YANG LIANTING REDUX by Celeste Sea
After the first time we fucked, she pissed on me. A whim. It had felt sacred, hot and vicious, and we’d laughed as the piss slid down onto my waiting tongue.
X-R-A-Y LITERARY MAGAZINE | COLLECTION VI | DAISUKE & LIZ’S SPECIAL QTPOC ISSUE
YOU MET DEATH ON LEX by Vi Khi Nao + Jessica Alexander
and asked her to meet you at a hotel in BrooklynYou would not meet her in Vegas where the sounds of your mother’smovements came through the walls between your roomsMeanwhile, in another state Death courted our brothers on Uber and GrinderAs you removed one blind eye from the invisible pocket of your black braYou realized that your memory of your brother had an invisible purseWith its zipper sewn on its side and its contents were pennies or wishesSo when they hit the surface of your eye the world you knew rippledBack then all you wanted was a plate of black olives impaled by toothpickscharred from a wild fire that raged Northern CaliforniaIn winter, you wanted a fireplace, too, and a thick soupyou weren’t allergic toDuring autumn rain the earthworm on your sternum writhedAnd you were deciding whether to die or live your life weddedTo Zinfandel’s fading legs or to walk through an inch of snowTo buy three mangosteens from a corner grocery storeBack when I knew none of this and knew you less, I climbed wetStairwells, snowflakes melted on my eyelashes, and clumps of snow fell off the trees,which were heavy and shaggy and white and greenI pulled myself close beneath my heavy coat and the train I got on began movingIn and out of the elongated, silvery body of an eel while the conductorSpoke through his amplified microphone attached like a second, semi-translucent,chain-mail-like skin, “Do you need anything? Say chocolate?” And, the trainyeel obediently responded, which surprised you greatly, “The compressor in me is broken.It’s like the heart of the AC and, no, all I need is a new shoulder, honey.”As if the train seat had been a bassinet, the engine a chimneycoughing up clouds, I knew that I would drift off in smoke and for another yearOr two I’d doze. Back then I told everyoneMy favorite thing about Pennsylvania is leaving Pennsylvania on a train.Especially after Clarice Lispector spit black tobacco into a tin can and left itnear the railing. I have always known this about love: the ground youplace it on does not exist. I knew, too, that sleep is not a type of aonairwine, situated above my consciousness, waiting for their insomnia of volcanicash to make me drift like a listless soul. Beneath that Lispector phlegm, that thickoral mucus, hint of smoke and ash, was an answer to a question I had not yet learned to ask.So, all the way to Brooklyn, I slept. The train rocked my body back and forthlike a jug of water inside of a stroller. From the window view, the effervescenttrees were woefully mourning their winter-torn sleeves, standing tall and hip-widelike pregnant women in a dream, I exited the train, and climbed the stairs to your hotel room,where you lay on your back begging Death to let you sleep on the railroad trackor take pesticides in the countryside with South Korea. The winter had beenlong and wet and when, in a dream’s sunset, I crept up the steps, I like tothink Death heard what you could not hear yet,because she startled and she left and the sun spread, warm and diluted, onthe backs of my eyelids and I woke just as the train screamed into PennStation’s open mouth. With the grayish duffel bag strapped over my left shoulder,I lowered and bowed my head while my feet slowly marchedthrough the crowd’s soporific mourning of procession.Each human head was a dark blue, wilted tulip, its witless petals droopedand sagged heavily against the gullible sound of footsteps amplifying andtriangulating the proximity of my distance. I shoveled along the cylindricalcement walls, into the yellow glow of a stairwell, and stepped up just as thesun set on Vernon Boulevard.Meanwhile, on the other side of Pulaski Bridge, maybe 40 minuteswalking distance, you sobbed intermittently into a grocery bag which wavedlike a half-staffed, mortified flag in the wind, & eventually it floated away from youas you stopped at the corner of Nassau where clumps of sooty snow hadmelted and frozen again and the walk sign flashed white and you crossedthe avenue just like the living do. The short walk was the longest walk you ever tookin your very short life—the compelling wind was pushing you and you likea pregnant woman, pushing you towards the metro, pushing you into the pavement,pushing you into the snow. By then it was night and I stood beside a giant windowon the 21st floor of 474 48th Avenue watching the Empire State Buildingchange color. The black sky was perforated with a thousand tiny squaresof light, each one ushering me, like a Russian novel, into its own domestictragedy: a tv glowing in a living room, a couple eating take out at a kitchencounter, a man smoked on a narrow balcony and curled himself against the wind.To stand beyond the reach of weather, I discovered, was yet anotherway I may be lonely. It was all emptiness, staring into the private things thatcouldn’t stare back at me. Sometimes the intimacy of distancewas too much. The glasses on the ridge of my nose refused to be that lonelyrose, fading, wilting from that indeterminate breath that had fogged up their glass.I took the elevator down 21 flights to the street where black cabs stoodwaiting and a driver asked if he was waiting for me. I assumed no onewas and I crossed the street. At that point, I had met you twice.Once I took an Uber to a restaurant where clavicles were juxtaposedbetween wooden and metal chairs shifting in and out of periphery, butyour clavicle was most prominent of all. You sat diagonally from me, silentlysipping hot water with a wedge of lemon, your fingers spread with gentlestrength around the teacup’s opening. You ordered salmon and ate slowlywith your eyes shyly downcast. For a moment, I sat inside the soft light ofyour quiet pleasure, the setting sun lit the wooden table and glowedagainst your profile. You squinted slightly, and delicately speared small flakes ofsalmon. You hardly spoke save when someone said I was adorable, and you shylyraised your eyes to mine and you agreed. When you left, the placeyou sat was stainless and the sun fell behind you, leaving the city in adismal neglect of chance. I, however, collected myself and you placed mein a box called Wisdom. I waited by the light for life to change her colorsfrom infancy to myopia. You waited and waited for the city to changewhat we were unable to change until four years into the future. That evening,sitting with my legs curled up by the hotel bed, I thoughtabout my brother, Jim, who had a way of holding me tight inhis arms when we slept. Years later, when he took a large bubblebath full of foam in India, I kept on having a recurring dream of Jimdying and of having to announce the devastating news to new peopleeach night. We met, the first time, inside a crowded conventioncenter. Djuna Barnes, famous fictionist, wore a cowboy hat. She stoodseveral rows from me, and laughed with such exquisite abandon. By contrast,you stood patient as the sunlight, and I leaned toward yourwarmth the way some plants twist out of shade. I have alwaysbeen so reticent in the company of others, my sapphic shynesspeeling out of me like a clementine in front of a bay of unripe avocados oroverripe raspberries. You gave me chocolate and two books and later, thenext day or the day after that, I could not stop crying while I waited for mytrain to come and take me back.Four years ago, in that endless Pennsylvania winter,I wrote you, “All I do is grade papers but I have a fold-out.”It was a faceless message, the kind written in the quiet, iridescentrecess of my idleness, the kind that arrived after a storm has been builtright into the towering headdress of a tornado, the kind that walkedout of you like a vagrant beggar from a beach house near the sea. When Iwas young, I coped with my queerness, my handsome isolation, myoverwrought loneliness by smoking weed, one string ofvaporous vapor ornamentation after another, by the window and climbingthrough it after dark. My body was strikingly vigorous, though I spentmost of its innocent muscularity by being restlessly listless, walking inand out of kitchen doors like I knew the difference between having awallet and David Foster Wallace. You were reticent and precise. The windblew into a window and the stacks of papers before each paidgrader swirled around the room, save yours, which you held downwith your free hand, while tapping your sharpened pencilagainst the tabletop. The others, limp and languid like overwateredhouseplants, shuffled listlessly between the window and the vendingmachine. You did not hear them. Your focus was unparalleled, your eyesscanned the page, you made a swift mark, and moved on. They nudgedtheir papers to your side of the table. I cannot help but picture them: boorishbrothers and grinning stepsisters, turning the key in the lock, and leaving. Youdid not notice. You turned the page, and tapped your pencil againstthe tabletop. Then it was five o’clock, a winter night. The castratedphotographer pushed his bike over the ice and up the rollinghills and past the frosted cornfields to your door. I wonder what it was liketo say goodnight. Your profile, your steady eyes fixed on the horizon,and your silence, while he confessed he’d like to dip his fist into your head.He said it would come out sweet and soaked in golden honey. He painted you a blurrypicture of yourself. Your wrist bone bent oddly to the left. He had a sheep’s headshipped to you from Morocco and a Nordic Wolffish from the Arctic Circle.He wrote a sonnet each day and sent them in a box he’d carved fromwhalebone inside a box made of glue and pigeon’s nests. You did notknow what to do with all of these intoxicated gifts. You could not carrythem around and so you bought a plastic storage box, foldedeach gift neatly into scented tissue paper, and closed the lid. I wroteyou in Pennsylvania. I said, “I have a fold-out,” then I put onmy headphones and spent the evening walking under the yellowglow of street lamps, the red brick, the sparkling snow. That wasnot the same year. I walked like a downcast philosopherbeneath the Kinzua Bridge, measuring my time and distance slowly. All ofmy vacant thoughts were in the clouds, waiting for theprecipitation of a long- lost meaty memory of meeting a futureyou to rain back down to me, storming my petite form into anambulated oblivion. My life has been this long, arduous academic road.My head always in the dense pages. Those long endless paragraphswhere the wheat, the cornfield, and the muted stone of an idea traveledback and forth between prolixity and nothingness. From time to time, Iwonder if you would marry me even after our galaxy stoppedexpanding. I wonder on nights like this if you would mutely climbinside my submarine and sit beside me until all the speed boats spedpast. I wanted to walk beside you up a narrow stairwell with arms fullof paper bags and rice and cabbage and keys jangling in your hand. Iwondered whether you’d love me more if we fell onto the bed orif instead, I scrubbed the crisper down before dumping the vegetables in, orwhether you’d forgive me if I slept and the sound of engines carriedmy dream to the beach and if a smog curtain closed behind me and if Iwent on wondering whether you liked wrist bones or clavicles best, or if Iwent on wanting, in spite of it, to fold my mouth around your hip, would you know?Would you hold my face in your hands like a melon and carry my head home?We’d hardly met. I was learning so many words do not mean whatI thought they did. I have come to understand moisture in a very differentway. Words often, despite my heavy proclivity for wanting them to, do nothave much moisture in them. They lack water and something else.Something I can’t pin my fingers on. Something to do with acousticsignals or density or the waxy content in the cranium of dolphins. Afterreaching into my armpits in the dark afternoon many years later fortwo wheats and three stones, I found your fingers cracking out laughinglike they heard a terrible knock- knock joke from the edge of theiralpha-keratin. I wonder if you would love me less if all my clocks andobligations cracked wide open and I oozed out, formless as raw egg or if Iwas not ticklish or if I owned an orange cat. The kind that spoke Cantoneseor Vietnamese with a Southern drawl. The kind that a mandarin orangewould mistake for its distant, house-arrested cousin. Some morningswhen I woke up in the early light to unlower the blinds,the kind that made you more sultry and less formal in the Houstondarkness, I imagined you being a fruit basket that someoneaccidentally left on the third floor of a vacant apartment complex. Therewere bell peppers that didn’t shake like bells and there were mythologiesin you that didn’t arrive with a broken chariot on its coeval asphalt.In times like these, you don’t ever take the elevator with me to the rooftopwith the lavish bar and flamboyant cocktails that night we orderedcabernet and sunk into the plush cushions and did not drink a sip of it and I feltas if I’d stepped inside a future where I did not exist or a memory thatbelonged entirely to someone else. The night was all around us and, foran instant, I was certain it was me and not my brother who was dead.But in the morning when I raised the blindsyour stillness, which is either that of a hummingbirdor its opposite, is so exquisitely composite and fatalistic and soI try hard to step inside of it. A fantasy you once told me.I lean over you. I brush your cheek. My neck crowned bya collar of trees. I say, Baby, how did you sleep? I slept poorly andunevenly—like my subconsciousness sat on an old- fashionedscale—the owlgift vintage—the kind that represents truth and fairness. Buton the other side, the other side of your amnesia, the one you had onlyknown briefly and intermittently, the one outweighing everythingabout the rapid heartbeats of raven who sat (unevenly) on an old redwoodtree by the side of road. Compelled by distance and sadness, I swiftly cupyour face like an old beggar cleaning knives for the endangered denizensof the foggy city he dreams up each night, then watches swirl slowlydown the drain of each morning, leaving his belly full of asadness that is jagged and undefined. It is possible,of course, to miss someone who sleeps beside you, too,and so I remove a hybrid hyacinth from a drawer of atree and whisper soporific leaves into it so that it is alwaysfalling asleep by exfoliating into what you alwayslove and can love. There is a mist waiting outside like a widow.Her eyes are soft and wet with tears or sweat from running upan evanescent hill. I try to run my hands through her near the mulberrywell as a way of telling you that I wish your heartbeat smelled like a teakettle with fresh mint stuck in its sprout: metallic and fresh and bloomingwith an arc of wheat. Longing so thick makes my handssomnolent, even my knuckles lull the handle of ateakettle to sleep. In your absence, I pour hot water up intoa mug, with a wedge of lemon and take the steam into myselfas if I were pulling on your breath. Meanwhile, a livestreamof the Governor’s address drones on in the background, I sighinto a kitchen that is newly emptied of you and the kettle sighs,too, and the governor says it’s impossible to quantify suffering.But I have drifted to a time long before Ida or Covid-19, I amrousing my Manhattan- bound self from a dream,and pulling her by her winter sleeves, up the endless stepsof a Brooklyn hotel, ordering death to leave.
ZAC SMITH on Normal Life with REBECCA GRANSDEN
What is an ordinary day? With our days increasingly under analysis, it’s a reasonable question. Everything is Totally Fine arrives at an opportune time. Zac Smith’s stories are permeated with seemingly mundane events, actions familiar to the everyday, the stuff that makes up life. And life is strange. What do we feel when we think of ordinary days? Nostalgia? Longing? Resentment? Relief? As Zac Smith sat down to write these stories, maybe he had some of these in mind, or perhaps he wanted to forget about them. His ordinary days gave rise to a collection of stories, something he didn’t know he was doing at first. It’s this sense of serendipity, arbitrariness, and absurdity that trails his words. With that in mind, here is Zac Smith’s ordinary day.
start the day right
Rebecca Gransden: What happens when you get up in the morning?
