[the warm sound of night]

mixture #10

2012-02-12T23:43:00.003-06:00

Her lips unfurl and her mouth is a flame.
I am aflame. The advice you gave
is what you couldn't follow.
In Paris, the news cut in for a celebrity death:
Somebody died of bonheur.
I am dead of night and you can be morning.
This mourning is convex and a little warmer
than forecasted. It would be.
Her lips unfurl and her mouth is a flame.

'harm's way'

2011-12-02T16:18:00.003-06:00

would be a great name for a racehorse or a Harlequin romance
or a tourist sloop that hunts up the Nile
seeking casual malevolence each night. I write you this
from Maadi, the tony home of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri,
who once blamed a terrorist tourist slaughter
on the visitors who'd taken the bullets, who were
far from danger until, suddenly, they weren't.
"The young men are saying that this is our country
and not a place for frolicking and enjoyment,
especially for you," Z'd said, to you.
But the tourists only stopped coming recently,
when the Egyptians started doing their own thing
by draping themselves and their country with public danger.
Meanwhile, Zawahiri runs from American missiles
somewhere near Nowherestan, frolicklessly far from home.
He took harm's way. I try not to. I'm also far from home,
but I permit mine occasional frolicking and enjoyment.
When it's quiet in Cairo, I think of casual malevolence,
sometimes of baseball and of its best position:
third base, the hot corner, the place you go that's quiet
until, suddenly, it isn't.

stray bullet and a hot meal

2011-10-23T21:03:00.006-06:00

[Discovered on the hard drive: fiction, circa 2008.]

It would be great consolation to the world’s estranged if they knew that the surest path to reconciliation was a stray bullet and a hot meal, a .45 crashing through the wall of your fifth-story apartment at midnight followed by a 1 a.m. cold call to your former better half—phat thai at, say, Suzuki’s?—the cold call at 1 a.m. because you know she’s awake, Suzuki’s because they’re always open, phat thai because their phat thai is the best, cheap, but not so cheap that the spices don’t burn your nose hairs, hey, you could have died back there, you didn’t see the other hole in the opposite wall, because before then you were calm when you called the cops, acting all suave and everything, this sort of thing happens in the city!, you were so casual, but they came and found the second hole right between the picture frames of your mother and your brother back in Muskogee, and if you put up a string between the two holes and pulled the string tight you would see that the thing went barely three feet over your chest, three feet lower and they’d be threading that string through your ribs, you stupid Muskogee boy, what are you doing in New York?, but this phat thai is delicious, things haven’t changed much at Suzuki’s, same chef and everything, same awful pictures of downtown on the walls, same awful green plastic frames, this is not the nineties anymore but you wouldn’t know it in this place.

So you called her because you decided your life was too short to not be talking to her, and here she is, wearing those going-out clothes with such disdain, still all arms and legs but one year older, it’s a year that you can see in her face, not from wrinkles, but as if someone had taken all her features and pushed them a millimeter apart, so, here’s reality, you’re both getting older, you’re not kids anymore, this phat thai is delicious, how are you?, I almost died back there, I’m well, thanks for asking. My god, I haven’t been here since the last time I was here with you.

Go ahead, laugh, yuk it up—is that a hair?—but on the inside, you’re shaking a little bit, you’re not sure if it’s because of the bullet thing or because you’re with her, it’s gotta be one or the other, you were always weird like that, always scared of one thing and not the other, as if you didn’t have room for two fears, that’s what made you a good musician when you moved to the city, you used to have stage fright so bad, but you were so miserable in this town that you didn’t give a shit how you played the sax, so you played great, and if you play great in New York, get in with the right people, you can gig whenever you want, which is a great way to make interesting friends if you aren’t kind of busy being in love with somebody. She orders spring rolls and you get crab rangoon. This place is terrible, a mélange of Asia, the menu an archipelago of Pacific cultures, but you love it, you love it in all its begrimed neon late-night glory, a bullet came crashing through your wall, fuck, all you needed was a hot meal and to see somebody who would miss you if you were gone, so you called her to see how she’s doing, to see if she would miss you when you’re gone, and here she is, but that rush of calling her is over now, you were still scared of the bullet when you called her, still feeling the rush—you didn’t think about what you would say when you saw her, all arms and legs, face slightly distorted—so it’s true, it’s her that you’re afraid of, not the bullet, not death. You beat death tonight. Now what?

There are rips in the plastic seats of the booth you’re sitting in, green vinyl torn up by the studs in people’s jeans, these seats make your bare skin itch for some reason, careful not to let your pants slide too low or you’ll be digging at your ass, where did the bullet come from? she asks, and honestly up until this point you had not really considered this, you had not thought out a realistic scenario in which a tiny ugly little shard of homicide would be flying through the sanctuary of your bedroom, so you were more scared of her than you thought, let’s face it, the bullet was just an excuse to have a near-death experience in order for you to call her, you’ve been waiting to get almost shot all year—maybe it was some guys fucking around on the roof across the way, this is the city but not that kind of city, this is still New York, people love their guns here, you dig at your ass and pull up your pants, why does her face look so different?, maybe somebody was drunk and just thought they’d squeeze the trigger, gunshots in this city go unreported all the time, people hear the bang and just chalk it up to a truck backfiring, even though trucks don’t really backfire anymore, it’s just that nobody likes the idea of bullets suddenly complying with the laws of physics, you just came here to play jazz, man, you just showed up, you didn’t ask for all this.

Things could be worse—you’re not dead, but she could be dead, you could be in mourning mode, elegy mode, all of a sudden you’re the fucking Music Man ready to flush some fucking tunes at her funeral, best funeral ever!, but thinking this you realize it would be just like all those screenplays that her freshman roommate used to write at college, always somebody dead, somebody’s wife or somebody’s girlfriend, god, from flipping through his manuscripts you’d think this country was the worst place in the world for a romantic twentysomething to be living in, the mortality rate is outrageous! Not that you could make fun of the kid for wanting to be a writer, for chrissakes, you were a music guy and you have to explain to everybody that they really do teach jazz at the University of Oklahoma, funny as that is, dumb white kids really can swing, when all you Muskogee boys say “swing” it comes out swang. That's just your flavor.

Food’s burned, the place is cheap, fuck America and all her food and all her rooftop gunmen, the Lee Harvey Oswalds of your enclosed little reality, losers all, you sit and you look at her and you think that it could have been the Thai chef, going out on break, sitting up there on top of the building across the street with all those new lofts you can’t afford, hanging out with his brother’s brand new gun, just wanted to hold it in his hands, new and shiny and heavy, whoops! You never know, man.

She’s starts getting twitchy, twisting in her seat, something’s happening in her head, you poor bastard, you already know what it is, it’s like when you get a cold and you feel the first little snot scratching at the back of your throat and you get a glimpse of coming week: well, she’s starting the twelve step program of calling it a night, first, it starts with the recognition that the conversation’s stopped going anywhere, you’ve talked dirt paths into the ground in all the places you keep wanting to go, so she’ll check the time, keep talking, throw the napkin on the table, lean to the side a bit, etc., the middle doesn’t matter, just the beginning and the end, which finishes with her meeting somebody else.

At least she has a sense of decorum.

Fast forward, you both stand, you make like kind of an awkward hug over the table, the A-frame hug, the worst form of personal contact in the universe, it must be what lovers are forced to do when they reach Hell together. You decide this is some kind of hell, there’s so much you want to talk about but no way to transmit it to her, something about your loneliness is a little awkward, spoils the conversation, forces her to talk about what she’s doing at her job when in reality you’re looking for that little thread of magic that winds through your better days, the thread that connected them all to each other but also parceled them together on some little shelf of history, buried beneath some tax receipts, no way to relive the magic, guess you’re just gonna have to keep jamming until something real happens again.

She walks out the door.

Some night. You wish you’d gotten shot in the ass.

funny girl

2011-10-06T00:14:00.005-06:00

You gallop back in intervals,
grin across a forgotten Poland,
your hand on a note of nothings
from which I'd turned some words
to beautiful suicides.

I'm never coming home again.
But I keep this little cornered smile,
and the grace of autumn so pliant,
paused fast on the moment.

So,
may your likeness die beautiful
if it ever existed,
and keep my rage for you afire.

the damnedest things

2011-09-25T18:30:00.006-06:00

Your love is conditional, guarded by diplomats, but real.
Tonight we bat our tirades at and over each other
like beach balls smuggled into a ballgame;
your hand brushes mine, the waiter notices,
his words surround the affection
like fenceposts lining a perimeter
that can’t be secured. The end of this plot?
Well, you’ll exalt New York and your share of it,
leave me to defend Chicago and the rest of
America’s nethers from this fête on heels
like some hapless, backpedaled Cary Grant,
and then we’ll melt into each other’s beds
like découpage. OK! It’s true, I can’t change.
This heart beats with ink. I shape myself
from black. You always take the form of a question,
opening away from the facts
over breakfast with a gust of champagne;
knowing me, I’d spend my mornings
with pen and napkin in hand,
looking a little careless,
quietly guessing the answers.

autumn number one

2011-09-04T11:38:00.007-06:00

Blame it on this chemical affection
and leave his youth alone for a change.
He points his car down past the docks
where the stevedores fish and smoke joints after work,
their bent bodies baked into relief by a sun froze low in the sky.
He just needs to keep moving,
to press himself out through the capillaries of this county
like a drop of blood escaping the skin.
His dog, a nine-year-old retriever,
sticks its head out the other window
while a sixer of Milwaukee's Best rattles against
the twelve-gauge in the back.
He conjures less magic these days
because more of the science is known,
and there's enough science to matters of the heart
that we can model many of these disasters in advance.
We project that he will never die.
But if he had his way, he'd go an ember,
incinerated beneath this perfect sun of endless summer.

victory at sea

2011-07-22T22:51:00.014-06:00

Aboard the U.S.S. Midway

Etta James paints the year's end in amber. Cabs stalk the wharf.
You're wearing the best suit you got and can't wait to get it off.
Somewhere this Friday night slipped into metaphor
and you test the rails on the flight deck: Sturdy.
They say, go ye into the byways and bid them fly, son,
before all these safe harbors turn to honeytonks
toasting their Buds to another slo-mo demise.
Ancestors spit on you from heaven!
Your granddaddy flew a PBY and lost it near the Aleutians,
adrift in this same ocean while the Japanese
searched for war in the fog overhead.
He later turned alcoholic and abusive and died young,
and sometimes heroes do that, but who's a hero?
Couldn't say. Even five-by-fives go sixes and sevens.
You're just a body of bliss with a girl on your arm.
This New Year's Eve, 2010, it's San Diego,
where the wind off the Pacific whips your jacket.
Etta's in your ear. You wait your turn to fly by night.

devotion

2011-07-03T23:49:00.000-06:00

You and that goddamn smile,
it's cocktail hour again
somewhere across this twilit city
and you'll brook no opposition.
You know you're the only one I see.
Years off, a woman gently grasps my wrist
and I know you'd shiv her if she ever hurt me.
Even when I'm pulling my best
angel-of-death impression on some
barren stretch of humanity, I'm not gone.
It's you. And the summer comes again,
someone's playing Lauryn Hill again.
Must be something, I've been told,
but it's nothing, the only nothing
for me. A filament of light
dangling aching happy
on an elemental string.

beat

2011-07-03T22:32:00.003-06:00

He's seen war, hurricanes, famine,
death metastasized. He laughs.
He's holding a beer. "Love
is the only thing that can break me!"
It still breaks me too. I haven't
seen what he has, but probably will.
He married a musician, a jazz singer
from Austin, bird-boned and reedy-voiced
and apparently not ready to watch him
catalogue the vanishing points of the earth:
"I think she's in Toledo or somewhere out there now."
He moved into a studio apartment near mine,
where each of us barely live. He's been shot at, never hit.
No one's pointed a gun at me. He orders
another round and asks what's on the jukebox
and tells me to go talk to the blonde by the door.
I don't. I'm fine. I think of what pain is
and how it looks on paper. I'm not sure he does anymore.
I see him smile. His name is Jim.

creators

2011-07-03T22:17:00.004-06:00

Still remember them, the nights
sick with the pain of watching love fade out.
But gently. Like a Polaroid in reverse.
Like a dimming ruined house
that doesn't exist anywhere anymore.
Sheer devotion is hard to fathom
after you stop wanting to give it, and grow.

I build things, small things with my hands now,
and many. I make love. And how about
another movie? Let that old feeling
stay where the histories go,
let it accrete a dimension of false magnitude
brought on by -- what else? -- time,

And let ancient selves teach love older names,
as holy and forgotten
as these forgotten books of psalms.
You are and I am and it is
as at least as irrelevant and sacred as this
endless summer traffic flowing
beyond these separated windows
every which way and that.

versus

2011-07-03T22:00:00.003-06:00

The two of us: just a pair of ids,
clambering around in bodies too new

to really do any damage. His personality
seemed organized around the deep desire

to hold a gun. Mine too. We climbed trees.
Later, he joined the infantry,

and I became a writer,
because these were

the only ways either of us knew
how to feel powerful. He became cold.

I did too. Not on purpose.
We etiolated. Then one night

he loosed the full capacity
of his crazy on me. We fought.

I remember it now and then.
It had a certain poetry to it.

His fists, my words. We'd grown
into men destined to destroy each other.

Just a pair of ids, clambering around
in the insanity of growing up.

lineage

2011-06-19T16:39:00.025-06:00

I know destiny like this place knows destiny.
In the barest hours of every morning,
light chisels shapes in
my kitchen's clay of dark.
A few lines of chair,
a crescent of teakettle,
a block of oven.
I am twenty-six years old.

It is quiet. I live alone.
I will take a place at the table
before dawn exists and gaze
through the nakedness of the moment.
Day half-discovered:
Maybe an errand here,
an assignment there.
I keep few friends.
I will work and be hungry
and then tired.
The rest is chance.

