My dead friend isn’t supposed to be on the whale watching tour. It’s a pale summer morning, the harbor glazed with fog. I’m standing on the boat’s upper deck directing tourists aboard, gesturing to empty seats, passing out pamphlets. And there she is, lined up behind a family of five. She’s wearing a navy windbreaker, jean shorts, and muddy white sneakers. Why are you here? I ask. You’re scared of the ocean. Only the Pacific, she says. The Atlantic is fine. I say, Okay, but don’t freak out the children. We jet off, gliding over the glass panes of the sea surface. It’s an hour journey to the watch spot, the boat picking up speed once we reach deeper waters. Roughly fifty passengers sit sardined on narrow benches, stuffing their arms into jackets as the cold cuts into the air. My friend follows me to the mic station. The concessions guy walks by and glares at her, since the area is roped off from pedestrians. I tell him she’s a wealthy socialite, so it’s fine.My voice vibrates through the shitty speakers: As you can see in your pamphlets, there are many types of whales. Blue Whales, Orcas, Sperm Whales…Forget about those. We’re here for the Humpbacks. A little girl, whose wispy hair is whipping in all directions, asks something. Her voice is drowned out by the engine, so I tell her to speak up.How long are Humpbacks!? They can be 48-62 feet, slightly larger than a school bus. My friend cups her hand to my ear. Are you on birth control? I mute the mic. Not everyone’s birth control kills them, I say. I know yours gave you a pulmonary embolism, but something like that simply wouldn’t happen to me. You were on some weird high-hormone brand anyway. So don’t worry. Now the little girl’s father is seasick. He puts his head in his hands, moaning and rocking. This kind of thing happens often. Through the intercom, I command him to stare at the horizon. Something about it resets your balance. But there is no horizon. Due to the fog, the gray blue sky melds to the ocean. Guess he’s out of luck. You weren’t my favorite, my friend says. But you were the fun one.You mean the slutty one, I say. I remember our first fight. In college I helped her make a Tinder, taught her how to scam men for money. But she got upset, called it amoral. She actually wanted to go on dates, to be touched. I called her unrealistic. That was a nice fight, she says. By the end, we saw each other’s perspectives, and I got a boyfriend. The dad is trying not to throw up, his forehead all sweaty. A stranger gives him a swig of Pepto Bismol. His daughter keeps poking him and shouting, Look at that! Look, Dad, look! She points to nothing. He stands up. Don’t go to the bathroom, I holler. It will only feel worse in there, and we need it available for the others. He sits down. I turn to my friend and say, I suppose you’re here to blame me for your terrible taste in men. That was the algorithm’s fault, she replies. You don’t have to make everything about yourself. I do make everything about myself. I wish my friend hadn’t died. It’s never fun to discuss at parties. I shelled out all this money for a therapist. For a whole six weeks, I stopped having sex. Then for a whole six months, I had too much sex. Her death makes me hate the ocean, which she always lied about being afraid of. The fog thins, tinting the water blue, deep blue, endless blue. I continue my spiel: Before a whale surfaces, there are clues. Look for circles of bubbles. If you smell something rotten, it’s their bad breath. The little girl gets a kick out of that. Her dad finally throws up in a paper bag, and the couple beside him flees. You know, I was in love with you, I tell my friend. There you go, making everything about yourself again. Isn’t that why you came, for a confession? No, I came for the whales. The boat slows, then stills, the engine clicking off. Bubbles form. We watch, wait. A Humpback breaches in the distance, a sliver of gray slicing through the waves. People rush to the railing to take zoomed-in pixelated photos for Facebook. Water spouts from the blowhole. Its tail tips up before submerging. The onlookers ooo and ahh. You should stop taking birth control, she says. Not any good. Do you want me to get pregnant? Kind of weird. Maybe if you got pregnant, you’d finally get over me. Now here she is, making everything about herself. When I take my pill, I think of her. When I meet someone with anxious-avoidant attachment, I think of her. When I imagine kissing a woman, I think of her. If she would have kissed me back. If she would have said I was doing it for attention. But isn’t it human to want attention? She’ll never understand that.The boat idles. The little girl is jumping up and down, struggling to see around the adults, and her dad has thrown away his bag of vomit. The sun spurts through the clouds. I point out more whales. To the right! To the left! Go, get your fill, your eighty bucks worth. The crowd clusters from one side of the deck to the other. You know, you weren’t in love with me, she says. Grief makes you uncomfortable, and pretending you loved me makes it easier to process. This is really homophobic of you.No, it’s homophobic of you. You’re fetishizing a dead woman. So what am I supposed to do? Just get over it?Yes! Just get over it! People die all the time. Go get knocked up by some man and move on with your life. You’ve been bumming me out. I announce that it’s time to get going. The engine starts, and everyone sits. I hand the dad another bag to barf in. I let the little girl keep her pamphlet, even though I’m supposed to re-collect them for other tours. I tell my friend she’s right. When I step off this boat, I’ll quit birth control, find a nice man to knock me up, and stop having gay fantasies about my dead friend. I saw the whales today, after all, and that’s what’s important.
I found the file by accident.It was tucked between Q3BudgetProjections.pptx and TeamSalesSeminar_2021(final_FINAL2).pptx on the shared drive.Jesus.pptxJust like that.I clicked it out of curiosity. Or maybe boredom. It's hard to tell the difference between the two when you spend the day in an office staring at spreadsheets that mean nothing to you. The file was empty. One blank white slide. No title. No bullet points. No formatting. Just a white void.A warmth emanated from the screen. I stared at it for a while. I bathed in its glow. My body slackened. My thoughts dulled to a low hum. Like I was recharging. Like I had taken something I wasn’t prescribed. Somewhere below the static, I thought I could hear a choir humming. Maybe it was the computer’s fan speeding up. The electric sermon lulled me into a trance. I don’t know how long I sat there.A wave of anxiety snapped me out of it. Any of my coworkers could have walked by, caught me slacking off. I told myself to close the file, to get back to work. But I couldn’t. My hands moved without me. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I started typing.I wrote:I was the one that stole Rachel's underwear at the 6th grade sleepover.I had never admitted that to anyone, though the memory haunted me awake with guilt many times in the 20 years since. It felt good.I typed another confession. Then another. And another. I kept going until—"Mary," the voice said. I looked up, heart racing. My coworker stood across from me, arms crossed. "You're in this meeting right?" he said. "You coming?"I clicked save and exited out of the file.It wasn't until later that night, stoned and half asleep in bed, that it occured to me. Other people had access to the shared drive. My stomach twisted. I sprung upright, grabbed my laptop, and logged in. Jesus.pptx was in my recent folder.I opened it up. Checked the file history:File owner: Mary SLast edit: Mary SI didn't remember creating it, but then again, I hardly remember anything I did at work. Assured that no one else had read through my confessional, I shut my laptop and drifted off.Weeks passed before I opened it again. Work got busy. Days blurred. But one slow morning, restless, I clicked the file. Just to vent. Just to kill time. I typed secret after secret. My muscles unclenched with every confession. I wrote down my hopes. My childhood fears. I described my first kiss. It was at that moment I decided I would speak to Jesus.pptx every morning when I got to work.The next morning, however, I discovered something strange.I opened the file, expecting relief before the first slide even loaded. But a new slide had been added:I miss the way my mother stroked my hair.I was hit with nausea. My vision tunneled. I hadn’t typed that.I deleted the text and replaced it with a secret of my own choosing:I google myself everyday. I saved the file. I closed it.I began checking the powerpoint every morning.Like clockwork, new slides appeared. And they knew things that I barely admitted to myself. Things I had buried. I wasn’t sure if the feeling it incited stemmed from feeling seen or feeling surveilled. Slide 16:It felt cold and sterile and free of guilt. No one noticed.Slide 21:I haven’t been touched in 46 days.Coworkers glanced at me differently. "You look great," one said in a tone that meant nothing. "You seem tired," another offered, like a question. I started bringing lunch from home, eating alone. I stopped taking breaks. I withdrew, unsure if I was becoming more real or if I was being erased.Eventually, the file ran out of confessions. It had mapped every failing, every fleeting shame. It started predicting my future.Slide 56:I won't be needed after Q1. I stopped checking the file after that. Not because I didn't believe it. Because I did.On March 31st HR called me into their office. I knew what was coming. Before packing up my few belongings and returning my laptop to IT, I deleted the file. Cleared the trash.On the way out, I passed the printer. A stack of fresh printouts sat waiting for someone. In big bold letters the title page read:JESUS (FINAL).I didn't stop to read it.
