around my face, or get up, turn on the light, and clap the motherfuckers to death. After turning on the light I see three of them on the wall just above my head and I smack all of them, one-two-three, letting their blood— my blood—smear the wall. I'm too sleepy to clean up, and when I turn off the light, the darkness pulsates with haloes for a second.
The path back to sleep will be impossible because I am now aware of the background noise my body has worked so hard to block out. I wear earplugs because my grandmother is dying in the next room and I do not want to hear it. Every night she sings, all throaty and guttural, two syllables which flutter up and down. 아퍼, 아퍼, 아퍼, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. Right now she is singing a variation on the theme: 너무 아퍼, it hurts so much, 죽고 싶어, I want to die. In dire combination: 아퍼, 아퍼, 너무 아퍼, 죽고 싶어.
If Google Translate is correct, my grandmother's esophageal tube has enlarged to the point where acid refluxes up her body whenever she lies down. She has a few devices lodged there to little effect. She also has a hip problem from falling off her roof twenty years ago. Her husband drank himself to death and her sons abandoned her for America. This once amazed me, the accumulation of suffering packed into one body, which is why I decided to move back to Korea and live with her. Now, however, she is just my grandmother.
My grandmother's stream of piss sounds healthy, and I hear her leave the house to wander the neighborhood. She never closes her bedroom or bathroom doors but always slams the front door. This week I have woken up to her chopping vegetables, barging into my room to pick out my dirty laundry, and watching TV with the volume maxed out. With their death knells, she and the mosquitos are formidable.
But I'm not sure if she's actually dying. During my first month, I didn't sleep because I was terrified that at any moment she might keel over and breathe her last, but I've come to realize that a dying person doesn't have this much fight in them.
My aunt says that me coming to Korea has been a "present" for my grandmother, but my Korean is so bad that while she regales me at mealtimes I just nod and clear off my bowl of rice. In the vocabulary of pain, however, she speaks simply and succinctly—I feel like I'm being ripped in half. Have you ever rubbed pepper flakes into a wound?
I'm wide awake and heave a sigh. Per usual, I open Instagram and let the blue light ruin me. It is afternoon in New York and pictures are being posted. In the yard, I hear my grandmother cursing a family of feral cats. The cats took up residence a few weeks ago—a mother and three orange newborns—but my grandmother waged war after they began pooping in our yard. She has thrown unopened cans of beer. She curses them as she would her children. I hear each thump of her cane, the cats' claws gristling the asphalt.
At dawn, my grandmother falls into an intense fit of snoring. The pearling sky makes visible three mosquitos pinned against my wall. They are half-flattened and half-protruding, perfect for a glass case or a crucifixion scene. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
MOZZARELLA by Megan Navarro Conley
After they drown and bloat with water, white people look like mozzarella cheese. Not the shredded kind in resealable bags, but the smooth spherical cheese in the little wet bags near the deli counter. Sometimes I buy this cheese from Trader Joe’s because plucking it off the refrigerated shelf makes me feel fancy. I like to turn it over in my hands, cup it in my palm while waiting in line.
I learn this fact about white people and cheese while standing in a river. I am nineteen, and I still think I’m going to be a doctor. The director of my honors program tells us that we need leadership positions if we want to apply to med school, so I am standing in this river wearing a neon green hat that shouts Volunteer Team Leader. Behind me, on the shore, are ten other college kids looking to fill lines on their resumes. It’s 9am, and we are all cold and tired and hungover, but because I am the team leader, the park ranger hands me rubber pants and boots to wade into the water.
It rained the night before, but the tree lying halfway across the river clearly fell a long time ago. It’s caught litter in its branches, a matted solid clump of chip bags, soda cans, plastic bags, anything unnaturally dyed and saturated that immediately draws the eye. My friend stands on top of the tree, dry and holding open a garbage bag.
I’ve picked up most of it. At the top of the ravine, I can feel the park ranger staring at me while the other students pick around the shore, poking into bushes, around tree roots. I am wondering if his job is always this cushy, when my friend pinches her nose.
“It smells like shit.”
“Really? I have a bad sense of smell.”
“It smells like something’s died.”
I try sweeping the leaves downriver, fishing through the grey-brown muck. I think I’m almost done with this area, ready to wade out of the water and step out of these rubber boots which will stand up even when I’m not in them.
“There’s this big thing against the tree,” I say, and my friend crouches down above me to get a better look.
Not that we can see anything in particular, but I can feel the weight of it, pressing both my hands against its squishy mass, it’s at least half the length of the tree trunk. I start thinking out loud about what it could be: “I think it’s a waterlogged pillow. It’s so squishy and heavy because it’s all weighed down, but this is definitely cloth.” My fingers search for the edges of it, manage to grip parts of the fabric, and this is when I begin to pull.
My friend slaps her hand over her mouth, and I hear someone else scramble up the ravine, shouting to the park ranger.
“It’s just a mannequin,” I tell my friend, but she begins laughing and shaking her head, on hands and knees as she crawls along the tree trunk.
I am still pulling on it, using all my weight to try to dislodge it from the tree, but it only rocks back and forth in the water, cresting small waves against my waist. I can hear the park ranger speaking into static, the other volunteers buzzing with excitement, but I keep standing in the river, and I keep pulling, and even now, I don’t know why I did this. Maybe because I am nineteen, and I want to be a leader, and I want to be a lot of things that, deep down, I know I am not. Maybe I keep pulling because I don’t want to accept what it is, because if I have to accept what it is, then I have to accept what I am, and I have to accept that I am holding someone, I am holding an unfortunate someone the same way I refuse to be held. If I have to accept what is in front of me, I have to accept all the rest too, and I can’t do that because I am weak, so I keep pulling. If I keep pulling, this will be something else, this will be happening to somebody else, and I need that to be true, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s disgusting and horrible to think this way. If I can make myself into what I am not, then this isn’t allowed to be someone’s body, and I will keep pulling until it isn’t.
Years later, I’m going to learn what the word dissociating means. I will think that the word is too soft to mean what it does, this violent expulsion from the body to protect the mind from further harm.
It turns over in the water, suddenly, revealing a smooth, creamy surface. I press a fingertip into it, the way you press a sunburn to see the lightbulb left behind, but all I leave behind is an indent, deep enough to fill with water. I pull again, and then his arm pops free—a doughy wrist, a ballooned hand. Looking back on it now, I should’ve held it right there in the water, until the police arrived.
THE SPRING PAGEANT by Richard Mirabella
Danny’s niece, Joan, sat at the newspaper covered folding table in front of the TV and painted the bear head he’d made for her school’s spring pageant. He trusted her with the head, when he would trust no one else with something he’d made, especially a child, but Joan understood how special it was to create objects. Joan didn’t destroy, and never had as far as he knew. Craig and Shannon, her parents, hadn’t complained about it anyway. Every book Danny ever gave Joan still existed intact.
From the entryway of the kitchen, Danny watched her lay brown paint over the bear head’s surface. He’d painstakingly smoothed with gloss and then textured it so that when painted it would have the appearance of fur. Now and then he came to stand by her, but he’d only had to explain the technique to her once. At the stove, he heated up oil for fried chicken, her favorite.
Joan was eight-years-old, and her parents were dead. Craig and Shannon, two nice people, one of whom was Danny’s brother, were killed in a car accident. It was almost mundane. His brother had been conventional, sweet, a little dull. When Craig asked Danny to be Joan’s guardian in the unlikely event something was to happen to him and his wife, Danny accepted, because the something would never occur. Craig and Shannon would grow old and Joan would mature with and test them, but it hadn’t happened. Here she was in his apartment, brushing brown and black paint on a papier-mache head.
“I want my bear to have blue eyes,” Joan said.
“Why?” Danny called from the kitchen.
Joan didn’t answer. The bear should have brown eyes or black. He’d let her paint the eyes blue and she’d see the mistake. He still didn’t like to tell her what to do. It didn’t come naturally to him.