Zac Smith: Currently I wake up around 5:45 to do chicken chores and let out one or both of my dogs. The chicken chores involve cleaning and refilling their water thing, unlocking the door to the henhouse, and cleaning the poop out from where they sleep. Usually I try to go back to bed for a little bit after this, but sometimes my toddler wakes up and I can’t go back to bed.
RG: What happens after that?
ZS: I cook breakfast and brew coffee. Breakfasts I cook include: scrambled eggs and toast, omelets and toast, egg sandwiches with tempeh bacon and avocado, biscuits and veggie sausage gravy, scrambled tofu with peppers and onions, savory oatmeal bowls, and oatmeal with banana and pecans. I think my mornings are pretty normal.
RG: What happens at lunchtime?
ZS: I cook lunch and we eat lunch. Lunches I cook include: hummus sandwiches, mac and cheese with lima beans and bbq tofu, black beans and rice with fried plantains, some kind of grain or pasta salad(s), shitty fajitas with tofu, quesadillas, and avocado toast with feta. Sometimes my kid helps me cook - today we made a vegetable soup with dumplings. Then, when work allows, I hang out with my kid while my wife gets some alone time to work or rest. We usually read books together or play with magnetic building tiles or toy animals.
RG: What happens in your afternoons?
ZS: Things I like to do in the afternoons that aren’t “going to work” include taking my toddler to a playground, going for walks or hikes, playing at home with my toddler (e.g. building an obstacle course), and cooking with my toddler (e.g. baking cookies). Sometimes in the evening I take time to play my guitar alone. More recently we’ve been checking for chicken eggs in the afternoons, as well.
RG: Do you travel to and from anywhere? What is that journey like?
ZS: I have been working from home since February 2020. For a long time the only places we would go were nature areas. Last fall, I started taking my toddler to places like coffee shops or small/outdoor stores/markets. Usually, on Sundays, we spend the morning driving ~20 minutes out to a nature area, then a coffee shop, then a small market. I’m laughing at myself saying I do the same things in different ways and places. We’ve only recently done some longer trips, because of the pandemic - we spent the day in Portland, ME to see some family and a few days in Upstate New York to see old friends. My kid seems to enjoy road trips and our friends were supportive of spending a lot of time in parks and playgrounds just hanging out. But most of what we do around our home is like a 2-10 minute drive.
intermission: where Zac Smith explains why Everything is Totally Fine
RG: How long did it take to write the book?
ZS: The oldest piece in the book was originally written in mid-2018, and the most recent story was written in May 2021. The earliest ones weren’t written with the idea of including them in a book, and then when it all started taking shape, I rewrote them in various ways to make them better fit the tone or to include self-referential (self=book) content. When working on it as a book, I wanted not to have too many of the pieces previously published online, since I think that in general the only people who will read it have also read one or more stories by me online, and I want them to feel like it wasn’t a waste of money to buy the book. In terms of getting the book published, there were/are only a few presses I really liked and felt like sending it to: Soft Skull, Tyrant, Future Tense, House of Vlad, and Muumuu House. I received kind and personalized rejections from Yuka at Soft Skull (who’s now at Graywolf) and Kevin at Future Tense, was ignored by Giancarlo (which was fine/expected, based on what I know about how he responded to book pitches; he was nice and supportive when I originally reached out to him), and accepted by House of Vlad. I didn’t have any expectation about publishing it via Muumuu House since I assume Tao gets a lot of unsolicited book pitches and he hadn’t published a book via Muumuu House in ten years, but we had been emailing about stuff/writing and then he offered to publish it, which surprised and excited me. I felt bad about pulling it from House of Vlad but Brian seemed ok with it and hadn’t started working on editing it really by then, so it felt like I hadn’t wasted too much of his time. Muumuu House is/was consistently one of my favorite places and I admire Tao’s editorial vision, and he has been very excited about and supportive of the book.
RG: I’d love to know how you chose to compile the collection—the order of the pieces, the selection of segments, etc. It’s a cohesive collection. Were the individual pieces conceived as part of a larger work, or did that take shape over time?
ZS: I’m glad it reads as cohesive. The book was originally going to be much shorter and published online as part of a collaborative project with Giacomo Pope, but then we didn’t feel confident we’d get more people to contribute like we wanted, so we took our respective collections and reworked them for books—his poems mostly ended up in his Chainsaw Poems & Other Poems and mine became Everything is Totally Fine. The original working title was Everything is Totally Fucked and Giacomo claims to have proposed that title as a joke based on what I wanted to write, when describing it to him, and then I just used it unironically. That seed was something like seven stories, and when I decided to make a book out of it, I started writing more specifically to fill it out and let the themes/ideas naturally develop from there. It went through a few drafts where I would try to flesh it out with previously-written-but-unedited stories, print to line edit everything, then categorize the stories based on certain things about them, and then figure out which categories made sense and thus which stories should be cut. I think this was an effective process and helped me feel like I wasn’t including any stories that wouldn’t make sense in the full book context. Also, around this time, Mike Andrelczyk would send writing prompts consisting of 3-4 unrelated photographs in a group chat we’re in together, and I would try to write something really quickly based on those, and then later I scrolled through the group chat to edit and add them in. There are probably close to 20 stories that I wrote for the book which aren’t in the final version, which seems like a good number relative to the size of the final collection.
In terms of sequencing, I realized I had about 2x as many first-person stories as third-person stories, so I divided the book into thirds, with the middle section being the third-person stories. Once I decided to do that, it helped guide me in terms of writing additional stories and experimenting with ways in which the narration is framed or “revealed,” which was fun for me, and it helped the sequencing. For sequencing in general, I tried to make sure I didn’t have many stories that were overly similar right next to each other, and to break up lengths a little bit. The last third I think has the longest pieces and is less cohesive, while the first section has some of the shortest pieces and is more thematically cohesive, which I think is funny in terms of naming the sections and maybe gives a little bit of an arc to the collection.
I want to note, too, that around when I started sending the book out to places, I traded manuscripts with Crow Jonah Norlander and he gave me some good suggestions in terms of copyedits but also a desire to see a certain type of story in a certain place, so I reworked an older piece for that because it seemed like a good idea, and he gave me some insight on some of the categories of story and that helped me when later writing more stories. I also got very nice and similar feedback from Graham Irvin, who gave some good suggestions specifically about doing call-backs or making certain stories more referential to being in a collection, which I thought was good, and I tried to do sometimes in a way that made me laugh. Alan Good provided copyedits and suggestions for ten stories in exchange for sending him some vinyl records, which was fun, and I recommend hiring him for copyediting. When finalizing the book, Tao recommended replacing four stories and asked me to write new ones for him to look at, so I sent him a mix of things I wrote over some two-week period and things that I had originally cut from earlier drafts, and then we finalized everything. We’ve finished the copyedits and are waiting on potential blurbs before finishing the cover and printing them, as of August 5, 2021.
the end of the day approaches
RG: When do you eat in your day? Your book features foodstuffs—pizza, yogurt, cookies—in sometimes antagonistic scenarios. Is this coincidental, or are you in a secret war with food?
ZS: I think about food a lot and eat a lot of food, partly because I do all the cooking in my family, and partly because of how eating/going out to eat was a big part of my family dynamic as a child. I like that you thought of the food being in antagonistic scenarios in my book - I think my relationship with food is unhealthy, in general. But I also think food is funny. Most food seems really dumb, but I also like food and have a lot of both good and bad memories associated with food. And I usually feel really interested when I read stories where people eat food - what they eat, how much they eat, when they eat it, etc.
RG: If you stay in one place in your day, what is that place like and what is your opinion of it?
ZS: I spend most of my time at home. I like where I live. It feels open and airy and we have a nice yard now to do things in, like raise chickens and garden and run around. Our neighborhood is pretty quiet and we are close to nature, although I feel like I don’t take advantage of nature as much as I’d like to. I spend a lot of time in our small office doing work for my job. I think I would enjoy never looking at a computer again.
RG: Is there anywhere in your day you make a special effort to travel to just to write? Do you have a routine when it comes to your writing? Does having a routine, or lack of one, influence your writing?
Where do you usually write?
ZS: I haven’t really prioritized writing lately, so no, I don’t think so. Usually I do my best writing on a laptop in a place that’s not my office, like sitting on my bed. I don’t have a routine. I’m unsure how this affects my writing. I think maybe having a lack of routine means I take long breaks between projects and so my writing is demarcated into periods or larger ideas, instead of a continuous flow of writing.
RG: Do you relax? If so, what does that look like?
ZS: I feel like I am often trying to relax because of some baseline level of anxiety. I usually try to relax by lying down on a couch, bed, or hammock. I enjoy taking naps in my bed whenever possible. I think I might simply be a lazy person who doesn’t want to do anything. I think I also relax by quietly doing chores.
RG: How is your evening and/or night?
ZS: My evenings usually involve putting my toddler to bed, locking up the chickens, and going to bed. The bedtime thing can be very stressful, but it’s also very nice and, I think, grounding/connecting. When I do bedtime, I usually end up singing 4-5 indie rock songs while holding my kid’s hand and lying in bed. After, sometimes, I watch a movie with my wife, or drive out to do chores, like going to a hardware store that’s ~20 minutes away. At night I usually read in bed.
RG: Does boredom influence your writing?
ZS: I think so. I think I started writing to alleviate boredom. I’m unsure how frequently I experience boredom, now, because of technology and my daily responsibilities. I want to be bored more. I think some of the stories in my book are about boredom and anxiety, though. I try to make an effort to pay attention to what’s happening around me when I am in public so I can see things that I could write about, which I think means I try to not preventatively stave off boredom when I’m in public, but I’m not very good at it.
RG: Have you noticed if you are more likely to have ideas for your writing at a particular time or place? Is there a type of circumstance that is conducive to bringing on ideas?
Do any ideas arrive in dreams?
ZS: I’m not sure. I think maybe I think of stories most often while walking my dogs. I think I’ve dreamt about story ideas before but they usually don’t make any sense when I think about them later. One time, recently, I was falling asleep and thought of a good story idea, so I got out of bed to write it and email it to myself, but it didn’t end up in the book.
Everything Is Totally Fine is due out from Muumuu House on January 18, 2022, and is available for preorder.
GARIELLE LUTZ on film with REBECCA GRANSDEN
The way we talk about film, how we digest it, is worth a thought. We “capture” images, we “take” pictures. For those oldest reels, where life skitters in shades of black and white, it’s tempting to view the images as a record, as a window or portal to another time. There is a truth in that. Pointing a camera at people unaware their image is being taken, in that between-time when the medium was new and its nature not widely known, has an unnerving quality. When animals are presented in these infant days of moving image the issue is somehow amplified — it’s the obliviousness that makes them more alive, and hence their long-deadness more pronounced. If — according to some physics I don’t understand — we are a way for the universe to observe itself, and the act of observation influences existence in its most fundamental state, then does turning that act of observation back onto ourselves have an equal or opposite consequence? If our eyes were designed for that purpose, do we risk contradicting our reason for being here? At the heart of the capture of any image is the tension between permanence and impermanence. Actors become icons, and we refer to the immortality of the screen, knowing that film degrades, is lost, human error deletes storage, and all those films we’ve streamed and purchased are available only as long as our provider of choice decides so. The travel in time is one taken in memory when we watch a film, if it’s good anyway: the first cinema we frequented, the old carpet in the house we grew up in, the friend who introduced us to a film much beloved, the night we couldn’t sleep because of a scene that haunted us. The bristly material of the fold-down chair as it grazes the rear of your adolescent knees, that person who sat too close, and the one that cried a little too hard. As a smaller person, legs crossed staring up at the tv with the smell of dinner threatening to take the end of the film away. Here we arrive at Garielle Lutz.
‘As a kid, I didn’t see a lot of movies, but I loved to study the movie advertisements in the Friday edition of the local paper: the ads were always awfully small, and all of them would fit onto half of a page and offered only the logos of the local movie houses, miniaturized samplings of lobby-poster graphics, the names of cast members and big-shot picture personnel squeezed into sideways-squashed lettering that was hard to read, and, most gratifying for me, the list of show times, because something seemed practically occult about those sequences: 1:10, 2:55, 4:40, 7:20, 9:15. (Movie schedules were a big influence on my interpretation of the running times of song titles listed on the backsides of record albums: I began to think that 2:38 parenthesized after a title meant that that was the time of day when I should listen to the song, but most of the times were in the range of 2:00 to 3:30, and I was almost always still at school then, or on my way home, so that would have meant not playing most of my records, and I liked my records.) The movie ads were the only thing I ever bothered with in the paper (I had no use for current events), and my favorite toy was a cheap projector (fabricated mostly of plastic) that would beam onto a wall anything I positioned in a little skirted expanse beneath the part of the device housing the bulb, and I thuswise whiled away many an evening staring at movie ads magnified into magnificence onto the barest wall of my tiny bedroom. The downtown movie houses in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the thriving, thwarting little city in which I grew up — the Rialto, the Colonial, and the Capri (all on Hamilton Street, the main drag) and the Boyd (a couple of side-street storefronts down from the city’s only skyscraper, a gothamish Art Deco uplooming at the corner of Ninth) — had been curtailedly palatial even from the start and by the time of my childhood had stopped short of offering a portal to anything englamoring. The seats were plush, sure, but the places always smelled like the shoes and socks of people who’d had to walk punishingly far to be charmed. One Sunday I was taken by the hand to see a matinee of Mary Poppins at the Colonial, but the lady at the box-office window told my parents that the showing was sold out, so we went back home, and I was relieved, because I knew I would’ve otherwise had to sit through the whole miserable thing and keep telling myself, “I should like this, what is wrong with me that I don’t like this, please let this be over and done with soon,” the same thing I always told myself while faced with the longueurs of dreamless Disney dreariments like The Sword in the Stone and Pinocchio. But there was a drive-in theater (called the Boulevard) in our working-class district, and on summer weekend nights my parents often packed me pillowedly into the car for the double features, but aside from my delight in the intermissional operettas about the hot dogs and chocolate bars on offer at the snack bar, the only movies I can remember staying awake for long enough to form much of an impression were Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Walk on the Wild Side. From the first seconds of the opening-credits sequence of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (early-morning Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, Holly Golightly in black gloves all the way up past the elbows and nibbling a pastry (though I still hope it’s a croissant, not something sticky), I had my first dim inklings of how I wanted to grow up (as Holly) and where I wanted to live (in Manhattan [though the closest I would ever get was a one-month sublet in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, when I was fifty-one, and from 1983 onward I would have to make do with the concrete-canyon effects achievable by walking slowly and desirously eastward on the narrow, Manhattanesque five-block stretch of William Penn Place in downtown Pittsburgh]). That swoon-inducing opening sequence was just about the only thing I took away from the movie as a seven-year-old (I’m sure I dozed off during much of what followed, and there are only snatches of the movie I care enough about to watch now, but those two minutes and twenty-seven seconds at the start were the first of the half dozen or so turning points in my life), and for days afterward I begged my parents to buy me the soundtrack album, and they gave in, and I’ve still got the thing (the running times of the songs range from 2:24 [“Hub Caps and Tail Lights”] to 3:18 [“Holly”]; dismissal time at the elementary school was 3:05). As for Walk on the Wild Side, I remembered almost nothing from it other than a dawning suspicion that adult life was to be lived in louche black-and-white and with only fitful approximations of affection ever possible from other people. I’ve never since looked at that movie again, but as a teenager I glommed on to a used copy of a 1962 paperback anthology of short fiction called Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters, and I must have found the title welcomingly, life-blightingly apt and must have recognized that the man whose name was featured in the title was the author of the novel on which Walk on the Wild Side was based, but I don’t think I read very far into the thing before giving it a toss. A year or two later (by then I was a mostly mute and ignored beanpole of a junior at Louis E. Dieruff High School), Lou Reed came out with his Velvetsy recitative “Walk on the Wild Side” and stirred up in me some inchoate, chiaroscurist memories of the movie (by now I knew it had had something to do with prostitutes); the song was perfect, though “New York Telephone Conversation” and “Make Up,” both on side two of Reed’s Transformer album, suited me better in those confusingly boy-crazy days. Oh, and I can remember, but just barely, three other movies of my youth, all seen between ages eleven and thirteen: Funny Girl (why had my mother insisted I take the Union Boulevard bus with her to go see it at the Boyd? The low-cut blouses seemed both dirty and scary to me) and Grand Prix (almost three hours long, and all about racing; my only childhood friend, who loved cars and glued-together hobby-shop models of them, wanted to see the thing, and I would have gone anywhere with him, though I daydreamed through most of the picture) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (again with my friend; giggles in the car on the way to the Rialto but long faces on the way back).