Except one thing.
I know where I come from.
I am twenty-six years old,
a son and brother of survivors.
I live alone, but I am never
alone. Everything's covered,
not lit, by a pale film of
luminescence. The sun will arrive.
This moment arrives. Everything rises
and reveals itself. Every day I rise

and become my father,
as he became his:
we breakers of bread,
witnesses to history.

if you find the real world, let me know

2011-06-13T23:08:00.009-06:00

I spent long hours on porches,
hers and mine, to convince her
she wasn't unhappy. I brought beer
and held her cheek as bribes and tethers
to hold her with my (competing) theory of reality.
She'd flinch, sort of. She stayed.
We were both in good neighborhoods then,
places where the men were young and tall and thin
and walked their big dogs beneath the elms,
and the women eased through their worlds
with half-smiles and sundresses
amid an uncollapsible profit of beauty.
My girl was lonely, adrift in livid loveliness.
She stored her library-copy Foucaults
atop piled stacks of never-to-be-scanned fashion mags,
always on her way to some
eventually unsatisfying coffee shop or another.
I was too casual to ever really keep up with this,
a ham-and-cheese guy too OK with OK atmospherics
and some solid albums everybody'd already heard before.
Her tastes: acidly fissiparous,
constantly fragmenting into smaller
and smaller shards of dissatisfaction.
But I like a good disaster. It stokes my sense of adventure.
And I like getting my ass kicked a little bit,
so I tolerated the deep mysteries of her anchorage to me,
her motives always buried like murder plots
behind those ice-blue eyes and a pair
of overexpensive sunglasses doomed to near replacement.
"Maybe I'll only ever be half-happy," she said in a down moment;
life's a real swoon, ain't it?
But she'd smile and feed life with a little of her sunlight
and it was moments like that that kept me weak
and sent me caroming off the walls
of this godforsaken magnificent city.

note to self

2011-05-13T11:18:00.000-06:00

For all your pretty talk, your heart tends to wander.
You're always ditching some sweet life in D.C.,
or Las Vegas, or San Diego,
and trickling off to a grubby triple-homicide
in a part of the world nobody wants to see.

Nice memories of all the heres and theres:
sunsets made of bourbon, waves
crashing against the winter midnight,
fists of rusty mountains knuckling
into some good Western sky—

And the girls, too, passing like cirrus clouds
or sometimes faster, like a pack of smokes at a concert,
great, transitory, and then you stagger into love
with something else again sort of like
a honky-tonk piano rattling into
a surprise new key,

well,
you never want much, do you?
But when you do want,
god keep you and your crazy guitar heart,
because that thickstupid intensity you get
is both your best and worst quality, brother.
It fills your whole world up with wanting
and scares the shit out of the kids.

But headlong into the chaos is sort of how you got here,
or there, or anywhere, really--
you travel enough and eventually everything
is made of gold with this sun falling over it,
your world of insane magic disasters and strange men
sitting on porches, eyes glancing off the sunset,
saying Son, have you ever played the piano?
And their light will turn to silk and ribbon and
home is everywhere and new again.

labor for glory

2011-04-03T18:50:00.005-06:00

Note: Dredged up from the archives. Originally written May 29, 2009.

On a recent trip out to Nevada I was standing on the shoulder of a remote desert highway at two o’clock in the morning, along a rutted edge of sun-crozzled pavement that ran through a black silence of sagebrush and Joshua trees. Nothing moving and nothing lit, not even a rind of the moon.

A collection of nothings, in fact: no cars; no planes; no radios. No phone service. No insects or birds or rustling fauna. Not even a gentle breath of wind.

Imagine being deaf, or dumb, or blind; or no longer being able to taste, or to have memories, or to love. Imagine the death of a close friend, or imagine there no longer being stars in the sky or galaxies beyond our own, seas beyond the horizon, ships to traverse them. Imagine the inexistence of music and then the inexistence of film. Whither a light switch? Conceive of waking up one day and finding out no one had given you a name, or an arm, or a family.

Votaries of emptiness all, and to our minds, each a kind of dark matter, a negative presence; the sudden cessation of a motion, the final and comprehensive absence of a sustaining otherness.

John Updike said being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. This is why we blare TVs and go to the symphony and sit on our porches staring out at the road at the traffic trudging by. Hence Facebook and real books and Wal-Mart and Amtrak tickets. The twelve-pack, the four-door, the queen-sized bed. The rituals of Christmas and the birthday alike. Fortune cookies and this blog and t-shirts with words on them. Walt Whitman and Paris Hilton and the Rolling Stones. The Hague, the Statue of Liberty, and the street where I live—all these things are bound to us.

So do yourself a favor and go set yourself down in the middle of a desert in the predawn dark, all the vibrations of culture and knowing fucking motionless on this bald causeway of the earth as the deathbed of philosophy and ideology and politics lay sprawling cold beneath you.

Someday we die. That’s it. Beyond that, nothing.

But knowing that and feeling that and then waking up the next morning is still, now as it ever was, some good hell of a thing.

errata

2011-03-24T19:51:00.007-06:00

I write too much about love and death. I say "too much" too much because I'm always too hard on myself. Love and death are very important. So I write about them. If cars were more important to me, I'd write about cars. The first car I drove was a 1980 Mercury Cougar. The first car I owned was a 1990 Mercury Cougar. I now drive a 2000 Mercury Cougar. There is no 2010 Mercury Cougar.

When I take photos I like it when the subjects barely make it into the frame. I like the way faces look when part of them are hidden. I like it when the flanks and tops of buildings go veering out of sight. I like not knowing, not having it all. Life shouldn't be too conquerable. It should be a bit of a flirt. I will never dunk a basketball. I will never have a cocktail with Ingrid Bergman. I will never be a famous concert pianist.

When I was 19, I was terribly depressed, and I used to listen to Debussy's collected piano works on a Walkman every night as I waited to fall asleep. I fell asleep on the headphones and it hurt my ears. When I went to Paris five years later, I went to see Debussy's grave at Passy. I got lost, and an old Frenchman in a navy blazer named Pierre showed me the way. He'd watched the G.I.s drive the Nazis out of the city. "I will always be thankful for Americans," he said. Pierre took a blurry photo of me at Debussy's headstone.

I think about doing things that terrify me. Joining the Army. Becoming a cop. Traveling to war zones. Most of this is bullshit, and I'll never do it. But I might. After 9/11, I didn't fly for seven years. All my friends moved away after college and I started working a job I hated in the county where I grew up. Then I met a girl who had spent the last year traveling places I swore I'd never go. There was a picture of her posing in a bikini with someone else's AK-47 somewhere in southeast Asia. I started flying a month later. I took 21 flights that year.

I don't remember high school. The cornfields outside my high school still look the same. The roads still slalom in the same directions and go the same places. I remember college but I'm starting to forget what it was like. For four years I played saxophone in the concert band and there were times when practices and rehearsals consumed me. When I started getting good enough, I could feel the contours and textures of the harmonies in ways that should have been reserved for eyes and hands. But then I stopped playing. Music now has the familiar distance of girls I used to like. The surfaces are all the same. But the passion is distant and foreign.

My best friends hate all the same things I do. I don't talk to my best friends as much as other friends. I don't care about meeting strangers. I'm not a good conversationalist. Many times I don't know what to say, even around the people I care about. To me, shared presence counts as sociability. I like the perfect way actors talk in movies, like gods. I like the perfect way rural folks talk when they don't give a fuck. Classical versus punk. I keep fragments of throwaway conversation and phrases with me forever, until they are so forgotten that they completely belong to me.

I remember every first kiss with every girl I've cared about. The good ones always make me a little nervous. Relationships make me nervous, because I'm always afraid I'll eventually stop loving. Lifelong love seems staggering and impossible. What emotional metabolism could sustain it? I like beginnings for their momentum. Beginnings are always better than the ends. Beginnings can be anything. Photos from beginnings are more interesting, as are memories from beginnings.

Before Pierre took me to Debussy's grave, taking slow steps, we talked about literature. The old man seemed to like me. I found myself wanting to impress him. I said Flaubert and Proust astounded me, which was true. He asked me if I'd read Guy de Maupassant. In a moment my mind flickered back to a used bookshop in Kansas City earlier that spring. My hands had wandered over the shelves. I had picked up a collection of de Maupassant's stories. My eyes had skated over a few sentences of prose before I put the book back on the shelf. I'd bought a copy of Moby Dick instead. It was now jammed in my backpack for my stay in Europe. I looked at Pierre and his eagerness to talk to me and felt a short moment of tender sadness. You don't get to share everything with everybody. You will always be a little alone.

I told Pierre I hadn't read de Maupassant, and when we reached Debussy's grave, I laid a flower on it. He wandered away, a little awkwardly, with a tiny wave, presumably to visit a former friend. Soon, I left Paris, and saw so much, and later finished Moby Dick while flying over the Atlantic, and it was so beautiful, the book and the travel, the growing older, it was hard to believe the luck of any of it happening at all.

meditations in an emergency

2011-03-13T19:31:00.002-06:00

Starts with a shudder, or a rumble; a few books and CDs tumbling off the dresser, a crash of dishes in the kitchen, the sound of splitting concrete. For a few moments, gravity reinvents itself, and an 18-year-old cashier at some convenience store somewhere ducks and watches all the junk food hurling itself off the shelves, the vodka taking suicide plunges in aisle three. A woman outside jogs into the street and stops, then takes a few more steps, whirls around at all the buildings around her shaking in place.

Later, and an entire world away, a man rolls over in bed as the sun strikes his face, a little cold, the blankets kicked off in his sleep. He checks his phone. First, the disorienting, half-conscious jolt of re-entering the world at midstream: God, there’s video. There, in Japan, a helicopter flying over a terrifying brown ooze of mud and glass and metal that’s swallowing farmland and hamlets Biblically, a liquid extinction, death in real time. The water sweeps into towns and up the roads, carrying cars and houses and telephone poles farther inland, and the warning sirens eventually die out, you see, because they’ve been carried away, too. Later, the ocean recedes — the ocean! — carrying a man nine miles out to sea before he’s picked up by the navy. Ashore, it’s a deluge of dumpsters and trees and mud and crumpled front doors with no houses attached to them, and no one even knows when they’ll even be able to really count the dead.

Did anyone in Libya think about the tsunami? There, a calamity of a different family: young men pouring out of their homes with beat-up Kalashnikovs — where did all these guns come from? — wearing bandoliers and ammo belts and kaffiyehs in strange configurations. These kids throw their scattered might against the old immovable tyrant, or, rather, the foreign brigades bought with his billions. There, against the low sunlight, a young man in faded camo and tennis shoes lies on his back on a cement road with a heavy machine gun between his legs, trained at the sky, pitting his bullets and his amateur rage against Qaddafi’s professional air force. Where is the US?, the New York Times quotes the rebels as wondering, while rockets and small-arms fire rain on their positions. Meanwhile, puffy guys in suits in Washington with thin-ish hair ponder a no-fly zone, their thinking plagued by the potpourri outcomes of a dozen foreign interventions and abstentions: quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, blunders in Somalia and Iran, humanitarian failures in Bosnia and Rwanda. What happens if Qaddafi wins? God, what happens if the rebels win? What then? This is a fucking disaster.

The thing that separates a disaster from a crisis is that something has dissolved: society, government, family. There are disasters given to us by nature, disasters forced on us by people, and disasters inflicted on ourselves. When I was 19, I watched an anxiety disorder and a depressive episode take away my personality while I survived my days beneath heavy doses of Xanax. Certainly nothing compared to a tsunami, or a civil war, but that kind of perspective is hard to attain when living through it; in either case, the point is that nothing is immune from a kind of devastation. Happiness, like cities, like families, like governments, takes years to build. It requires the kind of momentum only achieved by stability: Time to get to know someone, time to establish reliable political coalitions, fair laws, vibrant commerce. The agonizing part is that it only takes moments to tear down. A wall of water annihilates the city, a protest turns into a bloodbath, a friend’s trust is violated by a bad decision. How many years of power did the Fukushima nuclear power plant provide before it became a radioactive deathtrap? How many generations lived in New Orleans before it was drowned in a storm? Painful to ask, but would the Libyan rebels have been better off not to rebel at all?

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places,” Hemingway once wrote. “But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

The trick is to survive and keep going, if you can, and to build again. But that requires a little luck, and the world needs so much of it.

murder is another thing that people do

2011-03-05T18:56:00.006-06:00

My best friend lost his mind one March inside a white, two-story apartment house in the west part of Warrensburg, Missouri. I know he lost his mind there because I was sitting with him when it happened, in his pitch-black living room cluttered with weapons and dirty laundry and empty bottles of hard alcohol made by distributors I’d never heard of. This was his life after a recent tour in Korea: an Army ROTC poster was the only thing on the wall; the coffee table was covered with a smattering of 9 mm rounds, a bowl of day-old soup, and a modified 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

He started talking about the death he’d seen in his dreams and the death he knew was coming to us all, and he soon began referring to himself in the third person with the kind of comically theatrical baritone that would have gotten him laughed out of the room if he wasn’t being serious: “You need to get ready. The world is not meant for us. You don’t know what I’ve seen. Do you know the truth of this world? Do you know the truth?” He talked about seeing a demon with six arms flying over a killing field where millions were dying, feasting on the corpses. “I saw its face,” he said. Then his voice plunged: “Its face was mine.”

He reached for my neck and we began to wrestle. I was 20, and he was 23. We’d known each other since I was 4. I was bigger than he was, but he was stronger than me. We sat on the couch and struggled for a while. By then, I was deliriously adrenalized. My breath and my hands and my arms all shook and I wondered if I could really kill a man. I tried to imagine what death would be like, what it would be like to no longer feel anything, to no longer be anyone at all. But it all still seemed abstract and somehow impossible. All I understood was living, and so in that moment the question was how to keep living. My universe became an equation of weapons and exits and my mind a kind of abacus, quantifying the room.

Three feet behind me, an Egyptian-made AK-47 with a modified stock and a banana clip leaning up against a wooden chair; three feet behind him, an antique Nazi infantry rifle with a swastika cut into its stock on top another chair. The shotgun sat on top of the table next to both of us, where a nickel-plated .45 was also hidden in a cubby beneath. But violence is strange and unpredictable, and something prevented escalation; something stopped me from reaching for a gun, and something stopped him, and so we grappled, grappled until time seemed to lose all meaning of shortness or length, grappled until he began to cry and say my name and beg for help, at which point we stopped, reality returning long enough for me to escape before he swung back again, murder once more becoming a thing that happened to other people.

* * *

In the United States, according to FBI statistics over the last decade, an average of 15,000 people are murdered every year, mostly by young men with guns. Depending on the context, 15,000 is either astonishing or relatively negligible. If 15,000 people were rounded up into a camp somewhere in rural Nevada and shot, stabbed, strangled, burned and crushed to death, we would collectively process it as a crime against humanity and demand a reckoning of Biblical proportions. But when those 15,000 are spread throughout a population of over 300 million, as is actually the case, their deaths are as random as those in traffic collisions and just as statistically predictable. The difference is that more than twice as many people — a little over 30,000 — die in crashes every year, making car accidents the bigger public health problem. In fact, violent crime has been in a slow decline for decades, suggesting that life in the U.S., at least in this respect, is better than it’s been in a while.