Joan had once loved Danny loudly. Before her parents died, when he visited them, she wanted to sit next to him, or on him, while he ate or talked. She said, “Uncle Danny! Uncle Danny” if his attention strayed for a moment, and he’d have an urge to shove her off of him. God, what a horrible thing to think, but he wasn’t used to someone hanging all over him, never liked or wanted kids. Now, they only hugged if he asked if she wanted a hug and she’d say, “Of course, Uncle Danny.” Maybe she still loved him, but in a quiet way.
Tonight, he could have been fucking. He wanted it constantly now that he didn’t have time for it, and it was torture how easy it would be to find someone. He was young and when he looked in the mirror, he saw his temporary beauty. Strange to think of his brother in those moments, but he did. Craig, in the driver’s seat, crushed. How beautiful to have a body. The flesh would fall away from the bone someday. All this sculpture he’d been working on for ten years, all of this trying to put something together, to make life and a body out of armature and material, clay, or paper and glue, whatever, made him think about what lived under the skin. Joan, when he had his arms around her, felt as frail as an old lady, and she went out into the world every day and survived.
They ate the fried chicken, and after went back into the living room to watch Adventure Time together, the only show they both liked. The bear’s blue eyes had dried.
“It doesn’t look right,” Joan said.
“I told you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Oh yeah. I meant to,” he said.
The bear’s mouth hung slightly open, so when Joan wore it, she’d see out of it, as if the bear had swallowed her. He’d painted the inside black, except for a vivid red tongue.
Joan dipped a brush into dark brown and dabbed it over the blue eyes, took up another brush and circled the dark brown with a paler brown. When that dried, Danny touched two dots of white paint in each iris and the eyes came alive. They looked too much like human eyes, but when he saw how happy they made Joan, who smiled without stopping herself, he loved them. They might have made his best work of art together. He wished he could take some of the freedom he’d felt putting this mask together and bring it with him to his other work, which he labored over in the most boring manner, trying to find meaning within a piece, a reason for making it, aside from the desire to build. Sometimes it’s just a bear head, the best one you can muster.
In the morning, with the light a sad pink out the kitchen window, he made pancakes with peanut butter chips, and they sat at the table in what he thought of as their dining room, a small space between the living room and kitchen.
“I had a dream that the Easter Bunny was a slaughterer,” Joan said. “He had a machete.”
She never told him her dreams. He tried not to visibly thrill.
“Jeez, really? Slaughterer?” Where had she come up with that word? One of her shows or books or games. How much of the world did she already know, if not understand? What other disgust could be introduced once your parents have been annihilated?
Joan shoveled a soft wedge of pancake into her mouth and stared at the bear head still on the folding table in the living room. It was only a bit larger than her own head, enough to fit over her.
“Can I bring the head with me to school?”
“No, I don’t want you carrying it around all day. I’ll bring it to you.”
“I won’t carry it around,” Joan said. “I’ll wear it.”
“I don’t think that’ll go over with Ms. Felice,” Danny said.
Joan emptied her plate and brought it to the sink and ran water over it. Before they left the house, she passed the bear and tapped it on the head.
#
He arrived at 3:00 PM to help set up for the show. Somehow, he’d become the type of person who volunteered. Last week, he’d found himself standing in an elementary school art room with his roll of brushes from home, painting a giant wood panel, which he had provided—something he’d found years ago and had intended to use for a project that never developed. He moved the panel now, with Ms. Felice’s help, out of the art room, down the hall, and onto the stage in the gymnasium/auditorium.
“Thank you, Danny,” Ms. Felice said. “This is really beautiful.”
She liked him, he knew. She was a good-looking woman, younger, and it made him nervous, even though he didn’t want her. So, he tried to be kind, but not too friendly.
“Very welcome,” he said.
The panel looked good in this space, in the dimness, with the curtains closed. He’d painted evergreens, like Joan wanted, and giant strawberries in the grass, according to her specifications. An odd landscape, he thought, which he liked, but the school could keep it for next year’s pageant. Joan would certainly be in the play again. It was the only thing she’d been excited about for months. In May, two weeks from now, her parents would be dead a year.
On the other end of the stage, Ms. Felice placed some of the props that had been passed down through the generations. Ugly things, basically. She unrolled a carpet of fake grass and the mustiness reached him from ten feet away. From a saggy cardboard box she removed three sections of a fake Christmas tree and clicked them together.
Down on the folding chairs, the third graders gabbed and fidgeted, some of them already in costume. Joan had taken the bear head from him when he arrived and put it on, and still wore it. Why she wanted to stand around in it for so long, he didn’t know. Wasn’t it uncomfortable, sweaty? he asked. She shook the head.
Soon, the parents arrived, along with the first, second, and fourth grade classes. The place filled with chiming voices, screeching laughter, adults talking, chairs scraping the floor. Danny stayed back to help Joan with the rest of her costume, which Ms. Felice had made. Joan climbed into it and zipped it up. He liked it and told Ms. Felice it looked well-made. She flushed and babbled about what a compliment it was for an artist to appreciate the work she’d done. Joan resembled a stuffed animal, but with the more refined bear head the effect became slightly unsettling. From a distance, she looked less like a costumed eight-year-old, and more like an actual animal. Not really a bear cub, unless that cub had been starved to the brink of death.
Once he joined the audience, sitting in the last row, his palms went cold and wet. A cool dribble ran through the center of his body. He jittered, afraid for Joan, though she didn’t show any fear. This was a play for kids! No one cared about the quality. He smeared his palms on his jeans. He wanted Joan to be good. He wanted her to be happy. Just let her have this.
After the lights went down, and Ms. Felice introduced the class, he felt better. The stage glowed bright yellow, and music started from somewhere, through speakers; a ghostly piano. A performer in a sparrow costume hobbled to the front of the stage and sat in a large nest made of straw. Once they’d gotten down into it and their legs disappeared, they looked like a giant bird. There were real, smooth brown and grey feathers, and the mask impressed him. Eyes gleamed black and dangerous, seeking an insect to devour. This little school. They didn’t mess around.
The kids sang a song about the sun coming out and making the sky happy. Some voices were muffled behind masks. The kids without masks—one boy dressed as a farmer, his feet bare, and a girl in an Easter dress—carried the song for those whose voices didn’t project.
When the song ended, the story began, but it was such a nothing kind of story that Danny didn’t bother following it. Where was Joan? After the song, she’d disappeared. No one had interacted with her.
“But what if we can’t find the magic egg?” the girl in the dress said to the farmer.
Danny caught sight of Joan. She’d been there the whole time, positioned in the dark by a panel of wood, next to the bare, false Christmas tree. Was she supposed to be standing there like that? He craned his neck to try to find Ms. Felice at the front of the audience. She shifted in her chair, held up her arm and pointed at something, whispered at the stage. He missed a bit of dialogue that made the audience laugh. Still, Joan stood and watched from her place in the dark, the white around her bear eyes visible in the gloom. Another song. The other children cleared the stage, leaving the farmer to sing it alone. The little boy didn’t appear nervous.
Joan stayed still until the song ended. The other children reappeared, and as they did, Joan joined them. She lurked, crouched and held her paws in front of her. The sparrow sat in its nest again and eyed the audience with one empty eye. Joan leapt at the farm boy and shoved him off the stage where he thumped at the feet of the front row and squealed. Ms. Felice shot to her feet and went to him. The other children turned and looked around at each other, wondering who had pushed the farm boy off the stage, except for the sparrow, who didn’t seem to be aware of anything. A boy dressed as an insect of some kind, didn’t seem bothered by the violence either. He zipped around the stage, playing his part, dedicated to his insect life. At any moment, the sparrow might snap him up. The audience made noises. The boy’s parents were at the stage. Joan stomped after a little girl in a bunny costume and climbed onto her. The girl couldn’t hold Joan’s weight, so she crumpled. Once she’d fallen, Joan left her there and moved on. Before she went after another victim, Ms. Felice appeared and put her arms around her and pulled her off the stage.