‘By the time I reached my later teens and set off for Kutztown State College, formerly Keystone State Normal School (a drowsy, modest little campus of low-slung buildings clustered on both sides of a two-lane in Pennsylvania Dutch country, a half hour’s drive from Allentown), I was not so much indifferent to movies as finding myself increasingly shying away from them; I don’t think I saw more than six or seven movies during all four of those years, and by “saw” I mean having sat in the presence of something projected on a screen in front of me but not necessarily paying it any mind. I would much sooner have gone someplace where I could have watched just those opening couple of minutes of Breakfast at Tiffany’s over and over and over, but this was the mid-1970s, and opportunities like that did not yet exist. Maybe my limited receptivity to movies makes more sense to me now than it did then, because I’ve since learned that I am neurologically nonstandard and am not rigged for linearity or narrative drive, not attuned to what is called “story sense.” From childhood through my early twenties, I usually had one tape recorder or another within reach (portable reel-to-reel devices until the advent of cassette recorders), and I was often promiscuous in what I recorded: once, when I was in third or fourth grade, I’d taped a span of dialogue, ten minutes or so, from a movie (The Rainmaker, from 1956, with Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster) that my parents were watching on TV. I remember listening to that tape over and over for weeks, though I had no idea what the characters were talking about (it was over my head and out of context anyway); I was just enthralled by their saying the same things again and again; and if you’re anything like me, when you listen to something repeatedly like that, something sooner or later happens to the words: their limitive communicational properties, the gunk and slop and whatnot of meaning, somehow get rinsed away, and what you’re left with is no longer speech but instead a bare human bleat or coo (maybe even just barely human), an onrushing current of underdifferentiated sound that nonetheless becomes more and more orderly and consolingly predictable the more you listen to it, and I was listening to it a lot. I was more and more drawn toward experiences like that, humanesque voices on endless repeat; and college, by the time I showed up, didn't seem to be offering anything along those lines. (Or maybe it did — it’s just that I never wandered over to the halls of music. A professor over there wrote haiku and had locally published a book's worth of it entitled [with maximal helpfulness to readers, like me, who needed everything spelled out], Haiku Poetry.) Midway through one term or another, at an appointment during which I was supposed to choose courses for the next semestral go-round, my faculty advisor talked me out of enrolling in an Olympian-sounding seminar called Mental Hygiene (I’d had my heart set on that course, because life seemed to keep pushing my thoughts in unsanitary directions), and he insisted I’d be much better off in a course called Literature and Film. I have always been one to give in, so I let myself be signed up. By that point I was an English major but seemed to have barely any interest in books (I idolized the kids in the studio-art program but couldn’t draw or manage anything even plausibly minimalist or conceptual, though I was fond of the jargon, and I had just switched my major again after things hadn’t worked out with a semester’s worth of grisly intros to accounting, marketing, and economics). I guess the draw of the film course was that we’d get credit for just sitting in the dark, and during the second of the screenings (The Informer), it occurred to me that I could close my eyes and keep them shut and nobody would even notice, and that was how I made it through the rest of that picture and, in coming weeks, through all of The Grapes of Wrath and The Maltese Falcon. I’d just show up in the auditorium and sit there in excited lassitude and feel as if I was pulling something off. I’d tell myself that Andy Warhol would surely approve. I also blew off reading the books that the movies were based on. I’d just zip through the pages of the paperbacks and color every word with a thickset yellow highlighter. The papers I turned in had nothing to do with the books or the movies, and it didn’t even matter. The prof wanted us to feel free. I felt trapped anyway. I believe I briefly had a boyfriend. He wanted us to go to see Liza Minelli in a seafaring romp called Lucky Lady. He was always drawing life-size, head-to-toe likenesses of Liza Minelli on scrolled-out paper on the floor of his dorm room and then tearing them splendidly to pieces. We went to see the movie. I did the “I’m not watching” thing again. We broke up. The next semester, I went to see a couple of movies in a film series held in a fadedly elegant dining room in Old Main. The Boy Friend and Women in Love — I really tried to watch those two, I tried to do what moviegoers apparently muscle-memorily do, but I felt overwhelmed, couldn’t keep up, wanted to walk out, go back to my dorm room, flop onto the bed, and listen over and over again to “Candy Says.” The only movie house in that town was a bystreet shoebox of a place that always showed first- or second-run features, but one week it was improbably screening The Boys in the Band a good four or five years after its release. I dropped by investigatively on a weeknight, and the audience was sparse: sad sacks steeped in unrelentable middle age, hunched but sleekened teens who looked as if life had already thrown them one too many scares, popcorn-guttling townies who no doubt showed up for everything — all of them alone and unfragrantly male and seated as far away from each other as possible Within a decade or so, that movie would be maligned as a shaming circus of stereotypes, and for a while it was even pulled out of circulation, but to me it was the first glimpse I’d ever had of the vivid, witty, heartsore society of present-day metropolitan homosexuals. The movie’s structure (it had been based on a two-act play, 182 pages in hardcover), the propulsions of its plot, the arrowing lacerations of the dialogue — none of those sank in. The only thing I took away from the movie was the tone, the mood, and it seemed like a tone and a mood I felt I could maybe at least school myself to approximate if I had no choice but to keep growing bodily as a male and if I could somehow bring myself to start opening my mouth around people. (I never did find an entrance into that society, even if there might have been a smaller-scaled, local equivalent.) But I had somehow managed to sit through an entire movie from start to finish, without once drifting off or shutting my eyes, and that was progress of a sort. Another turning point in my development as a movie-watcher was on a chilly Saturday night of my senior year (I was by now a slow-poke, petulant commuter) in Bethlehem, the smaller city next door to Allentown. An old friend from high school, a student at a selective university across the local river, had proposed that we kill some time at a movie, as long as it was within a six-square-block radius of Luke’s Mid City Lunch, where we’d just finished a dinner during which we barely said a word. Our choices were Taxi Driver and W. C. Fields and Me. Neither of us had heard of either, but I was familiar at least with W. C. Fields, though my friend wasn’t, and when I clued him in, he said he was in no mood to see a movie about “some old-time guy.” So we went to Taxi Driver, and from the start, everything about that movie — its hallucinational neonscape, the nicotine saxophonery of the soundtrack, Travis Bickle’s shatterbrained Honest Johnism, his paranoiac charms — seemed piped directly into all the tubes and ducts and back channels of my neurodivergency and all of my disaffection as a morbidly alienated hick-college isolato with shit for brains. I never once took my eyes off the screen, even though the running time was a longsome one hour and fifty-four minutes. Audrey Hepburn as Holly in her two minutes and twenty-seven seconds of Mancini-scored daybreak window-shopping at Tiffany’s had been my impractically aspirational second self, my undoubleable gamine lodestar, from the primary grades up until now, but if I couldn’t be Holly, and it was beginning to look an awful lot as if I never could, maybe I could at least be as fucked up as Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle, but a Travis Bickle with a touch of the androgyne, with plucked chin and upper lip, lacquered nails, a bracelet or five. Come fall, I was packed off to graduate school in Appalachia.’
An early image-capturing machine was the magic lantern. Magic is slight of hand, it is trickery in the service of beauty, it is technique employed to astound and dumfound. Movie magic and the magic kingdom. When I think of a lantern it’s not as an example from my life. I don’t think I’ve ever used a lantern to light my way. I imagine a raincoated man holding his lantern aloft, scouring dark streets. Or a policeman hurried by a reported crime, seeking a clue in the lantern’s glow. Perhaps an insect-harried porch lantern. These are images brought to me from the recorded image, from photography, and from literature. There are those who regularly use lanterns of course, but this doesn’t detract from the object’s association with the cinematic. Like a waggling cigar, like a twirling walking cane, some objects can now never be disassembled from their use as film props. The lantern’s light emits from the screen, and if the screen observes us back I wonder if it changes us as our faces moon out of the gloom, caught in the lantern light glow. Garielle Lutz’s stories are populated by people smothered in their complexities. Routine work spaces and dour apartments are shown anew through the filter of Lutz’s way of seeing, of reporting, of describing the minutiae of commonplace interactions. If you are reading this then it’s perhaps safe to assume a familiarity with the writer’s singular style, which doesn’t need further comment from me. What does require attention is the off-kilter psychological depth to Lutz’s stories, a depth in part brought about by the familiar being made unfamiliar, by viewing the everyday through the eyes of a strong and unique voice. I think of the best auteur directors, the ones who cast a twisted eye on normalcy, and then I consider the ones who do all they can to escape. Over to Garielle.
‘I wasn’t a very good fit for the program, the college. It was a party school in a carnivalian town of eyesore Ohioana. The first couple of years, I’d kill entire afternoons pacing up and down the main street, making the flaneur’s circuit of Woolworth’s and the record stores, with hair newly chopped and deformed and punkishly asymmetrical (a little Medusan on one side) from yet another destructo shearing I’d given myself without recourse to a mirror. Nights, I was often at the library, paging groggily through the assigned books, draining the vending machines, browsing the stacks until last call. The eyeglass frames of the middle-aged guy who manned the main-floor exit’s security checkpoint were all out of proportion to anything else on the planet; the lenses looked as big as windshields. It was in my third year that I rented a one-room apartment whose door sometimes swung reliably wide open of its own accord while I was out, and I often as not was out, because, having outlived my interest in the courses I was taking and the ones I was teaching, I’d finally started resorting to the two movie houses downtown: the Varsity on one side of the street, the Athena on the other. Both of them were pleasant enough dumps, and the tickets and the popcorn were cheap. I reported to those two theaters the same way that other people no doubt reported to a second, depleting job or to a fittingly sacrificial adultery to spare one’s spouse from another night of one’s wearisome company at home. I always took my seat with expectations of neither entertainment nor revelation. I went to matinees, evening shows, nutso midnight fare. I sat through stupid comedies eliciting stupid laughter, mainstream dramas about people with plenty enough money to have plenty enough trouble in love. I became a moviegoer of compulsive depressoid indiscrimination, content with whatever would help me squander whatever was left of my waning, central twenties, because what good was life while you were alive? But I wasn’t so much watching the screen as registering the watchiness of the enviable people enjoying themselves in pairs and threesomes peripherally all around me, and I’d want what the movies were doing for them that they weren’t ever going to be doing for me. My shoes usually got stuck to soda spilled on the floor, and afterward, on my walk to a convenience store on the way back to my apartment, every stray straw wrapper and leaf clung to my soles. One night it was a couple of light bulbs I needed. I asked the girl behind the counter if I had to buy the whole box of four or whether I could buy just two. On the way back I had to carry one light bulb in each hand because she hadn’t bothered to put them in a bag. I remember that night and that girl more than any of the hundred or so movies I’d watched in that town. She was a dolefully homely chaotical thing looking doped by sweets, and there was a general, far-spreading smell of wet lettuce about her, and flourishes of dark hair on her arms, and you can always tell when you’re seeing somebody else whose first waking thought, day after day, is “There’s too much of an age difference between me and the world.” Sometimes it helps to come face-to-face with your double like that. It helps even more if the other party will never even know it. The least you can do is flee. I left that school without finishing a second degree. The first one had been ruinous for me anyway. I typed six or seven dozen application letters and got hired for a job in my home state, one of the wide-stretching ones in the East. The job was at the end opposite the overpacked, overpatinated end where I’d grown up. It was a job for which I had no aptitude or preparation other than a ready meniality, a willingness to hit the skids, and it took up all my time and seeped even into my dreams. It was at least a couple of decades before I had anything to do with movies again.