But it still seems like a problem to anyone who's been to the courthouse. There, the run-of-the-mill pre-trial docket resembles a cattle call run by law enforcement. I’m especially bothered by the never-ending march of 17-to-24-year-old boy-men who slouch into the courtroom with their eyes down or with their heads cocked or with no expression at all, getting in society’s bad graces early, accused of doing things I’d never do. They seem younger than I ever was, now that I’m 25, yet also somehow older, and tattoos climb arms and necks like vines growing out of all those white-and-grey correctional jumpsuits.

I reported on crime for year and often encountered this scene. Some of the boy-men look bored with the pace of the proceedings, bored with their mothers in the gallery, bored with life, violence monotonous, school a joke, the prosecutor an asshole, the cops liars; others of the boy-men look frankly surprised to be there, mouths nervous, eyes searching the faces in the gallery, maybe looking for a little help. I’m never sure. I wouldn’t follow many of their cases, and surely some of them are innocent, but statistics tell me the vast majority of the boy-men will eventually be found guilty of something or other, the variety of their crimes practically Whitmanesque: stealing a car; beating up a girlfriend; forging checks; ditching some weed during a traffic stop; robbing a drug dealer and, occasionally, shooting one. Historic decline or no, the sheer mass of people moving through the Boone County courts in Columbia in a year is mostly stupefying and completely depressing. Worse yet is near-arbitrariness of the factors that decide who will be the murderers among them. I dare you to pick out the killers among the boy-men in the docket. I guarantee you’ll miss.

For instance, during an 11-month span starting Oct. 8, 2009, and stretching to Sept. 6, 2010, a strange and improbable thing happened in Columbia, a burg of roughly 100,000: No one was murdered. An average of three or four people are slain there every calendar year, but in a year when violent crime was statistically up, the city’s death toll was stuck on zero. Was the number an illusion? Drug deals still went wrong, maladjusted husbands still abused their wives, gangs still scrimmaged each other with enough small arms to overthrow an island government. Over the summer, Columbia weathered a tense period of multiple shots-fired calls — for which the body count was an accumulated zero.

Take a moment to comprehend how remarkable this stretch of time was. A gun with a caliber even as small as a .22 can make killing accessible to anyone capable of a moment’s worth of poor judgment. And, rest assured, it was business as usual for poor judgment in Columbia this year. Ponder this: On May 14, 2010, a 19-year-old man survived being shot twice in the torso and once in the leg during what police called a drug-related home-invasion robbery. To understand the fragility of a number like zero when comprehending homicide, imagine that, in a fraction of one key second, a tendon in the shooter’s wrist had flexed a millimeter tighter. The bullet’s trajectory could have shifted a crucial inch closer to an artery or vital organ, and it could have taken away every Christmas dinner the man would have with his family for the remaining 50 years of his normally expected lifespan. Then there was the almost freakish July 23, 2010, shooting at the Boone County Fair, just outside Columbia city limits. Police said a 14-year-old boy fired at least nine shots — “in a sweeping fashion,” according to a Columbia Daily Tribune report — at a group of teenagers with whom he was fighting. One of the bullets hit an 18-year-old in the back of the leg. The shooting happened not far from crowds attending a concert. No one was killed.

Given the number of gunshot victims that appear in emergency rooms every night across the U.S., infinitely tiny equations of trigonometric luck separate murderers from other criminals, much in the way any drunk driver sloppily turning a curve could be a killer if someone happens to be coming the other way. In each case of pointing a gun and pulling a trigger, the moral irresponsibility is the same, depending on the level of premeditation. But the disparity in the seriousness of the outcomes — the distance between a gunshot victim living and dying, measured by the minutia of geometry — is mind-blowingly vast. And it’s a chasm that only seems to get wider when considering how many of those deaths are determined by chance. Does this not bother anyone else? How do you feel that Columbia’s 11-month reprieve was probably not the product of good law enforcement or better behavior, but of bad aim?

This talk of averages and probabilities gives murders a character of being something ordinary, which happens to be what many murderers are. The average face of murder looks not like Jeffrey Dahmer’s, but like Blake Logan’s, the 18-year-old nursing home worker with a steady girlfriend, who shot a Columbia woman in the head during a drug deal gone wrong. The gun went off when the two began to struggle. Is he evil? He has a MySpace page. It’s hard to call many second-degree murders “evil” when their causes are so mundane. Most murders, like most crimes (and, indeed, most of our own failures), can be explained by the same array of human weaknesses common to everyone: jealousy, vanity, insecurity, desperation. Violence is simply human imperfection with the volume turned up. For something to be genuinely evil, at least in Western thought, it has to be unable to be explained by pathology or a motive — and that sounds inhuman, doesn’t it? How many proto-Satans did police arrest this year, versus screwup healthcare workers? What if, like slacking off on taxes, like going to work, like taking your girlfriend to the movies, murder is just another human behavior? Maybe this doesn’t terrify you. But it terrifies me, most of all because I believe it to be true.

* * *

There’s a famous short story by Tobias Wolff called “Bullet in the Brain” in which a lippy bank customer gets shot in the head for talking back during a robbery. Those spare few milliseconds before the man’s death balloon into a kind of Proustian bullet-time: All his synapses fire on overdrive as he remembers a luscious vision of a baseball game from his childhood, the bullet boring in on his brain, death calamitous and coming but beautiful, a last, glorious wisp of living before the lights flickered out.

My vision was different. As I struggled with my friend in his Warrensburg apartment, I imagined him forcing me on my knees as he positioned himself with the Kalashnikov behind me, unable to see the end coming before my existence was ended in an instant, boom-black, my death unglamorous, lonely, pointless. In those moments, I wished I had fallen in love with someone. My life felt empty and poor.

I don’t think about that night much anymore; nor do I think much about my friend, the murderer-who-wasn’t. Looking back, my worries are scattershot: the seeming meaninglessness of that night, whether my life was truly in danger, how death could come under such ambiguous and irrational circumstances. Still worse was the sad realization that the world around me would keep going about its business, oblivious, death just another moment. We prefer that our finished lives have some consequence and closure, and that their ends not be untimely product of dumb, bad luck. The problem is that this is out of our hands. But this is not entirely bad. The logic of chance also goes the other way. During the Holocaust, there are some Jews who, in the clutches of history’s most efficient killing production, had every expectation to be murdered, but survived. After the brutality of camp life, perhaps some even wished they had died — but still they hadn’t. The gods kill us for their sport, but they’ve also had a history of letting us live.

As I grow older, I find myself occasionally burdened with an inexplicable survivor’s guilt; inexplicable, because it comes for calamities I was never a part of. A couple years ago, I visited the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy. There, the graves of thousands of young American men knit the bluffs over the English Channel like sutures in the earth, aligned with an eerily mathematical precision that belies the disgusting carnage that preceded it. War is the ultimate exercise in homicidal chance, and these are the men who lost: those for whom the shell didn’t fall a few yards farther away, for whom a machine gun nest wasn’t cleared quickly enough, for whom the landing raft’s doors opened just a few too many meters from the shore. Today the cemetery is obsessively manicured, but death’s indignity survives like a weed. Some tombstones lack names, simply reading “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God,” the prettiest phrase for the ugliest end. These are not men for whom the dog tags simply slipped off.

My biggest shame at Normandy comes when I stare at the hometown and birthday of a man who grew up in my county, barely older than a kid, whose body will never leave France. Nineteen years old — I stare at the marker and think of all the things I hadn’t done when I was 19, all the things I hadn’t seen, the friends I hadn’t met, the memories I’d got to make. At 19, I had still been a virgin. Six years later, my life now has a degree of completeness that this grave’s owner may have never gotten to know, because I was lucky enough to have been born in 1985, because I didn’t die in a motorcycle accident when I was 17, because I didn’t get shot by my best friend when I was 20, because there is no draft that would have put me in harm’s way in Afghanistan or Iraq. I am a survivor; I am product of luck; I am an idiot standing at my other’s grave. Fortune’s fool, meet fortune’s darling.

Six years later, getting my start as a reporter, I now hovered over murder like the angel of death in reverse, only ever arriving to deliver bad news, trying to ferry the stories of the dead back to the living, which explains why I am sitting in a Boone County courtroom watching a jury deliver a verdict in a November 2009 murder trial.

The ceremonial courtroom is capacious, big enough to carry an echo, with huge wooden benches for the public to come see some of society’s most talented people try to apply order to the tiny moments of ambiguity and chaos that tend to define our lives. Today it is nearly empty. The case I am watching was transferred from Springfield, where it had gotten significant play in the media; out of a notion of fairness, it had been handed over to a Boone County jury, which was subjected to the following tale:

According to police and witness accounts, the defendant, Jeffrey Bolden, 42, world-class shithead, had doused himself with gasoline while attempting to set his father on fire with a Bic lighter. When the lighter failed — what luck — and police showed up, Bolden ran and was eventually caught after being bit in the leg by a police dog. Paramedics removed his pants to wash off the gasoline with a hose, and he began masturbating and taunting the female EMTs, even after he was handcuffed.

At the hospital, he encountered 62-year-old security guard Monte Ruby. The two knew each other. Ruby used to be a security officer at Bolden’s high school. Ruby was a beloved figure in Springfield’s black community; Bolden, who was also black, called him an “Uncle Tom.” Ruby’s daughter died in a suicide. According to witnesses, Bolden knew this, and he told Ruby “You’re a bitch, your daughter’s a bitch, and I’m glad she’s dead.” Witnesses said Ruby acted like a saint. They also said Bolden continued masturbating in the E.R. as doctors tried to treat his leg.

At one point, when Bolden began to struggle, Ruby tried to restrain him. When Ruby stepped away, Bolden, who was handcuffed to the hospital bed, kicked the 62-year-old security guard in the back of the head. Ruby stumbled. Security personnel rushed into the room, and with Ruby’s help, tied Bolden’s legs down. A few minutes later, as Ruby was leaving the room, he collapsed and fell into a coma. He had a hemorrhage in his brain. He died a few days later.

The defense argued that Ruby had choked and scratched Bolden and that his kick was in self-defense. A grey area. The case also became mired in medical testimony as pathologists gave rival theories on why Ruby died: one (for the defense) said Ruby had high blood pressure and suffered a stroke stemming from the stress of the situation, not from the damage of the kick, which would mean Bolden was innocent of murder; the other (for the prosecution) said Bolden’s blow caused the hemorrhage, which would mean Bolden was guilty. The prosecutor’s pathologist added that Ruby previously had surgery on his neck, meaning it was less able to cushion the blow of the kick, resulting in the brain injury. Another grey area, and again, the minutia of murder — if Ruby had never had a small neck problem, if Bolden’s blow had hit Ruby’s back and not his head, if Ruby had not turned around to walk away, the security guard would likely still be alive today.

Through all this, the Boone County courtroom was empty save for members of Bolden’s family, who sat quietly on the defendant’s side of the gallery, and members of Ruby’s family, who came dressed in black, at times wincing and covering their faces during particularly brutal moments of testimony. I cultivated a relationship with them for my reporting, but they were decent people, quiet and modest, which made me feel predatory and mercenary. When we had lunch during a break in the proceedings, I didn’t have the nerve to take out my notebook as they talked about their lives and asked me about mine. I felt out of place as reporter; I was no longer a spectator of death, but was now paddling around in its wake.

After closing arguments, the jury took hours to deliberate. The Ruby family waited patiently for their little piece of justice in the hallway outside the courtroom, speaking little, waiting for someone to give the word that would eventually come, that the jury had a verdict, as they eventually did. We filed back into the courtroom.

Here I am, waiting. We’re all waiting: Bolden’s family, Ruby’s family, me, the jury, the bailiffs, the attorneys. In the moments before the judge announces the verdict, the room seems to bulge with silence. Absolutely nothing that happens next will bring Monte Ruby back to life; then again, for me, absolutely nothing that happens next will take me back in time to a world where I die in my friend’s apartment. This room with the pale-green walls, this courtroom with the skinny and charismatic judge, this family and its heartache — this is the only world that exists and ever will exist. This is what chance has wrought, and no amount of order can change it. But we all wait anyway — everyone, that is, except a pale golden ladybug, which suddenly crawls up over the bench a foot in front of me, wandering slowly over the grains of the wood, indifferent to everything.

And just when the room seems to cocoon around it, the ladybug is gone, and I wonder how strange it is for me to be here.

austerity measures

2011-01-27T23:44:00.011-06:00

The remembering happens at night.
The terrain of my old bedroom,
the piles of books and shoes,
as fixed in my eyes as a mural.
Climb a little closer, baby;
break me with your pretty mouth.
Still there, the empty pints,
the windows' light-block silhouettes,
the endless, earnest silence.
Still there, the rage at nothing lingers.
I love with my body, my hands,
so now I forget with my hands, my fingers;
my explanations of purpose collapse;
my cup is never full.
For now, while I can, I seize the friendly dark
and remember in dashes and flutters
how I'd loved you:
wordlessly, to the same songs
careening aimlessly
through this great hell of
hopeless having-yous,
ever a man of a moment,
ever letting go.

district of columbia

2011-01-13T23:04:00.013-06:00

Six blocks from my apartment, the Capitol Building looms over the broadway like some incandescent cross between an antique lamp and a wedding cake.

The girl holding my heart is about a thousand miles, a million words away.

Sometimes, at night, when I either tire of writing or the words no longer come to me, I sally out of my apartment house and go for a run through the ludicrous cold of a Washington January; partially to ground myself in where I am, partially to beat back the silence. Both help keep the heartbreak away, but barely.

At night the Capitol complex is abandoned, liberated from tourists and journalists and lawmakers. The Capitol police linger as if only to safeguard the stillness of this place. It is lonely, but barely.

Across the street are the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress; across the Mall, the Washington Monument and a dozen other national treasures.

Across those thousand miles are surely a thousand awesome and worthy lives, but I don't care.

The Capitol's guards eye me as I lope in approach, a man wheezing and insane to be wearing shorts at this temperature, but my legs are big and warm. Surely the guards are vigilant for Glock-wielding lunatics to whom apolitical mass extermination has become a uniquely American expression. But I'm only a jogger, and they're only cold, and so they watch just long enough to be sure before taking another slow lap around their police vans in the name of duty and salary. It's necessary. So much importance collected here in this half-mile of federal America. So much importance collected in that little burg I left in Missouri.

All this collection makes us vulnerable, you know. That's why why we have security guards and avowals of love. Build up walls to keep the bad away, to beat back the dark infections. If only things could be spread out, made safer, made easier.

But for things to be important, it becomes necessary for them to collect. Or maybe it's the other way around: Out of a centeredness grows a vulnerable cruciality. Doesn't matter. A collection of limestone cathedrals, a collision of hearts — if it's followed by duty, and power, and love, then we must protect it, or risk losing it and beginning anew.