Ever since her husband was hit by a municipal bus, Mrs. Atwal would spend her afternoons watching the hippos at the aquarium. Their fleetness of hoof belying their primordial size.At two o’clock, on the nose, the hippos were isolated in a separate part of the tank and the mermaid show would begin. Children crowded the double-paned glass. A drowsy piano tune was piped through the speakers. The mermaids emerged from some unknowable recess in the tank. Each time one of the mermaids waved at Mrs. Atwal, or otherwise made eye contact with her, she imagined a hippo breaking loose of its enclosure and flattening the mermaid against the glass.“Afternoon pick me up?” The question threw her, as the man was small—very small—and she couldn’t be sure whether he was asking to be physically picked up.“It’s the good stuff,” he added, and held out a large soda container with a crooked straw poking out from the lid. Then shook the drink so the ice rattled against the sides. “Seems like you could use an eye-opener.”She declined as politely as possible. They watched one of the mermaids purse her lips and blow a kiss to the children.“I hate these floating turds. I wish one of them would get crushed by the hippos already.”She decided she liked this man, and when he asked her if she wanted to visit the food cart—the one by the penguin exhibit—she accepted his invitation.Outside, an axolotl-shaped balloon escaped a child’s hand and floated skywards. The man pointed at the boy and bent over in laughter.“Idiot,” he said. “How hard is it to hold on to a balloon?”The man ordered a single tray of fries, which he proceeded to slather in ketchup from the condiment pump. Mrs. Atwal ordered a small pouch of chips, which she slipped into her bag for later. They sat down at a picnic bench overlooking the Gentoo penguins.“You know how much they pay you if you fall into one of the exhibits?”She shook her head.“I mean, with a good lawyer, we’re talking millions. Even with a bad lawyer, you’ll be set for life. Just for slugging it out for a few rounds with some puffin.”He continued: “A couple of months ago some kid got bit by an otter. Guess what? A quarter million dollars. Can you imagine? He was ugly as sin before the otter got him. A quarter million! What would you do with all that money?”She tried to think of an answer. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine as her husband had taken out multiple life insurance policies before he died and she had that much—more—in the bank.A seagull flew over to pick at the greasy jetsam under their table.“Fuck off, you ocean rat,” he said, trying to kick at the gull, but his feet couldn’t reach the bird from his seated position.Mrs. Atwal rose to go to the bathroom.“Where are you going, lady? It’s just an ocean rat.”The bathroom was precisely empty. She sat down on a toilet seat in the stall and thought about whether seagulls could digest fries or if it caused them to get sick and throw up later.Under the stall, she saw a coral blue tail fin trawl across the floor tiling. She opened the stall to find a mermaid in a silver wig crying over the sink. She edged beside her.“Why doesn’t Jason look at me the way he used to?” the mermaid said.She wondered if Jason was the other mermaid in the show. Or a land dweller with the biologically appointed number of toes.“He’s always talking with Miranda. And she can barely go thirty seconds without reaching for the air hose.”Mrs. Atwal nodded conspiratorially.“Miranda doesn’t have the lung capacity for this work.”“Right?”“And Jason, I saw him laughing earlier when a child lost his balloon.”“How cruel.”“Cruel indeed.”The mermaid threw her mammalian arms around Mrs. Atwal.“Thank you.”The mermaid hopped and shimmied out of the bathroom. Mrs. Atwal returned to the picnic bench, where only the man’s partially eaten tray of fries remained. She took out her bag of chips and ate them leaning over the railing encircling the penguin colony.“Ma’am,” said the moon-faced attendant. “You have to stand behind the red line.”She looked at the red line, which was several inches behind the railing.Would standing behind this line shelter her from life’s assorted dangers? A tall order for a band of paint, she thought.But like the well-mannered woman she was, had been raised to be, she stepped behind the red line, and for a moment even she believed that nothing bad could befall her.
Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of the Rat is subtle and riotous, “a fat California orange in the palm of your hand.” Hall invites us to examine how we are changed by our tragedies and our inquiries—every shard of human experience piled at the sides of our roads. It is an exploration of our private ruins and all that finds a home there. I sat down with Elizabeth in West Adams to discuss Season of the Rat, anal breathing, sex, shapeshifting, California, and what’s on deck for this literary powerhouse in the making.Aiden Brown: I was so excited when Allie [Rowbottom] asked me to read this book. Without knowing what to expect, or knowing you, it just blew me away. One of my favorite things about it is the ambiguity of its genre identity, so I have to start by asking how you describe Season of the Rat. Elizabeth Hall: I think I’m officially calling it autofiction. It’s definitely based on my actual life. I’m usually not very interested in writing just a straight memoir because I get bored easily. And so the research is a huge help to stay motivated, and also provide a necessary counterbalance of joy and exhilaration—so any memoirs or essays I’ve written in this vein dovetail heavily into research, for better or for worse. AB: That was one of my favorite things about the book—the research kind of weaves into and around the more emotional and personal narrative, which creates such a strong portrait of intellectualization while still resonating emotionally. Your protagonist’s—or your—exigence for the rat research is self-evident within the narrative, but what drew you to researching abandoned gay bars?EH: The bars were actually before the rats—I found this book about Orange County by an LA Times writer Gustavo Arrellano, and there was this anecdote in the book about them. My friend Caitlin and I started going on adventures to these places in Laguna. It was an avenue of research that served as kind of a reprieve from my other research about my mom, or the cult she was part of that was founded in Orange County. A lot of my work focuses on sex trauma. Some heavy things were coming up within my own family in that regard. So I think it’s natural that I gravitated toward locuses of queer joy, especially in what I tend to think of as such a stiff place. And that research, too, helped me navigate my own queer journey. It was easier for me to go to an abandoned place to discover my queerness in a way than to go to a gay bar with people in it. I took the introverted path.AB: That’s so interesting because in the book, there’s almost always someone with you in those scenes. Actually, that brings me to one of the things I loved the most about this book—I mean, of course, I don’t love that it happened—but the way your relationships, for better or for worse, kind of lurk beneath your research and weave in and around it. In particular, I found the connection between the trauma you endured and the research on rats, garbage, and ruin so striking. How did those connections develop for you? Was it something you planned going into the project or something that emerged over the course of writing it?EH: So, the origin of the book was the sex assault. It started, honestly, because of an argument with my wife. The scene was cut from the book, actually, this tiff about the tent. But it was the first camping tent I’d bought for myself, and I’d taken it on so many solo camping trips, including a journey from here to Portland for my first book tour. And when I was about to go camping by myself in Joshua Tree with it, my wife was like well, you’re not going to bring that tent. And I was like obviously I’m bringing the tent. I don’t have another tent. She and I had just moved in (this was during the pandemic)—my wife also works a corporate job, and so she was living at a very different income level than I was. So, I took the debate over the tent as almost a symbol of that disparity. Like, of course you can just buy a new tent while I have to be okay with sleeping in my rape tent. I also didn’t want to give [Mark] or the assault power over my beloved tent. Eventually, it became a joke between my wife and I—we had a riff on “rape tent” for a very long time. And so the first scene of the book was originally going to be about this rape tent. I had intended it to be an exploration of [Mark’s] and my relationship through the lens of class. Actually, the assault came to be more in the background compared with the original exigence of the project. I really wanted to emphasize how much resources play into why people stay in abusive dynamics. AB: Period. Absolutely. EH: This was around that time when it was really popular in certain lit circles to listen to edge lord-y podcasts like Red Scare. They had an episode—actually, just the other day—where the hosts speculated that people stay in these dynamics for psychosocial reasons—they were attempting to do a psychoanalytic read on various dynamics like narcissism, or codependency. So, there was also a part of me that wanted to write this in opposition, not to Red Scare specifically, but to that whole idea that people are addicted to their lover, or that emotional reasoning is even a primary motivator. I wanted to shift the conversation—people, I feel, are almost taking pains not to talk about the resource aspect. It’s expensive to live in Los Angeles, and a person shouldn’t have to give up their life in a place because someone chooses to do something to them. When the assault happened, we had already been broken up for a while, but we were still living together. My primary motivator for staying wasn’t that I was just having such a good time hanging out with this person, it was for want of choices which didn’t implode my life.The choice to stay was one I made to try and control the situation. I’d just gotten a nonprofit job, which I was able to turn into a full time position largely because of the stability I had at that time, and because of the stability I’ve had with my wife Heidi since. At the time I was writing this book, I was working at one of the most beautiful libraries in Los Angeles. And I’ve worked hard to get these two idyllic situations. Had I gone to a shelter or stayed on a friend’s couch, that destabilization would have been observable to an employer. And I’d never had a full time position. I wasn’t able to even get a tooth fixed. I’m a big proponent of Maslow’s Hierarchy—like, how are you supposed to concentrate when you’re worried about having your basic needs met? Without the stability I have now, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this book, at a minimum. AB: What is your relationship with [Mark] like now? How did it change or what changed about your perspective on it while you were writing Season of the Rat?EH: A part of me wanted him to bear witness to the pain he’d caused. Another part of me wanted to write about it quickly—I wrote it within months of leaving the situation—to preserve the sense of love I still had for him. Another myth that I’ve encountered is that you’re supposed to immediately hate someone after they’ve harmed you in that way. But we shared all kinds of deep intimacies with each other over the years. I understand why people do close their hearts, and my feelings toward [Mark] have hardened over time.I don’t think of [Mark] as a monster—I think doing that makes it harder to heal. While I understand why people would need to think of someone who did that