‘I was in my late thirties by this point. I had a TV — a big lug of a thing that a friend at the time had insisted I take off his hands — and cable-TV service was included free with the rent at the place where I was living, but because I didn’t have any furniture and stuff kept piling up everywhere on the floor, it took only a month or so until the lower half of the screen was completely blocked. There didn’t seem much point in watching anything if I could see only half of it, and I didn’t feel up to clearing the clutter away, even though another friend kept calling me from another part of the state and berating me for not watching shows like Seinfeld, because he said we were living through a golden age of television. I don’t know what came over me, but one evening after work I drove to a local mall with a little cineplex and bought a ticket for The Crying Game, because I’d read some words to the effect that it was an absorbingly sad movie, and I felt that it might be time for some sadness of my own to be absorbed, if possible, and watching the movie the first time I did in fact feel that something within me was getting itself blotted up. I went back the next night and watched the movie again, and again I felt my sadness being sponged away at least a little. The next night I drove straight home after work. The night after that, I returned to the theater, but this time I brought a pocket cassette recorder and recorded the audio of the movie in full. For two or three months after that, I played the tapes in the cassette player in my car whenever I was driving somewhere, and before I knew it, I started driving a lot more than usual, which was a little odd, because I can’t stand driving. When I came to the short-streeted business districts of the dun-brown small towns that are all over the place out here, I’d roll down my driver’s-side window and turn up the volume until the speakers were fully ablast. Eventually my life resumed its usual patternings, and I’d come home after work and listen to my talk-radio shows all night long, but then in 1995 the movie Leaving Las Vegas came out, and I’d read about it in the local paper and it sounded like a movie with plenty of utility, so early one evening after work I drove straight to the cineplex and watched it. It sopped up a lot of me. I felt absolutely imbibed. I went back the next night and then the night after that. I let a few nights pass and then went back again. My handheld tape recorder had broken a few months before, and the replacement I’d bought was too bulky to sneak into a movie theater, so after the limited run of the movie came to an end, I was all on my own again, except for the music of the Smiths, which I had chanced upon, belatedly, a year or so before. The only trouble with the Smiths was that their albums were short. Then a few years went by and the century was practically shot, and as the dawn of the new one was approaching, everyone was warning that everything was going to shut down, people were building underground shelters and loading up bunkers with packets full of dehydrated Salisbury-steak dinners, but I never got around to stockpiling anything. I figured I’d take any apocalypse one day at a time. New Year’s Day came and went, nothing changed, in the conversations I overheard at work nobody seemed disappointed other than about having to get rid of all that chalky food in all those envelopes, I fell in love with an impatient, deep-brooding beanstalk of a woman with a tempest of darkmost hair and a kennel-sized apartment in a city a couple of states over, and I rode overnight buses there for protracted weekends, I got dumped, for two seasons afterward I broadcast my heartache from dusk to dawn in one America Online chat room after another, and then one day I was idling through the pages of Time Out New York and alighted upon a full-page ad for a movie called Ghost World. I’ve always been bored with anything having to do with ghosts (I have a soft spot for flying saucers, though), but the movie looked at least halfway valid. It was playing at a narrow theater on a long streetful of bookstalls and roasteries and sweet shops at the easternmost end of Pittsburgh, and I drove in for a Saturday matinee. I sat all the way at the back, in a row only a few seats wide. I believe I was the only person in there under the age of seventy. The movie started out as a dumb teen comedy, then veered readily into the blindingly dangerous dreamways of two misfits a couple of generations apart I felt that ample helpings of the two halves of myself — the smart-mouthed, bridges-burning teen girl and the geekish male loner sinking through middle age in pleated pants a little loose in the seat — had been scooped out and heaved bloodily onto the screen. I could hear other people in the audience sobbing too. I drove back to the theater the Saturday after that and then the one after that, and then the Thursday night right before the reels would get packed up and sent off. Months later, on August 6, 2002, the movie was released on VHS. That was a Tuesday. I drove to my apartment after work and led my hulking TV by the cord and out into the hallway, booted it down the stairs and out onto the parking lot, and then hefted it into the closer of the two Dumpsters. I drove to Best Buy and bought a budget-priced TV-VCR combo of modest screen inchage and the Ghost World video. I watched the movie every night for weeks. That must have been when my relationship with movies started coming of age. Now I could watch a movie on repeat, pause it, obsess over emotionally crucial moments. But not until a few years later (in the meantime I’d suddenly, improbably gotten married, and then the marriage just as suddenly, just as improbably fell through) would it one day finally dawn on me that the marathon walks I’d now been taking in Pittsburgh for a couple of decades were always the exact same walk, along the exact same route, with the exact same stops along the way, and that even though the city itself was underappreciatedly glorious (it always looked at once thrillingly fresh and lullingly predictable), it must have been the repetition itself that I found most essential and sustaining. And it was the same way with the few movies I’d find myself inclining toward, like a plant struggling toward available light. This was never more true than with Michelle Williams’s mutedly virtuosic performance of faltering grace in Wendy and Lucy, an eighty-minute lyrical tone poem of a movie I chanced upon toward the end of summer in 2009 and then watched almost every night, in states of increasingly trancelike devotion, for well over a year. (I soon accumulated almost a dozen DVDs of the movie against the day that the discs will one after another inevitably degrade.) The movie is moment by moment a complete grief-shot religion unto itself (example: from 40:58 to 43:54, Wendy’s gawkish, sad-eyed recital, to a distracted auto mechanic, of what she believes has gone wrong with the serpentine belt of her car condenses itself into a low-affect lamentation about everything that goes wrong with a life). A trinity of movies to which I also remain devout and return to with deepening constancy, as if to a shrine, are The Forest for the Trees (a low-budget German film, from 2003, about the unraveling of a self-bewildered twenty-seven-year-old woman who has uprooted herself to teach at a school in a different city); The Dreamlife of Angels (a French film, from 1998, about the brief, tumultuary friendship between two young women who meet at a sweatshop in Lille); and Blue Is the Warmest Color (another French film taking place in Lille, from 2013, remarkable for the most soul-harrowing breakup I’ve seen depicted in any medium). I guess I just eventually find my way toward the movies I most need, and then I stick by their side for life.’
Worsted by Garielle Lutz is available from SF/LD.
JUST A SHOT AWAY by Hannah Grieco
I can picture Mark’s face, the surprised V between his eyes as he watches the news. Or answers his phone at 2AM. Or opens the door to two police officers. Who knows how he first finds out?
But I know he’s shocked, absolutely floored, in full denial. This has to be a mistake, he insists. Nat would never, she barely even—
We have video footage, they tell him. We have a clip of your wife shooting a pretty blonde bank teller right in the face. And Mark says, my wife? Natalie? She couldn’t—
We have another one of her blowing up a gas station, my man. Spraying gas all over a young man’s brand-new pickup truck, the 30-day tags curling in the wet, the gun rack drip dripping, and her flicking a lit match at that truck like she didn’t care if she went up in flames, too. But don’t worry, she’s a fast little number, as you must know. She smiled at the security camera and took off in a neon green Suzuki Samurai. It was practically held together with duct tape, it was so old. That’s not your car, right? Not according to state records.
A Suzuki Samurai, Mark says, I didn’t know those were still street legal. Where did she get it?
He pauses, before asking almost hopefully: did she steal it?
No idea. We couldn’t make out the plates. But she drove off with these two other women. Hot young things, too. Has your wife ever mentioned an interest in women?
Women, Mark says, and a whole new world of possibilities opens up, as if he’s been blindfolded and now he can see. And right then Joey comes in, rubbing his own eyes. His pajama bottoms sagging in the back from his pull-up.
Mommy, he asks? Is Mommy back?
No, no, Mommy’s some kind of serial killer lesbian now, Mark says, and the words feel true, they feel good, they roll off his tongue with a buttery victimhood that settles his nerves, relaxes his tight neck and shoulders. All the arguments, the simmering shame—he knew all along the problem wasn’t him.
We’ll get you a nanny, he whispers into our son’s soft hair. Maybe Grannie and Gramps can come stay with us for a while. You’re safe, kiddo, don’t worry about Mommy.
I can picture his face, the V between his eyes smoothing out as he walks Joey back to his bedroom.
I should feel more than a slight pang at the idea of never seeing my kid again, but all I feel is relief. A luxurious, deep-lung breath that I hold for a second and then let out.
I LIKE PICKUP TRUCKS by Kayla Soyer-Stein
Here is what I am doing this summer:
1) Drinking.2) Riding around in the backs of pickup trucks.
There’s not much else to do on this island.
Tonight me and Kate think we are the drunkest we’ve ever been. We are outside the bowling alley and looking up at the sky at this one star, which is chasing us all over the place and about to fall on Kate’s head. LOOK OUT, I scream and Kate covers her face and falls all over me, knocking me down, and we both lie in the wet grass and laugh like witches.
Hey what are you doing all the way over there, Riley yells, come back over here. So me and Kate fall to our feet and trip over there where everyone else—Sadie, Adam, Benjamin, Max, and Riley—is sitting outside this little house, I don’t know whose, across from the bowling alley, drinking the beer that Adam bought because he is twenty-eight. Sadie is getting really close to him, giving him a back massage. I look over at her to see if she is having fun because she found out a few weeks ago that her father has cancer and will probably die soon. Her little sisters are living on the mainland with her mother who is working an extra job there for the summer. And her older sister Melody who is only seventeen is pregnant and living with the man who raped her two years before, only here they don’t call it rape. Don’t judge her, Sadie always says, they’re in love and besides, every girl on the island does the same things that Melody does, except Melody is the only one who gets caught.
You have to be careful what you say around Sadie because even though she hates living on this island, she gets very offended whenever anyone says anything bad about it. Like if I was the one who said that about every girl on the island doing those things, she might never speak to me again. We are practically sisters though, at least we have been every summer since we were eight and nine, when Sadie’s family moved out of the house next to ours and Sadie basically moved in with me and my mother.
They’re summer people, Sadie always explains about us, carefully pronouncing the R at the end of summer, and it’s true: we’re not really summer jerks or as islanders say summah jerks, because my family has been coming here since before most islanders were born, and our house is just a small old one walking distance from town, not one of those ones down a private road that leads to the ocean, and we don’t have boats or parties or really much of a social life, my mom just likes to come here and read and go on walks and pick blueberries and I don’t do anything unless it’s with Sadie. Still, it’s like she’s saying mentally handicapped instead of retarded.
Kate lately has been saying retarded all over the place—like that’s so retarded, or whoops! I’m retarded—and when my mom tries to get her to stop, she rolls her eyes as if we didn’t both attend the same hippie private school our whole lives until we graduated eighth grade last year and Kate went on to public school as if it were her own superior idea, as if it wasn’t just because she’d been rejected by all the private high schools she applied to. It was lucky though because at public school she learned how to drink and smoke and wear eyeliner, so I learned those things from her, and Sadie apparently was busy learning them here at the same time, so that this summer minus the eyeliner we can finally all do them together, which is such a relief and exciting, like finding out we all speak the same language.
It’s a relief especially because the last time Kate was here, three years ago, it was a problem because she and Sadie did not get along. Specifically, Sadie thought Kate was a snob, by which I think she meant show-off, because Kate rode a boys’ bike and taught us how to play Red Rose, the game of pinching each others’ forearms until they were covered in bruises, and in Truth or Dare her dares were always things like: run down to the end of the driveway naked and stand there until at least one car drives by, which she couldn’t understand why Sadie refused to do, especially since Sadie, unlike Kate, was still totally flat-chested. But the truth is that Sadie probably wouldn’t have liked any of my friends when we were that age, because I was still pretty much her only friend then, and in the summer, unless someone was visiting, she was mine.
Now that Sadie has her own life on the island, though, she and Kate seem to have reached some new understanding. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it’s like they have something in common, something that I might not have in common with either of them. For example: this morning we were riding our bikes to the quarry and right near the swamp that used to be the town ball field there was this green snake in the middle of the road. It was pretty big compared to most wild snakes I’ve seen, and instead of slithering head first the way most snakes do, it was working its way peacefully across the road sideways, like a big S rewriting and rewriting itself, so that it seemed like by the time it got to where it was going it wouldn’t even be the same snake, but a new, refreshed version. Usually I’m afraid of snakes, and I won’t even look at the ones my mom finds under the rotting boards in the yard, but for some reason I liked this one. The way it moved was so cool and strange.
Hey, I screamed to Sadie and Kate, who had both biked on ahead without noticing. HEY! DID YOU SEE THIS SNAKE?! And then, just as they stopped and put their feet on the ground and turned their heads, a car drove by right over the snake and cut it in half, and all of the different snakes it seemed to have been while it was alive disappeared back inside that one cut-in-half body, and suddenly instead of watching a snake doing its weird sideways thing, I was staring at its guts or whatever snakes have oozing out onto the pavement and feeling like I might throw up.
Don’t just stand there looking at it, Sadie yelled back at me. Jesus fucking Christ! Get out of the road! Sadie has been saying Jesus fucking Christ a lot this summer, but she used to say Jeezum, a word I have never heard used anywhere except here.
And I knew, because I know Sadie, that what she meant was don’t just stand there looking like you have nothing better to do than notice a stupid snake that got cut in half, like you’ve never seen a snake before, and like no one has anything more important to do than swerve out of the way to avoid hitting you. Looking, in other words, like a summer jerk, the kind who thinks it’s okay to bike on the wrong side of the road, who thinks she can just walk down the middle of Main Street barefoot, who expects restaurants to serve breakfast until noon on weekdays, who pronounces frappe fra-PAY and laughs and asks what the difference is between it and a milkshake.
Kate didn’t say anything but I could tell by the way she turned and put her foot back on the pedal that she was on Sadie’s side, not for the same reasons as Sadie, exactly, which she couldn’t have understood, but for some reason of her own which amounted to the same thing.
A woman in a pink shirt leans out the window of the bowling alley. If you’re drinking alcohol, shame on you!, she shouts. And if you’re underage you’re going to have to take that beer somewhere else. I can’t have you kids drinking on my property.
Can’t have you kids drinking on my property, Max repeats, except he’s not actually saying the words, just echoing the rhythm of the sentence in high-pitched woman noises.
Well, we can’t be here anymore so we all get into pickup trucks. Adam and Benjamin have them. I like pickup trucks because you can sit in the back. I am the only one who thinks to do this, everyone else scrambles into the front and flips around with the radio.
Yessss! I love this song, I hear Kate say, because she is like that, even though it’s a country station and she hates country music and I’m pretty sure she has never heard whatever song this is before in her life. She’s just saying it to impress Benjamin, Max, and/or Riley—I can hear them all talking through the little sliding window in the back of the extended cab. Adam’s truck does not have an extended cab, which is why nobody is in it with him except for Sadie.
Let’s go, I say. So then we are streaming through the night and the air is cold hitting my face and my hair is flying around crazily. I look up at the stars and I can’t even see the one that was following Kate earlier, and I want to tell her but she is sitting in front and can’t hear me, I’ve been screaming this whole time and no one can hear me OH MY GOD SLOW DOWN I’M GOING TO DIE SLOW DOWN SLOW DOWN! I think of this accident that happened a few weeks ago and of the boy in a coma in the hospital on the mainland and how something like that happens here at least once a year, and I know Benjamin is drunk and shouldn’t be driving but at the same time I think this is the most fun I’ve ever had. I think it in exactly those words, a complete, self-contained sentence, which layers itself on top of itself in my head until I stop screaming and Benjamin finally slows down because apparently we are in town, or the village as summer jerks call it, or downstreet as islanders do, all meaning Main Street, which if I had thought about it is probably where I would have guessed we were going.