Frozen, a bell clanged inside Danny’s head, and he saw himself, a character in a movie, running through the halls of the school looking for an exit. No one knew him. They didn’t know Joan belonged to him.
He hurried up the aisle and climbed onto the stage where some of the other kids were crying, their parents coming for them, calling names.
Backstage, Ms. Felice no longer held Joan, but leaned against a wall on the other side of the room from her looking at the little bear.
“Ms. Felice,” Danny said, but didn’t know what else to say.
“Joan,” he said.
Had another child switched costumes with her? She stood as she had on stage, still and quiet in the dark. It looked as if she wasn’t breathing.
“Joan, come here.”
Ms. Felice came away from the wall and stood next to him. “Do you know what’s going on?” she said.
He didn’t want to talk to Joan while she wore the bear head, but she didn’t move to take it off. The air smelled sour, as if someone had spilled milk days ago. Yesterday, he would have gone to her without a problem and pulled the mask off, took her by the arm and brought her to the car, even if she screamed and cried, but today he couldn’t cross the room to her.
“Are you a bear?” Danny asked.
Joan didn’t speak. Danny tried to think of later, when this had ended. She would be in trouble. They’d spend a silent hour in front of the TV, and she’d go to bed without saying goodnight.
“You should take her home now,” Ms. Felice said. She sounded afraid. She wanted Joan away from her.
He didn’t want to take her home. You will live here now, with the props—Ms. Felice will fold you up and put you in a trunk until next year’s spring pageant.
“Joan,” Ms. Felice said. “I’m disappointed. You know I care about you so much, but I’m disappointed.”
The bear didn’t move its head, not an inch.
“We’re sorry,” Danny said.
“She might be in trouble. Ryan might be hurt badly.”
“You have my number,” Danny said. The stage wasn’t that high. Ryan would be fine, but it didn’t matter. The parents were angry, and they’d come for him.
“Take her home,” Ms. Felice said.
“I will. I am.”
“Do it, then” Ms. Felice said.
Neither of them needed to do anything. The little bear came out of the dark and walked toward them, between them, and out the door into the hallway. Danny went after her, afraid the parents might see her. He wanted to get out of the place, get her into the car where they would figure things out.
The setting sun filled the car with intense light, bright and real, and Joan still wouldn’t remove the head. He didn’t ask why she’d pushed Ryan off the stage or jumped on the bunny girl. They drove without the radio. A short trip home, but his body felt weighted down. A magnetic energy poured out of Joan from the passenger seat, and he wanted to look at her. He didn’t take his eyes off the road.
When they got home, they walked up the stairs, and in the echoing space, her silence chilled him. He touched her on a furry shoulder and she allowed it, but didn’t react to it, only waited for him. Keeping his hand there, he squatted before her, taking in the smell that came off the body in front of him—a mixture of things, of whatever the costume was made of, some synthetic fiber, the paint and glue, sweat from within. Unlike Joan’s smell, which he knew now as much as his own. He slid his other hand onto her opposite shoulder and with a quick movement he pulled the mask from her. Her face appeared, red and soaked, her hair slicked over her forehead and cheeks, her eyes bloodshot and tired. He hurried her to the bathroom, ran the water cold and splashed her face, and she screamed as if he were setting her on fire.
#
He thought, before catching himself, that he should call Craig and ask him what to do, but Craig was dead. So, he’d call Dr. Keyes in the morning if Joan wasn’t back to normal. After her bath, she wanted to go to sleep. Not hungry. He couldn’t tempt her with a piece of cold leftover fried chicken, which she always said was the best part of making fried chicken for dinner. She fell asleep immediately, and he sat in the room with her for a long time, looking at his phone, scrolling and scrolling, not taking anything in.
In the morning, she awoke, and he informed her that they would not be leaving the house today. He made breakfast and she ate it. Without prompting, she went into the living room to watch TV. Before she’d gotten up that morning, he’d put the bear costume in the closet in his bedroom. This day would be the hardest, and he’d think about it more than the spring pageant in the coming years. He washed the dishes, let the phone ring and ring, never did call Dr. Keyes, sat with Joan and watched TV, turned off the TV and insisted they read, insisted they draw, and throughout it all she didn’t speak, not until the sun had gone down and she turned to him and said “Are we going to eat today?” He realized he hadn’t made lunch or dinner. He ordered pizza and turned on music while they ate.
The next day, Ms. Felice called, and he spoke to her for a long time, closed in his room, while Joan completed her assignments at the kitchen table. Ryan hadn’t been seriously hurt, but his parents were incensed. They wanted an apology, and he may have to pay some medical bills for a broken finger. She had done her best to deescalate the situation. She wanted him to know she cared very much for Joan. Did he want to get together some time to talk more about Joan and her care?
What to say about Joan? He didn’t have words for what he felt, for his experience of her now.
“Maybe, the costume allowed her to be angry,” Ms. Felice said. “And out of it, things will go back to normal.”
It sounded nice and neat to him, but in his gut, he knew it wasn’t the case.
#
Uncle Danny sleeping. She watched him. Nothing woke him up because he was so tired all the time now, because of her. Having to take care of her. He slept quiet, not snoring like daddy used to. She got the bear out of the closet where she knew he’d put it. Went very slow out of the room and through the rest of the apartment, out the door and down the stairs, the whole time thinking he was going to yell at her or run down and grab her.
He didn’t know she was a night creature. Glowing eyes at night. She saw everything in the dark. At the bottom of the stairs, she climbed into the bear and zipped it, but waited to put the head on, carried it with her until she reached Fletcher Park, the prettiest park with the nicest trees and water. She didn’t care about the playground, swings, the sports fields. None of that. She liked the trails. In Under the Wooded Grove, when Jeremy was lost in the woods and he found the hedgehogs who were curled up in balls, each with the power diamonds inside, he was disappointed because the diamonds could send him home so easy. So, he threw them in the creek. That was her favorite book.
The trees were just getting leaves on them which meant it was summer soon. Tall light-posts lined the trail. She put the bear head on. Sometimes there were people here and she’d be scared because there weren’t supposed to be people here after dark. Not tonight, though. No people. If she needed to, she’d jump into the trees on either side of the path and be quiet. It always felt like she had a reason for coming here. She didn’t know the reason and it was frustrating to not know. She couldn’t sleep but got good at pretending for Uncle Danny. Once she’d come out here in the night air, she’d go back home and normally get to sleep. Only if she’d come out here first.
Ahead, something moved on the trail, something small. When she got closer, she saw a tiny animal running in circles around and around and around, racing itself. She didn’t like how it did that. Why was it doing that? Around and around. It freaked her out and she knew something was wrong with it. At the end of the trail was the pond where the ducks were. When they came here, Uncle Danny pointed. Look at the ducks, like she couldn’t see them. She preferred a lake or the ocean.
She crept closer to the tiny animal, a mouse she now saw. It didn’t notice her and run away like it should have, only chased itself in circles, stopping now and then, starting again. Joan watched it for several minutes, then backed away, afraid to turn her back to it.
#
Something had fallen between he and Joan that wouldn’t lift, and it hadn’t been there before the spring pageant. Their lives before that day faded from his mind. He sometimes caught himself thinking of scenes from the play, images of the sparrow’s eye peering at him from the stage, and the little insect boy fluttering about. These two had something in common with Joan. Dedication to being animals. He tried and failed to treat her as he’d always treated her. There were moments when he understood that he’d failed her, and those thoughts squeezed his throat, and he had to push them away too quickly to evaluate them.
She was Joan, after all. His brother’s child. He did everything as the weeks after the pageant passed—fed her, washed her clothes, brought her to school, watched her favorite shows with her, bought her another book from her favorite series. Underneath all of this lived the mistake he made each day without realizing it until it was too late. He feared her for a moment with every interaction, and it spoiled the air around them.