to them that way, it created a dissonance for me between the reality of what happened and the ten years we spent together, the friendship we had. And even after it happened, we lived together; we were in a band together. Prior to his violations, I really did enjoy his company. After the assault, he was still my primary emotional support, which was that much more destabilizing. There’s a pattern in my life of being close to someone that then I had to extricate myself from—music I couldn’t listen to anymore. I always knew I was going to write about him, and I wanted to do it with a degree of diplomacy. I mean, I could write another book about sex assault two years later and write it totally differently. AB: You say this in the book—and really it was a gut punch for me as someone who’s had similar experiences—that he never denied the assault, it was just something that didn’t impact him on the day to day. EH: Yeah, he just went on living his life. The day after it happened, we dropped off the other person who was on the trip with us (who didn’t know what had happened) and I noticed that [Mark] was already on dating apps. He dropped me off in downtown LA to go on a date, and I spent the whole afternoon floating through the city. By the time I’d gotten in my Uber home to San Pedro, he was taking selfies in the desert with a new girl he was dating. I remember going home, crying and just thinking I can’t run away from this—I mean, literally—I didn’t have a car. And he got to just go on like everything was normal.AB: I was really struck by that portrayal of the banality of that kind of assault, and how human—or maybe diplomatic is the word—you were while still expressing that anger and that devastation that comes with sexual assault. I mean, we harden toward them over time, like you said, but making them monsters can also obfuscate a situation for us in so many ways. It is like floating, or like walking a tightrope. That brings me to this tension between fear, harm, and love. I felt that tension very strongly in Season of the Rat. What’s the relationship between those ideas for you personally?EH: I'm someone who grew up very much fearing showing emotion with the exception of, perhaps, within the church system. Definitely one of those people who went wild at a youth retreat—hands in the air, all that. I felt like it was like a safe form of love, I guess. I'm not religious now, but when I was younger, the idea of Jesus providing unconditional love was huge to me. Especially because that was not something I was getting necessarily in other aspects of my life. My mom is a wonderful person, but she has a lot of anxiety that tends to manifest as hypercriticality of herself and others. I think she moves through the world believing criticism is really helpful, and that it’s a loving thing to do. She grew up in a very dysfunctional home that created that lens of get it together, you know—“lock in.” That was translated to me and my sister through her, so I don’t think I was ever going to have that easygoing, free feeling love vibe. Part of [Mark] and my whole relationship was that we were both very much afraid of vulnerability and emotionality. The main thing we did together was smoke a lot of weed all the time and listen to music together—we really were not linked up in a soul-bonded, emotional way. In fact, I don't think we ever even said I love you until we’d been dating for four or five years—which is insane—and it only happened then because I was having an emotional affair with someone who was so free-flowing with love. That's why I was attracted to the affair, I'm sure. It woke me up to the range of love that I was missing out on. Even today, I'm married and I still get very embarrassed about showing affection. My wife worked on a really big live show, and I was making her a little card for when she came home, and then I was so emotional, and it low-key embarrassed me. I was like, I'm not going to put this out. And then I was like, wait, yeah, I am. This is so dumb! I am almost 40 and married. I don't still need to feel that way. So it still happens, that fear of being seen, to use a TikTok phrase…AB: The mortifying ordeal of being known.EH: Exactly. I mean, love is one of the most vulnerable things about us—the fear that it won’t be returned. I'm not like that now—compassion is free, love is free; it hurts me none to share these things with people. I think having access to love from Heidi—she's a very extroverted person, very giving, a very different person—and seeing her vulnerability with me and with her friends has been really helpful in navigating that vulnerability and fear, and letting love kind of effuse within our dynamic.AB: I haven’t had the pleasure of reading your first book, but I assume by the title I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS, that it explores similar ideas around vulnerability, love, and sex from a different standpoint, since you were in a very different place in your life when you wrote it compared to Season of the Rat. I’m curious how,if at all, your process differed between the two books?EH: Both were written during destabilizing times in my life. Going to CalArts for an MFA was a pretty good culture shock for me. I'm really more of an autodidact. I barely went to undergrad college, skipped a lot of classes; I thought it was like a hack to use a spreadsheet to track my class absences. It's not a hack, it was a waste, but I thought I was real slick. Going to CalArts was, in and of itself, a bit of a risky move for me. [Mark] had applied to grad school in California, and CalArts was the only place I got into near where he was accepted. At the same time, my mom was in the process of finding some things that had happened in the past with my sister which were pushing her to get divorced, and then she went bankrupt—her whole life kind of blew up. So, I don't think it was that surprising that I was drawn to an excessive research project. I think it was escapism. I'm a very escapist person, whether that be through marijuana or exercise. The idea for the clit book came from a poem that I had previously published, which was comprised of sex writing cutups, that people were responding really well to. I didn't feel like I had the writerly skillset for a novel, but what I could do—similar to the rats—was, and is, research. I can always do that because it makes me happy, and research is an escape in some ways. You get to live in another world. The clit research made me feel so alive. I’d wake up in the morning at like 5am (I’m an insomniac) and the sun would be shining—California sun, you know, every day.It was so beautiful, and I could travel to the sixth century or something and it felt crazy, and that made me really happy. I also was learning at the time how unhappy my sex life had been with [Mark]. Because I was raised really religious, he was the first person I’d ever had sex with. Even though I wasn’t religious anymore, there was still that internal backbeat of thinking it was cool that, although I was like 26 and in grad school, I had only had sex with one person. It was definitely misguided in retrospect. As I wrote, I was having a lot of compulsory sex with [Mark], because I just didn't know. I was having sex every day and giving blowjobs every day, and had no idea that wasn't a normal thing. And I never came, obviously, so—I'm only being this frank because it's a sex book—AB: No, I love it.EH: So, I was in the process of recognizing that cultural training, and of discovering that it wasn’t just me—it was actually everyone I talked to. I would talk to friends in the grad program and they all were like yeah we never come, even people who’d had upwards of twenty partners. I initially thought maybe it's just [Mark] and then it's like–, okay, no, this is systemic. Actually, until he read the book, I don’t think he had a desire to focus on my pleasure. I really think this comes from an internalized misogyny among many women and men, this idea that women's pleasure just doesn't matter. Like, no one comes from penetration. I mean, some people do.AB: Love that for them. Huge if true.EH: Right, it’s rare; the vast majority of people don't. And he was like Well, I've never had that problem with previous partners.AB: Okay, so those women were lying to you. EH: They're lying to you! Until he read the book, which probably hit home the ethical aspect of pleasuring a partner, did anything change in terms of us having better sex. But writing the book was eye opening for me and really changed a lot of how I thought about actual sex and agency around sex. It also exposed a lot of my own internalized misogyny, which I'm still working through.AB: Speaking of things you’re working through, I’m curious what your writing life has been like—how did you start?EH: I struggled with learning disabilities, and didn’t really read a book until high school, which was when I got into diaries—Sylvia Plath’s specifically. Then, I got into biographies of writers. Anaïs Nin was the first writer I was obsessed with. I was still very religious then, so I would go through and cross out the curse words and the sex words. I always knew I wanted access to a different life than the one I was living, and reading and writing were windows into other worlds. Reading shapeshifts time; you’re slowed down and almost living inside the book and alongside the book. I was interested in the lifestyle of a writer or what I thought that would be. A lot of my favorite writers were very craft-oriented like Nabokov, Miller. But Nin especially—she was self-taught and kind of a bad writer when she started, so revision was big for her. I knew with my academic sensibilities that it would be huge for me too, and that’s really informed the kind of writer I’ve become.AB: I really see the confessional style in this work. That’s so interesting you say that because my primary impression of this book (once I could catch my breath) was how well-crafted it was, both structurally and on the sentence level. Season of the Rat comes out in May—what else is on the horizon for you?EH: I’m not working on a big project right now, but I am working on some smaller essays. I write reviews, for Full Stop and other places. I really like doing critical work. I think I was scared to do any kind of review work because I didn't feel like I had the academic training to understand books systematically, but I found out I really love doing it and my editor at Full Stop, Fiona, is such an amazing reader and editor that I just want to keep working with her. I’m kind of loosely working a novel idea—the problem with novels is that I lose interest really quickly—but, it's about a health clinic that does anal breathing—AB: Oh, hell yeah.EH: —which doesn't exist, but it's inspired by trends in colonics. I've always written a lot about wellness and been interested in it, not as a practitioner necessarily, but as a cultural phenomenon. AB: I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see someone trying to harness anal breathing in a few years. EH: Oh, anal breathing is the final frontier. I feel like whenever my larger projects don't work out, they usually become a smaller piece. I have an essay coming out in Hobart that kind of dovetailswith Season of the Rat’s storyline. I feel like there is an idea for something about my mom that’s percolating. I tend to be inspired by things in a moment and then go hog wild over them. If I were a really disciplined person, my life would probably look different, as would my writing, but I let my ADHD take the reins creatively. I'm definitely here for the girls and for the messiness.AB: There’s a lot of really beautiful vulnerability in that too. Girls forever. I can’t wait to see what you do next.Season of the Rat is forthcoming this June from Cash 4 Gold Books.