I can tell you everything on Main Street with my eyes closed, not just everything that’s here now but also everything that used to be here. There’s the tiny post office where Sadie’s mom used to work, with the eagles carved out of granite from the quarries in front. There’s the hardware store where two old men used to sit on stools by the door and smoke pipes and hand out brown paper bags to any kid who came in, and each bag had an orange inside and some perfectly stale ginger snaps, and the smell and texture of the orange peel and ginger snaps and paper bag all mixed together in this way where it was like those three things were meant to be together, always. There’s the IGA which is the island’s one supermarket, and next to that, the gift shop that used to be Gibson’s, which was sort of a general store that used to sell penny candy, with all the jars lined up on shelves that were built into the walls. There’s the bank and the store that rents videos and sells T-shirts, and the new fancy restaurant that I have never been to, and the art gallery, and two real estate offices, and the Pizza Cove where we sometimes go to play pool.
The Pinching Claw, at the end of the street, is one thing that hasn’t changed yet, where me and Sadie used to get ice cream sundaes literally every day after swimming from Melody’s old friend Christine, who works there, who we all used to play with when we were little, but who has a baby now and is so fat that you can hardly tell her apart from her mother, who also works at the Pinching Claw. We stopped going there last year not because the new place that opened down by the ferry terminal was better, but because we felt awkward ordering from Christine, whose fatness not only made it hard to recognize her sometimes but also seemed to make it hard for her to recognize us, and she glared out at us through the takeout window in a dull, impersonal way, which we thought was the same way she glared at all the customers but then sometimes we were afraid it was a special glare, just for us.
Anyway, all that is lined up on one side of the street, and on the other side is the parking lot, which is probably the most beautiful parking lot in the world, or maybe the only parking lot that could ever be called beautiful. There are benches facing the harbor and you can sit on them and eat takeout from the Pinching Claw if you want to, and throw french fries to the seagulls and watch the ferries come in and out.
It’s one of those places where me and Sadie used to go but where my mother would tell us to stay away from after dark, because even she knew that, like the playground and the frog pond, it would be taken over by smoking, drinking, swearing teenagers, except now we are those teenagers and we’ve taken over not only the parking lot but also the upstairs room with the pine cone wallpaper in my mother’s house, and the front yard where we have pitched a tent which is where we prefer to sleep so that we can smoke and make noise and come and go as we please.
My mother knows we went bowling tonight but she has no idea where we are now or who we are hanging out with—she doesn’t even know who these people are. She’s probably asleep by now anyway but if she’s not and she asks us tomorrow what we did we can always tell her we ran into Matt, this boy from Boston we met at the quarry last summer who my mother likes and whose mother she knows. We can tell her we went night swimming, which is something we’ve done before with Matt. My mother used to take me and Sadie night swimming once or twice every year—she would park on the road side of the main quarry and stand shivering on the rocks with a flashlight, watching us take turns diving off the low ledge.
When we went with Matt, though, we decided to go to the other quarry, the one invisible from the road, where some granola-y summer jerks swim naked during the day and island boys sneak around in the bushes and spy on them. We’d never been there before, and we thought night would be a good time to see what it was like without having to look at a bunch of naked people or be naked ourselves. It was obviously much better than the regular quarry. You couldn’t see or hear any cars, for one thing, and the whole thing was completely surrounded by trees. The water was so still and black you could not tell it apart from the sky, and there was a high, flat rock jutting out into the middle of it which me and Sadie climbed up onto in the moonlight to undress, and when we climbed back down to dip our feet in the water Matt had already made the mistake of taking off all his clothes, and I saw his dick for a second before he noticed that we were not about to take off our bras and underwear and then he quickly pulled his shorts back up as if nothing had happened.
Benjamin turns off the radio and stops the truck just in time for me to hear Riley yell: You faggot! I’m going to beat your ass! He is just joking around with Max but still, I’m shocked to hear him talk this way because the last time I saw him he was wearing a T-shirt with my favorite band’s name on it which made me think that he was different from the other island boys, sort of an outsider, more sensitive and aware of what was going on, and I thought maybe he dreamed of getting out of here and doing something, like maybe being some kind of artist or musician, and I imagined that it was similar to the way I feel about my high school, how different and superior I feel to everyone there, all the preppy girls who listen to the same shitty music and dress the same, and how I know there is something much better in store for me. And all of this sort of made me like Riley before, I mean sort of have a crush on him, even though his hair is long and greasy and he has terrible skin, but it occurs to me now that I know nothing about him, or any of these people besides Kate and Sadie, and this scares me and makes me feel suddenly homesick, not for my mom or our house the way it is now but for how it used to be here, the things me and Sadie and Melody used to do, like play poker with penny candy on the braided rug in the living room, and how the hairs from that rug would stick to the Sour Patch Kids and Swedish Fish, and the rug itself became sticky and dandruffed with sour sugar until finally my mom rolled it up and took it to the dump. It’s stupid because those things don’t even exist anymore but I still feel like I’m betraying them somehow, like the fact that they don’t exist anymore is my fault.
I jump down from the back of the truck and everyone else climbs out of the front and we all stand around under the giant seagull statue holding brown paper bags crumpled around cans of beer. What are we doing? I ask, because we all know it’s only a matter of time before the cop shows up and we have to go somewhere else. Kate starts telling me how Riley told her about a party he knows of at someone’s house not too far from here, and that lots of people there are going to be rolling, and if we get there soon enough we can probably roll too.
Rolling? I repeat.
She looks at me like I’m mentally handicapped. You know, like, taking ecstasy?
I know what rolling means, I say. I just think it’s stupid to call it that.
Why? Riley asks, but Kate doesn’t ask why. That’s because she knows what I’m talking about, how she once told me all the words people at her new school have for smoking pot, like puff and blaze, and we agreed that we would rather never smoke again than talk that way. We never specifically discussed the term rolling since neither of us have ever done ecstasy before, but obviously it’s the same sort of thing.
Never mind, I tell Riley.
It’s not really a party, he says, just some people hanging out. Not the kind of party you girls are probably used to, anyway. But they said they have some extra pills if you want to buy some.
I look at Kate like: What kind of party does he think we’re used to? But she looks so excited, it’s like she’s been waiting her whole life for this opportunity. So I go over to consult with Sadie about it, who is still sitting with Adam in his truck. I can see their faces turned towards each other in the dark, Sadie’s long hair hiding her expression like a curtain and the smoke from her cigarette drifting out the window.
I’m sorry about your dad, I hear Adam say when I get closer, and that’s when I remember that there is stuff going on in Sadie’s life that none of us have been talking about, stuff that has nothing to do with me or Kate or the fact that it is summer but that Sadie has obviously been thinking about this whole time. I hear her say awkwardly: Thank you, just as she sees me come up to the window and then I pretend that I didn’t hear anything they just said and I start telling her about the party Riley told us about and how people are going to do ecstasy at it.
That sounds fun, Sadie says. You and Kate should go.
I give her this look, like: Really?
What, Sadie says.
I think maybe it’s the ecstasy she’s not excited about, and since I’m not even sure I want to do it myself, I say: Well, what are you guys going to do, then? Do you want to go swimming?
We’re just going to stay here a while, Adam says. It’s the first time he’s said anything to me directly, and for the first time I really get a good look at him: shaggy dirty blond hair, small blue eyes, flannel shirt. I still don’t see what makes Sadie think he’s so cute, or how it’s even possible for someone that old to be cute.
You guys should go, she says again, this time like she’s actually trying to convince me. I’ll meet up with you later. Okay?
So now we’re standing in the kitchen with a bunch of people we don’t know, eating orange popcorn and gummy worms out of giant bags while we wait for the ecstasy to kick in.
Where the hell is Sadie, anyway? someone asks, a big guy with a red face and his pants still tucked into rubber boots from the haul.
Her and Adam are having sex, I say without really thinking about it.
Holy shit, they are? says a blond girl with glasses and a tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder. She also has a black eye, but no one else seems to notice this and she is acting so normal I wonder if I could be hallucinating.
No, I say, I just made that up. But... it is a possibility.
Hmmmmmm, we all say and widen our eyes at each other, and I like this new way of talking I seem to have developed, this way of just saying whatever comes into my head. I see my reflection in the dark window over the sink and its beauty is almost obscene.
But oh my god I am so cold. My teeth are chattering.
My heart is beating really fast, I say. Is that normal? Does anyone else feel like their heart is beating really, really, really fast?
She’s rolling, the same guy with the lobster boots says, and it occurs to me that if I am rolling, there is nothing I can do about it, nothing that can make me stop rolling or roll back the other way, and that even if something is wrong and my heart is not supposed to be beating like this, there is nothing I can do now to make it stop beating like this because whatever it is has happened, it’s happening, and you can’t make things unhappen.
She’s freaking out, the guy says. He looks like he might be starting to freak out, himself. I clench my teeth hard to make them stop chattering.
No she’s not, says the girl with the black eye, she’s fine. Come with me, she says, and I follow her down a hallway and through a door into the bathroom, where it is blindingly bright and there is a mirror so shiny it makes me nervous, like at any second our wild faces could leap out and kiss us.
Close your eyes, the girl says, and give me your hand.
Our hands and arms are two icicles that melt as soon as they slide into each other and combine to form one slithery half-liquid creature that seems to have a whole life and feelings of its own.
Oh my god, I say, what are you doing, what is that?
She laughs and I open my eyes and see that she is holding a small pale green bottle of lotion in her other hand and that it is the kind that smells like cucumbers, and then I notice for the first time that our hands smell like cucumbers and I laugh too.
Are you okay now? She says.
I nod, and it’s true: I am okay, I feel great.
We go into the living room and I sit down next to Riley on the couch, I mean loveseat. Apparently I’ve forgiven him for the language he used in the parking lot. Are you rolling? I ask him.
Riley nods like a maniac and falls into my shoulder. But I thought you hated that word, he says into my ear. It sounds like I love you, the way he says it, and I’m kind of flattered but at the same time I feel like things are maybe moving too fast, and by things I don’t just mean whatever with Riley but things in general, everything.
I do hate it, I say. I just said it because I’m rolling.
On the other side of the coffee table, Kate laughs very loudly. I almost forgot she was here, but now I’m so glad to see her that I get up and move over to her side of the coffee table and sit on the couch next to her and lie down and put my head in her lap.
Kate thinks I’m funny, I announce. Kate, do you think I’m funny?
Sometimes, Kate says, looking down at me, yes.
Kate is looking very queenly and indulgent tonight, like a beautiful mother who thinks her daughter is even more beautiful than she is. I want to tell her this but I know it doesn’t make sense so instead I start telling her how happy I am that she is here, that we are both here, and how lucky we are, and how lucky it is that she and Sadie are friends this summer instead of hating each other, because I want them to like each other, because they are my two best friends and my two favorite people, and I’m so glad we’ve finally all reached this point together where it’s like we all speak the same language and it’s not just because I’m on ecstasy that I’m saying this, it’s really true, I’ve always thought it, I mean I thought it a long time ago before we took the ecstasy and nothing is going to change after it wears off.
Kate is smiling at me.
What?
You’re talking really fast, she says.
Meanwhile, Riley’s eyes are practically bugging out of his head and he’s drumming a beat on his leg with his fingers like he’s been waiting and waiting for me to finish talking so that he can say what he wants to say, which is: Let’s dance.
No, say me and Kate.
Don’t you want to dance? He says.
No, we say louder.
Come on, he says, I have so much energy, and leaps up from the loveseat and starts blasting this terrible goth music or whatever and jumping and spinning around the room tossing his hair like a crazy person. Now I’m back to not liking him. I can’t make up my mind.
Let’s get out of here, yells Kate. She grabs my hand and pulls me up off the couch and we run outside into the backyard where it is quiet, and then we go around the other side of the house to the road and we walk slowly along it, still holding hands in the dark, until we come to a hill and I realize that it’s the hill that leads up to the playground so we go up there and sit in the swings. Kate picks a normal swing, low to the ground, but I choose the one that is shaped like a horse, where you sit in the saddle and pump by pressing your feet against a metal bar in the front. This horse swing is smudgy white with a blue mane in the daylight and I’m familiar with the way it is broken, like the horse is crippled and leaning onto one of its sides, and each time I pump my feet against the bar it makes a long, shrill, whining noise that you can hear from my house, which you would also be able to see from up here if it were light out.
We should have a house here, Kate says. After college. You, me, and Sadie. We could just live like this for the rest of our lives.
You mean, like, on ecstasy?
Noooo. Just you know, like this. And we could grow blueberries in the backyard and sell them at the farmers’ market.
And blackberries, I say.
Yeah. And raspberries.
We could grow every kind of berry.
But what would we do in the winter?
In the winter we could make pies.
We’re holding hands again while we swing and we twist our fingers into a tight knot that feels like a promise, and we agree to tell Sadie about our plan when we get back to the tent. Then after a while we stop swinging and lie down in the grass, and Kate puts her head on my stomach and I play with her hair while she softly pinches my arm, over and over, and at first we keep talking about what our house will be like and how great it will be to do whatever we want in it, but then after that we’re just lying there, and that is fun too. We stay like that for what might be hours.
Then something happens. It’s like a change in the light, although the actual light hasn’t changed yet. I don’t know how else to describe it but it’s like instead of being up there on this thing where everything is beautiful and amazing and great, you’re down here again and that feeling is washing over you in waves—or else the opposite feeling, which is like a terrible sadness, is washing over you in waves, it’s hard to tell which one is washing over which. But waves, literally, you can feel them in your chest, you can practically see them rolling up in front of you, cold and salty and gray like you are at the beach, the beach here which is not flat and bright with sand like other beaches, but sharp and craggy with gray rocks covered in barnacles that cut your feet and fog so thick sometimes you can barely see the ocean, only hear it. Which is not to say the beach here isn’t beautiful because it is. It’s maybe even more beautiful, it’s just a different kind of beach.
Do you remember that snake? I say suddenly.
What snake? Kate says.
It got hit by a car.
Oh. Yeah.
The sideways one, I add, and she nods like she knows what I mean. I’m not actually sure why I just thought of that snake, and there’s nothing I want to say about it in particular, so we just sit there for a little while longer in silence. I feel like I’m swimming, like a combination of being weightless and trying hard to keep my head above the surface.
Are you sad? Kate says finally, like she is reading my mind.
Kind of, I say. No. I just feel kind of weird.
Yeah, me too, she says. Let’s go back.