One night a few months after the pageant, he awoke sweating, shivering, his body molded out of wet sand. He’d been dreaming of pain in his head, and here it was when he awoke, following him out of the dream. A figure stood a few feet from the bed, human-shaped except for the head.
“You’re pretty sick,” she said.
“Yes. How did you know?” He sounded so frightened. For a moment, he had the ridiculous suspicion she’d poisoned him.
“You were yelling. You’re shaking.”
She was steady as a hunk of granite lodged in the earth. Didn’t come closer for a long time. When she did, she put her hand on his forehead. He felt an elemental indifference running through him, coming from her hand. Keeping her palm pressed against him, she slid it down to his cheek, where it cooled him.
His brother used to ask him if he worried about being alone, and he said of course he did. Wondered if straight people got asked that question as much as queer people. Well, you won’t be anyway, Craig had said. You have us, and you have Joan.
He did have her, in a way his brother never expected. Full time. When her hand touched him, he imagined that he was so sick he was dying. He couldn’t lift himself from the bed and Joan wasn’t strong enough. In a minute, he’d ask her to call an ambulance if he couldn’t get out of bed himself. She was here, and maybe she’d be there on his final day. Not in the room, but there, in his life. He hoped.
Joan standing next to him. She wore the bear head and he didn’t ask her to take it off. Crying in front of her would be like crying in front of a river. He breathed to calm himself and tried to remember he was young and strong. Like his brother had been. An error inside of him could delete him from the world. He wouldn’t even know it, that’s how easy it would be. It’d take Joan a moment to notice something had changed. She’d take her hand back when she realized he’d left the room, and stare at his long, empty body on the bed, a broken tree in her path.
AUTUMN CHRISTIAN on film with REBECCA GRANSDEN
Quiet like a bomb waiting for its lit fuse, Autumn Christian has steadily accrued a series of intrepid releases. Nominally designed to satisfy certain genre cravings, Christian’s writing transcends any label simply by being uncommonly good. Her work is strange and provocative, endlessly imaginative, full-blown addicted to ideas, and fearless. For any insight into a mind this committed to creative freedom, the natural starting point is to visit the environment Christian grew up in.
‘I was born in Oklahoma City, but my parents moved to Fort Worth when I was a toddler so my dad could pursue a career in video games. One of my first memories is walking behind the undeveloped land behind my house, full of rocks and dirt, and hearing the hiss of a rattlesnake.
‘I thought most of America looked like the suburbs of DFW. It seemed normal to grow up on a cul-de-sac full of kids and mothers that stayed home, attend Methodist church every Sunday, and go to Chili's or Olive Garden afterward in a black velvet dress.
‘But my grandparents were also dairy farmers who lived on a farm in Kingfisher, just outside of Oklahoma City. I spent a lot of weekends milking cows, climbing into granaries, bottle feeding calves, and digging holes so I could fill them with mud and climb into them wearing my bathing suit. The characters in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath talk exactly like a lot of the rural Oklahomans I know.
‘Spending so much time in rural Oklahoma, and then at my Dad's work, surrounded by game developers, engineers, and (at the time) cutting edge tech, has brought a strange dichotomy to my writing. Southern gothic mixed with sci-fi. Video games and the brutal reality of farm life. I'm always trying to merge the high and low. The primitive and the future. To show how they're interrelated.’
The open blue skies above the grasslands of Oklahoma suggest space, while psychological claustrophobia permeates Christian’s fiction. With a surrealistic touch, duality is addressed in innovative ways. Conjoined twins, the mechanistic view of human existence, and the indifference of the natural world, are explored in all their depths and ambiguities. It’s this interfacing of elements that brings an electric quality to Christian’s writing. Raw despondency contrasts with cool systematisation, biological processes become confused, and wildness confronts an accelerating technologized world. These concerns are reflected in pivotal films from childhood years.
‘The first film that really embedded itself into my consciousness was the Miyazaki film Princess Mononoke. I saw it when I was 9 years old with my Dad at the Angelika Theater in Dallas. It was one of the few times I had alone time with my Dad, as by then my parents were divorced. I had never seen a movie with such intensity. I can vividly remember San spitting out the blood of the wolf, her mouth ringed with red as her earrings flashed. It was probably a little too adult for a nine year old, but I was transfixed by it.
‘Then there was The Matrix. I found it in a bin in Best Buy when I was around ten years old, and the description entranced me. At the time I'd never seen a film that dealt with themes of reality and consciousness. It set my brain spinning off into thinking about who we are as human beings, and how our warped perception influences who we are. Rewatching The Matrix now, it definitely has moments of cheese, and Big Blockbuster silliness with its action scenes and tacked on romance. But at the time it seemed perfect.
‘I mostly watched movies with my Dad and my brother, so we ended up watching a lot of Asian martial arts and horror. Tale of Two Sisters, a Korean horror film, was probably my favorite of these. It's a fragmented film, full of confusing madness and vivid imagery, and to this day I still don't completely understand it. Although I don't have a sister, the claustrophobia of the home, feeling trapped as ordinary spaces become horrible, and the split personality of the step-mother all were reminiscent of experiences I had.
Another major film was Blade Runner. I was living with my aunt at the time, after dropping out of college. I had this huge collection of books I had to leave behind, and I'd only managed to bring some of my Philip K. Dick novels with me. She got me Blade Runner to watch back when Netflix still mailed in DVDs. It was comforting in its human warmth juxtaposed with the coldness of the cyberpunk city. Its slow burn still never managed to feel boring. Although it's a beautiful movie I know the particulars of the moment also made me attached to it. I've probably watched Blade Runner more than any other movie. I don't often rewatch movies, it's difficult enough to get me to sit still long enough to watch one these days, but Blade Runner is a dark comfort I can return to time and time again.’
Blade Runner’s poignant exploration of Artificial Intelligence and the ramifications it has for human consciousness points the way towards the central themes of Christian’s fiction. Common to the stories is a sense of human capacity being insufficient to get to grips with interloping forces, whether those forces are from a man-made, natural, or internal source. These sources are often oblique and difficult to pin down, as is the compulsion to write itself.
‘I've been writing fiction pretty much as long as I can remember being able to read. I always considered myself a “writer.” It wasn't a choice I could remember making, and in many ways it never seemed like I had any other choice. Books were a huge part of my life as they allowed me to access worlds that weren't mine, in quiet privacy. To retreat from the world without anyone knowing where I went.
But cinema, with the exception of video games, is the closest we can get to a full body story experience. It was common for my dad, brother, and I to go to the movies on a weekend and I remember walking out the exit in a daze, nearly in tears, overwhelmed by the intensity of what I'd seen. I wanted to create stories that made people feel like that.’
When queried on films that have had a direct influence on her writing, Christian offers up examples that glory in hyper-stylised representations of violence. ‘The double feature of Planet Terror and Death Proof. The spattered, colored violence of Planet Terror, Rose McGowan with a machine gun leg, combined with the stretched out, cool romanticism of Death Proof only interrupted by spattered bursts of action.’ The choices reflect a time when cinema twisted sensationalist spectacle and turbocharged exploitation into art. ‘The movie Oldboy with its strange intensity, evocative oddness, and unrepentant violence. The violent melancholy of the protagonist eating a live squid lives rent-free in my head.’ Films synonymous with an iconic visual sensibility also dominate. ‘Sin City, with its beautiful darkness and entangled narrative from multiple perspectives, and Akira, with its nightmare cityscapes and intense, overwhelming horror of being stuck with a power you don't understand in a rapidly changing body.’
Key to Christian’s relationship with film is living through a time of transition for the medium.