Last spring the county newspaper paid me $200 to write about local dreams. I interviewed a man whose job it was to cycle out the books from the little lending library in the center of town. We met at a diner nobody liked and was always empty but stayed in business as such diners often do. He told me he mostly dreamed about colors. Yellow in spring, green in winter, purple in autumn. Summer heat made the man's legs swell and he didn't want to talk about what he saw those nights. He seemed uneasy about the approaching season. As we spoke my smartphone gathered time beside undercooked bacon. Recording a voice I'd listen to speak these words once and never again. This is the nature of the news and the people who write it. We fill our notes with memories and chronicle a world that grew so fast it forgot how to stop and remember.I ask the man if he believes in dream analysis, and he tells me when he sleeps on his back he sees faces in the colors. People he met when he served jury duty in Greenfield three years before. I don't know their names or anything about them, he told me. The day aged through the pollen-painted window. Buzzards circled above the bridge across the river to the rust-lined highway to Boston. The man fingered the bacon on his plate. Oh, he said. We sent a boy to jail for murder. Outside the diner the man asked me if I'd put him in my story. I told him it's up to my editor. I didn't know if that was true but when I don't know something I appeal to some faceless power. We shook hands and he asked me what I dream about. I told him reporters should never become part of the story. He laughed and said, No, really. Tell me.I told him when I dream about the places I used to live, they look nothing like those places, but in the dream it's all real and true, that I know those places like I do the people I've loved. Every place in my dreams has a road leading north. I thank him for his time. You're from around here, he said. Not really, I said.The man got in his car and backed into a fire hydrant. Water gushed like blood from a torn-off thumb. Then he turned the car around and gunned it against the hydrant. His engine sobbed. I took pictures with my phone but they were all blurred, out of focus, smeared with light. Faces filled the windows around us, some I knew, faces angry and entertained, faces of why now, of not this again, of I get it, man, I really fucking do.
&
The paper assigned me to cover a recent wave of carjackings. Not the carburetor thefts. They told me that was a different beat, and that we'd talk about pay when I had something good.As I waited at the light on Avenue E one morning a woman opened my passenger door, flashed a ten-dollar utility knife, and told me to drive.Where? I asked.South, she said. I gassed it. A pollen-clouded patrol car was parked outside the gun store at the intersection. A cop, leaning against the door, didn't look up from his phone. We left town. Drove past restaurants, gas stations, farms. All for sale. The butterfly sanctuary was closed for repairs. Further south a line of cars waited to park at a brewery. Food trucks belched steam and a couple locked arms on the grass. I nearly collided with the car ahead of us.Watch it, said the woman.Sorry, I said.The woman told me to take the highway. We inched through Sunday construction. Men clustered by potholes and idle machines. I wondered if any of them looked inside my car and confused us for husband and wife. I told her this.Don't say that, she said. She checked her phone and was on the verge of tears.Her directions were more forceful now. The ramp past Deerfield, left, right, left. Take it slow down this street. Look for a truck with no bumper. Apple red.The same, the woman said. The same.She was out of the car before I parked. The woman sprinted, slipped and shouted up the angled drive and flung open the garage door. Two men fucked on a yoga mat, free weights and kettlebells and gym clothes abandoned around them. A radio spewed dad rock on a chair. The woman grabbed one of the men by the hair and tugged. The men broke apart, their passion fissioned to sweat and rage. I see you, the woman screamed at one of the men. He didn't seem angry or shocked. Calm, almost, as if this was expected, predicted, even welcome. No one said anything. Just frozen acknowledgement, where no words suffice to explain how the resolution of tension causes both pleasure and pain. Then the woman shoved me back to the car. Pushing tears back into her eyes as she moved. Drive, she whispered. South I drove again. Small mountains rose as if the world was teething. We approached the tallest, one I'd climbed before blind-drunk on a snowy, lonely night. I hooked an observation road and shot past hikers too weary for the steep rock path. My legs ached from the long sit. At the peak we got out and gazed across the valley and the towns and the curves of the green-brown Connecticut River.I dreamed about this, said the woman.What do you mean? I asked.I saw my husband. Driving there. I felt how happy he was. How that garage felt more like home than ours.How did the dream end? I asked. The woman rocked back and forth, hands in her pockets.Like this, she said. What do you mean? I asked.I forced you to drive at knifepoint. When we arrived I forgot my knife in the car. My husband chose someone else. Then we drove up this mountain. Then I woke up.We said nothing for a while. A prop plane flew above us in a circle and then turned north, against the wind.Then the woman said, The way my husband felt. That love inside him. That deep, physical love. I'll never forget.Then she said, I don't have any money.We drove back to town under a rose-gold sky. There are no sunsets anywhere like those in western Massachusetts. I wondered if I had the right to tell this story, or if everything was off the record, or whether these things even matter when you're a witness against your will. As we turned onto Avenue E the woman pressed her knife against my neck. Wallet, she said. Then, more softly, she said, Please.She took thirty bucks and a gas station gift card and the picture of my nephew, then tossed the wallet in my lap and stepped out into the street.
&
The paper laid me off on the fifth of July. In June we covered bridge repair delays, unaffordable homes, church fires, community musicals, childhood illiteracy. Covered births, deaths and arrests. Covered sickness, hope and happiness. We covered the war, and then they shut us down. Some private equity barons out in Boston coveted the land beneath our office. I had an hour to clear the city desk I shared with three other journalists. One week's severance. Benefits 'til the end of the month.I asked my editor what to do with my half-finished story about a man who'd drowned in the river. He was a local, an institution, a bellwether figure. Sought your change outside the sandwich shop. Bought milk and bread from the communist theater group on the corner of Avenue G. Once, he told me a story about being a judo champion in California and as he spoke he hand-chopped the air and winced and bore his teeth, but he seemed proud to remember those moves. Ben. Ben Armstrong. I'd written his name on a notepad and circled it in red ink.Forget it, my editor told me. We were close in the way you become when you deal with the constant mess of private lives, because that's what local news is, a constant mess bursting into public, ordered and shaped by writers and publishers. But I knew next to nothing about him, his family, what he wanted, how he saw himself, here, at the end. But it was too late to ask. I watched him slide a half-dozen reams of untouched paper into his backpack and step nervously out into the light on the sidewalk outside our office. On the bathroom wall I wrote in permanent marker The News Was Here. Then I pissed, didn't flush, and left with some notebooks and pens.At home, I caught up on my drinking. Shouted at hummingbirds. Built a castle of beer cans on the back porch and staggered through its walls before a midweek thunderstorm could blow it down. Mostly I slept. My blanket gathered cat hair as I moved from bed to floor to couch like some forgotten, guilt-soaked king. I wondered whether the stories I told really mattered. If they changed the world or changed someone's mind. If any sort of story matters when a story must make noise, provoke, and never repeat.My mother, a man's voice said from beside the couch one day. It was the man from the diner. He gripped his legs with thick, red hands. Like many men who lived in town, he seemed on the verge of explosion. His eyes darted between the brown houseplants on the windowsills.Then he said, That's who I see in the summer when I sleep. That's not a color, I said.She is, he said. Like this. The man pinched his arm and then held it close to me. His arm shook and a small spot bloomed red then purple-brown. The ease of his bruise scared me and I wanted to tell someone about it.I loved her but she, well, you know, said the man. The man's arm kept shaking.Then the man said, Someone can love you and still do terrible things. Like nobody taught them how to do it right.Yeah, I said.I rolled over and listened as the man watched me and breathed. Am I asleep? the man asked.I think I am, I said.No, said the man. I'm asleep. And I really don't want to be. I want to wake up.I turned back toward him and then said, Sometimes when I want to wake up I open my eyes as wide as they'll go. Sometimes if I do it enough I can break through the sleep and escape.The man tried it. The valleys beneath his eyes turned the color of plums. He used his fingers to stretch the skin like he was trying to release air from inside his head.It's not working, he said.I'm sorry. Am I dead? Did I die in my sleep? I don't know.Please wake me up. Please. Please!Alright, I said.I threw off the covers and gripped the man by the shoulders. We made eye contact. Blue ones. The sky in spring.Ready? I asked.Yeah.I shoved him. As he fell backwards the man grabbed my face. I lost my balance and we tumbled together in darkness. I don't know if I hit the ground. Don't remember. All of a sudden I was awake, alone, in my blanket, and that was all. I sat up. I had nowhere to be. No stories to sell. I closed my eyes.What remained was a burst of relief. Like a bath of liquid gold. But it wasn't my relief. In half-awake clarity I knew that the man had escaped from the dream. His dream or mine, I wasn't sure. But he was free, somewhere out there, even if it meant returning to whichever hell had inspired the dream to begin with. I wanted, desperately, for the man's happiness to be my own.