When we get back to the house where everyone was before, there are just a few people left smoking quietly on the porch. The girl with the black eye is there and it obviously really is a black eye. Riley is there too, and another guy and girl I don’t recognize. The guy mutters: What’s up. Everyone else just nods when they see us.
Sadie was here looking for you, Riley says. We told her you went home.
The sun is finally starting to come up now, but the fog is out too so it’s not like we can see the whole sunrise. The light, though, while we are walking back to our tent is pale and bright and more beautiful than any light I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop staring at it, as if the light itself is something special and specific to stare at, and not just something that is everywhere shining on other things.
So what happened? Me and Kate look at Sadie expectantly. She settles into her sleeping bag and fusses with the pillow. What happened?
What do you think happened?
Everyone thought you and Adam were fucking, Kate says. We laugh a little.
Right, Sadie says and closes her eyes. There is silence for a moment as we try to decide if she is telling the truth.
Really?
Yeah.
We digest this quietly. That’s weird, I say finally. Was it... fun?
Yeah, Sadie says, oh my god I am so tired.
I’m pretty sure I won’t sleep for the rest of my life, and I think of all the things I should ask Sadie, like did it hurt and is she going to see Adam again? But I can tell that Sadie is removed from us now, defensively wrapped in her sleeping bag. Me and Kate will go back to the city and our separate schools, and next year instead of coming here for the whole summer I’ll go to Spain with my dad and Sadie’s dad will be dead, and this night is something we will never speak of again.
What I finally ask is: Did you do it in the truck?
No, says Sadie, we went into a house. I can’t talk anymore, she says, I really need to get some sleep. And she closes her eyes and lies very still in her sleeping bag, but she’s still awake. I can tell by her face.
JANICE LEE in conversation with VI KHI NAO
VI KHI NAO: I read the first half of your Imagine A Death during a flight into San Francisco. I am currently in Boulder—where I think the landscape ofthe high elevation may have altered my relationship with your work in the second half. Many of your sentences are long - like Bela Tarr long - and they require strong lung capacity to fully experience, inhale the depth and intensity of your gaze.
Being near this mountain, I feel I could acclimate to your long, gorgeous, beautiful sentences that open one world into another world into another world.
Has this long form (the long sentence) been a constant companion in your writing life—the one that you take long walks, long meandering with, the one whom you desire to stay faithful to or is it a decade obsession with an endpoint?JANICE LEE: First, I’m grateful for your use of the word “acclimate” here. In thinking about landscapes, which are really important to me, I’m really thinking about climate. And climate not just in terms of the weather, but in terms of everything that is and has been and will be, everything that constitutes the space and the world, everything that unites us. So for me, the sentences are an extension of that kind of immersion in the world, in the entanglement of space. There isn’t just a body in a space, this rigid category between background and foreground, or external and internal, but where does the climate end and the body begin? I’ve always loved slowness and long takes. Bela Tarr, yes. I read Pasolini’s essay “Observations on the Long Take” in college and it changed the way I watched films and saw the world. But the long sentence as a form for me. I haven’t always written this way, no. I’ve definitely had long sentences here and there, but for a while, I was drawn to fragments. Long sentences, like fragments, are still an extension of expressing what can’t be articulated or encompassed in traditional sentence structures. What I love about long sentences is the ability to get lost, and I think this is important. The opportunity to get lost once in a while.
VKN: Do you think pain—in the tradition of length—is a type of slowness? When I study your sentences—your long sentences—& I go through this metaexperience (this slow, extended moment) where at the beginning I am an innocent, possibly naive person, and by the end of your sentence, I feel I have lived five cat lives. I am old and senescent—maybe in the way you have depicted the senescence of the tomato—Do you think long sentences like a camera with the widest lens possible—in either film or photography—are more technically capable of capturing pain—psychological or physical—better? Or do you think the fragments are equally or even more capable of capturing?
JL: That’s such an interesting question! Maybe pain, rather than a type of slowness, is a type of presence. I think about how trauma reconstitutes and reasserts itself in the present constantly, and how the present moment might be tethered to a moment in the past, or, become capable of expanding outwards. I think too about the difference between pain and suffering, at least from a Buddhist point of view. How do we let the pain in, how do we let it manifest? How can we acknowledge pain but not allow ourselves to become attached to it? I think that long sentences do capture a wider lens, the roving camera, so to speak, but it’s about the meandering, the letting go of a defined and linear trajectory, the reminder that no matter the length and windiness of the path, one can still arrive home. The long sentence also can encompass changing vantage points, the multiplicity within a single gaze, or multiple gazes that can exist simultaneously. Any departure from the standard sentence, whether it’s moving into the territory of unending sentences, or fragmentation, I think is about reaching towards a kind of articulation that doesn’t yet exist.
VKN: Do you think trauma can operate in the antipodes—delay the presence? A little. Or a lot. When I read the way you captured “trauma” in your work—I felt like a car going through a car wash. You are drawn to slowness and to length—n order to create and write Imagine A Death—did the interiority of your consciousness have to mimic your form? Or can you lead a fast and furious life and still produce work the opposite of your project’s vision?
JL: Ok, so I laughed out loud because The Fast and the Furious is one of my favorite film franchises. I’m interested in all the different kinds of inhabitation. I love being immersed, living in, sleeping in, dozing off in worlds like the films of Bela Tarr or Tsai Ming-Liang. I love to be reminded to slow down, to not treat time like a commodity. But I’m also a product of the ’90s and capitalism and action films and chaos cinema and I love the adrenaline rush that occurs inside the safety net of an action film like The Fast and the Furious where somehow, after all of the explosions, it’s still about family and returning home. But yes, trauma messes with time. It can delay, expand, protract, contract, blur, instigate. It’s a reminder that time isn’t linear or constant. I was thinking about what the long take does for me as a viewer, and how I experience the long sentences of Laszlo Krasznahorkai, but while writing, I also didn’t feel like I had a choice. It was as if the writing was almost channeled through me and poured out. The sentences didn’t want to end, couldn’t end, yet.
VKN: Yes, I read that in an interview of yours. Where Satantango and Fast and Furious co-exist in you—you quoted from Ufologist Jacques Vallee: “Mathematical theory often has to confront the fact that two contradictory theories can explain the same data. A solution is inevitably found not by choosing one of the contradictory theories, but by going to the next, third level.” Do you think Imagine A Death is your ontological or mathematical attempt at going to the third level? You were a pre-med major before pursuing biology and writing—had you continued in the medical life—do you think that Imagine A Death is a slow, frame by frame capture of you being a neurosurgeon placing trauma on the operating table, dissecting it second by second? Or is Imagine A Death a type of slow film or photograph in which you develop in the dark room of your imagination?
JL: In some ways Imagine a Death is a gesture of anti-colonialist sentimentality, in its narrative form and through the grammatical resistance of the long sentences, but it’s also about resisting colonial notions of the apocalypse and finality and redemption. This book felt like such a spiritual undertaking. In terms of the analogy with the medical life, Kerotakis and Daughter feel more like the neurosurgeon with a knife performing surgery. And Imagine a Death is more like the accidental but also utterly intentional slow film that was created because I left my camera on in my back pocket, or like those accidental iPhone pictures that capture more than you intend.
VKN: I mentioned pain in your work in relationship to the long sentences because of your compassionate, thorough, expansive consideration and contemplation in regards to apocalyptic suicide (your depiction of the suicidal pigeons) and apocalyptic rape (the pregnant goat that was gang-raped and eventually died). In your long sentences, you slowed down these moments—not just the moment where the writer was abused & revisiting that abuse (re-seeing a moment through a different, more acute lens, or replacing the camera/lens of that gaze with a broader, meta-lens,) and you process that grief (the loss of comprehension for inhumanity and brutality) for the readers. Do you think you can lend compassion to another who is lacking in compassion? Can writing/art/literature alter the empathic vernacular of a psychopath/an abusive person?
JL: Pain is a part of life, right, but how do we decide to exist in the world and in relation to other people despite or because of our pain? How do we desire to be free and imagine a kind of freedom beyond the causes and conditions of what currently bind us? The entanglement of grief and trauma and abuse and how our wounds shape our pasts and our futures—it’s all so complicated and difficult to look at, because it involves us having to look at the ways in which we have been complicit or complacent to or have perpetuated pain in the world, in response to the ways in which we have been harmed, or in the name of survival. Both of those incidents with the animals, and others in the book, I hated having to write them, but they are part of this world, and most importantly, they are part of us. When you ask about lending compassion to another, even if they’re lacking in compassion, I think the difficult answer is yes. We have to. We have to lend compassion to others (which, to clarify, isn’t the same as justification), and, we have to lend compassion for ourselves, which often is harder.
VKN: What are some of the challenges you face in writing a book of such a sophisticated caliber, Janice? And, were you able to resolve some of those challenges? Or are they life-long sorrows that you must revisit frequently by inducting a new birth/book into the world?
JL: Thanks for saying that, Vi. There are the constant challenges around articulation and the limitations of the structures in narrative and language. This book is especially important for me because it really does feel like it took a lifetime to write, the entirety of my being. I had to be open enough to be able to face all of my own demons in this way, and I had to write all of my other previous books to be able to understand myself in relation to language the way I do now. But it’s all ongoing. I feel very drained, but also relieved, after this book. It may be a while before I write another novel. There is some more breathing to do first.
VKN: What are some of your demons?
JL: My own fears and expectations around success, my doubts and grievances around what it means to be a writer, my feelings of inadequacy and self-worth, my processing of childhood wounds and relationship to my parents, the abusive relationships I’ve been in and my own unconscious complicity in perpetuating toxicity or harm, my own struggles with depression and suicidal impulses.
VKN: What is your definition of success? Also, there are 46 chapters in your Imagine A Death—do you have a favorite chapter? One you return to frequently because it captured something you were unable to capture for so long? One of my favorite moments (Chapter 20) is about a framed photograph dropped in a dumpster “miraculously” finding itself re-hung again in the same spot on the wall. There was something very tender and meta about this moment. How often we discard things because we believe others don’t value them or care as much as we do—but we are often wrong. People do care. I often think about sentences you have written—ones which you may cut down or deleted completely—and how another person may find tremendous value in their existence. Are there sentences you have erased that you feel deep sorrow for? Which sentences of yours should we re-hang? Also, how long does it take for you to write one of those long sentences? Ten minutes? An hour? How does the passage of time operate in the production part of your writing?
JL: I want to think of success, not as being about achievement or merit or legitimacy, but about desire and attempt and expression and existence. Rather than being tied to notions of good or bad, and rather than being seen in opposition to failure, why can’t success just be, not as a point of comparison or power over someone/something? Can’t failure be a kind of success? Can’t learning from a mistake be a kind of success? Can’t success be a gesture of reaching without turning into grasping, without becoming an attachment or way to measure us against each other?
I love that with the photograph moment as well, and it’s actually an example of a way that the novel started to influence the real world. That photograph is based on a real image (in real life, it’s a painting that my sister created when we were very young). She hates the painting but we had kept it because our mom loved it so much. The night after I wrote that scene in my manuscript, the actual painting fell off the wall and crashed onto the floor. It happened in the middle of the night; no one was around. We were all asleep and were awoken by the sound of breaking glass.
I don’t know if I have a favorite chapter in the book. Right now, I’m quite fond of “The Dream,” where everyone is burning alive, because it says something about death and intimacy for me.
I’ve deleted countless sentences, but I can’t remember them now. They will manifest again, I’m sure, in some other reincarnated form.
In writing this book, some of the sentences came out very quickly, over maybe 20-30 minutes, and some took more time, hours, or several writing sessions. I only listened to Russian Circles while writing this book, so something about the tension and momentum of that music helped me with rhythm, and helped me keep going.
VKN: A lot of your work that has arrived in this world exists in the capacity of fiction, though you also have a book of essays, a poetry book, etc. You operate on so many different levels—aesthetical strata—from being a graphic designer, professor, editor—how do you desire others to view or is it even possible to categorize your Imagine A Death? Is it experimental documentarism? Autofiction dressed like a bouquet of suicidal pigeons? If such a thing were to exist, what is an ideal way to pigeonhole you?
JL: As I’ve learned to articulate better, especially after hearing/reading writers like Renee Gladman and Matthew Salesses, the category or genre as a construct is important in terms of the expectations it creates, or dismisses, subverts, haunts, resists. And I am operating within certain expectations, but I also want to draw attention to the inadequacy or limitations of those expectations. In that vein, I do very much think of this as a “novel,” but one that hopefully expands on what a novel is “supposed” to be or look like. I love “autofiction dressed like a bouquet of suicidal pigeons,” though I don’t think Amazon accepts that as a genre category ☺
VKN: Also, what Korean film (to watch) and Korean dish—an appetizer perhaps or a gallimaufry of dishes—should be paired with your Imagine A Death? I love when wine is properly paired with food. And, I think of film as a type of wine.
JL: Oh my, such a difficult question because it’s so hard to choose. Okay. The Korean film would be Poetry directed by Lee Chang Dong.
And the Korean dish is one that I haven’t had yet before, but it’s appeared to me in my dreams and my ancestors are insisting that I need to eat it: Gwamaegi, which is a certain kind of dried fish.
VKN: Thank you for this beautiful pairing! I love dried fish and will have to try Gwamaegi when I re-read your book again with Poetry playing in the background. Many writers of Asian persuasion feel compelled to include Asian words or popular phrases or sentences or fragments or Asian language scripts in their work. Your Imagine A Death is mostly devoid of these ethnic gestures. I often feel that experimental writing allows one to be a devoted citizen of the weird, where experimentalism is a type of universal ethnicity. Do you feel at home in experimental writing? Where the textuality and materiality of the experience dominate the narrative mainframe of the literary?
JL: Such a good question. So at least in this book, I didn’t want the identities of characters to be specified. So I avoid those kinds of identity markers. But in terms of thinking of experimental writing more broadly, my relationship to it has changed throughout my life. In my earlier work, especially after my MFA, I was very drawn to “experimental writing” as a space to resist conventional forms and the canon, as a site for resistance and transgression. This also coincided with my politics at the time, which was much more about disruption and dismantling. At this particular point though, I’m thinking about things a little bit differently. It’s not just about resisting the dominant paradigm, because this then just re-centers the dominant narrative over and over again. Instead, I want to think about this as another worldview that is equally valid, another way to see and be in the world. So how might stories and sentences not only resist formal conventions, but also work against the myth of resolution and redemption, open up our biases around narrative and plot and character? How are our beliefs and assumptions around narrative structures and language related to our fears and beliefs about the state or ongoing future of the world?