I jog along, and the Capitol diminishes behind me. Back in the building where I live, the radiators tick, a toilet flushes downstairs, and somewhere, in another room nearby, a new congressional staffer watches a basketball game, counting the hours till he rises and makes his way back to the Hill. I strip and fall into bed, drifting through a volume of Chekhov as I fade off in this seat of power, thinking of you.

difficult kind

2010-11-16T21:40:00.014-06:00

This house. This bed. This blood. This loss. This street. This sun. This song and pavement. This printed ache. This book of signs.

This mattress is a tourniquet. This pain is a psalm. These are the women I loved, these my promises of remission, my badges of burden.

The symphonies that survived the night: Sibelius 6, Mahler 4, "Eroica." Remember me a moment before you turn on the lights, remember these dreams of mine, I hang from your words.

These are the sheets I drift across. These are the stoplights at which I spent countless moments in consideration of choice. This is my regret, this, my gentlest laugh; this is the worst of myself that can never be excised.

This beating heart. This ancient muscle. This ceaseless talk of going, this gift of mine, this ancestor of calamity.

This is my soul of shreds, my self of scraps. The tiring fights. The amber joy. The oceans of night draped over an age of orphan wonder.

This, and all of myself: this heartache of glory, this endless surrender.

beautiful girls

2010-08-23T16:23:00.013-06:00

Disasters of the heart.
I keep forgetting about them as I get older,
I who fill my time with work
and books and empty sex,
having chased out all the demons
from my bygone life of need.
I had needed to be saved
and then hadn’t,
adulthood’s nifty trick,
though sometimes I lie in bed
and stare at the ceiling
wondering if life now lacks
some essential desperation
to bring it purpose.
What happens when a woman
stands between you and oblivion?
Is it love? Before,
I’d lived off infatuation,
satisfied somehow with desire
and desire and desire and
always looking to others for salvation,
love all tied up in death,
drifting out on choppy waters
a madman copacetic—

But then I got older.
And sometimes lovers are merely lovers,
and the cars simply pass,
and work is something you do for money.
Grounded and needless and satisfied,
it’s a quiet life,
so quiet that I lie in bed and think:
Does no one else tire
of the way they always feel?
I could use a little more calamity,
blood of my fathers and blood of my sons;
I no longer need to be saved
but long for a little disaster,
hungering for suffering still,
I the ex-fanatic,
I who beg you to break me,
break me up.

gods and monsters

2010-08-10T17:54:00.002-06:00

There are paths across this violent planet
I’d like to see but can only find when
terrified and confused and alone,
carried across by a fancy or ego
or incompetence otherwise impossible to achieve
while on my best behavior.
Why? Blame the soul.
The thing about souls
is that sometimes they choose
loneliness or vanity or ambition
the way frigates choose the open water.
They're the moral organization of chaos;
the impractical part of us
whose identity can never be
modified, shaved down, faked,
carrying us onward even when hobbled,
staying broken even when fixed,
bearing weights and loves and grudges forever.
And the soul is there
the way mistakes are always there,
inhabiting every atom
of our imperfectible little lives,
always impractical,
always emerging unbidden,
sometimes on a Tuesday,
sometimes when you’re standing along the curb
with the paper and a sandwich,
standing there thinking about a commercial and
staring at a girl across the street like an idiot,
and the soul either hits you or you just kind of remember
that not every single day
is the most meaningful day of your life,
so please god
do not let this be the day
I get hit by a fucking car.
And there it comes,
that animal velocity in us,
breaking our bodies across a dozen muscles
to funnel this tempest of a life
into a meaning we’d never intended
with a force we’d never fathomed,
and we are insane for this, no?
and murderous, and in love,
all us gods,
gods all and monsters.

organization

2010-07-26T18:47:00.006-06:00

When someone prods a weakness
the personality coils around it.
This is why secrets are scarved in anger,
especially among those like me,
men whose hearts are built from ancient tissue,
whose worst vanities become ringed
by arrogance or silence or laughter.
To hurt is to remember
the unambiguous tyrant
your manners and intuition
had costumed in amity,
to be a body built of mirrors
facing inward;
to be yourself
without regard for being yourself,
casting off from Elba
with a map
and a favorable wind.

idol

2010-07-26T18:38:00.007-06:00

I don't think I'd wanted to be someone else,
just myself, except better,
except better meant something
other than myself,
a muscle-and-bone matrix
of finite mass and mutability.
Sit down and have a beer;
let us speak of the ridiculous people
who think about these sorts of things
as I do, whose dreams become
the preferred altar of worship,
because only dreams exist without
the connective tissue
that keeps us on a loop
between the house
and the office
and the grocery store.
"But I just want to love," you cry,
"a family, a place to eat!" No matter.
You will remember you are fine soon
and soon forget.

subduction

2010-07-26T18:28:00.008-06:00

This is the life of memory
in a time of decay,
a half-remembered world
buried in misshapen grabs
of motion and color,
whose emotional content
lay just as much in those
fanatical teenaged vows
as they do in the mundane glimpse
of a stroke of light
on a cream-colored ceiling,
or a snatch of congas
against the fleeting April rain.

This is the topography
of an emotional era
slowly flattening beneath
the lifetime being heaped upon it—
and this being a human geology,
emotions, buried, do not emerge as diamonds;
they become our sand, our oceans,
our soil.

commitment

2010-07-26T17:39:00.004-06:00

Sometimes when I feel this
it's like being attack by saran wrap
and existentialism
listening to windy breakups
across a well-lit cafe
"I'm glad it works for you — dick"
and such meanness
fun for a while
but I am disposed
to sympathy
and casual relationships
forever—

tell me, what color is the dresser
in your bedroom?
carnations
prophylactics
textbooks
family
I do this to myself
and choose to corrupt
who knows how many of my socks
will be in your closet
forever

the life before

2010-07-26T17:32:00.003-06:00

When I think of you
I fall into various stages of panic,
never knowing how I felt then but uncertain
or maybe just ephemeral,
plotted on a course for loss or love—

But a very different time, that year,
insane with desire and ambition,
addicted to all things an inch
beyond my reach;
love beyond love,
light beyond light,
some life more full and complete
than life would allow;
twenty years in
on loveless abject poverty,
the life before shrugs
and recovery—

The time is barely mine anymore,
either forgotten, or understood,
and I risk being dreamless
at the expense of pleasant company.

July

2010-07-26T17:27:00.004-06:00

The way we lived out the summer,
slouched in chairs, legs out,
on some patio or another.
In the sun, at night.
Enjoying the days
before they collected into months
and ran away, like children.

Like children we lived out the summer:
with motion, without direction.
Somewhere there was music, or a movie,
or another picnic,
until there wasn't,
until summer ended,
when like children
we stole away,
in the sun,
in the night.

purgatories

2010-07-26T17:21:00.004-06:00

No poems today. Just lines
issued from a dull mind
uninspired by the raindrops
drumming on the window A/C unit.
It is strange to have magic

and then not have magic

but souls exist whether creative or not,
though perhaps creativity
is the merit
that makes us want some to survive
more than others

when we live in a place
where form exists but
lacks something essential;
a place where we hope for
the ghost ars in the shell poetica,
that hidden soul of words
to emerge and rescue us
from a terrible cosmic glitch
of unimagination.

But no imagination today, nor dreams,
just the words and sounds
that used to be their ferry.

notes from chicago, july 2010

2010-07-11T22:47:00.009-06:00

I think of this painted waste,
of the blight-on-white
brick-walled bodegas
where we used to meet,
still bleeding beats
from all those anthems
that now seem written
to remind me of you,

and I remember those notes from a life
when I spent only the good words
on the lengths and bends of your body,
when, less a feeling than a universe,
such love was something somehow different,
a moral combustion
and a glorious sum
of backseats, movies;

life after life
it ambled away,
and I still think of this waste
the way I first wished
it would think of me.

debussy

2010-03-14T17:39:00.006-06:00

Another cramped summer on the Left Bank,
though I guess the problem's in every arrondissement:
buskers clogging Châtelet and Les Halles
and pesky men at the gelato shop
polishing their disdain for your accent.
We all know God hates the fucking tourists but
sometimes it takes a squall of fanny packs to remind us
something is always beautiful
and not just there on the days
we choose to see it,
because even in Paris
the soul stays mostly at rest,
unprovoked by music
or poetry
or combustible love
or maybe some implacable, dapper-looking fellow
who seems mostly right when he says
we have the right to beauty
but no right to comprehend it.
Je cherche la région cruciale de l'âme —
well, what do you dream about?
I'd always imagined falling in love
to classical music, the better Debussy,
though I guess if I were a different person
it could have been anything:
old movies, gardens, cars.
In our dream lives we
are always dallying about
with certain set pieces
plus the leading lady, and
in mine there was always
a grand piano casually left about,
plus maybe some snow.
When I was a musician
they taught us to bound the world
in elegant leaps,
but those were big words for such crippled lives
spent lurching to practice rooms
in tiny, exhausted steps.
It's there I learned how much practiced dreams
are good for practical lives,
and affection's as real as a dream, anyway,
because dreams are real,
they're just our rented selves.
So when wandering the Rue Mouffetard
with a lover
and barely a care,
except for maybe later
when I go to lay another rose
on Debussy's grave,
how much should we ask what it all means?
In the worst scenario
I find out that mine's a rented life,
where I need nothing,
own nothing,
and can only be turned out.

well

2010-03-14T16:16:00.007-06:00

teased by the onset of depression
always needing to be at home
with a crossword puzzle
and a bottle of rye
protected from angels
by the ceiling fan
and rye
and decent television
sending one's self dangerously close
to a laugh
again
a sordid latitude
a quiet sight
well

to never be alone
o, never to be with my sweet thoughts
at home sharing dishes with madness
watching game shows and the weather channel with suspicion
o, to have people! what do they think
when I stare off into soup
in public
and murmur
these lines
what a world
when all is wicker-backed chairs
and TV movies
maybe I needed this
problem
maybe I needed
to grip
terrible beauty
body radiant
madness
well

crime life

2010-03-14T14:20:00.001-06:00

In the spring there is hardly time
for our double lives, which can
comfortably take up the winter.
Now, there is too much ice cream
and too many easygoing girls in dresses
to leave room for death in my day,
which statistics say will happen
more frequently now anyway.
Maybe I'll go outside and buy a Coke
but just in case
I'll still have my guns and grieving mothers.
If I drink beer on a patio at twilight
I know there is a man somewhere who has
a bullet for every line in this poem.
No? The sunlight just seems brittle
to those of us with fantasies of disaster,
and even on rainy days
I am always dwelling over some
lost life or another, names swallowed
by drugs or love or government service.
Everything is tolerable but silence, because
those of us chasing lives of self-destruction
are appetized by madness, I guess because it
makes us still inside. And it's so quiet now.
Let's grab a Coke and talk about it.

the years

2010-01-02T15:04:00.005-06:00

A kitchen light, an off-color floorboard.
A bra dangling from a Japanese folding screen.
It’s spring again, I’m twenty-three again;
I ache and feel wonder again.
The strains of Schubert from the morning radio
carve grooves too deep to be smoothed.
Three apartment buildings outside your window
climb skyward in a cubist frenzy
as a frieze of eighth notes descend
like stoplights over Harlem.
Yeah, so we’re young again, or old,
or whatever it is we say when re-gripped
by our best, most terrible desires—

And why the hell are we always on the set
of some opera every time we’re falling
in or out of love? With a flourish,
this is how to remember being twenty-two: lovesick
and cold, I’m waiting outside your building
on a street obliterated by snow.
My hands, your hands, and yet it’s
the voices of strangers that cut through
the one o’clock dark of a dying December.
Let’s go wither on that balcony of yours
with its snow-sheathed balustrades
and bathe in some Wagner for a change.
Why should stillness
always have to fall over everything?
Why not hollow out the dark this time?
These, questions for the gods,
who know everything, see everything—

While we mortals sit on the sides
of county roads, like bugs,
pretending to look at maps
against the failing autumn sun.
It’s warm and you’re splayed across the hood
of the weathered two-door your papa
bequeathed you. That shirt, those cutoffs,
the endless ribbon of skin around your waist.
My arms, my eyes, this helix-strand of highway,
this golden waste of wheatfields.
Being crushed by desire is a god
great enough for twenty-one,
but the hills and the trees there
seem painted now in watercolor,
the landscape swollen with silence.
The world ashes its cigarette and asks,
was that really it? Everything is forgotten now,
and quiet, and equal—

So maybe all I had I lost in a gasp
some summers back. Sun hanging low
in the window again, sumptuous as a tangerine.
A pair of heels. A row of eyeliner.
A boombox with a broken volume knob.
And then, the dark.
It’s not so easy to do this again,
but on we go, at least to remember
what was lost
of our better selves—

And on we go,
'til we are forgot.

you are for me as you cannot be for yourself

2009-11-28T13:03:00.000-06:00

Prodigy. Girl of infinite wonder.
Face hanging open like a broken gate.
Beating the air with prophesies
issued from honey-sticky lips.
It’s a drag because sometimes
no one knows what we’re doing anymore

or what we’re saying, like last Saturday,
when the world was held together
by a pair of jeans
and a milkshake.
Yet you’re still curious about life,
right?

Because I’ve thought about the spots
where you grip the earth in secret,
where you’re adrift in the wind
and signaling.
I keep checking the sky
for some midnight pilot
tracing your name in stars,

oh me,

but I’m still in the thick
of it I guess. I spend so many nights
thinking about you like this—
a curiosity in orbit,
incapable of knowing anything else,
caught up in some cold tract of self-brilliance.
What is it like to be someone else, anyway?