A miracle had come to the mansion that evening, dressed in peasant robes as she played go on the doorstep. The house of Lord Liu was in desperate need of a blessing. The past month had been disastrous for those staffed within its walls. The change from a serene yet celebratory atmosphere had quickly dulled after one of the maids caught sight of the Lady’s physician leaving her room with a cut over one eye. Surmising that he had said something to anger her, rumors spread over the course of a single night – vines choking the mansion halls, blossoming with fragrant anecdotes.The less fantastical yet albeit as shocking truth was made clear the next day, when all the maids were assigned dark sashes to wear across their waists. A sign of mourning, a homage to the Lady’s stillborn daughter. They were to wear them throughout the year and were warned to tread carefully around the Lady’s room, as she was, according to the physician's report, “of a disagreeable disposition.”When servants came to deliver her meal trays, they came silently, heads hung low like crouching flower stems. She would get angry over the most menial details – a stray stain on one’s cheek, a distractingly uneven gait. Once she had clutched a young maid by the cheeks, demanding she get on her knees and pluck out her own eyes.Those are my daughter’s, do you understand, you knave? My daughter would have had those eyes. Her nails dug into the maid’s face, drawing blood with her thin fingers. She would have had them. Greedy. All of you, taking what isn’t yours.No one could bring themselves to complain. Employment at the wealthiest home in their village was the best most of them could achieve, beyond taking up whatever meager trade their families specialized in. They were well compensated, and much of their pay sustained relatives. They were servants, masters of staying out of the way when need be, so they listened as she wailed night after night and learned to adjust.It was on another of those tumultuous evenings that the girl arrived at their doorstep. She couldn’t have been more than eight years old, barefoot in white robes, setting up black and white go stones on a wooden board. Her dark hair was short, brushing against her shoulders, two buns tied with lavender ribbon on either side of her head. At first, she appeared to be some beggar child, perhaps sent out to be the breadwinner by a parent. More careful parents would have their children rummage through the cook’s trash, and the servants, who had all come close to living similar lives, turned their heads whenever they saw mousy clumsily scampering off with bones and rinds. The nature of her posture, too straight and poised to be that of a poor person, was immediately suspicious. Her robes were free from blemish. Though she wore no shoes, her feet were similarly spotless. Most striking of all was her skin – the palest, most enviable shade imaginable. Courtesans spent half their earnings on lead powder to reach such lengths, and died before they ever could.The maids exchanged furtive glances. They ought to remove her quickly, or call one of the guards – how had she managed to evade them, anyway? And while lugging that wooden go board, too?Before any of them could attempt to escort the girl off the premises, the Lady appeared from the opposite end of the courtyard. None of them realized she had left her room, and her steps held no trace of a sound. Her dark, ebony colored hair slid in lazy circles down her back, uncombed for days. “Who,” she said aloud, in that quiet tone that suggested a beating, “are you?” “Hello.” She rubbed a white go stone between her fingers and looked up eagerly.That day, the Lady of the house received the daughter she had so badly wanted.
. . .
She was, according to the maids, a no-name girl from a no-name land.Her official words were that her parents had died of plague, and she was now an orphan. The go board and stones belonged to her father, the last sentimental possession she carried. The establishment they used to run had been burnt to the ground to stop potential contagion. She was – according to her words – all alone and dearly missing her mother, and had caught word of the compassionate Lady Yin of the Liu household. Compassionate? Was the same dry, echoing thought in all the servant’s minds. By now everyone had heard of how unhinged she’d become during her time of social recluse. She was still visited periodically by other court women, but solely because she was of higher rank and could not be disrespected in such a way without the possibility of punishment.Compassionate was not a word that could be used to describe her any longer, but it was the one the go-girl used, and just the thing to soften the Lady’s hardened heart. She had taken the orphan in and claimed her as her own. The Lord had contested the decision at first, but he worried that any comment on the girl would revert his wife back to her former state. Lady Yin kept the girl at her side during all her daily activities. During the few times she left the house – still publicly in her year of mourning – she toted her newfound child with her. The Lord had decided that the girl was a cousin they were charitably adopting. Visitors had no choice but to believe it – she had all the doubtless exuberance of a noble. She looked like the Lady, and many theorized that once she was of age, the two would be difficult to discern from a distance. The girl was not prone to childish outbursts. She wasn’t meek by any means, but she never seemed to share the tantrums of others her age. She settled disagreements by striking deals, a skill that amused elders of the House. They engaged in her games for their own fun, and thought nothing of the calculated way she examined their moves, mistaking her serene expression for complacency.But the servants noticed the girl’s strolls through town, where she talked with any established businessmen she could – and their sons. She was never swayed by material things. Birthday gifts of jewels and silk managed a thin smile from her. And when she was presented with a meal, she ate alone unless it was required that she dine with guests. A guard posted outside her window had caught her pouring soup on the flowers below, a wastefulness that could never have been attributed to someone of her supposed origins. All their combined observations were, together, a coal lump of speculation. How could they explain the bone-chilling coldness of the girl’s skin, the strange way she smiled, as though unsure of how her cheeks would shift when she did? How she embraced her mother with all the affection of an undertaker, arms stiff as wood? For a while they entertained the notion that she was a demon – told stories to each other in the servants’ quarters about how often the Lady and Lord would get sick now that they’d accepted the girl as their own. Some days it seemed they were well and truly dying, with how skinny the Lady had gotten, though she insisted that she was fine, that she was getting better; she said all these things as she cradled the young girl in her arms, the girl who was squeezing her fragile mother tightly, latched onto her skin like lice.The conclusion came upon them swiftly. The girl had come when the House was at its weakest, the Lady at her most vulnerable, to drain every last drop of good fortune from them. And what would the servants do once their master was buried and gone? Where would they go? Back to the streets, every last one of them, begging as they once did, or working in the sweltering forges, or sewing cheap tarps in the shops. They had been nothing before and would be less than nothing now, the dirt that lined the irrigation canals.So they plotted, as servants are naught to do, and waited until the girl had departed to her own chambers – which took days, to the point where the cook had suggested they just pry her off, the Lady was too delirious to know, she’d probably appreciate the lack of weight pressing against her feeble lungs. At the behest of the maids, they waited for the girl to finally leave her mother’s side, all teary-eyed as she sullenly returned to her room.They caught her as she was about to climb into bed. Her eyebags were swollen and dark, and her skin paler than usual. She shuffled onto bed like a maggot, and asked quietly for the furs she adorned herself with before sleeping. The maid held the blankets above the girl’s head, intending to drape them over her shoulders, and with the other hand sliced her neck.The girl made a sound, something like a whine, an animalistic noise. The blood gushed from her in crimson ribbons, streaming down the bed. The other servants left their hiding spaces and circled the maid with the knife to watch the demon die. It twitched on the mattress, writhing weakly, fighting with a frail, human-like strength. It made slow motions with its mouth. What demon cried out mother with such a cracking voice?They all seemed to shake their heads at the same time. No, they thought, watching the little girl go still on the mattress, she was killing them all.
Before getting into bed, Gaspar Santos plopped his dentures into a glass of water. He adjusted himself into a comfortable position between the sheets, sinking into the softened mattress, and eased gently into his sleep.Back in his younger days he had been a pearl hunter, and in the wee hours of night he dreamt he was diving deep in the sea, exposed once again to sharks and fanciful currents. Darkness and silence besieged him, and no matter which way he looked, he could not make out an oyster. All at once he realized he had descended deeper than was advisable and his oxygen would run out before he could reach the surface. Gaspar Santos’s muffled scream was released as a burst of panic bubbles. He flapped his arms and legs, convinced he would not make it. Unable to calculate the distance, he felt he would soon capitulate, but in the exact instant in which he involuntarily thrust open his mouth, he emerged to the surface of sleep and gulped an unexpected mouthful of air.Soaked in sweat, he became aware of the clinic as his breathing slowly returned to normal. His eyes caught on the dentures. The bluish light filtering in through the window blurred the outlines of the glass, and he discovered a likeness that cracked him up. His prosthetic teeth, submerged in the bottom of his glass, resembled a marine oyster. Gaspar Santos’s laugh bounced against the walls and multiplied in the night of Mindanao. It was a laugh imbued with generosity and delight; the only thing missing was some teeth.