VKN: Intimacy & vulnerability seem to be compelling materials for your work. What is the most intimate thing you have experienced lately, and how has it changed you as a writer?
JL: Okay, I was trying to think of something more sophisticated, but what’s popping into my head and is probably my most honest answer is doing psilocybin mushrooms with my boyfriend for the first time, when we literally melted into each other and became an amorphous blob. Doing mushrooms has also been a major portal for me, especially after the recent deaths of my dad and my dog Maggie, and has allowed me to speak with my ancestors and the dead, and the entire living world around me.
VKN: I am sorry to hear of your losses. Were you close to your dad? How han is your Imagine A Death? And, can you talk about your own visibility in the writing world? Outside of cinema and the camera lens, do you feel visible? If you have experienced a range of invisibility and now you are in the realm of visibility, what is an antidote to invisibility (in relation to politics and patriarchism?)
JL: Thank you so much, Vi. We were close in some ways, and so distant in others. He was living with me though, and he died at home in hospice. But the han, yes so much han, for sure. Probably in everything I write. There’s a point in the book where han is basically defined but not labeled as such. Also, your question about visibility is so important right, and so complex. As an Asian woman, how I’m perceived isn’t always up to me, but it affects how I’m seen, treated, valued, read. There is a kind of hyper-visibility or pre-judgment that erases much of who I really am, which isn’t as easy as just being invisible, and my own awareness or fears about how I’m perceived changes the way I operate in certain spaces. This is something I’m constantly struggling with, not being so attached to my identity or having to be seen in a certain way, letting go of aspects that I can’t control, and to try and just participate in more genuine encounters.
VKN: What is an example of a genuine encounter for you, Janice?
JL: Well, today I had a long and prolonged moment of eye contact with a squirrel who was eating the cucumbers in my garden.
VKN: That is so beautiful! In two days, your book enters the world! How will you celebrate its birth? I don’t want to hurt your other books’ feelings, but is Imagine A Death—is it a favorite of yours?
JL: It’s definitely the book that feels like it required all of my other books to write. So maybe not “favorite,” but for me personally, it does feel like the most significant. On Wednesday, I hope to eat something delicious (I don’t know what yet), have some kind of small ceremony around gratitude, abundance, and letting go, and will probably walk to the 7-11 to buy some scratchers!
VKN: One of my favorite Korean idioms is this idiom: 눈코 뜰 새 없다 (nun-ko tteul seh eupt-da)—“I don’t have time to open my eyes and nose.” What don’t you have time for? And, do you have a favorite Korean mantra/phrase/axiom? If you were to invent a Korean idiom, what would you invent? Also, this is non-sequitur, but one of my favorite long sentences of yours is: “and also she had come to see the sentence itself as a colonialist structure, and thought that perhaps these long sentences might be something she could give the reader, something they didn’t need but would receive anyways, like a gift, like listening, or something like it, and even in all of that gesturing towards a productive contemplation that might finally lead away from the past, she wondered if it was too late for her, if in fact because of everything she had already done, everyone she had already hurt, was it perhaps too late for us all?”
JL: Ha! That is a good one! I love the curtness of that idiom, how relevant it is, but it also reminds me of how we don’t have time for each other, for ourselves. I want to have more time for everything, especially for opening my eyes and nose. A phrase that’s always fascinated me because of how ridiculous it sounds is 파이팅! (pronounced “Pa-i-ting!”) which is derived from the English word “Fighting!” It’s like a cheer or term to encourage people, and the strange grammatical incongruence is so funny to me. A new one I just learned about yesterday thanks to @fluentkorean’s Instagram is this: 방귀가 잦으면 똥이 나온다 / “If farting becomes frequent, then the need to poop is imminent.”
THE CROW CAME ONE MORNING AND WHAT’S LEFT TO WONDER? by Derek Maine
He takes his shoes off by the door. A solemn peek in the hotel mirror suggests pleated pants, starched shirt, taut tie, he’s running out of matching letters to describe his appearance which is always, and only, just that. To himself he appears as an apparition. Do others see him, he wonders often. The meetings today went well. He sold himself. Passed himself off as one of them. Someone they could trust. Someone they could have a beer with. At a baseball game. A hot dog too. He is not that someone. He hasn’t had a beer in some very long time. A hot dog would upset his stomach, surely. He calls his home. No one answers. Everything is being created or dying and he obsesses over which. The crow circled above his house this morning, before he left for his work trip, and that is another thing he has been considering. He steps forward toward the television then steps back. The room looks like all the other rooms. Describing it would kill it, surely. Has he used surely twice? He has. He wishes he hadn’t but it’s too late to change it, he sighs. Someone else is in the room, came in with him. It’s him the other way. There are always two, wherever he goes. He is an unwilling participant in an argument for argument’s sake which has raged on within him for 39 years. Whenever he picks up a new trick, or learns a new phrase, the other way does too. It bores him. He wishes there was another way, but he only contains enough energy to wish. He seeks nothing, he has done no serious investigation. He avoids the television, walking further into the room, not wanting to stir up an anger. He pulls the curtain to reveal a view of the highway. What a stupid way to live, he says to no one. The phone rings. He picks it up and says something like, “hello.” It is not 1979, in case you were wondering. It is a year, but not that one. His wife is on the other end of the line. He can hear his children screaming in the background. They love him. They miss him. They say goodbye and he hangs up the phone. He wonders who they love. He considers who they miss. It is not him. It is their projection of him. He is too many things at once to miss. He is too many things at once to love, he thinks. He is listless, the other way suggests he could be lifeless, if he’d like. He doesn’t want to be listless or lifeless. His co-pay is too rich for any other state of being. He distrusts professionals of all varieties, preferring amateurs or, better yet, people and things to happen with no explanation whatsoever. Plus, what books have the therapists read? It only ever shows you, on the websites, which insurance they accept. It never digs into their relationship to literature, being the only thing that matters to him. Since he mentioned websites, he can delete the part about it not being 1979. He doesn’t want to. It is a nod to an earlier work. He is conscious of building an oeuvre, even if he still has to look up the word every time to spell it correctly. It’s the “e” after the “o” that always trips him up. His wife sends him a text. She is privy to his rhythms. Suggests he use the hotel treadmill to stave off the thing that doesn’t have to come. He’s missing cigarettes. He’s not missing beer, but he’s always missing cigarettes. He does not want to exercise. He does not know what, or how, to be. It disheartens him. It unsettles him. He will do nothing to improve his prospects of knowing, or being, or being any other way. It is the only way he knows. He is not going to leave the hotel room. He is not going to change clothes or shower or turn on the television or open his computer to write or go outside for a walk or eat any food or think about anything other than how he is feeling, which is an absence, and occurs to him to be the only thing happening in the entire world at the moment. He masturbates when it is time to masturbate. He takes a Tylenol PM when it is time to take a Tylenol PM. He lay on top of the sheets, naked, unable to sleep. He takes a second Tylenol PM when it is time to take a second Tylenol PM. The couple next door is having sex. Or the person next door is watching pornography, whatever the case may be. His wife is jealous of his work trips, his time away from home, his peace away from the kids. But she does not have to be him, he thinks. He does, he’s sure of it. He is in pain at how brief life is. And how poor of a showing he’s made thus far. His oeuvre is weak and wildly inconsistent. He would like to be different, but he does not know how. He wonders what he would write about if he could write anything at all, writing being all he’d like to do, though he’s never examined why, and he’s terribly aware that if he were to, he might find something else to dislike about himself, and so he does nothing. He tries to conjure an image but comes away, as usual, with nothing but formlessness. He is unable to imagine a red dot. Or tap into any visual. It is all, instead, a constant flow of language. He has a business degree and a loneliness he’s immediately thrust onto everyone he’s ever been intimate with, and an immediate regret. He’s lost the plot, control of the narrative, not a natural editor, too fat around the belly, bags under the eyes – the Tylenol PM never works, wondering what the crow wants with him, if anything, probably nothing, he’s made babies and has a life insurance policy and isn’t sure there’s much else left for him to do. He pulls into his driveway. It is the next day now, if that makes any kind of difference. His wife kisses him softly on the lips, she’s headed out to a yoga class. The kids are out playing with friends. He takes his shoes off by the door. A solemn peek in the bedroom mirror suggests pleated pants, starched shirt, taut tie, he’s running out of matching letters to describe his appearance which is always, and only, just that. To himself he appears as an apparition. Do others see him, he wonders often.
COLLEGIATE GOTHIC by Daniel Felsenthal
Summer
I met Miles on move-in day after my advising troop finished doing icebreakers and trust falls. Actually, I met his dad first.
“Herman Kahn,” said a man wearing a fleece embroidered with the mascot of our university on the breast, and beneath it, the words Class of ‘72. He extended his hand as though he were a freshman himself, but looked at his son, and their dance gave the impression of a family whose dynamics were more important than people outside of the family.
“Miles! Care enough about someone other than yourself to meet your neighbor?”
“I told you not to wear that stupid fleece, Dad. You’re embarrassing me.” Miles’ eyes hardly passed over mine, “Hi,” and then he turned back to Herman, “Please leave before I never talk to you again.”
My parents would disown me if I acted so rude, but Herman obeyed.
“Wanna go to a party?” Miles asked.
He learned from his older sister, also an alumnus of our university, that freshmen usually go out in large, aimless-seeming packs, so we should assemble a group.
“A group of girls,” he clarified. “More than one penis in a room is practically a gay club around here.”
Unlike Herman, Miles wore a yarmulke. I thought religiosity got squeezed out with each generation by America, sex, capitalism, and the same festering animosity that led Miles and his dad to scream at one another. Or at least this was the case in my family. The children of churchgoers mostly seemed to stop believing in God around the same time we stopped believing in Santa Claus. Still, we maintained a basic respect for our parents’ authority. Miles, on the other hand, became a religious Jew after his parents split up, when he got close to a youth group leader at his temple, and he despised his dad, blamed him for divorcing his mom and messing up his childhood, which was a doubly fraught perspective since he’d come to Herman’s alma mater.
“I was shut out of the other Ivies,” Miles explained to me.
I was accepted by a few, but went here because it was the only school that offered me enough financial aid.
Maybe Miles’ family legacy accounted for his self-confidence. He acted like a bro with other guys, but surprisingly, charmed the finer sex. Enough girls jammed into his room that a few people had to stand on his bed while we passed around a fifth of Belvedere his mom gave him as a present for being salutatorian of his high school class. Everyone smiled and wanted to be liked by everyone else, and people who would never have spoken to me in high school were so friendly that it felt as though going to the same school were a bigger commonality than being of the same race, or faith, or having the same amount of money.
“Miles acts this way because he is Jewish,” my mom would tell me, if she and my dad were here. But they left that morning, so I pushed her prejudices out of my brain.
Walking to the frats, we passed around an Ocean Spray bottle of orange juice we spiked with the rest of the liquor. Miles led us up the steps and past the scratched, peeling columns of the mansion where the brothers of Rho Beta Rho lived and drank. One yelled, “If you have less than four girls for every guy, you’re not going to get into our party.”
“That’s insane,” Alicia told the bouncer, a bearded sophomore.
Luckily, we got in before she vomited and Sarah took her home.
The brothers invited us upstairs to smoke a joint, probably because they were trying to woo Miles. It was the second time I’d gotten high in my life, an opportunity that never arose until last summer.
My roommate, Rizwan, came and went all the next morning, chatting on the phone in Arabic, but apologized for waking me. The only furniture he brought was the rug he lay between his desk and bed. He wanted to hang out with Miles and me, and Miles was polite, yet cool—and sort of unfriendly.
The two of us got drunk on a few bottles of Petite Sirah he stole from his stepdad, who had a beach house in the Hamptons with a wine cellar. At a party thrown by Tau Tau Tau, we danced on every girl not surrounded by a protective shield of friends. Someone wearing a shot glass as a necklace kissed me, and when she backed my body across the dance floor and into a wood panel beneath the stuffed head of a moose, I slipped my hand under her waistband. She was wet, and pawed at my erection through my pants, but then she pulled away and would not dance with me anymore.
I met Anna Merriweather at the campus cantina, where I picked up a meat lover’s slice to sop up the liquor. While we dawdled back to the quad, I told her about Miles.
“I’m not sure why he wants to be friends with me,” I said. “Because he seems to be kind of racist. But everyone makes jokes about people’s race and stuff here. I guess it’s OK now that we have a black president.”
“It’s like that back in England, too,” she said skeptically. “Everyone going on about being English instead of being British, being Egyptian instead of being English, being Irish instead of being British.”
I was shocked she liked me. After we kissed for a couple of minutes, Anna pulled away. “Oh my God, I’m pissed.”
She wanted to come back to my room, though, where we kissed some more, my hand underneath her bra for so long that my hand went numb. Rizwan opened the door, closed it again.
“Sorry!”
Later, I went to the bathroom and rested my head against the partition until I threw up.
Fall
I got into college because of my art portfolio, which I thought was pretty good, and my high school teachers and college counselors and obviously some of the admissions people thought it was very good. Still, I was studying Economics, because my parents insisted I take practical classes. Most of them were three-hundred-person lectures, in amphitheaters, with professors who lectured from slides. My only seminar, Craft of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, fulfilled a distribution requirement. Our first day, we went in a circle and introduced ourselves by saying a little about our interests in the world of art history. I said that I liked Vincent van Gogh.
“We won’t be studying Impressionism,” Dr. Villani said. She smiled at the rest of the students while they laughed.
“I know that,” I said, feeling my face redden.
My work study job was at the DVD rental library, and Miles sometimes did his homework with me behind the desk. There were two posters hanging there, one from Pulp Fiction and the same Shepard Fairey portrait of Obama I tacked to my wall when he got the nomination a couple of years ago. We ate at the Hillel dining hall after, where the food was kosher and relatively good, and Miles told me about his ex-girlfriend. She had split him into two people, one who stayed at home in a perennial act of lovemaking—he had burning, halcyon memories of crossing Central Park at night after their parents went to bed—and another who left Manhattan for his freshman year of college. Only her father was Jewish, Miles explained to me. That was one problem. But the reason they broke up before he arrived on campus and she left for Wash U. was because they decided that college was a time to meet new people, to grow and change. He and she got coffee together over fall break, and after crying, in a turn I did not expect, they had sex.
“But what about her mom’s religion?” I almost asked.
“I’ve felt even worse since then.”
He set a care package from his mom in the lounge mini-fridge.
“Why?”
“Because now I’m more confused than I’ve ever been,” he shrugged. “I’ll probably just call Herman later.”