Like the way you are, the big smile
with the copper-glossy hair,
smile like the sun. (The sun
still rises, right?) Like
the sun. Whereas I drive
in my car for hours
with no direction...

sometimes towns look
better that way.
Well, smacking oars on water,
intransigent, incongruent—
I want to worry about what you worry about
and not be a slave to myself anymore.
Like in Berlin, when I was dazed and alone,

wandering the Friedrichstrasse
with my bag and a song in my throat.
Some empty thing’s always taking me
to Paris and Chicago, and I know
there’s a place where those two
don’t fit together,

but my friends
keep telling me it’s OK and
I guess it’s OK because
these days the bars between our
homes seem to be lit better
and better and

someday the streets
will finally be picked clean
by taxis and we won’t have
anything left to fear

except the utmost sincerity

god damn does he go

2009-10-25T10:08:00.003-06:00

Johnny was something with the ladies,
I'll always remember him with
his highball and dinner jacket
making a rodeo on the Steinway
for someone he was
barely interested in, and
isn't it funny? Always on the
verge of suicide and such beauty,
well, it is what it is, boy
had weight on his shoulders
no love could allay, but
god damn does he go—
if only we could all carry
ourselves straight to that sweet hell
he could put us in,
and go and go again—
sing it with me friends,
o good times, o good times,
o good times will you ever end?

prayer for an american century

2009-08-21T12:30:00.001-06:00

No working. No working
for love or money!
The pretty waitress leaned
over and asked, just
passing through?, and
doesn't she deserve better than this?
No more poems. No more poems
til they bear the fruit of living!
All the feats of language
come from advertisers anyway
and all these sons of Santa Clarita
have missed the worst and most
meaningful of life.
The trains rust on their rails
and we sing the song of separation,
forever and ever,
and ever,
amen.

disposition

2009-08-20T07:40:00.003-06:00

When I was twenty my best friend
tried to kill me, he got drunk and
spoke in voices and sent his Army
hands toward me, my neck,
I worried later (when I got away)
that I couldn’t kill him, I mean,
I couldn’t squeeze my sanity through
a pinhole of violence barely small enough to see,
couldn’t make these sad musician’s hands
speak to act for the life of me.

And so it is the way it always is.
A year ago I fashioned myself as
one of the Brooks Brothers blood brothers
and this morning I watched a kid with
a bald spot like the sunrise get 20 years
in a manslaughter, his slammer pajamas
barely hugging his ass, and shit,
aren’t we all in the wrong place
from time to time? I thought of you
and your pretty legs and me and my hopeless
self and how my hopeless hands grip
the open air and leave nothing but
nothingness in their wakes, blades on a fan,
bars of a cell—well, we all make mistakes and
that’s just how it happens sometimes,
everything pathetic gets its naked day
in court, where our wasted selves abide.
Blame no one, we all find hearths
in which we’d burn. And that’s it.

It is the way it always is.
My fingers still don’t work.
So tie that tie ‘round my neck, baby,
watch me hang myself with desire.

Near Deventer

2009-07-02T13:13:00.001-06:00

I looked up from some of my files and saw a little boy, through the train window. It was somewhere near Deventer, on the way to Berlin, and he tumbled towards the tracks a toddling mess of blond hair and fair skin, halting just beyond the shade of the tree where his family picnicked. He started to wave up at the train, in little floppy motions, and I felt something catch in my chest. I paused a moment and lifted my hand, but his little arms and little red shirt had already disappeared, still waving, beyond the horizons of my window.

I remembered, then, a night over a year ago, some muggy twilight in the heart of a Chicago August; I was in town for one night before I had my one-way to Berlin in the morning, where I was moving for work, the first good job offer I’d ever gotten. We were stepping off the El somewhere near Wrigleyville, where Memo suggested we get off and take a walk for a while. There was a wine-bottle’s worth of drunk between us, and we seemed to veer off the platform without direction. It was hot, and my shirt stuck to my chest and shoulders. Memo wore a dark blouse and a white skirt that danced against her legs every time she walked.

Memo finally pointed us towards Lake Michigan, looking down at her feet as we walked, gripping her skirt at her hips and squeezing the fabric between her fingers. “Look at this,” she said, rubbing it with her thumb and inviting me to touch. “Got it today. Guess how much.”

“Ten dollars,” I said, just looking.

“I like where your mind is,” she said, “but this is Chicago. Forty bucks. Still a great deal.”

“Okay.” I smiled.

The brownstones seemed to lean in over the street, covered in the thin membrane of orange streetlight that bounded in arcs across their fronts with every lamp. We passed a busker with an accordion squeezing out a tango by Piazzolla, with a nose that looked to have been broken three times, pivoting to face us as we walked by. We passed a deli with a green awning that we would eat at when I used to visit, still bearing the same white strip of 80’s balloon font, Sal’s, that now looked a little bit older and a little more foreign from the wear of passing time. Caked stains from rain runoff striped its sides. I stopped for a moment as Memo walked ahead and I watched her reflection disappear off the edge of the deli window in a drain of color. I’d loved her before, and always would, but I would never tell her, not then, not ever. There were the little rules of the universe, repeating themselves infinitely in quiet dramas played out in the past and present and future, at school, in the Little Village, on the waterfront where we were about to make love and then dress without speaking. A history and destiny so real and certain that its story seemed to be printed in letters of fire.

My breath shook. Beneath the lights and the motion of the city, the streets seemed to writhe and tremble with life. Ahead, there was a storefront neon whose cursive message—Open 24 hrs.—seemed to set the air around her shoulders into vibrations, and Memo paused a moment before stepping off the curb ahead.

“Hey,” I said, even as she started to turn. “Wait up.”

at the Platz der Republik

2009-07-02T11:07:00.003-06:00

I lie in a park watching the sky.
Clouds pass in domes of grey,
mottled with the blue of summer.
Climbing away.

The things we do when in love.
How long is not long enough?
These are the things we do now.
Sitting in parks, watching the children.
I don't know you, and you don't know me.

My hands pass in front of the sun.
The sun passes the earth.
The clouds climb together
towards the atmosphere, to ignite.
I don't know you, and you don't know me.

I lie in a park watching the sky.
I lie in a park.
Climbing away.

the land of ready

2009-04-19T21:21:00.004-06:00

I was born in the land of ready.
My father died with grey ink in his heart
holding a book called “Be Angry At The Sun.”
We wrapped the sun in lattice
and painted the door
geranium red.
Change flattened the lilacs.

Born in the land of ready and plenty,
so haven’t you heard?
Kill thy poet and vengeance is swift.
In this town the best give birth
blessed to stoke the bitter plenty.
Bobby spins his 808s
to wind Deb up for magic
and there I’ll be caught again
with cigarettes and silhouettes
keeping that shit in line,
holding pregnant light to smile
for one more run through town’s main drag,
fronting for the little magic,
with string quartets and pirouettes
hopping cold-cocked bastard motherfuckers
who stamped their feet upon
my sovereign right to anger.
And what!
I traveled space and time
to ride this Motown supernova.
It’s a chanteuse honky-tonk;
I danced in a melody made of satin
and transfigured all the tenements on my block.
Bobby spun and Debbie spun
and every year their bitter past
meets some better pavement,
and lo to all those motherfuckers
who dared tread upon it.

I was born in the land of ready,
where everywhere decent was named
after decency everywhere else;
Danny drove an old police cruiser
forty miles to the ocean,
where he blew out his brains
to Dre on cassette.
We speak of him kindly but barely speak.
John Q. Layaway. He was Army. My mother blamed
a sweet and lonesome wind.
He was not born Ready.
Abby was born ready.
But she cried and fought and finally
cussed her way to Washington,
cut by heart and better fury,
losing re-election,
fleeing by Danny-chariot
into the muddy palms of the Potomac.
And through the window,
my brother held a fist of paper flame
to his sweet and lonesome sky.

I snared the moon in a net of fingers
entombed across a dark and endless paddock.
Come see the dead,
the ditchlilies,
the ignorant rays of the sun;
this land of our fathers,
the sometimes-magnificent
blue-collar made-its with
hokeyisms fresh for all occasions.
Laugh, drink beer,
wake up for work.
So
you came back and asked
if I’d loved someone in this town.
The savage candor:
Jump from a bridge—
Isn’t the water, suddenly, there?

white noise

2009-01-03T14:18:00.002-06:00

No longer occupying my life
in swift, broad strokes
but in a splatter,
I’m driving with the radio
on low AM-band static
in the Douglas county rain
and there you are in bursts—
phantom, atlas, eyelash,
traveling the airwaves bad and beautiful,
knotted up in light.
I imagine your handprints
on all the windows,
a happy little honky-tonk,
my Navajo blankets in neon;
all the pretty lonely words
spoken from a distance measured
in airfare.

Driving drunk on sleep,
work tomorrow—
don’t you know what I am?
A name in miles,
a favorite song, a date of birth.
And I may never get away.
So tonight, it’s the tuxedo
with patches on the elbows,
poignancy in the bed of the Chevy
flying down the quarry highway.
They say you’re doing fine now,
I wait to pass that judgment
until I see your name in the news,
I just hear you,
I always hear you,
I never change the frequency.

bud light poem

2009-01-03T14:18:00.000-06:00

[this poem appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of EPIC]

this is a Bud Light poem,
as requested.

it is low calorie.
you will not gain weight
reading this poem.
this poem still looks good in a bikini
after all these years.

it is zesty
delightful
affordable
and available
everywhere poems are sold.

(CAUTION:
pregnant women should not read this poem.
please do not drive after reading this poem.
please do not provide this poem to minors
or conservative congressmen.
do not post this poem on facebook,
as potential employers may be watching.
consider this a warning.)

since you are in our target demographic,
you may have seen this poem
advertised on TV.
honestly, we know
this poem looks better with actors.
but since this poem lowers inhibitions
after a while
it’ll make you look good, too.

we’ve also heard some connoisseurs say
that this poem is not “poetic.”
so what?
this is not a Guinness poem.
this poem is cheap.
there are symbols,
we’ll leave it at that.
(hint: disable the pop-up blocker
on your browser.)

not that you need symbols.
this poem has pathos, buddy.
this poem has everything America is about.
this poem fills vast seas of loneliness,
and it makes it look easy.
“poetic”?
yeah. we’re all literary here
so we know what we’re talking about.
the next time you’re cracking open a Bud Light poem
just remember:
if T.S. Eliot was so smart
then why is he dead?

reading frank o’hara on the blue line and a few words about disappointment

2009-01-03T14:17:00.000-06:00

Words cheapen most things
and so all along I’d said nothing,
careering through life on silence,
musician of gestures and tics.
I was becoming a catastrophe,
one of many in my office,
beautiful, and interesting, and modern,
shaded well by the dim noir
of fading juvenescence;
full of fuck and thunder
on the cherry eve of atrophy.
Well, I yet worried about being drab
and struck by nothing, that
no inbound collision could have force enough
to punch a hole through this world—
it seemed that we, for instance,
would never again not be ourselves.

Je ne crois que ce que je vois:
the days parading about,
memos in the yawning waste
or letters addressed to unseen addresses.
No more bohème splendor.
No more naked and be angry.
The building we worked in
grew smaller each morning,
I listened to cellos sobbing Debussy
on my little plastic radio.
A stroke of cement, a calendar year,
I dreamt of urgent self-destruction
worthy of Latin America
and made little trails in the carpet.

I arrived seven days late
and two years older,
but I finally wrote on the dream,
gilding it with only the good words
during a hurried August lunch hour
at the sandwich counter where
they might feed me pastramis forever.
I showed the cocktail napkin to no one.
My delusions I keep at a separate mailbox
so I don’t have to sleep with them,
since people still read, after all,
still carry newspapers once in a while,
still write lovesongs
on oceans of light.
I went back to work a bespoke articulation
flickering in the syllabic shadows
of the high-rises above the El.
The paycheck would come as always,
but I’d inaugurated that summer
the season of whim’s content,
when against the hull of my generation I shattered
the last remaining vintage
of a rhetoric.

time machine

2009-01-03T14:06:00.001-06:00

The chassis of the time machine
is up on blocks on your patio out back.
All tubes and mirrors,
tender iron musculature.
Some manuals obscure the kitchen table,
stolen from the library where we’d first met.
They crackle when opened,
read that when activated
there’ll be a carnival of lights,
estuaries of past and future;
we get first kisses
at our funerals
where we did all our drinking at school.
You built the frame, connected it,
I provided the parts
and even the name:
“Comfort Pageant.”
Tonight our vertices collide
and we plot out co-ordinates
to be vivid again
though I never needed a machine
to revisit the past.

the tenor-man

2009-01-03T14:00:00.001-06:00

[for Neil Ostercamp]

a hotlight punches through the dark,
fist-of-god
setting the stage afire
crowning the night band
with blazing halos,
now-crown princes of Cool
white-hot
and basking in the final seconds
of anonymity—
their horns resplendent,
lacquer-tongues of flame
in radiant silence,
miming eloquence,
bells bulging-pregnant with song—

the sight of it
makes me think:
won’t take long to get
the whole damn band going
alto trumpet drums and piano
plus audience
hemorrhaging a rhapsody
like exploding—
the darkness and the music and the bodies
one mass of color and sound and smell—
the existensual:
perfumes and sweat mixing
with heavy breathing
and the minor melody,
the beat of the percussion bleeding into the
glossy blacks on shoes and
hot pastels of cotton
and the taste of gin

and the lithe tenor-man,
smiling like the Cheshire Cat
because he knows what’s coming
puts the horn to his shit-eating-grin,
steals a deep breath
and barks out a liquid telemetry
that pours through the room
his eyes closed
lids fluttering
as if giving notice:
this space belongs
to him
and tonight
we’ll take
Giant Steps
until the wailing-some river
of sound is
drowning every space in the room
and shooting through the crowd
its refrains crashing like waves
rolling along the tabletops
and pouring into every crack
in the brickwork;
tides in syncopation
percolating
into conversations,
between the clink of glasses,
rafting over the sound of shuffling feet;
blue notes cresting their way towards the back,
til they explode out the door
and through the casements,
all the way out onto the street
and into
the night

 so what, so what

tonight we’ll remember there were
things we’d wanted once
before this tenor-man steals a breath
and thumps that serpentine melody
until we forget—
a prizefighter
ducking and weaving the beat,
the poor band choking to keep up,
punch-drunk
from his new math:
‘rhythm post-Bop rope-a-dope’
and god-damn!
I’ve seen it before,
the boy letting it be known
he is a motherfucker
with a trajectory
saying ‘so what’
while destroying the joint
with this orgy of sound
wrapping himself around the horn
like the contortionist’s
brand new act:
“The Drunk’s Car and the Tree”
Don’t know where the metal ends and
flesh begins
one tenor-chassis,
one violent extension of his body,
its voice: his
blues, his
song-song-song
on a theme of
neverending night
so he
twists
and
leans
and
makes love
to the melody
pillow-talking it,
getting that horn
preaching to every body in the joint
holding sermon
a theophany
arpeggios like hal – le – lu – jah
blithe man
diving through his lower registers
going down,
searching for that low B
hal – le – lu – jah
down,—
seducing the tenor
to speak in tongues,
slang I didn’t know I’d wanted—
down,—
making me ask:
what do I do
with all these verbs
down,— I have been given?
they wouldn’t even conjugate
if I tried.
down,—
down, B downBeat.

all it takes is
one slap of the tongue
to make me think
jazz is not music—
it’s language
all the way

do-re-mi:
the lexicon of midnight

and god-damn
if this tenor-man’s grammar
ain’t the bluest shade
of proper—

symbolism

2009-01-03T13:57:00.001-06:00

I miss an abstraction,
a concept of a woman,
the way words only gesture at meaning:
"there it is."
I miss her and don't miss her,
it's no longer her I write about
but the word "Her."
It's no longer myself writing
but the muscles of this body,
which used to hold her close.

sharon olds

2009-01-03T13:55:00.002-06:00

It’s hard not to read someone like, say, Sharon Olds,
and see that writers have
clearly different experiences.
I write poems about loving women, missing women,
and Sharon Olds writes about the nakedness of bodies
and the way men are distant.
I can’t even imagine us meeting, and making love.
Afterwards, Sharon Olds would come into the bathroom
and find me on my back in the shower,
and for all the poet between us,
for all our mountains of words,
she’d say What are you doing?
and I’d go Huhhh?
I see her poem now:
“Rubble of soft angles and soggy muscle,
like he wants to go down the drain with the water.
I ask him what he’s doing
and he barely gives an answer.”
In my poem,
I write that I like the way
warm water feels on my chest,
it feels good,
and man!
Sharon Olds!

pupil

2009-01-03T13:53:00.001-06:00

I am your pupil.
Your body, the tome,
lie open before me.
I peered into it;
thus tutored, I learned
to paint such sentences.