I notice some crocodile cracking near the bend, which is already pitched the wrong way—against the turn, so as a car’s tires point left the road’s normal force pushes it right, recipe for a rollover—and think somebody’s going to get killed. So I go to the municipal office to complain, but no one’s there. BE BACK SOON says the sign. So I grab one of the envelopes and start to write on it, just right on the envelope, my name is Ryan Pendleton I live at 29 Keep Tryst Rd in the Hermitage and someone’s going to get hurt and then the woman comes back, hi can I help you? And I say yes who can I talk to about some alligator cracking in the road, and she says pardon me, and I say I mean there’s bad damage, something really terrible could happen, I grew up by that bend and I know how kids drive on it, it’s dangerous even without the cracks, who can I talk to about putting a sign up? and scheduling some maintenance? And she says sir that would be traffic, or well hold on, paper shuffle, to be exact you’d probably have to talk to the sheriff about the sign, and the maintenance would be the state department of transportation, and by now I’ve been here ten fifteen minutes, all in the wrong place, so I’m starting to get a little short with her, not her fault and I’d like to think not mine either but I say okay, the sheriff as in across the street? Or across town? because I can’t remember if it’s the cop cars that say Monroeville Police that park across the street and the cop cars that say Duquesne County Sheriff that park across town, or the other way round, and she says as in across town, and I say I walked here, you know, I don’t have a car, I can’t walk all the way down Main Street and still get there in time, can you call him? And she says okay sir but I’m sure he’ll ask you to set up an appointment, maybe for Monday but I’m not certain, and that’s when my fist hits the desk, involuntarily really, I am just six layers deep of not getting this simple fucking concern addressed, and as I’m trying to level my voice back out Is There A Problem Here? and I turn and no-sir one of the Monroeville Police’s uniformed officers, not even the correct side of town but he’s eyeing me, he’s right by the envelope I put down, just trying to get some information here sir as regards a road near where I live and of course he picks it up and reads it, and the woman’s face doesn’t not register fear, and secondly I may or may not be a known Concealed licensed entity to some among the Duquesne blue so suddenly Monroeville’s More-or-Less Finest is doing some spring kinematics in his head, one hand hipped and one hand in the kind of palm-forward configuration that’s meant to calm but really feels like he’s trying to summon some kind of invisible force power to get you where he wants you, at the very least down and disarmed, and while he’s getting closer I’m thinking of Eddie, that girl from high school’s little brother who didn’t wear a seatbelt when his sister’s friends were whipping around Long Pond Road and lost control and it was only Eddie who went through the windshield, only him, probably saw the most amazing shower of glass before he lost everything, upside down blood in his head and shiny shards in the late afternoon sun, maybe he heard his science teacher Mr. Bonner saying something about the states of matter, how glass is not exactly a liquid but it’s not entirely right to call it just a solid, either, it is an a-morph-ous solid, which I always remembered because it sounded like Animorphs, and just like Tobias glass was always ready to change, to break, and it didn’t have any long range pattern either, glass is random and it’s not brittle like a crystal it can be blown and shaped into something like the big thick tempered mostly bulletproof window I fell into, after, BE BACK SOON, the blood eddying behind my tongue, sunset coming and the bamboo shoots still growing silently silently towards the road, an inch and a half per hour, and when they’re wet they bend down, they’re so easy to hit, you have to pay attention—
The night trees were blue by the Wensum. Eels seethed in a ditch. In the flint wall of a garden a door trembled. A green man sat naked on the riverbank, his feet in the water, head nodding, vines and tendrils ran down his chest. A swan guzzled between his legs, blood flowed down his mossy thighs. Twitching and jiggling, burning ropes suspended from the boughs of a hawthorn tree. Across a playing field the cathedral rose, all spire, dissolving sour yellow into the sky, drifting towards the moon.Cakes were scattered in the mud by the Watergate. The girl guides were elsewhere, in bed. The guides’ carers were in bed also. Or sitting at a kitchen table with a mug of malted milk staring at their reflection in the black glass of a garden door.A walking stick, made from a shark’s backbone, floated down the river. A leprous-white hand attached. And to the hand, an arm, a body. Lids flickered; eyes opened; large, luminous green. The man was a watcher. Watching himself looking out for others to whom he could attach his gaze.Andrea tucked the hospital gown into the waistband of her jeans. She sang a song of her own making. She smiled, which made her think of teeth, her teeth, and she smiled again, broader this time. A plaster covered the puncture mark in her left hand. The hand was sore, and several of the fingers were numb at their tips. She stopped and looked at her hand, fearing, for a moment, that it would become another thing, shears or claws or jaws, or another’s. Another’s perfect hand, unscarred, cold and steady with silver fingernails and dry palms. Andrea wanted to be sure that she would not change any more than was necessary.Men came down the path. Three men. One stared, eyes out of his head. One sang and leered. One walked with a swinging stride, hands in pockets, his face two tiny eyes, a red gash of wet lips. Three men taking possession of the night.Andrea knew the moment they noticed her from the thickening of the air in her throat, from the return of pain to her left shoulder, from the sudden heaviness of her boots, the stickiness of their soles. The men called. They told her what they thought she was. They told her what they wanted to do. They told her what they were going to do.Andrea stood still in the middle of the path. The river slowed and stopped. The river speeded up. The men came closer, growing smaller all the while. Andrea reached into the gown pocket and took out a gross anatomy knife. The men came on, their sounds more distant, their forms shrinking away. The handle was plastic, lemon yellow and warm. Andrea drew long lines where they might have been. The air parted with a sucking sound, again and again. The men whispered in the grass; they had not passed but they were gone.She tossed the knife into the river, wet before it hit the water, picked up her tune and followed the way towards the road. The trees shivered as she passed. Canaries with glass beaks fussed and chittered in the air a few feet above and behind. Andrea reached in her pocket and found the knife. Safe.Wavering orange light was visible through the trees, cries drifted with the smoke from Lollards Pit across the river. The path warped to her left, ran through a wicket, past a cottage and out before a tower. The Cow Tower. The place she would meet her friend Judith. Andrea walked on but could not see her. She passed round the tower to a tall iron gate and looked through. On a green silk divan reclined a large woman in a great fur coat.‘Aren’t you terrible hot, Judy?’‘I like to be cosy, don’t you know, old girl. You’re looking less than marvellous, if I might say. You made it here all right?’‘A little local difficulty. Nothing to speak of, darling. How did you get in there?’‘The ladies from the Adam and Eve carried me over. Would you believe it? Big girls the lot of them. My kind.’‘It’s been quite some time since last orders, Judy.’‘A long dry season, my friend, makes kindling of us all.’Judith reached over and switched on a tall standard lamp. Yellow light projected upwards, illuminating the canaries that swirled above where the upper floors used to be, making their beaks sparkle.‘How should I…’‘Just give a good firm shove, love.’The gate moved, shifting a mound of dried leaves forward with a hush. Andrea looked up and around. A dark circle of blue, the sky, a ring of gun ports, another of arrow loops, pellitory and red valerian grew in effusions on every welcoming surface.‘The armchair is for you, sweetie. You must be exhausted after your troubles. No one was less deserving of troubles than you, dearest. Curse the deserving, the bastards.’‘You wouldn’t have a cup of tea, would you?’‘Haven’t I flask? And a hamper too? You’re starved, of course.’Andrea took a melamine willow-pattern plate out of the basket and raided the same for gala pie, potato salad with chives, for asparagus spears sopping with butter, for sweet tomato chutney, for a salad of endives, marigold leaves, watercress and sorrel soured with vinegar. She was a long time eating and all the while Judith watched her contentedly, pulling from time to time on the pipe of a port sipper glass. Andrea poured herself a mug of tea and settled back in the armchair.‘Did you tell them at the hospital before you left? That you were going to leave?’‘I did not.’‘Might they look for you?’‘I suppose they might. But I’m here, aren’t I? Where they aren’t. And I haven’t done anything wrong.’‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’Andrea took a fat gulp of tea.‘Have I done something wrong, Judy?’‘You haven’t done anything wrong, my love. Not a thing.’‘Only to myself.’‘Only to yourself.’‘What did I do that for Judy?’‘You know why, honeybear.’‘I can take care of myself now.’‘You should.’‘Do you love me, Judy?’‘I do.’Judith patted the silk heavily raising a small cloud of dust out of the horsehair. Andrea dropped the mug and rose, the plate fell on the stones, she approached the sofa, Judith opened her coat and her arms and embraced Andrea, enfolding her, pulling her close, stroking her hair. Scents of parma violet, of turpentine, of chypre, of wet slate, of old leather, of smoking peat. As Andrea began to fall asleep Judith reached out and turned off the lamp. Judith could feel the knife through the gown.Andrea woke, blinking, alone on the divan, swaddled in fur. Six girls in brown and yellow uniforms crowded around the gate, gazing down at her, their faces bright, shiny and serious.‘She’s awake.’‘We can see that…’‘Would you like a cake, lady?’‘Shutup…’All but one of the girls laughed. The one who had offered the cake.‘Cake for breakfast?’ said Andrea.The girls danced, singing: ‘Cake for breakfast! Cake for breakfast!’Andrea walked, smiling, to the gate. The unsmiling girl pressed an open pink toffee tin forward. It was crowded with fairy cakes, each topped with a thick, vermicular swirl of buttercream and a scattering of blue and yellow sugar stars.‘Take one…’Andrea took one.‘Take another.’She took another.‘Thank you,’ said Andrea.‘Bye! Bye!’ said five of the girls, and they skipped off.The unsmiler stood still. She returned the lid to the tin.‘We’re picking up rubbish today. Along the river.’‘Oh…that sounds…’The girl interrupted her with a solar, yellow-toothed smile. She held the cake tin up at a distance from her uniform and marched away.Andrea shuffled off the fur. She stood looking up to the new sun and raised an arm to protect her face from a shower of hard bright objects; birdless glass beaks. Andrea squeezed through the narrow gate gap, turned back to the river. She walked down Ferry Lane towards Tombland.A lone horse passed by slowly, pulling an empty cart. In the shadowed window of a house was a rocking horse with a mouth too large for its head and ivory slabs for teeth, as if it had not quite finished eating a piano.The lane sank and river water flowed rapidly along the deep channel. Andrea stepped to one side and a large boat with a tall mast under a single sail came on, one man fore and another aft, throwing, pushing and pulling on long poles.Roped together on deck were two vast pieces of roughly dressed creamy limestone. The water flowed back to the river and the channel filled in.Andrea stopped next to a gate in a black iron fence. A sign read: Browne’s Meadow. She stepped in and onto the large bituminous rectangle of a car park bounded by red brick walls and, beyond these, by willows and sallows that nodded and soughed in a soft breeze. A fine, many-handed chestnut roan stood at the centre, its haunches facing her, its tail flicked as she approached. She made a wide circle round to face the horse, which she patted and then embraced around the neck. The ground became soft under her soles. The cars were sheep. The tarmac was grass and sweet briar, bramble and mulberry, whortle-berry and holly, juniper and gorse, cornelian and hazel; bilberries, redcurrants, gooseberries, dog’s mercury, barberries and bittersweet grew in random profusion. Andrea released the horse’s head and it plodded into the distance.Andrea sat in the wonder meadow. She felt the similitude of her limbs to the various parts of nature surrounding and thought of how she might be joined to them more completely, more fruitfully. Her skin was bark to her. Her body south-facing always, a spirit searching for union, for extension, for vegetable tranquillity; unpractised in green ways, in rootedness, but sapful, exalted and germinal. She might, with the aid of an artful incision, grow atop a hawthorn, or an alder, an oak or a hawthorn, or entwine herself for life within a gorse bush, a thousand shining yellow eyes, spiny green fingers, tough branched arms, scenting the air by day and night.Memory is an arsonist, setting fires cell-deep at ungovernable intervals of time and space. Lights go on, searching out pain. The hands of another. The mother voice, singing to block out the noise. Titanic laughter and with it confusion. Clouds, white, grey striations, disposed across the eye. The folded heron in the reed bed, the river drifting deeply, its world mirroring still. Judy sat on the orange plastic seats in casualty. And again, Judy waiting on the orange plastic seats in casualty. And later, Judy waiting on the green plastic seating in casualty. For Andrea to return, clean and swathed.It might be the deep chill damp of the earth rising or her body warmth sinking into the meadow but there is a gradual cooling, a dimming, an extinguishing. For the first time since memory began these hard fires, their successions, their wasting, their consummations, their miseries, go down and out and mindsmoke drifts, drifts away. The dark, at last, is light.The suffering blue of the sky called her back from the green, the hard tar and grit beneath her gown; a sheep, a car, beeping its horn.Andrea stood and brushed herself down. The driver spoke some sour words out of their window and reversed to park. Out in the lane Andrea headed for the cathedral close through a crowd of grinning, blue-uniformed boys. She sat on a bench and looked up at the pink-tinged spire, at a falcon stood distantly on the air aside its uppermost taper.‘When I rise,’ she said. ‘I shall be free.’
The itch begins in the jawbone under the gums. I can’t get to it with a finger or tongue or backscratcher. Have to let it itch, like watching a fly you can’t swat tickle your forearm. It’s happened before. Happens more these days. Nothing shows up on x-rays, and now dental insurance is all used up.The tooth itches as the boss talks. He’s wearing a suit on casual Friday. It’s gray and fits him in the shoulders but not the belly, so he leaves it unbuttoned. The blue striped tie hangs over his belt. It’s like he’s guest-hosting a nineties talk show. The boss scans the room as he talks, and it’s like he’s looking right at you. He makes that passing sort of eye contact of CEOs and preachers. The way experts do during their TedTalk on the secret history of statistics. You know the talk: This message will change your life.The office is desks and phones, like in old movies. Phones on every desk, desks in every cubicle. Phones now ring in the background because the boss has gathered us to stand by a long table—a hundred of us, the whole floor, in a semi-circle. The table is in front of the west windows overlooking the city. On the table sits a vase. In the vase, an orchid. By the orchid is a box. The boss is in front of the table. He raises his arms in symmetry. He learned this somewhere, probably the same boss school that taught ambiguous eye contact and said to give bad news on Friday afternoon. The boss, we all know, is about to lay half of us off. Year-end is the time of “tough” choices. Boss school must have taught him, Make sure to look like this hurts you too; you did everything you could.Right then, the itch itches, just at the bottom of the molar. Those roots go down into the bone. The boss is saying something about Hannibal crossing the Himalayas on elephants. He’s going to quote the Dali Lama. Put money on it.Speaking of the Dali Lama, four summers ago, on my two-week vacation, I was in India on overcrowded sidewalks. A bike courier blazed by in his cotton shorts and glasses and no-helmet, just pumping. He turned past a truck, then around a car, then hopped onto the sidewalk. But a pigeon, swear to God—didn’t even know India had pigeons—plopped down in front of him. Pigeon, gray and blue and clueless, stalled right in the path between the bicyclist, a bus in the road, and a fire hydrant.Instincts took over: Bicyclist turned, missed the bus but rammed into the hydrant. The bicyclist was going as fast as the cars were supposed to be going, so when he fell off the bike, his body flew car-speed. The pigeon didn’t flinch. Just waddled along while the bike bounced into the road and went under the bus tires, as the bicyclist soared overhead, like, yes, a bird, but landed like an egg. Rammed his unhelmeted head into a bench. The crowd swarmed the bicyclist. He was laid flat out, maybe breathing. All I remember is a tooth on the sidewalk. A whole tooth, the big molar. It’s like a wicked iceberg—the top half is rounded and blunt, but beneath that flat top a root system runs sharp and long, like those Italian horn pendants disco dancers used to wear. The bicyclist’s molar was speared with two points. Those points, when not being knocked out, stick in the bone beneath the gums.That’s where the itch is: in the bone, at the tips of those points at the end of the molar. Not a strong itch, just an unreachable one. But it goes on long enough—boss talks about how proud he is of what we’ve all accomplished “together” (arms raised like an Olympian)—and the idea of finding pliers and pulling the thing out seems reasonable.“…over the Himalayas,” says the boss. Himalayas? Hannibal crossed the Alps.While the boss is riding mastodons up Everest, here in the room, across the circle of employees gathered near the west windows overlooking the city, standing beside the boss, one of the secretaries, Shannon or Shelly-something, sneezes. And that slows the boss. The boss says “Bless you” like a priest. The sneeze, though, sparks an idea: Fake a cough. In the cough, maybe with my mouth covered, I could stick my thumb inside and wiggle the tooth. A wiggle usually makes the itch stop. Except the boss is the center, like the sun, of a half circle, and we’re in orbit around him, but also directly across from our current (and future-former) coworkers. So maybe a push against the cheek. The right hand comes up slowly. Don’t draw attention. Move like the room has motion detectors. Then a test—just a quick scratch of the neck, like maybe the heater kicked on and the breeze set off the small hairs. Nothing to notice. Take your time. The boss isn’t going to stop until he’s scaled Mount Kanchenjunga.No one turns. They’re all still focused on the boss. No one watches the fingernails scratch the side of my throat—up, down, small circle. The scratch takes focus off the tooth, but not all. Like a mosquito has somehow gotten inside. That moment when the mosquito is in the vein, before it pulls out and the brain says, “Kill it.” But by the time you notice a mosquito, it’s already got your blood, and left its spit.Boss pauses. This is the emotional climax. He says something about Nepal, and you know that he practiced this in front of a mirror. He’s got a ring on his finger. He practiced this for his wife. I assume he’s straight. It’s something about the suit, the off-the-shelf that doesn’t fit. He said to his wife, “How does this sound?” and he raised his arms and rehearsed, “The real test of character comes not in victory but in loss.” She said, “It’s great.” She asked if they had anything going on Sunday because an old college friend was in town and wanted to go for lunch. The boss said, “Sounds fine.”Then my knuckle pushes against the cheek, and it does nothing. The cheek is condoms. There’s no way to get to the itch without going in. But the sneezing secretary is looking across now. She knows who the boss means when he says, “and even in hardship.” For the boss she typed up all the emails and attachments waiting in our inboxes, ran the names by HR. She’s probably screwing Boss. His “Bless you” was too concerned. Boss probably tested his speech on both wife and mistress. He’s that kind, like Hannibal: too much man for one woman. Leaves his seed in every town he conquers. Or maybe I’m thinking of Genghis Khan.So, the thing to do is bring the other arm