‘Cinema has had a huge impact on a writer's writing in general. Compare anything that people write now compared to before television. It's leaner. Sharper. We all now share a sort of visual shorthand, and no longer feel the need to spend pages in loving, lush descriptions of things that we've all seen on a screen. We can instead focus on short, punchy, provocative moments. We can choose to pick words that directly hack into the reader's brains.
‘I grew up in the 90s, right before television started to get really good. I watched a lot of episodic, forgettable shows before I was introduced to shows like Firefly, Dexter, and 6 Feet Under in my late teens. It was then that I realized narration could evolve into something that felt so real, it was like it curled around my brain. It wasn't just something to have on in the background while I was doing something. It forced my attention. Narration is a constantly evolving process, and as our culture develops, we get better at understanding and creating it.’
This is fiction that knows where fear lies — it’s not with riding the ghost train but with the guy who pulls the lever to start the ride. It’s him who we repeat rumours about, who walks in his own mythology, who steals kids. Christian’s characters often deal with mental anguish, many of the stories addressing emotional distress and neglect.
‘I think trauma is at the center of many stories, because trauma is centered so much within the human experience. Although it's a much more recent movie, the grief that permeates Hereditary is one of the most vivid and unflinching perspectives I've ever seen.’
Her characters are flawed, struggling at times, but also defiant. The seductive power in the transgression of boundaries is acknowledged, as is the fascination with figures that embrace extremes of human behavior. The sunshine man, who makes an appearance in “Sunshine, Sunshine” — a story featured in Christian’s collection Ecstatic Inferno (Fungasm Press, 2015) — stands out as particularly memorable, and yet he makes a hauntingly brief appearance. Christian’s poeticism infects the grit of her narratives with an emotional intensity that is at times heartbreakingly lyrical, and at others menacingly bleak.
‘I have always been intrigued by dark, powerful villains and antiheroes. Men who may or may not be alien, almost Lovecraftian, larger than life, and sometimes stunning in their cruelty. I think of Hannibal in Silence of The Lambs (and Hannibal in the series), Randall Flagg in The Stand (although he's scarier in the books), Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Bobby Axelor in the show Billions, and Dexter Morgan in Dexter.’
With categorisation increasingly moot, if it ever was a concrete construct, and cross-pollination across all mediums common, Christian is reflective about the place of her own writing.
‘I'm usually considered a horror or sci-fi author, but when a story comes to me I don't pay attention to genre. I have always been interested in the merging of highbrow and lowbrow art. Genre and literary. I want to feed someone broccoli that goes down like chocolate. Have them get a taste of Faulkner or Dostoevsky, but it reads like Stephanie Meyer. Or, for a film equivalent, you sit down to a fun movie like Legally Blonde and find that it's actually a fairly intelligent piece of art about our ideas of perception, attractiveness, social clout, and how we form friendships.
‘I don't care so much about being seen as intellectual as I am about transferring ideas like metaphysical viruses. Some people think style or characters or deep meanings are the most important things, but above all, I think a story needs to be engaging. If it isn't engaging that means something isn't working correctly. It's a difficult trick to pull off, to merge fun with deepness, but one that I'm fascinated by. I want to generate ideas that people can't tear their eyeballs away from.’
Imbued with loaded and vivid imagery, Christian’s fiction is inherently cinematic and almost demands to be adapted for film or television. Forefront in her mind as best placed is a 2019 CLASH Books release.
‘Of all my books that I'd like to be adapted, it'd have to be Girl Like A Bomb. I can see it either being a terrible or a brilliant movie, depending on how the director handled the sex scenes. I feel like the book itself rides the line between B thriller and cult classic, cheesiness and beauty, so that makes sense to me.’
Undermine the algorithm:
‘If any fans of my writing are reading this, I'd recommend these 3 movies:
‘The Handmaiden, an adaptation of the novel Fingersmith, by Korean director Park Chan-Wook. It's an erotic psychological thriller without a wasted moment. I found it incredibly moving, provocative, and romantic.
‘Antichrist from Lars Von Trier. Intense, melancholy, peaceful, and excruciating all at once. One woman's descent into madness, back into the crucible of nature.
‘The Cronenberg film, Existenz, which combines tech, hallucinatory realities, and mind-warping provocative horror.’
MALL MADNESS
Between 7th and 8th period, Becky tells us she can speak to the dead. She swears she can show us after school.
When she pulls the box from beneath her bed, we expect a ouija board. Instead, she produces Mall Madness, fun for ages eight to eighty. As she unfolds the board, it greets us. “Attention shoppers: There’s a clearance at the sunglasses boutique.”
The four of us gather cross-legged around the game, and Becky explains the rules. “Wait to ask your questions until it says your car lights are on and you must go to the parking lot, That’s our cue.”
“I guess this is better than getting locked in the Spirit Halloween,” S’tanael says, deflecting from his giddy exuberance.
That each of us has a dead person is well established. It was the impetus for (if not the substance of) our friendship. Each of us suspects with near-certainty that another of our number is The literal Devil. We suspect this bringer of death—the killer, if only indirectly, of someone we love—is the worst-kept secret at Cheverus Jesuit College Prep Elementary.
And none of us agrees about which of us it is.
We pick our players and color-coordinated credit cards. Somehow, without prompting, we all begin to chant in unison, and it feels more campfire kumbaya than anything spirit-led.
“Ready! Set! Shop!”
S’tanael’s buying everything. We start thinking: He’s the Devil. He’s killing it—the game—so maybe he could kill other stuff. Then again, Nate also seems to have maxed out one of his cards within minutes.
Downstairs, the movie Swamp Monsters rumbles. Becky’s stepdad’s doctor recommended he drink beer and watch Swamp Monsters on repeat if his back is ever gonna be up to truck driving again. It’s hard to concentrate on a question for our respective dead person with all the cinematic gurgling and roaring, not to mention that one of the group has just let one RIP.
“Eww, S’tanael!” Nate says and punches his shoulder.
“Smelt it, dealt it.” S’tanael shrugs.
We scream as the real source of the smell emerges from under the bed. Becky hisses at her ancient cat, Macavity, who hauls his scrawny body, his grey fur dull and matted, toward the game. Becky shoves the window sash aside, scoops up Macavity, and deposits him on the roof. She ignores his screech as she slams the window shut.
“That cat stinks of death,” S’tanael says.
“How would you know?” asks Nate, adjusting his glasses.
“Guys, quit it,” says Becky. “Get back to the game. You ready with your questions? I totally know what I’m gonna ask.”
Mall Madness finally makes the announcement we’ve all been waiting for. “Your car lights are on, and you must go to the parking lot.”
Perhaps today one of them will ask a question I want answered. “Which of you suppressed a smile when I ‘fell?’” “Which of you sat cotton-eyed at my funeral?” “Which of you is the Devil?”
Mall Madness won’t be ignored. “Attention all shoppers. Attention! Attention! Your car lights are on!”
The lights flicker. Becky gasps the way she gasped when my body hit the ground all those weeks ago.
That day, Becky needled me as I climbed the rotting tree in her backyard. “You can’t reach the top branch!” Despite her taunting, I found a knot in the trunk to place my foot. I felt certain it would hold me, and I wanted to rub it in her face when I grabbed that top branch. I put all my weight into it and slipped while reaching for the gnarled limb.
“Attention! What is your question?” Mall Madness insists. “Go to the parking lot. Attention. Your car lights are on. Ask me. Ask me. Your lights are on. Your lights are on.” Mall Madness gets stuck like scratched and skipping vinyl.
I remember the fall, the impact with the cold ground, the faces above me as I blinked my eyes for the last time.
Before anyone can give in to Mall Madness’s demands, a low yowl bleeds through the rickety window. Becky yanks it open, sticks her head out. "Macavity! Shut up!"
S’tanael reaches for Becky’s arm and says, “Get out of the way!”
Becky and McCavity slither back inside just as the window drops like a guillotine. Glass shatters everywhere. A small shard embeds itself in Becky’s forearm. In shock, she studies it but doesn’t attempt to pick it out.