Should our sighs become
symptoms of the night,
my fictions will tell of
how your words came to bed
hell-bent on eloquence.

o.k. opera

2009-01-03T13:51:00.001-06:00

OK opera, give us your poor
and mass of huddled cough,
fuck, we need a break,
need singer upon stage,
melody upon melody,
melody upon mattress of song,
need park and bark,
your wretched, give us your starving,
your gilded windows,
your lyric tenor entrenched in despair,
a spray of consonance
of double consonants
OK, opera,
voice of your angel atop an oscillating fan,
voice of what conscience
from one end of this neon to the other,
from one top of this welfare cigarette to the bottom,
what are you if not a psalm for the masses
but a cloud of Puccini
waltzing immaculate fright?
OK, alright,
from one canvas of public transportation to another
we alight, OK opera,
you delight,
OK opera,
we come, we die,
you, OK, goodnight.

one regret

2009-01-03T13:50:00.000-06:00

My one regret is stupid,
not kissing her in the alleyway,
I remember knowing it as
soon as the place passed,
yet not saying anything,
dragged along like a child
looking back at a toy.
I should have said,
Stop!,
grabbed her hand,
walked back along the sidewalk,
thrown her against the brick and mortar,
and had at it like a couple teenagers,
but if I had done something that stupid
I would no longer be
holding on to anything,
would I?

nighttime in kansas city

2009-01-03T13:47:00.001-06:00

[this poem originally appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of EPIC]

Let memory say I am home tonight,
where all is again made new
and light must be sound
since everything hums softly
in rhythm with this town,
where fountains sigh into
the same open palms of
starlight cupped over streets
that knew my first summer
as the year of the pennant,
a century after this moon
crooned to the stockyard cowhands
who’d sang my wander-song
until stopped in the place
where I choose to stand.
Memory will say
I am here until morning sees
my city no longer,
where the lyrics are old,
the night a troubadour
and this, the year of my birth.

new dominion

2009-01-03T13:46:00.001-06:00

We’ll have no god but a new god
who can listen to the wind in our blood
when he journeys all the world’s galleries of sound,
hearing us sing no prayer but a new prayer
in a street opera with all the light of faith in repose.
Let him break bread in this new dominion
and wander the strange geographies of our bodies,
the lips aged by toil,
the hands weak from use,
the genitalia expended,
all the world’s largesse sprawling on our skins
like an endless melody unraveled by touch.
He may find us unfamiliar;
we had been made foreign by his absence.
No more.
Let there be no writ but the only writ:
we fashion our temples into concert halls
so the sonorous god will know
what we’d meant by “absolution”
when, wearied by travel and tribulation,
the final thing possessed
is a song connecting
one soul to the next.

monroe

2009-01-03T13:45:00.001-06:00

Monroe enlisted in ’43.
He rides the train now,
Herman to St. Louis to Springfield.
A dozen different pins inhabit
the pinstripes of his suit,
and he has a story for every stop.
In Italy GIs would sell ten-cent packs
of cigarettes for ten dollars,
and the girl who was waiting for him
married another fella.
They still fooled around
until the day she died,
and Monroe waits for his stop,
retired from upholstery by a heart attack,
never having been to Wrigley
or New York,
a monument avoiding all others,
decelerating life measured in
wavelengths of trackside telephone wire.
He says it’s as good a unit as any other,
and we are all a slackened sum.

intent intact

2009-01-03T13:38:00.001-06:00

Ants in suits in cars in busses
in trusses in transit in style
in love's indirection,
by ways and means inside of perfection,
of angle and chassis and target production,
quizzical by the light of the El,
all whim and fight and song and fury,
intent intact in vogue inferring
by wing by word by sight and service
of a want—a want, a want—a want.

expectation

2009-01-03T13:36:00.001-06:00

Most of my generation
is still cologned with the expectation of greatness.
It’s a thin membrane of slight unbelonging
worn about most of our shoulders like a favorite jacket.
We expect. That’s what we’re good at.

Most of us are dumb shits
and I’m a dumb shit, too.

erosion

2009-01-03T13:35:00.001-06:00

OK with dying.
OK with dying.
OK with dying.
Each eave as calm
As the next;
Becoming a mountain
Beaten to sand.

berlin, june 1945

2009-01-03T13:29:00.000-06:00

Berlin, June 1945.
The city eroded by bombs
And the bricks are snarled
In pools at the feet
Of passersby in three-button suits.
It’s a pageant of naked plaster
And there comes a question
Of how we get food now.
Someone checks the time
On a Rolex worth two
Of these less gently used city blocks.
Five o’clock.
Things were looking up.

the jeff city man

2008-02-25T20:55:00.002-06:00

I saw him before James, my mentee, did. The Jeff City Man.

The Jeff City Man was walking along Elm towards Providence, just beside Peace Park, where James and I had gone to play catch. I recognized the windbreaker I’d seen on him from various encounters on campus sidewalks over the past couple of years.

He’d stop me if we were passing each other on the sidewalk—sometimes running across the street and dodging traffic if he caught my eye—and ask for change, so he could buy gas and get to Jefferson City. He tried to avoid looking at me for long, which might have been because he was a tremendously bad liar. He’d asked me for Jeff City gas money three years straight, even though Jefferson City was only a thirty minute drive from Columbia. He must have had bad luck, I’d think, and then look down at the Jeff City Man’s fairly new-looking sneakers. It didn’t occur to me that someone might be looking at me, at the racial overtones of the thing, of a poor black man asking a white college kid for some change and seeing the white kid digging deep to find some excuse not to fork over some dough, because somehow “I’m broke from student loans and beer runs, sorry” doesn’t quite elicit sympathy. So then I’d convince myself the Jeff City Man wasn’t really homeless, and I’d await my next encounter with him as I’d slink away.

But today, watching the Jeff City Man ignore us as he strode by looking for other marks, I couldn’t quite avoid that race thing again. James was nine, and black; an at-risk one-parent child assigned to me by Big Brothers Big Sisters, the idea being that I could fill the gaping hole of an absentee father and be a strong role model, helping James’ self-esteem.

I didn’t think James really needed it.

“I score forty-three points yesterday,” James said, rubbing his Michael Jordan jersey over his early-bloomer nine-year-old’s Buddha belly. He sat a few feet away, sprawled out at a small distance from me on the fluorescent-green spring grass. We came to toss around a football, but James liked walking more than running, and sitting more than walking. He hocked a loogie and sent it spiraling over towards a butterfly a few feet away.

“M-V-P, aight? Cain’t compete wit’ dat, White Boy. Put me on Sportscenter, I’m a pimp.”

The last statement echoed in my head a few times before I started laughing at it: Aym ah peeeeeeyimp, stretched out I, and then he repeated it, quieter. Positive role model aside—he’d named me “White Boy”—I’d thought it was okay to keep him in check every now and then. Allegedly—allegedly—his family called him “Tookie,” a nickname that made me nervous, I didn’t know what it meant. He had six girlfriends, could skateboard better than Tony Hawk, and possessed a preternatural NBA-like ability to play ball. A forty-three point game against the peewee league was modest by his ninety-point-per-game scoring average, though I must admit, forty-three was still pretty baller. Not bad for a four-eleven and a hundred-thirty pound point guard with a Buddha belly.

“Hey! That’s Uncle Charlie!”

James pointed. I turned my head to see that to my horror he was directing his finger towards the Jeff City Man, moving along the near sidewalk in uneven strides. He had a new black-and-green windbreaker.

“Uncle Charlie! Uncle Charlie! Yo, over here!” James climbed to his feet sideways, swiveling around his jiggling gut to do it, and started waving wildly as I tried to shush him. “It’s me! It’s Tookie!”

The Jeff City Man didn’t turn to look at us, and James started to run towards him. Seeing images of my name in headlines (“White Boy charged with negligence in brutal murder of future NBA lottery pick”) I was on my feet in an instant and had tackled James from behind, dragging him down to the grass as he’d kept pedaling towards the Jeff City Man.

“What the hell you doin’, White Boy? Lemme go!”

I pinned him down until the Jeff City Man was gone, loping somewhere north along Providence. James groaned and rolled over onto his back, but not before delivering a sharp slug to my ribs. I allowed it. I was more worried about the fifty-three more grey hairs I’d count in the mirror next morning.

James, breathless, explained that Uncle Charlie used to be a circus clown after leaving the army, where he had been awarded “the medal of something something, I saw it, it was purple”; and that as a clown, Charlie knew people—like Bill Clinton, and Tupac.

“Uncle Charlie breathe fire, man. I seen it. He legit.”

Rubbing the sore spot in my side, staring up at the cumulus clouds that we’d start to name after celebrities, I’d filed James’ information away with the story of the time he’d been on the spaceship, and how Harvard had called him with a special invitation to skip the rest of grade school and join in their studies.

His mother called me that night to tell me never to physically touch her son again.

℘

I hadn’t done Big Brothers/Big Sisters in a year, parting ways with James at the end of that Spring. It was pretty apparent that there wasn’t a connection, and I didn’t know how I could be any use to him outside of paying for his ice cream so his mother didn’t have to. He’d lived in the basement of a shanty along Garth, the street running through the worst neighborhood in town, and to pick him up I had to climb over a sofa and stacks of empty sneaker boxes to climb the stairs down to his door.

I never even got to say a proper goodbye to him, and his mother later called me to tell me that James cried, though I didn’t know why he would. Still, I’d never felt so guilty in my life.

And for a while, that was that.

I was drunk when I saw the Jeff City Man again. Very drunk. One of my friends was leaving town for good; it hit me a little harder than I thought it would, and so I hit the sauce accordingly. It was a warm April night, after midnight, and I was sitting on my ass on the sidewalk waiting for a ride outside a gas station downtown when he walked up, like and apparition emerging out of the dark.

“Got a dollar?”

I looked up into his indifferent eyes. He was still wearing the black-and-green windbreaker, unzipped. A beer belly poked through the bottom of his faded black t-shirt.

“C’mon man,” he said. His voice was gruff.

I gave him three dollars.

He disappeared inside and I felt sick to my stomach. I’d drank far too much. In what seemed like only a moment, he was back outside, a brown bag in hand. The Jeff City Man came and sat next to me. I could hear his joints popping. He smelled like breath mints. He pulled out a bottle of Everclear, from a brand I had never heard of. He offered me a pull.

“Ugh,” I said. “Ugh, man. You’re not supposed to drink that straight.”

He shrugged boyishly and took a tiny swig.

“Yo,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

“Okay.”

He took another pull from the bottle, but this time didn’t swallow. He’d pulled a book of matches from his pocket without my noticing; lighting one, he put the brilliant flame to his waiting lips.

fog

2008-02-23T10:55:00.003-06:00

I remember the fog that night being as heavy as I’d ever seen it since I’d moved to Columbia. I could hear cars passing slowly through the streets, and I’d see their headlights as only tiny bricks of dull light before they approached and gained their full luminescence. As I walked through the campus for one of the very last times at night, I felt like I was in London, or maybe on the set of an old movie; lights warmed the dark mist as the outlines of austere old buildings would coalesce as I approached, and I wondered if I would ever be as happy in another city. Earlier at the coffee shop, I’d seen one of my old friends for the first time in months. Jerry had surprised me by not asking me what my future plans were. “We’re all tired of talking about it,” he’d said.

“Cheers,” I’d said.

We then clinked glasses, though the clink would be lost in the din of the café. It was early on a Friday night and neither of us were going out, but the rest of the coffee shop buzzed with the energy of an arrived weekend. Jerry looked good, though he’d put on a little weight since Freshman year when I first saw him cutting pictures of Eva Mendes out of fashion magazines for his dorm room door. He seemed a little more dignified now, wearing a nice brown jacket his father could have worn. He’d made it into law school at Georgetown.

“Do you remember Ben Turkisher?” he asked.

“With the hair?”

“He’s cut it all off now. He’s going to Abu Dhabi in June.”

Everyone was going somewhere in May and June, and we were talking about it anyway. It was a town still small enough to know most everybody, which is why I’d come to school here in the first place.

“Prinster make a decision?”

“New York.”

“Kelly?”

“New York. Maybe Chicago. She’ll know in a couple weeks.”

The pungent scent of roasted coffee filled the air and I almost forgot that I’d once gone to a movie with the barista my sophomore year. Her hands swooped over the rows of jars along the walls of the first coffee shop I’d ever known, and it seemed now that my childhood in rural Missouri would only be getting farther away. In four years I’d accumulated a history that I couldn’t even keep track of anymore, which seemed to follow me everywhere like a cologne I’d forgot I’d applied.

Jerry told me that his sister had moved to town last week, and he asked if I was still single.

“Still single,” I said. I declined to meet her.

“Oh, right; you’ve only got a month or two. Probably for the best.”

“That’s too bad,” he added.

“Yeah.”

We then clinked glasses again and then turned to look at the fog that was descending, watching the figures passing by the front windows in the twilight.

That night as I walked home I could hear voices shouting at each other through the fog, like ships signaling each other with horn blasts in the dark. A thin layer of moisture covered everything, and I slowly recognized the sidewalks that led to the building where I lived, which I’d walked along too many times to count. I saw another old acquaintance I almost didn’t recognize; they nodded as we passed. I smiled to myself, and the haze around my building faintly glowed as I approached, as if bearing only a suggestion of light. I walked inside the front doors and ascended the stairs to my one-man apartment on the fifth floor, my shoes squealing on each one of the steps, and when I got to my room, I found a note slipped under my door. I’d never lived alone.

legacy

2008-02-18T00:30:00.003-06:00

I never heard you play at the Civic Theatre; nor at the old Lyric Opera. I never heard you play at the university’s recital hall where ancient organ pipes lined the wall behind the piano, or at the coffee shops downtown where your friends sometimes did open-mics while we watched. I never heard you play Liszt, Chopin, or Scriabin, just as I never heard you play on the old upright tucked in the corner of your 5th street loft where stacks of your father’s old musty vinyls cluttered the shelves bearing the names of bygone virtuosos like Gould, Hofmann, Cortot.