“Don’t you reject him and all that he represents?”
“Of course I do. Did I tell you he’s engaged again? To a twenty-eight year old. He promised my sister that he wouldn’t. But she proposed last week.”
Every several days, I met up with Anna. Sober, she seemed as unsure about making a move as I was. We spent a lot of time sitting on her bed, holding hands, and sometimes we just got together and talked, or made out a little bit before or after we studied. Other times, we ate and I listened while she complained about her classes.
Anna and Miles liked to tease each other. She made fun of the books on his shelf, his love of Ernest Hemingway. He goaded her for being British.
“English,” she corrected him.
Her laugh was so loud that people knocked on the door and asked us to quiet down, and other times because Miles blasted music through his speakers. Around midnight, he kicked us out to give his girlfriend a goodnight call.
Our whole hall welcomed her with open arms when she stayed over for a long weekend. Everyone thought she and Miles were so cute, bringing a sunny, adult feeling to our dorm. She was morose, though, and I knew their relationship was not going to work out. She frowned a lot, stood with her arms crossed. Miles took her to dinner at restaurants downtown, stores, and an a-cappella show. She hardly looked at me, as though she had no idea that I was his best friend. They spent a lot of time on the couch in the common area beneath a blanket, her head on his chest while they watched Glee on his computer.
Our hallmate, Krista, pulled back the corner of a lump of foil to show me a dollop of red and blue frosting.
“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Can I have some?”
“I baked this cake for Miles, because he’s sad that his girlfriend left. We were all going to get dinner in the dining hall later. Then we’ll eat the cake after.”
“I have plans with Anna.”
“Who’s Anna?”
“You know, the British girl who hangs around here sometimes.”
“Oh, her,” said Krista. “She seems full of herself. Miles is your best friend.” She touched my arm and her eyes widened. “He needs you.”
“What’s this I hear,” cried Shaad from down the hall. “You’re skipping out on hall dinner?”
A chorus of people echoed them—Chris, Pritam, Bonnie, Jessica. “Hall dinner,” they said.
Everyone went, besides Rizwan. He never hung out with us. It started in the beginning of the year when we partied at the frats. They rejected him at the door, along with a bunch of other guys. Too many sausages. Not enough women. And then, weirdly, he rejected them. Greek organizations hated personal freedom, he pontificated one morning, yet still they were such an American tradition. In the ponderous, pompous way he communicated everything, he pointed out how people in the U.S. secretly loved to give up their individuality to the collective. Then, they covered their tracks by claiming that individual rights mattered to them. The rest of us silently disengaged.
“Was there a hall dinner tonight?” he asked in our room. A book was open on his desk.
“Just one for Kahn, because his girlfriend went back to her own school. We tried to find you, but you weren’t around,” I lied, and adopted a friendlier tone while Rizwan glanced at his phone. “You get up to anything wild, dude?”
“I went to Lush downtown with Suhel.”
“But you don’t drink.”
“No.”
Rizwan was always going to clubs with his Saudi friends. I didn’t really know what sober people did at clubs. I would probably never go to a bar until I was a senior because I couldn’t afford a fake ID, unless I stopped buying weed and never ate out again. Anyway, Rizwan was from a rich family.
The rest of his time was a mystery to me, although I imagine that he spent it studying, since he read constantly and was apparently really smart, at least according to Anna, who was in his Kierkegaard class. Usually, when I got back from hanging with her or Miles, Rizwan was asleep, sideways across the bed with his computer next to him or a book on his chest, a neon paper wristband on his hand. Around seven in the morning, he descended to the dining hall for breakfast, and returned to our room by eight, where he prayed in a whisper so quiet that it seldom woke me. All morning, he worked at his desk. I usually opened my eyes a few times, and peering from the protection of my covers to see Rizwan hunched over his papers, I knew that I could get several more hours of rest before my first class began at ten.
“Anna told me that the bouncers at Lush harass the underaged girls they let in.”
“Well,” he reasoned, “if they’re going to be doing illegal things, they can’t expect to be protected by the law.”
“You’re doing an illegal thing. The drinking age is twenty-one in this country.”
“The owner is Saudi. He’s the one breaking the law.”
“Don’t be a misogynist.”
Rizwan stared at me. I packed my pipe with weed and set up a fan by the window because he fussed about the smell. The book on his desk had a Latin title. In the beginning of the year, he planned to be a Physics major, but then he began double-majoring in Philosophy, announcing this development to our hall with great enthusiasm, as though we should care about a bunch of dead Germans.
I slid into bed. He asked, “Have you ever read any Ludwig Wittgenstein or Bertrand Russell?”
“No.”
“You haven’t?”
I shook my head. “What does Ludwig do, build pianos?”
Rizwan laughed. “He’s an Austrian philosopher. There are many homosexuals in Europe and America, aren’t there?”
“No more than there are anywhere else.”
“I don’t think homosexuality is immoral.”
“Thanks for sharing, Rizwan.”
“My professor told us that Wittgenstein and Russell are gay so easily it was like he was telling us they were roommates.”
“If I had a gay roommate,” I said. “I would have to put a rat trap in front of my butthole every night.”
Rizwan jolted, as though what I said was disturbing.
“It was a joke,” I explained.
“Do you like it here? I hate it here. I’ve had a cold since I arrived in this city.”
“Ew,” I said. “Stay on your side of the room. And for God’s sake, cover your mouth when you sneeze.”
I switched off the clip lamp on my bed frame.
“I want to go to California. Have you ever been? The weather here is so bad. I feel it’s contributing to my depression.”
I slapped my hand across my eyes. “Would you turn that down?”
Rizwan shut his light off and put on this stupid headlamp he had, which made it seem as though a worm was growing from his skull. When I suggested that he hang something on his side of the room, just to brighten things up and help me avoid my own sadness, he showed me a poster he found on the internet of Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. The famous men floated in an asteroid belt, staring at the cosmos.
“They are unintimidated by the concerns of other people,” he said. “But I will never be that way.”
Winter
Anna and I had sex for the first time just when we got back from Christmas Break. After so much anxiety about losing my virginity, it was gone in an instant, but the second time, I was just as frightened as I had been the first. She blew me while I lay on my back and stared up at the picture of Audrey Hepburn that her roommate Victoire hung over her desk. Anna never told me that she wanted me to reciprocate. Putting the condom on, I felt like I was dialing a stranger on the phone, listening to it ring before the person on the other end picks up. Then she dozed off, and I felt both restless and like I was getting sick. I texted her after creeping out of her room in the middle of the night.
“At the very least, you could have bloody woken me,” she replied.
My cold mounted the day after she broke up with me, only to dissolve into a dry hack I wanted to lose. It was Spring Rush, and frat row crawled with freshmen, trampling each other to impress the brothers and sisters. In my seminar, Dr. Villani stopped lecturing to pass me a box of tissues, but when she handed back our term papers, I felt the familiar flutter of getting good grades. You communicate your ideas so clearly, she wrote in the margins, dotting my word choices with three plus marks. She called me over once class was done and asked about my health.
“When I first went away to school, I had a cough that lasted two years.”
“I’m drinking ginger tea.”
“Eat Vitamin C,” she advised.
Art, a biology major from PR, and a few other brothers from Rho Beta Rho came to my dorm with a fancy, embossed envelope. I knew I had a chance there. One drunken night, a sophomore let slip that the fraternity’s charter required them to recruit members for diversity, plus Art, whose real name was Arturo, liked me. The Caucasian brothers flanking him carried a bid for Miles, who had not been to the fraternity all semester.
“He was our top choice. Do you know where he is?”
“He’s always at Hillel now.”
“Shit,” said one brother. “They got him.”
“What?”
“I had a Bar Mitzvah just like everyone, but the Hassids, they're a cult,” he said, as though I had become a man within the Jewish faith, too.
A fatter brother sniffed the air. “I hate this dorm. I have traumatic, smell-induced memories of my freshman year here, man. Curry and steamed cabbage. My roommate fucking emanated that shit.”
For the next two months, I went on a run with the other pledges every morning at six. We played tackle football after, and I broke three fingers and sprained my wrist. We drank every night: liquor, beer, curdled milk, hot sauce, the collected spit of Rho Beta Rho. Each week, I did the calculus problem sets of a senior. I did a junior’s dry cleaning.
“If any of us catch you hanging out with friends, or seeing girls, or even so much as taking a walk, you will no longer be a member of our brotherhood,” they told us on the one day we had off from pledging.
Another evening, they hung us upside down and poured beer down our nostrils. They bound our feet and wrists, broke glasses in the basement, and turned the lights off, “Crawl around for an hour.”
I thought of withdrawing myself as a pledge, but Art told me to stay, insisting that stuff got better. The brothers were not half as racist as they sounded, he said, and unless I was gay or something—Art looked at me with suspicion—I had nothing to worry about. He invited me up to his room and cleaned my wounds after the glass crawl, “We talk about getting rid of pledging traditions like this every year.” I leaned back on his bed, not needing to try so hard around Art. I could be myself, or at least act the way that I had acted with him in the past. But I had always been trying too hard, and so I had to keep trying hard or else he might think I was not the freshman that he had originally championed in front of the brothers. After all, there were so many reasons that Rho Beta Rho wouldn’t want me, of course, the main reason being that I’m Korean.
Spring
For Spring Break, the brothers went to Cancún, and Anna got marooned on campus like me. “I told my parents that joining a frat was how you got the best jobs in America,” I said when we crossed paths in the quad, the first time we saw each other since we broke up. “But they’ll just act so disappointed in me if I go home, and I definitely can’t afford the airfare to Mexico.”
“You know you really hurt me.”
“I did?”
Back in my dorm, I waded through the clothing flung on the floor, the ketchup-smeared plate by the foot of my dresser, and the mug with the thick film to clear a path for Anna. We lay on the covers of my bed and chatted.
“Rizwan’s been super passive-aggressive lately,” I said.
She glanced at the floor. “I wonder why.”
“I’ve spent the last week scrubbing gunk from the frat house basement. I literally cannot lift another finger until I’m a full brother next week.”
Rizwan burst in after a couple minutes, grinning, but the moment he saw me his expression changed.
“Would you pick this up?” He pointed at a T-shirt that lay crumpled by the leg of his chair. “It’s a basic matter of respect.”
“We’re in school. Respect doesn’t matter until we’re older.”
“Our lives mean less than other people’s?”
Rizwan annoyed me for being right, but Anna liked him. A few days later, the three of us hung out, with everyone else gone for their ski trips, beach parties, or families’ mansions. When I mentioned I hadn’t seen Miles in a while, Rizwan said he hated college.
“Besides Suhel, I have no friends, and Suhel and I are not always so compatible. If I take a semester’s leave, though, I risk losing my visa.”
“Everyone hates it here,” Anna shook her head.
“I don’t,” I said, but in truth I just never asked myself whether I liked college.
We streamed Iron Man 2 under the covers in my bed. I woke up to see Rizwan’s sleep-calm face, inches away from my own, and when I reached for Anna, she was gone. I moved my hand, which was numb under Rizwan’s ribs, and closed my eyes again.
Miles sent me an email before break ended:
I have to say i’ve been lying to you lately. First off, my girlfriend and I broke off all contact a couple of months ago, big surprise, which rocked me. I couldn’t focus on my homework. I just don’t care anymore. I didn’t want to tell you. Frankly, i dropped three of my classes as well, so I didn’t fail. Now my family is furious with me. They’re so wrapped up in these stupid American values that they dont know what’s actually important anymore. Anyway, this might be hard to understand, but im moving to Israel next week and joining an Orthodox community.
I knocked on his door to find it open, the bed stripped bare, the bookshelves empty.
Through the wall, I heard Rizwan jump up and down, overjoyed and full of future.
“I’ve been accepted to Stanford as a transfer! I’m moving to California!”
Summer
The summer has nothing to do with any other season. I spent most of it alone, staring at the plants in the garden and basking in the sun. I had begun to paint again, the first time since freshman year began.
I hadn’t left campus. Everyone else was gone, which made it a better place. I worked for Dr. Villani while she and her husband were on an archaeological dig. Most of my tasks involved house- and dog-sitting in their beautiful nineteenth-century redbrick, but she also asked me to conduct some research, for which I received a stipend, so my parents couldn’t complain that I was spoiled and lazy. “The block you live on is dangerous.” They read police blotters, sending me worried emails about crime.
In August, Art took the train down from New Jersey. He stayed in the room that belonged to the Villanis’ daughter, who was college-bound next year, on vacation with her mom and dad. Her list of prospective schools was pinned on her bulletin board next to a reel of photobooth pictures she took at prom with her friends. Her dream acceptances were the same as mine.
Art took me to a bar the first night of his visit, where he said I would get served as long as I looked confident and didn’t hesitate when asked for my drink order. (“Well rum and coke,” I practiced.) When we got home, because I told him not to do it in the backyard, he puked on the neighbor’s stoop.
In the morning, after taking turns over the toilet, we agreed that we would never drink again. But at night, we opened a bottle of whiskey we found in the liquor cabinet, and I leaned over and kissed him. Art was reluctant at first, but soon we were in the teenager’s room, jerking each other off on top of her bedspread. Art knocked over one of her field hockey trophies. We laughed. I blew him, and he blew me, and when I woke again Art was still asleep, rays of light sluicing through the windows.
He squirmed away when I touched him, making up some excuse about his sister’s birthday in West Orange, which meant he had to leave immediately. I sat in the living room and cried for a little while, and then I bleached the bathroom, threw the sheets in the wash, and did a few hours of work before I took Otis on a long walk, far from campus, in the townie parts where Obama signs grew sparser.
Otis lifted his leg. He pooped. We both grew tired. We trudged on. Eventually, I happened upon a Methodist church with a Korean pastor. The sun set over a slight hill in the distance. Across the street, an old, stooped white man emerged from his house, approaching the giant flag pole that protruded like an erection from one of the front beams, and began to pull on the ropes. I watched him lower the flag, which he would hoist each morning to the tip of its pole again. It was a military tradition, I knew, that some veterans carried into civilian life. There was a twenty-something ex-marine like this in my hometown, a flag hitched to his porch’s banister. Every night, he hit the bars downtown.
“Stay away from him,” my parents told me, “Army men are evil.”
But I always thought he looked so harmless, drunk enough that he could hardly walk, much less fire a gun. And if he died from liver disease, he would be this age forever. An immortal hero, I thought when I was a child. Now that I’m older, I think he was just another character. Someone to remind us how much young men sacrifice in the name of youth.