across the chest, to support the arm raised to the cheek, to tilt the head in the look of serious concentration: the dreamy co-ed in that Indiana Jones movie. The secretary is scanning the circle now. She looks past me. Doesn’t make eye contact. Maybe that means I’m not getting laid off. Or that I am. Once the secretary’s gaze returns to the boss, I push in again. Hard. And the push helps. It’s a dull pain. Cheek smushed into all the teeth. And the pain feels good. Push harder. The itch is still there, but the cheek, the inside mashed against the jaw, helps. The cheek warms like a fever.The boss pauses. He drops his arms. Puts them into his pockets and billows the edges of his suit jacket up and out. He stares at the ground. This is the point when all of us, fired and unfired, are supposed to feel for him. His Sophie’s Choice. This is when he talks about the American spirit after 9/11.It’s a stupid job anyway. Lay me off. Let me go. Terrible dental.The boss has his hands in his pockets, like a sign to do the same—lower my arms. Uncross. Unclench. And as soon as the cheek pain settles away, the itch comes back stronger. The tingle, like centipede feet. Inside the jaw, at the pointy tips of the molars in the bone. You would kill to fly unhelmeted and head-first into a bus bench. You would kill for pliers.And you can’t believe it, but that’s what the boss has. He pulls them from his pants pocket. One of those Swiss Army knives. No, a Leatherman. They don’t let you take those things on planes anymore. Someone would hijack a Delta with a Leatherman: “Take me to Cuba. I have a bottle opener.” With his Leatherman in hand, the boss reaches back toward a box on the table by the orchid in a vase. The box is sealed, so the boss needs the Leatherman to clip the straps on the box. Everyone is looking at the box. They all want to know what’s in the box. But I’m following the Leatherman with the knife out, with the pliers tucked inside.The boss sets the Leatherman on the table. The secretary watches the boss lovingly, excited about the box.The boss smiles. From the box, straps clipped, he pulls out a trophy. A real trophy, like they used to give in bowling leagues in those days when men wore Italian horn pendants and took knives on planes. He’s talking about the trophy, about Bill in Engineering, and forty years of service.Bill walks through the middle of the half-circle to the boss. The boss is all smiles. Couldn’t be prouder if Bill were his own father. Forty years of devotion. And there’s no way to replace that much knowledge and skill. No way to replace Bill. The company won’t be the same without him. But the boss and his secretary will make do. They’ll probably both get bonuses for replacing Bill with two part-timers in India.So then I step behind the circle and walk the perimeter because everyone is watching Bill get his trophy, even the secretary. Secretary most of all. The secretary seems really glad Bill is leaving. She says, “What are you going to do with your free time?” Bill grips the trophy and shrugs. And I’m closer now, side-step by side-step.The Leatherman waits on the table by the vase. Almost there. Jenny in accounting turns back, but not before I’m past her. Eyes forward, Jenny.Bill says he’s looking forward to time with the grandkids. What else is he going to say? That he’s planning to leave his wife. That he has a one-way ticket to Las Vegas. Gonna blow twenty-grand on legal prostitutes who smile when he asks for a birthday special.Now I’m at the table, behind the secretary, and the secretary has a good rear for someone who sits as much as secretaries sit. It’s just an observation. I don’t mean anything by it, but it is a surprise. How she lives at a desk, but she’s tight as a gymnast. It’s impressive. Just that kind of discipline.The tooth pulses now. Dull throbs, like a strobe light. And maybe it’s the movement, shuffling my way behind the half-circle, the blood pulsing. It’s pushing now. The boss says, “Let’s give Bill a hand.” The applause is my shot. So I press past, behind the secretary’s behind, reach across the table. My forearm grazes the orchid vase. It wobbles. I pluck the Leatherman. Pull it back smooth and quick as the boss says, “Bill, we’re going to miss you.” Orchid vase teeters. Vase does a spin like a coin settling—heads, tails. Vase stops.Bill takes his final walk back across the circle. Don’t worry, Bill. You aren’t the only one going home today. At least you get a trophy.And I’m back out, careful to slide the tool into my pocket, holding it with my left hand so it doesn’t slip and cut through the fabric. Moving step by step around the outside, past Jenny in accounting. Jenny’s not looking, but she steps back and closes the gap between me and the wall, and it’s her or the wall, and I plow into Jenny. Watch where you’re going, Jenny.Jenny teeters. She stumbles into the accountants, but I press on—didn’t even nick my thigh with the knife. The boss says, “On a serious note.” He’s at the end, and I’m back where I started. The boss pauses because the accountants are mumbling, and Jenny is straightening her shirt. The boss backs it up and tries again. “On a serious note,” he says. He says he’s done everything he can. He says, “But it’s like the Dalia Lama said, ‘If a problem cannot be solved there is no use worrying about it.’”He has a point there. When the pink slip comes my way, I can’t control that. The secretary waves her arms to get our attention. Good arms. Secretary is thirty-five, maybe forty, and goes sleeveless. She invites everyone to join in the break room. There’s cake for Bill. Cake for the lot of us who have emails waiting in our inboxes: instructions for What’s Next on our own journeys across our personal Himalayas.Then the circle collapses, splits into a hundred points all shuffling back to cubicles or to the break room, some patting Bill on his shoulders, Bill with his trophy on his way to claim his cake. The itch might go away with cake, the chewing. At least then, if I stick a fork in my mouth, no one cares. And I could cut the cake with the Leatherman, with the knife edge pressed against my thigh. But the cubicle first. The email, the merciful email.Back at the desk, the itch slows. I’m in my own cubicle, surrounded by a portrait of the 2001 Seattle Mariners, Taylor Swift bobblehead from a niece. I set the Leatherman on the desk. Close the blade. It’s the pliers I want.The computer screen wakes. It knows I’m back and has messages for me. The computer talks with other computers and already knows what the other computers know. Computers are gossips. From the other cubicles come the first sighs and oh-shits and thank-gods. The murmur like a hive. No one uses the office phones on their desks. They pull out their personal cells to call home. “Honey, I got bad news.” Some whimpers. Some sniffles. And I don’t know if the cries come from the people laid off or those left behind.My computer is slow. I’ve been asking for a new one since Halloween. The inbox is buried under windows. And by the time I get to it, there’s nothing. During that whole boss-talk, I missed six emails about invoices, but nothing like “it saddens me” or “we thank you for your service.” And the tooth pulses again. The Leatherman goes back in my pocket, and I head to the breakroom because at least there’s cake and maybe that will help. Maybe there’s ice cream with the cake and that can numb everything. Sometimes when this happens, I get a glass of crushed ice from the breakroom fridge dispenser and pinch the ice between cheek and gum like chew. The dentist says that’s no good. He says, “Have you tried B-complex vitamins?” Yes, and peppermint tea bags and hydrogen peroxide and Anbesol.Bill is by the microwave and flanked by other engineers. Bill’s happy, which is odd because no one’s ever happy. Yes, sometimes people are pleasant or amused, but never happy. And how the hell did Bill make it forty years—and is that the secret: that if you can give the company four decades, you get to be happy. In thirty-four years, I’ll grin like a piñata.No ice cream. And the cake doesn’t help. It’s white and over-sugared with supermarket raspberry jam for filling. The chocolate frosting is dry as plaster, but the breakroom fills with chatter about how good the cake is. Jenny in accounting says, “The cake is great.” You know nothing about cake, Jenny.I’m standing by the cake and Bill comes over for a second slice. He doesn’t want a whole piece. “Just a sliver,” he says, and I’m standing at the table by the cake, and Bill’s looking for a knife.“I have a knife,” I say, and pull from my pocket. “Great Leatherman,” says Bill. But he doesn’t take it.So I ask him, “What’s the secret?” Bill grins but won’t tell. Then the itch comes back like an allergy. And I know how rude this looks, but, on Monday, Bill will be in Vegas pouring massage oil on hookers, so I just do it. I set the Leatherman down by the cake and reach my hand inside and wiggle the tooth. My hand comes out pulling a string of spit—like I’m a basset hound.“Itch?” says Bill. He smiles like one of those wise Cherokee in every western movie. “Yes,” he says, “there’s a secret.” Bill sets down his plate. He moves his hands to his mouth. He flinches, pinches around, and draws from between his lips. Out, in his glistening hand, comes his top dentures. Bill smiles like a railroad tramp, all gums. And his face falls saggy. But happy saggy. Then tilts his head, puts the plate back in, bites down, and restores his face.He says, “Pliers don’t work. I know a guy who can get you forceps. And lidocaine.” Then Bill says he’s changed his mind and takes the full slice. He grabs a piece with his hand and sets it on his plate, then licks the raspberry jam from his fingers. “Here,” I say, and lift the Leatherman to Bill once more. “Congratulations,” I say. But Bill says he already has all the Leathermans he needs and walks back to the guys from Engineering with his full slice of cake.The Leatherman is perfectly designed. A knife and a saw and pliers all in one working unit. The knife for cutting cake. The pliers for pulling teeth. And maybe Bill is wrong about pliers. Only one way to find out. And maybe the company that makes the Leatherman is hiring, needs a good accounts guy. Probably that company has amazing dental. I could leave, at least after the Christmas bonus—no sense going before then. And the tooth isn’t itching now. And if the itch comes back, I know how to handle it. If it gets too bad, I have the pliers to rip that thing out or can get lidocaine from Bill’s dealer. I’ll take action. It’s like the Dalai Lama says, “Happiness comes from your own actions.” Or maybe it was Hannibal or Genghis Kahn. Either way, isn’t being happy what it’s all about.