Even in the cramped confines of your practice room at the university, where we covered the small window on the door with your sheet music for privacy, where we sat on the bench in front of the six-foot Yamaha and learned each others’ lips for the first time as the row of glittering black and white keys sat before us, you didn’t. The old bench creaked below our shifting weights and you never so much as played a scale, even as my ears braced themselves for some simple melody to puncture the intimacy.

God, how I was dying to hear you play. But you wouldn’t. You seemed to be waiting for something.

I never heard you even after you got prestigious, much later, when I used to see your name inspiring a bevy of adjectives in small performance reviews in the paper. Even though I never knew when you were coming to town—I only ever seemed to find out after the fact—apparently you were as good as I had always imagined you might have been, and so a couple years later everyone would be very devastated to see you go, especially so young. Fate, chance—what did it matter now? I loved you, but I’d never heard you play; I hadn’t, and never would.

These days I don’t think about you as much as I used to, though sometimes I still sit over my morning coffee and remember all the opportunities that were missed. The steam off a cup of Folgers will bring back moments like that becalmed early September afternoon when we’d spent the day together in your apartment, when you’d hovered around the keyboard as if you were going to sit down to play, but wouldn’t. By then it had become like some joke between us, though a nervous one at that; it was our final frontier, a new kind of virginity, and you’d said you wanted my first time to be special. That night I was supposed to hear you for the first time, at a concert—a big event for us—so instead of playing you put on some different recordings of the Chopin concerto you were going to perform and tried to show me the different players’ subtleties in interpretation that I couldn’t discern, even when you played them over and over again and showed me the yellowed score covered in marks penciled in by your hand. After a while you gave up and we made love instead. We then lay halfway under the sheets as some Debussy you’d put on continued to play, and the windows steamed either from the heat of our bodies or from the rain that was just starting to fall, the drops slapping the aluminum sill like the soft rapping of fingernails on a snare drum, your quiet breaths warming my shoulder one after another as if keeping time with the fragrant melodies murmuring out of the dusty speaker at the foot of the bed.

We’d share a bed but everything about you still seemed foreign. Over dinner, whenever we listened to music you would fall into silence for long stretches of time, sometimes swaying with the beat, as if you were imagining yourself playing, though there would still be a fork in your mouth. It was par for the course; in the beginning there was the night we drove to Kansas City to hear Yefim Bronfman play Rachmaninov’s 3rd, one of our earliest dates, and the first time I had ever been to a classical concert. I remember how we’d nervously held hands in the upper balcony while the people scattered around us trampled the silences with dry coughs and fluttering programs as that old potbellied Russian sat at the piano collecting himself between movements, pausing briefly to wipe his brow with a small handkerchief before continuing to destroy the hall’s gargantuan Steinway in the key of D minor, the open body of that great sleek machine thrumming with Rach’s massive four-note chords like a Cadillac hurtling through the night. Your palms were sweaty and you damn near cried when the concert was over, you said it was so inspiring. Crying for classical music? I’d never seen someone so moved by music, period, not having thought it possible. From that point on it would torture me not to hear you perform.

It should be special, you’d said.

Sitting atop the upright you never played for me used to be an oak-framed black-and-white of your diminutive father in a three-piece suit, wielding a cello that seemed almost as large as he was, and when I’d asked you who he was you told me the story about how your mother first picked him out of his section as he strutted his way through a performance of La Mer. She’d been smitten by the end of the first movement, even though sixteen years his younger, and the anecdote gave me the impression that I was in the process being roped into a weird musical lineage I couldn’t comprehend. You said your father had performed with Gendron and Rostropovich—more accumulating last names that suggested a caste of musical royalty with which I was doomed to be unfamiliar—and I guess this was somehow supposed to make me feel better about what you were doing to me in the 21st century. If you were a normal woman, maybe I would have just been contented to explore your body, but I by then I had classical music blueballs and at strange times in the day would find myself trying to remember how old Franz Schubert was when he died and if he was in the Classical or Romantic era. Near my bed at home, on the nightstand alongside my copies of Sports Illustrated I started keeping stacks of classical CDs that I’d checked out from the library, and could no longer fall asleep unless one of them was playing.

I lost my cool on a Saturday morning. Morning light from the window had been streaming over your shoulders and setting the tangles of your hair aglow at the moment when I remembered that Schubert died at the top of the musical universe at the age of thirty-one. It was like an epiphany; almost instantaneously I told you that enough was enough and, as I so gracefully asserted, “the fucking time has come.” You’d seemed maybe a little taken aback, grasping at the hems of your faded Led Zeppelin t-shirt, stretching it over the lines of your bra as you bit your bottom lip in apprehension. In the brief span of a minute it had become clear that my life was too short to do this any longer. We could have tried to play the waiting game forever if you wanted, but sooner or later airliners went streaking into buildings, the country goes off to war, the years add up on our bodies, debt catches up and we have to quit our dreams, or the neighborhood goes to shit, the schools go to shit, our pulses slow, our breathing slows, sights and sounds grow dim, the world passes us by and finally the waiting game gets called on account of the weather. Thirty-one? The truth is that most of us live pathetically abbreviated lives regardless of how old we get. Only a few get buried next to Beethoven.

When you’d said I should come to hear you with the student orchestra the next month it took a feat of strength not to rip that Zeppelin t-shirt in half with my bare hands and make love to you where you sat. Never mind that the sheet music to Liszt’s Un sospiro sat limply open on your piano, that by now I already knew of it on my own and could hum its melody, that it was nearly only an arm’s length away. I would wait.

℘

I have a piano now, which you also never played, not that you ever got the chance. I’d already been taking lessons when I moved to Chicago and got my first house, which had a sedan-sized empty space in the living room that I knew exactly how to fill. I’d found the one in a used piano shop on the South Side where sad old Baldwins and Hamiltons sat in rows in a room behind a video game arcade; whistles and jingles of pinball machines were rattling in from the other room right when I saw it—a homely black 6-foot baby grand sitting in the corner of the room, a Kawai. Most of its varnish had long since been stripped away, including some of its paint, replaced by a sticky layer of what must have been barroom smoke judging from the smell. But its insides had been rebuilt recently; its action was easy and its sound mellow, with a sparkle in the upper registers and a little edge in the lower octaves. I fell in love right away. Right as I was signing the paperwork for the clerk I heard a burst of Mozart come motoring out from behind me, exploding out of nowhere, and I jumped, not knowing that someone else had snuck into the room. No one had. I turned to see that the clerk had activated an old pneumatic player piano that had been rolled in while I was poking around. Its keys danced to the unseen command of invisible hands, a performance without a virtuoso. The irony was so profound I had to turn away.

I bought a copy of that Chopin concerto you were supposed to play. It’s hidden underneath the seat of the bench that I got with my piano, though I’ve never looked at it. It’s too hard for me. I stick to the kid stuff. That one night that we were leaving your apartment for the Chopin concert—it was still raining—and I’d grabbed you almost in a panic to tell you that you’d forgotten that very same sheet music, you’d just laughed and said you didn’t need it: performance practice for pianists was to memorize their music. I didn’t understand at the time that almost everything classical musicians did seemed to be steeped in some kind of tradition, whether personal or formal. For instance, you were supposed to play with your side to the audience so they could see your hands rather than your face. Blame Franz Liszt for that, you’d said. 19th-century women swooned when they saw Liszt’s prodigiously long fingers slaloming up and down the keyboard, and you’d once told me that his some of his rivals tried to have the webbing between their own fingers surgically removed in attempt to match his reach. I would have been one of them; I had big stupid hands, clumsy fingers. You had these spindly, elegant numbers that I sometimes daydreamed about… they seemed to stretch out forever. We held hands on the drive to the theatre as the rain abated, and I barely squeezed, scared to death that I would hurt you on accident. I was nervous as hell. It felt like we were getting married.

I remember every detail of that night well: the extraordinary near miss. You’d disappeared backstage through a back alley door once we got to the hall and I’d wandered towards the front of the building with almost two hours to kill. The rain runoff splashed beneath my feet on the sidewalk when I turned the corner onto the street and stepped beneath the theatre’s marquee overhang. I could feel air conditioning gliding across my face from the open front doors as if being generated by the amateur Impressionist paintings swirling on the whitewashed walls inside the red-carpet lobby, which was bathed in light. When I stepped inside, it smelled of dust, damp wool, and oranges, and I stood there stupidly, thinking: I’m finally here; this is finally it. Such was my paranoia that I turned off my cellphone when the mere thought of it ringing during the performance shamed me almost as though it had already actually happened.

The front doors had been propped open for the house crew to roll equipment into the lobby, an exotic menagerie of timpani drums, xylophones, cymbals and mallets of various sizes. Music students—classmates of yours—were setting up a concessions stand filled with fruit trays and soda, next to a donation basket for the school, and no one took as much as a second look at me. Admission was free for student performances, and so two hours before the show I was just another guy. I picked up a program with your name on it near the shuttered box office that included the history of this theatre on the back: built in pre-Depression 1928 in a design after the Paris Opera House, in the rococo and baroque styles of the Louis XIV-XV era in France. The lobby seemed to be more run-down 1920s than anything. I didn’t see what the pamphlet meant until I turned a corner and was greeted by a majestic red-carpeted staircase with gilded railing leading up towards the balcony seating. I walked up until I reached the lavish second-floor mezzanine, full of oil portraits of dead 20th century musicians I didn’t recognize, where I turned again and ascended a final short set of stairs that lead into the upper balcony of the hall. It was as if I had just stepped into a massive cavern; I immediately felt the vertigo of a towering open space, of twelve-hundred-and-nine tattered and fading red velvet seats like an amphitheatre of unglittering crimson sequins eyeing the pale wooden stage, the house lights seductively low, the massive red curtain like an old handkerchief being grasped coyly by the soaring beige walls of the interior. The lip of the balcony curved like the low décolletage of an alluring dress, and the nearly-elegant plaster reliefs and marble wainscoting on it were accompanied by chipping paint and water-damaged ornamental sidecurtains on the walls, the entirety of it all dilapidated and garish in a way that seemed not unlike an extravagant and once-beautiful socialite far past her prime, both half-loved and half-forgotten. I stood in the middle of the upper balcony of the hall, then imagining what it must have been like in the Roaring Twenties for a punk town like this to bask in the borrowed excellence of the Sun King.

From that vantage point I distantly saw you walk onstage towards the piano to warm up, and I scurried back down the stairs and onto the mezzanine actually afraid I might hear you before you’d intended. That was as a romantic a gesture as I could possibly conjure. I walked around the lobby for a few more minutes until I got bored, and in a quiet corner up on the mezzanine hidden away from the stairs I found a small oaken bench, which I sat on, then laid on once my back got tired. I thought about earlier, when as you were dressing you told me about the routines you kept for performances, routines that bordered on superstition, like how you always did yoga backstage before coming on to ease your nerves, how you did your hair a particular way to keep it from spilling into your eyes when playing, how you always made sure you wore a certain pair of old cotton undies because you needed to be “as comfortable as possible.” It was all eccentricity to me. I couldn’t imagine a world that could have created you, but it felt like I was about to be educated.

Though at this point in the chronology everything was already fucked, I didn’t know it yet, so I felt myself nodding off and I let myself fall asleep for a short nap until the show. I dreamt we were in your apartment again, lying still as we had when we were listening to Debussy on the stereo earlier that afternoon.

I opened my eyes and heard strains of the string orchestra and I jolted awake. I sprinted across the empty mezzanine and leaped up the stairs to the upper balcony three at a time until I stood in the threshold and to my horror saw the whole university Philharmonic in dresses and tuxes swooning in tandem with the acrobatic gesticulations of their exuberant conductor. But you weren’t at the piano, which was stowed away on a far corner of the stage; this was not the Chopin. Maybe this was a warmup? No one else was in the balcony with me. I checked my watch: 8:11pm. No, the concert had just started. I walked down towards the railing and carefully peered over the edge. A smattering of people sat scattered in a swath of empty seats and I could barely believe so few would come. I checked the program and saw that I had been right, you had supposed to go first, yet this was Beethoven’s 7th symphony instead, the next piece on the schedule.

I ran upstairs to check my phone only to find that the gods were laughing at us, wonting nothing in severity: the very first voicemail actually was not from you, but your mother, telling me that your father had collapsed in the driveway and that she was alone in the ER. It was the next three that were from you.

℘

That’s what happened.

After the services for your father you became withdrawn, hiding out in your apartment and not answering your phone for days at a time. On the few times you’d let me over I’d see the same piece of sheet music turned to the same page laying on exactly the same way on your upright; the keys were collecting dust because you wouldn’t even put down the cover. I would notice that before I noticed you were wearing the same hoodie that you had been wearing for days. You put Olivier Messiaen’s sparse and splintered Quartet for the End of Time on repeat and sat on your couch and watched Wheel of Fortune on mute as Messiaen’s Book of Revelations program music rattled off your walls. I got a sick feeling in my stomach every time every time I heard that opening clarinet riff start the piece again. You refused to talk about your father, but whenever you did, in tiny fragments, it was never in the past tense. You kept everything on your mind under wraps from me. You seemed to be absorbing pain the way you had before furiously internalized new pieces of music, neither of which seemed healthy. I wanted you to get counseling, or meds, whatever it took, but it didn’t hit me until later that classical musicians had shitty insurance just like the rest of the poor and you wouldn’t have the money for either the pshrink or the drugs. If you did, maybe you’d be living in an apartment that had decent heating. Winter was coming in through the decayed sidings around your windows and it seemed like all I could do for you was to come over and climb under two quilts with you and listen to that apocalyptic Messiaen as much as I needed to in order to keep you warm.

On those days when you wouldn’t answer my calls I headed off to the library to read biographies of composers, checking my phone in between chapters to make sure I hadn’t missed you. The stack of CDs on my nightstand had grown larger and larger and it was getting to the point where I could pick out composers of the pieces playing on the radio just from the texture of the orchestration or the quality of the harmonies. I couldn’t go to the gas station without noticing some band on the radio playing a tune with the chord progression of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, or be at the movies without hearing Wagnerian overtures swooping up in the score when the hero got the girl. The more I listened, the more it seemed like your music was everywhere.