“Where’s S’tanael?” asks Nate, voice quivering.
The whoosh of the October wind rushes in and fills the vacuum of silence. The creak of the last tree I ever climbed fills the room. Crack!
We stare wide-eyed, panting. Two cat ears rise from behind the discarded pizza box in the corner. Macavity’s eyes gleam. He witnessed it all that day, hidden in the fateful tree’s top branches, watching me fall to my death.
Thumping on the roof snatches our attention. Not the pitter-patter of an old cat’s paws, but the stomp-stomp-stomp of hellish hooves. A dark shape enters through the window. “Attention,” it growls.
The power fails. Becky whispers what we’re all thinking. “The Devil.”
“Yessss,” Macavity hisses, channeling the game. “There is a sale at S’tanael’s Soul Emporium.”
S’tanael staggers from a dark corner of the room. “Black Friday’s gonna be insane this year,” he says with a sneer. “And remember, Hell takes cash or credit. No layaways.”
TRAUMA SCOUTS OF AMERICA by Joe Kapitan
For the sisters of brothers Merit Badge: Hatchet Skills
The Trauma Scout Oath
Beth’s two fingertips laid there on the plywood floor of our fort in the woods. Her left middle and left index looked like two rubber fakes with the nails painted a loud orange, two made-in-Taiwan Halloween gags from Spencer’s Gifts in the mall, except that the pool of blood between her shaking, mangled left hand and the detached fingertips was growing fast, each beat of her pounding heart made visible by a fresh outflow from the stumps. The guilty hatchet was dropped next to the pool of blood, its blade painted crimson.
What came after is a broken-glass mosaic: Beth stumbling and sobbing, Mia death-gripping Beth’s wounded hand in hers, me carrying two bits of Beth’s in mine, Beth’s mom screaming, Beth screaming, the ambulance screaming.
Three weeks later, before the lake incident, she let us see her hand while her mom changed the dressings. The reattached fingers looked like they were taken from the corpse of a drowned man, bluish and bloated, joined to her by zippers of black thread. Tendons were permanently damaged, causing the fingertips to lean to one side.
No one was there to teach us how to split kindling the proper way. Our 1976-moms didn’t know how to hold a hatchet, didn’t even know where our dads kept them, on the bottom shelves of the workshops in the garages of our suburban colonials. Our 1976-dads and brothers didn’t think to show us, so we showed ourselves. What Beth’s merit badge taught us: don’t lay a log down on its side and try to split it. If you don’t hit it dead-center, the log rolls and the blade glances to the side and bites deep into your bracing hand. We learned that blood will never come out of plywood, and that soaking a fort in lawnmower gas makes it go up like a torch.
Beth wears her merit badge with pride. We still go out for drinks sometimes, the two of us, now that we’re older, and when she flips off someone using her damaged hand, usually an over-aggressive man, the middle finger drifts to the side, the “u” in her “Fuck You” falling over and looking more like a “Fuck Yoc”—an insult dipped in dialect; mostly understandable, enough to catch her meaning.
Merit Badge Status as of August 4, 1976| Merit Badges: | Hatchet Skills | CPR | Self-Defense |
| Beth | X | X | |
| Mia | X | ||
| Natalie | X | X |
On my honor, I pledge to do my will as I will—the rest is just a bunch of bullshit.
What’s Wrong with Mr. Dutton’s Secretary?The previous summer, when it rained, my older brother and I opened the garage door and set up an office. My brother sat at a folding table in the back of the garage. He was Mr. Dutton, generic boss of a formless corporation. He told me to sit near the front of the garage. Your job is to help Mr. Dutton, he said. My name was Mr. Dutton’s Secretary, as if I were the thinnest of beings, or fabric, a lace curtain to be brushed aside.
All afternoon I watched the raindrops collide with the driveway. No one came to see Mr. Dutton.
Merit Badge: CPRWhen Beth’s hand was healed over, enough that the lake water wouldn’t cause infection, we ran the test. It was late afternoon; the sun was packing it in, so we had the lake to ourselves. Mia looked scared, as if she might not go through with it. Beth and I were scared that we would.
We eased ourselves off the rickety wooden dock and into the murky water up to our chins. Our toes tunneled into the gray muck on the bottom. Mia was shivering. Remember, just to my limit, she said, no more. We nodded. She took a deep breath, slipped below the surface.
Beth and I each found a shoulder, putting our weight on it. For a minute or two everything was peaceful: the gurgle of the water in the reeds, birdsong. Then her spasms started. I stared at Beth, or through her, and we both pressed down harder. Mia’s flailing became wild, desperate, before suddenly calming again. Fear swept Beth’s face. We both grabbed Mia by an arm and hoisted her up. She coughed, gagged, her skin graying, her eyes bulging from her head. She was choking on water she’d inhaled, spitting cloudy mouthfuls at us. We couldn’t lift Mia’s dead weight onto the dock, so we hauled her to the shallows, through the reeds to the grassy shore. We laid Mia flat, her body still shuddering. I knelt next to her, putting my left hand beneath her neck, lifting to open her throat, just as the first aid handbook said to do, with my right hand placed on her forehead. Mia was expelling still, wheezing, and I couldn’t be sure if she was getting any breath in at all, so I bent over her with my lips sealed over hers, blowing what I could into her. She’s breathing, Nat, said Beth. Natalie, stop! But I couldn’t stop, not until Mia herself pushed me away. The dim light in her eyes was cold, departed, the look of someone deep at the bottom of a well who’d already decided not to climb out.
I wish I could remember how Mia looked before that day at the lake, right before she went under, before the best part of her never came up for air.
Origin StoryIn the 70s, the Girl Scouts were the only game in town. Moms in heels led living-room campouts. They were uninspired, both the living rooms and the moms. They smelled docile, like ground beef and freshly laundered sheets and dreams pinched back and transplanted to the point that they didn’t take. Me, I wanted to cut my hair and nails short, to bind flat my budding tits so I could put on shoulder pads and plant some boy’s face in the stadium turf.
Each girl got a small green pocketknife. It’s handy for so many things, the moms said. Cutting thread, opening packages. Instead, I cut myself out of their picture. The knife I kept.
Merit Badge: Self-DefenseMy step-uncle Jake was a doomsday survivalist, bunker-minded, his nightmares punctuated by mushroom clouds. His concrete safe room had a hatch built into his basement wall; a separate escape tunnel ended in a metal door set into the side of the ravine behind his house. The escape door had a hasp, but he didn’t keep it locked. The walls of the safe room were lined with shelves full of canned food, bottled water. There was a cot, a chair, a single light fixture.
He was the only man in my life who didn’t see me in pink-filtered light, so when he wanted to show me his bunker the first time, spur of the moment, I went, and when he touched me, I flinched, and when he played with himself in front of me, I didn’t leave. I have no idea why, but I didn’t. Instead, he moaned my name, Natalie, Natalie. I stared at the light in the ceiling glowing blue beneath its silver cage. Desperate insects threw themselves against it. It looked so pathetic, so incredibly small. It should have been so much bigger.
The second time he invited me down there, he planned it ahead of time, so I planned ahead too. Beth would sneak onto his property from the rear, up the ravine. I would go to the safe room with Uncle Jake at four. At five after four, Beth would enter through the escape tunnel, pocketknife at the ready. We figured the two of us could take him. It would have worked perfectly if it weren’t for the padlock.
I let him touch me at first so I could open the blade of my knife behind the small of my back unseen. His hands stroked the long seconds past. No Beth.
Fact: there is a particular paralysis caused by witnessing sudden violence that aids in self-defense. When a blade strikes an attacker’s face, such as a puncture or a slicing of the cheek near the eyes, the attacker will instinctively raise his hands to protect himself, presenting new targets to the defender’s blade.
Fact: blood does not permanently stain sealed concrete, but ragged scars stain faces. Scars can telegraph shame, and shame (to the shamed) is a billboard on a busy highway; it can lead a man to take his own life rather than see the looks on the faces of those passing by.
Fact: the singular goal of self-defense is survival. The losers never know they lost.
Awards CeremonyTo me, this last merit badge has no single look. At times it arrives like debilitating claustrophobia or love in another woman’s arms or shrill screams in the deep crotch of night or a forgotten gravestone or a corner office on the eighth floor with two walls made of glass.
Sometimes I look in the mirror and no longer recognize myself; I see Mia’s haunted eyes staring out of my dark sockets, Beth’s warped fingers reaching. Sometimes I go into work early just to watch the pedestrians streaming across the sidewalks below me like tiny cells pulsing through the arteries of pavement, splitting off and disappearing, bleeding into doorways and alleys, soaking into the floorboards of the city.
Sometimes it rains all afternoon, and I watch it from my desk, and no one comes to see me.
A NONLINEAR PROCESS: ON CHANGE IN TAO LIN’s LEAVE SOCIETY by Alan Rossi
Tao Lin’s new novel, Leave Society, is a book that embodies what it means to mindfully evolve one’s consciousness while also acknowledging that one’s individuality is tied to a sea of consciousness, myriad beings all evolving toward some unknown destination, what the main character in the novel, Li, might term “the mystery” or possibly “the imagination.” Leave Society is challenging in that it doesn’t have the typical propulsion of a novel: drama isn’t the point, but internal and external, by way of other people, i.e., other consciousnesses, revolution of the mind and experience is. It is, in my opinion, less a novel about leaving society, and more a novel about changing society—one’s own personal society and the society around oneself—through seeing one’s mind states, one’s emotions, and cultivating the positive ones, and caring for, and then carefully (and sometimes clumsily) weeding out the negative ones. Society in this novel is a mental place as well as a physical one, and its main character, Li, attempts a return to the primordial mind that exists in each of us, but that is obscured by a mainstream society mired in ugly politics, mindless entertainment, sexism, oppression, and dangerous drugs.
Leave Society might be a novel of ideas if it weren’t so autobiographically driven, which is another way of saying so character-driven, because it does contain fascinating ideas, playful ideas, whimsical ideas, and very serious ideas. One such idea with a hold on Li is that we live, according to Riane Eisler, in a dominator society based in sexism and racism, and that in the past, ancient societies lived by a generally egalitarian and peaceful “partnership” model; another relates to Li’s exploration of natural health remedies for everything from dentistry to gut biome; and yet another is that Li’s drug use is a compassionate, other-oriented use (so different from typical drug narratives). More than these ideas though, Leave Society embodies a lifelong process of opening and compassioning, which is—and this is a word I haven’t used to describe a novel in as long as I’ve read and thought about novels—completely radical. The hidden implication of the novel is that all beings exist already in a state outside society (and, implicitly, outside political ideologies). Li is simply waking up to this fact and trying to embody it.
Leave Society’s focus—ranging from the individual to the familial to the cosmic—is exciting because it doesn’t play by any rules of our current culture. It eschews easy formulations of attitudes towards everything from medicine to politics. It’s interesting to note that political things do occur in the novel—there’s war on the television, Li’s father has political party affiliations, as does his mother—but these things are observed neutrally, without commentary. Li cares about his parents equally, without regard to political affiliation—it seems weird to note this, but in a culture where families are easily and moronically split along political lines, it’s apt. The events that occur in Leave Society remain unpoliticized, which, in our current literary moment, is akin to not caring. But Leave Society is one of the most care-filled books I’ve read, and that care is, to use a phrase many writers will bristle at, apolitical. This is true not only for the novel as a whole, but for the main character, Li, as well. He doesn’t care where his ideas align on the political spectrum. His notion that we live in a dominator society, and the fact that he thinks we should return to other models provided for us from partnership societies, aligns well with the political left in the United States—sexism is bad after all. On the other hand, his questioning of modern Western medicine and science (everything from dentistry to physics) might seem to align with the political right. For the left, there is no grey area with something like the physical universe—you buy into relativity and quantum mechanics, even though they can’t be unified, or you don’t believe in science at all. But the novel refuses to politicize any of these topics. For writers who believe that “all writing is political,” Li’s character, by seeking novelty, complexity, as well as understanding, will seem incoherent at best and just wrong at worst. But Li is researching and investigating in order to aid his recovery from all society, in order to change himself. Li is not tied to any clear ideology, and for a reader who wishes to read beyond the easy delineation of contemporary culture, in which all things are politicized and then virtue-signaled, the novel is a welcome space of free-thinking that is sometimes playful, as when Li sees what he terms “microfireflies,” a strange property in the sky in New York, and sometimes serious, as when he’s attempting to help his mother’s thyroid problem with a more natural cure.
It’s not the apolitical terrain of the book that is most interesting to me though. It’s Li’s rigorous and complex evolution into a more compassionate person, a person of sincerity, thoughtfulness, and humor, as well as confusion, malaise, and frustration. Li is constantly making progress, regressing, reestablishing how and what and who he wants to be in the world, and trying again. In this way, he’s unlike almost any protagonist I’ve encountered in literature. Rather than caving to ironic self-awareness and self-distance and staying there, rather than succumbing to negative emotions and becoming plagued by depression, anxiety, and a general sense of despair, Li works with his and others’ negativity with a mix of frustration and thoughtfulness. He constantly changes throughout the book.
At the beginning of a section of the novel called “Year of Pain,” Li visits his parents in Taiwan. They watch a movie then the next day go to look for a piano. There’s a discussion of whether to buy or rent a piano, and when Li’s mother suggests buying, he says that both of his parents are “so greedy”. They argue a bit—“bicker” is the word the family uses—and then Li realizes “he was being like Alan [his three-year-old nephew]” in that, rather than tears, “he was crying dejected sentences.” Suddenly, outward bickering leads to internal examination, which Li expresses to his parents: “when the plan changed I felt not good.” On the train back home, he apologizes for calling his parents greedy and emails himself: “Parents seem taken aback by my outburst, and I also feel taken aback.” His demeanor softens, his ideas soften in that he’s able to let his ideas go—especially the thought that his parents are greedy—and then, on the train, he cultivates a YG (a breathing exercise which seems to allow him to expand his consciousness and leave concrete reality for a few moments), and when he returns, after being seemingly disembodied from his self, he finds himself wanting to hold his mother’s hand—a childlike, strange, and yet intimate gesture.
What happens here is this: external conflict leads to internal examination, which leads to internal softening, a softening of ego, which then leads to external softening and feelings of, in this case, wishing to connect—this is typical of the novel. A shorter way of saying it: Negativity examined leads to positivity, which leads to intimacy. Li is not only rewiring his brain through nonfiction books and non-mainstream study (away from our current culture’s emphasis on individuality and separateness and difference as virtues), but also through an examination and then realignment of his own mind states toward intimacy and connection. This intimacy and connection is reminiscent of Zen Buddhism and Daoism, a softening of the ego into a more direct expression of spacious connection. But change is not linear, as the novel—and Li—suggests, and patterns emerge.
In the same section, from days four to seventeen of his trip, Li reports that he is “relatively calm.” He focuses on his parents’ health in helpful ways and deals with his own health issues privately and calmly, but then on day eighteen he gets a worrying nosebleed, a generalized pain returns on day nineteen, and while at a Bed and Breakfast, Li feels worried for his own health and discovers “noxious cosmetic” products and “statins” in his parents’ bathroom, both things Li has warned his parents about. Worry compounds. He gets angry: “researching statins for the fifth or sixth time in a year, Li slammed the computer on the wood floor.” Worry transforms into anger, and Li conducts his parents toward information about the drug and corporations, stressing that he was “showing them helpful, potentially brain-damage-reducing information.” Anger then transforms into controlling behavior, which softens over the course of the night. With his parents’ full attention, “the night began to feel productive and intimate.” It’s this intimacy that is one of the most surprising, exciting, and profound things about Leave Society.
There’s a basic humor to everything Lin writes, but it’s never been so clear that Li (and Lin) care, and it is the close tracking of emotional states, of mind states, that reveals this care. In the space of a few pages and a day and a half, Li moves from relative calmness to feeling emotional as his mother investigates her face in photos (she’s had plastic surgery, which Li has struggled to not feel judgmental about), to worry over his own and his parents’ physical health, to anger, and then to a striking intimacy. Tracking these emotions section by section reveals both Li’s patterned, habituated ways of being, and his increasing awareness that there is a way to steer his mind away from negativity and aggression, toward connection and intimacy.
There’s a way of explaining away Lin’s tracking of Li’s emotions. Don’t all novels do this on some level? And they do, but most novels don’t dedicate their prose to such pointed cataloging of the universals of human experience: calmness, frustration, anger, upset, connection, intimacy. These are basic universal emotions that Lin brings to the surface of his novel. While Li’s days in the particular might look radically unlike the reader’s own days, in the universal Li’s life is like anyone’s: abstract emotions defined, tracked, and patterned. Li lives from deep within himself, and that depth is communicated to the surface of the novel, operating in and as external reality. In other words, Lin lets us see this depth so clearly it becomes impossible not to be moved by a character so devotedly reckoning with their own emotions and thought patterns.
As Li recovers from mainstream society, his progression toward more positive states of mind continues, though not without complications and regressions. Recovery, it should be noted, is synonymous with change. Recovery is transformation. The term, cribbed from the language of addiction, is used to show that we live in a society mired in addiction: to television, the internet, fast food, drugs of all kinds, to everything. Robert Aitken has famously said: “The things of the world are not drugs in themselves. They become drugs by our use of them.” Li (and Lin) understand this, and while Li is recovering from actual drugs, he’s also recovering from an attitude of addiction. Not only was he addicted to drugs, he was addicted to negative ways of being, negative thought patterns. But recovery, change, is difficult. For instance, “bickering” reaches a climax in a section titled “Conflict,” in which Li’s dad proclaims that the three of them—Li, his mom, his dad—will be “bickering for a lifetime,” which is how a negative moment can feel: that it will never end. The family, triggered by Li’s dad not being ready for a walk, enters into a recursive and nearly nonsensical argument about who is to blame for all the bickering, as well as past indiscretions. Li shuts his father’s computer forcefully. Li’s father exclaims “don’t hit me.” Li’s mother asks if Li hit his father. Li looks at her in bewilderment. Li’s father blames Li’s mother for Li’s behavior, the “bickering” culminating with each family member blaming the other as the source of the bickering, leading to a discussion of when Li’s father hit Li’s brother when Li’s brother was an adolescent, which leads Li’s father to pronounce that sometimes it is right for children to be hit, causing Li to shout, “Isn’t hitting things good?” seemingly threatening his father. When Li’s father says, “You dare hit me,” Li responds “You’re so fat…Of course I do.” All while Li’s mom is shouting for them to stop. Li’s father eventually leaves with the dog, Dudu. All of this occurs across two and half pages, ending with Li alone in his room, Li’s mother crying, and Li’s father returning. Eventually, each family member apologizes about some action they took or thing they said during the prolonged bicker. Things calm down—anger and frustration pass.
It’s difficult to convey in an essay how amusing and moving this is at the same time, but it’s that combination of amusing and moving that strikes the reader as incredibly real. This reality comes from the fact that each character is treated as being capable of change, as struggling to make certain changes (at Li’s behest or their own), and attempting to be better communicators. And because Lin is clearly tracking his own family and their interactions—anger flares up, then, in what seems like no time, flames out—there’s an authority regarding each character’s journey that is unlike most novels. Simple, struggling, yet dignified with sincere and often funny attempts at change. The scene ends with Li saying, “I’m trying to stop being like this.”
Later, at dinner, a grander reconciliation occurs:
“So I care for you two,” said Li. “I’m here. I’m here so much.”
[…]
“Li really loves you, right?” said Li’s mom.
“Right,” said Li’s dad.
“Dad counts as a good dad, right?” said Li’s mom.
“Ng,” said Li. “Right.”
One way to think of Leave Society is that it is comprised of these contractions and expansions, defensive aggressions and passive regressions into negative states and then opening up again. The characters collectively form this pattern. The novel is not only tracking Li’s change, but his change in relation to his parents, his parents’ change in relation to him and each other, and eventually Li to his partner, Kay. It suggests that all these minds contribute, collectively, to a larger change. Li is “trying to stop being this way,” and his parents, likewise, are working to bicker less—as separate entities this change is impossible, but as a unit, together, Leave Society suggests, change becomes more possible. Why is that? Because patterns become apparent: Li can see his actions in his father’s—when he slams his father’s computer (an outward, physical aggression), we then learn that Li may have learned this violent petulance from his father, who hit his brother. Li’s worry, likewise, is mirrored in his mother, who worries about her son. In a defensive mood, Li offers this as blame for his neurotic tendencies, but in a more open state, he is open to criticism and correction. For instance, at one point Li says, “When Dad says I need control [referencing the shutting/slamming of the computer and his occasional throwing things], I don’t feel not good … I agree. It’s good to keep reminding me. It’s like me reminding you two all the time about health things.” The characters’ negativities mirror each other in the same way their positivity does, and change is presented as a collective process. The novel then isn’t just like the patterned breath of an individual, but a collective breath of beings tied together, breathing together, changing together, evolving together.
Lin captures the progressions, regressions, and paradoxes of change. To change means to become aware, and to become aware means to inject oneself directly and pointedly into one’s own habitual thoughts and emotions—what I mean here is that one begins to watch and understand one’s patterned existence rather than simply being swept up by the wave of that existence, a “this is just how things are” attitude. But this is not how things are, Leave Society suggests. Late in the novel, Li slips, habituating “himself back into tormented glumness, unable to stop bitterly arguing with imaginary people in his mind.” But shortly after this, as he leaves Taipei the final time, he tells his parents that he’ll miss them, and he looks “deliberately at each parent’s face, and they group-hugged. He’d last told his mom he’d miss her when he was maybe ten. He couldn’t remember ever telling his dad.” The tenderness that has occasionally burst through bickering and confusion levels out in even-tempered care. Likewise, when Li doubts his relationship with Kay, and finds himself feeling “quiet and somewhat closed off” from Kay, he sees that his weeks of uncertainty regarding the relationship “were rippling through him, bothersome and mocking, his own creations,” Li has come to a new place. He recognizes that these mind states are his own creations, that his negative thinking is, as Li also states, a “habit.” The relationship with Kay stabilizes as Li’s doubts drift away. He’s begun to see beyond his negative mind states. He’s begun to see them for what they are: self-created, and though still difficult to manage, he now knows better what to do with them. Rather than being swept by the wave (the negative thought or emotion), the awareness emerges that one is the wave– and when this awareness emerges, it becomes less and less possible to be constantly swept up. In this space, there’s room for consciousness to come together. Toward the end of the novel, with Kay in Hawaii, Li’s world becomes more pointedly not only his, as the singular third-person pronoun dramatically shifts to third person plural: “they smelled each fruit, suckled their juice,” “they made a smoothie,” “they fed some chickens,” “they spoke a narrative about their day,” and “they discussed leaving [society/New York] in parts, leaving mentally and chemically, carefully and gradually. Going beyond.” They’re now changing together. With a message rooted in conscious change, Leave Society is the apolitical novel that we need right now: a book about going beyond politics and society and moving toward an aesthetic of collective being. The process should be careful, gradual—there will be progressions and regressions, suggests Leave Society. It’s a process that is occurring already. Leave Society makes me want to be a part of it, and then the book made me remember that I already am, that we all are.