Other times I knew you were home but didn’t want me over I’d sneak into your empty practice room at the school and timidly plunk around on your piano, as if afraid I’d make too much noise or damage the keys—though in reality, who knew what kind of violence you used to perpetrate on this keyboard on those late nights when you’d spend hours going over etudes long after everyone else had gone home. And though I sat here and touched the same keys I still didn’t understand yet what your fascination with playing this thing was. To my inexpert hands it was like a black-lacquer mechanical bull, and I missed the magic that sounded like it came so easily on the recordings you’d showed me. The question I’d had about you from the very beginning remained unanswered: why had you devoted yourself to a life of music in a country where classical was dying?

All during this time I’d invite you out, but you wouldn’t leave; I’d come over and you’d let me hold you, but you wouldn’t let me see you cry. I’d wait for you to talk, but you’d barely say a word. I still saw you whenever I could, but as the weeks passed you let me come over less and less.

Yet I wasn’t surprised when one day early in December I heard from someone that you’d finally gotten on a piano again, accompanying a few freshmen instrumentalists at the university to make a few bucks. In the beginning they said you just sight-read the piano parts and got by on the mediocrity of your unrehearsed virtuosity, but at some point I guess you’d turned the corner and started practicing a little again. I saw you near the campus; your cheeks regained some of their color, your gait quickened. Then one day after I came over unannounced you told me that you were going to study abroad next semester in Austria as originally planned, and you needed money in a hurry. I hadn’t seen you for a week and a half, and you had cut your hair very short. The piano had been dusted and the piece of sheet music that had been there was now gone. Your stereo was silent and the kitchen smelled of garlic. You were busy tidying up and then said you had to be somewhere, even though I had just arrived.

But then I came over a couple days later, you were sitting on your couch, listening to the Messiaen again, your eyes glazed over. When you were implausibly chipper the next time I saw you, I was concerned. We got in a heated argument when I said I wasn’t sure if going to Austria so soon was a good idea. You stormed out, leaving me alone in your apartment. That night we argued again on the phone, for nearly an hour, but when you hung up on me it became apparent from our random final topic that this fighting wasn’t about Austria at all. I didn’t see you or hear from you for another week. Sometimes I’d be walking by your place on my way home and would swear I’d hear music, and I would stop and lean up against the streetlamp outside your loft to see if I could hear you. But all was silent; you were never there.

When we finally talked again, there was no reference to our arguments, or to much else for that matter; you said you were busy, and were feeling pretty tired from making arrangements. We didn’t talk about what would happen to us while you were gone. We didn’t talk about much at all, and by the time you hung up I realized that I didn’t tell you that I’d gotten a good job offer in Chicago. It just hadn’t occurred to me to.

It was snowing the last time I saw you. It was late at night, a week before you left. I was walking home from a drink with my buddies and I saw you standing with a man in a uniform underneath the darkened marquee of the theatre I was originally supposed to hear you in. At first I felt a pang of jealousy before recognizing him as one of your friends from school who moonlighted as a security guard for the hall, a lanky violin player. He was unlocking the door for you. You surprised me by hugging me when you saw me; no kiss. You were holding a piece of sheet music. I couldn’t see what it was.

“Gonna play?” I asked, amiably.

“Gonna play,” you nodded, smiling at me almost as if I were a stranger. You held the music against your chest and large flakes of snow collected in the crevice between the paper and your arms. The kid slid off the tie for his uniform and told you that once he got back from dinner, he had to kick you out; midnight or so. After he left, your smile eased into neutrality. “I have to perform pretty soon after I fly over there,” you explained. “Need to get a feel for a big hall.”

We then stared at each other, not saying anything. You pulled your music closer to your chest as the snowy wind hustled by. We were like two anxious teenagers standing at the front door at the uneasy end of a first date. You knew I wanted to come inside, and I already knew that for whatever reason, you’d prefer if I didn’t. When I realized that I didn’t care why that was anymore, with a little sadness I knew that you’d almost tapped out the last reservoir of my devotion. It felt now like I had never truly known you at all, that you had never really let me in, and that the last chance to do so had long since gone drifting by.

Without saying anything you opened the door and stepped inside, not giving an indication to follow. You paused briefly, and peered back outside, eyes darting across the flakes scooting through the dark. You looked at me and your face brightened. “Sibelius weather,” you smiled, perhaps trying to be cryptic, or just unintentionally arcane, unaware that I of all people actually knew who that was.

Then you went inside. And when I couldn’t find the will to come storming in after you, I knew it was over.

℘

I never heard you play, not in that theatre or in any other, not in the squalid practice room in which you spent the bulk of your days, nor in the unnatural quiet of your 5th street apartment which smelled of the fresh bread you’d bring home from the corner bakery twice a week. I never heard you play the piano you father first forced you to get lessons on, just as I never heard you in Vienna where they say you’d started practicing with an abandon that was unbelievable; never in the months when you’d come back, when you’d started coming into your own; never on the tours you took afterwards. Though there in the beginning, though mad for you and mad to hear you play, I hadn’t, I didn’t, I never did.

I’ve made my peace with this, though there are times I think of you when it seems like on every street corner, in every bar, in every apartment I go there’s a musician scratching out some song; a little something they’ve written, or maybe just a Bob Dylan tune, anything that catches the ear. This week I saw a twenty-year-old white kid belt the blues as if he would drop dead in ten seconds, a girl whaling on the drums like she had just been beat and was out for blood, a middle-aged accountant sitting in with a rock band who played his guitar as if there was a comet strapped to his ass and he was not long for this planet. And then I’d go home and listen to Puccini over and over again and hear all these opera singers who’d fashioned their giant voices into weapons that could sail over ninety-piece orchestras playing the most sweetly narcotic romantic overtures on earth, and it sure as shit sounded like everyone from Tchaikovsky to Tupac was scared to death of not being heard. That fact made you seem so strange—and the miscalculation that befell us so astounding—though a glimpse at the truth behind the noise finally came to me at my beat-up Kawai at two in the morning, fooling around with some jazz tune when for the first time I seemed to actually hear myself in the piano, the notes going where my thoughts instructed, as if an extension of my body, as if I’d found a grasp beyond my reach. In a dizzying flash I felt transported to the last time I saw you at the theatre, walking in alone:

You’re there, getting out of the snow and tracking through the dim dark of the foyer, already knowing every creaking step of the lobby by heart. With only the window of an hour until midnight to play in the hall, you don’t mince steps. Once inside the crumbling amphitheatre you walk past along dark aisles of worn-down seats towards the brightly-lit stage, alone in a building meant to accommodate hundreds, greeted by a roaring silence instead of steady applause. You walk across the groaning floorboards of a stage older than your grandparents, a stage that has seen tens of thousands of other performers before you, and you take a place on the bench at the foot of the 8-foot Steinway. You start to play.

The slow, rhythmic opening comes from the belly of the piano like waves rolling up against a low-tide shore—a subdued, velvet melancholy seeming to come straight from your own hands, which move almost without command. A few moments later, when you briefly pause at a fermata, you look up and see the hall is an ocean of dark from under the hotlights aimed on the stage. You can’t see what’s out there, if anything at all. It seems like the piano is the only thing that exists.

Once you resume the prelude everything melts away: thoughts of travel, mourning, the dwindling audiences to this art you know is dying; you forget the first time your father played Bach for you, the first recital you gave, the first time you met me. You forget all of yourself and all of everything and it seems almost like time itself starts to slow. With a little gentle dissonance you enter with the famous main theme on your right hand, which sounds like a blossom unfolding, the lines of that melody wrapping like vines around the accompaniment of the left hand, growing, expanding, exploring and advancing and collapsing—it’s all so beyond yourself it seems unreal—and the music is an explosion of so much color and warmth and largesse that it doesn’t matter whether you’re alone or there are a million people listening, you’re lost in the sound and it won’t be until the quiet of midnight that you’ll again remember why so many of you become addicts, why so many of you die young and divorce madly, why you keep going when, as with so many before you, you already knew how the best nights of your life were going to be spent alone on such stages.

quartet

2008-02-18T00:27:00.002-06:00

[in honor of the Contreras Saxophone Quartet]

That night our jeans lay crumpled on the floor around us. We’d taken to calling ourselves and each other Todd because a huge audition was coming up and we weren’t feeling the requisite team spirit, and we were sitting around in our boxers because Todd, the alto player, said we were playing uptight and needed to loosen up. Our bari player, Todd, had then produced a full bottle of rum out of his case, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. We’d been drinking for about half of the rehearsal.

We were sprinting through our hardest piece at about twice the suggested tempo when soprano Todd stopped playing.

“Todds,” he said, waving his hand. We stopped to hear what he had to say. He was wearing grey boxers, Hanes. He then began singing the alto player’s melody to him in a big, lilting baritone voice: “Your mom / is a crack / whore.”

“Hey Todd,” alto Todd replied, “Not as / big a crack / whooooore / as yours.”

We continued to play after taking another pass at the incredible appearing rum bottle.

Alto Todd’s phone rang from his discarded jeans. He was wearing blue striped boxers. “Hey Todd,” he asked me, “throw me my pants.”

I did. He shushed us quickly and answered the phone. “…Hi Todd,” he said to the caller. We giggled like schoolgirls. There was a very long silence and then we could hear a tiny flustered voice coming from the speaker. Todd’s expression was very calm as the voice said something. He seemed to be listening intently. Then he replied.

“Your mom / is a crack / whore.”

And then he hung up.

It was almost one o’clock on a Sunday night. We’d been rehearsing for four hours, the end of a very grueling week. On Tuesday we’d be on a flight to D.C., trying to win a prestigious $5,000 prize. We’d spent all semester preparing, even though bari Todd had pointed out that even if we won we could have made more money using the rehearsal time to work part-time jobs.

Alto Todd’s phone rang again but he didn’t answer.

When we got tired of playing the tough piece we quickly disintegrated into blasting the Mortal Kombat theme song as loud as we could play it, the culmination of a combined four decades of classical training. We could hear our echo bouncing around the room as if there were another quartet there. We were playing in a big space with tile floors and a low ceiling that used to be a dorm cafeteria before being converted into a band room. There were still big sinks lining the east wall. Rows of empty egg cartons curtained the opposite side to dampen sound, and at the front of the room, placed between two huge shuttered windows, was a single, lonely poster with the portraits of old band composers superimposed on it: Percy Grainger, Vincent Persichetti, Paul Hindemith, and John Philip Sousa.

It was as good a home to us then as any.

the soprano

2007-08-23T20:11:00.000-06:00

Today, in my old neighborhood just beyond old Highway 63, rivers of dark ice lay exposed on the sidewalks and the asphalt where cars and foot traffic have torn through the blanket of snow that covers everything in sight. Just beyond Mr. Cooper’s home sits the small, peach-colored two-story house where my voice teacher used to live. It used to be that you would see strands of Christmas lights peering through the aftermath of another winter storm, but I hear the widower who lives there now is a non-practicing Jew who doesn’t celebrate the holidays. Looking at it, petrified in the ice with the rest of the neighborhood, the house seems much more austere than I recalled.

I remember the first time I actually saw the interior. It’s been almost ten years. My girlfriend then, Penelope, had encouraged me to get voice lessons so both of us could audition for leads in Sacred Heart’s Easter mass, even though the only reason I was in the chorus was to be with her. She’d found Mrs. D’Amico’s number on an old wrinkled printout pinned to a bulletin board in her school’s choir room. The name sounded familiar when Penelope handed the number to me. I called it later; a woman with a mellow voice answered with a distant “Yes?” I told her my name and that I wanted voice lessons. She replied that she knew who I was; she’d lived up the street from me my entire life. Even over the phone, it made me feel strangely naked that Mrs. D’Amico knew what I’d looked like growing up. I’d never actually met her.

When I went to Mrs. D’Amico’s for my first lesson, it was October, one of those soggy autumn afternoons after school where the sky was gunmetal grey and brown leaves had already began to collect in the nooks around porches and sidewalks. I hated this time of year. Halloween was the Christmas-before-Christmas for most kids, but I was diabetic, and my friends—who’d all since moved away—would make me go be a proxy candy collector for them; they’d never given me anything in return except a small bottle of cheap vodka in that last year of trick’o’treating before we’d decide we were too old for that sort of thing. They were all starting to get girlfriends.

As I stood on her steps for the first time, the autumn breeze raced past, colder than usual. Even though it was the afternoon, I was shivering a little when the burgundy front door opened slightly and a face peered out. “Are we ready to sing?” the soprano asked.

No. I wasn’t.

Up until that moment when I was finally looking at her, Mrs. D’Amico had been nothing more than a silhouette in the draped windows of her home, where muffled arias sometimes wafted out to the street as I passed on my bike—and at that moment I was struck speechless. Streaks of grey exploded from the crest of her hair like Impressionist brush strokes, silver against fading dirty-blond, and when she said my name I saw that beneath a small, curving nose, she had the skin and the smile of a twenty-year-old girl. I couldn’t place her age. She was not young. But she was beautiful. She invited me in.

I took my wet shoes off in her small foyer as she disappeared down a flight of stairs. Ceramic Halloween pumpkins grinned at me from beneath a full coat rack, where dark, figureless wool jackets seemed to be huddling together for warmth. I could see a scarecrow wearing a colorful scarf and an evening gown through the doorway to her den. The frames hanging in the hallway all bore some Halloween theme, little comic Frankensteins, black cats, cartoon witches… Later, after I’d been to her house season through season, I’d know that every decoration was a transient, just placeholding until the next major holiday came along. Mrs. D’Amico appeared again from the stairwell, holding two steaming mugs.

“Would you like some tea? You know you would.”

I didn’t drink tea, but I felt compelled to say yes. Her fingers brushed against mine when I took one of the mugs from her and cupped it between my hands. I forgot to ask if it was sugarless. I watched Mrs. D’Amico instead. “You should never sing cold,” she said, swaying as she stood near me, and she hmmed a kind of warm half-sigh that actors gave when peddling coffee in TV commercials. She glanced at my socks as I tasted the tea in tiny sips. It burned my tongue.

I wondered if I would tell Father Gaddis I’d had impure thoughts here. I decided I would probably let it slide, just like about the things I’d wanted to do with Penelope, which she’d not allowed. Already, I hadn’t told the Father about necking with her in the sanctuary after everyone left, or about how sometimes we hadn’t even waited that long.

Mrs. D’Amico started telling me about singing in the classical style. She compared the proper technique to the way babies cried; their voices never got tired. “When you shout for help,” she said, “there is nothing forced about it, is there? It just comes out.” She looked at me quizzically, as if examining the exact impact of this statement. She told me that that was what I’d be getting out of proper training.

She led me up the stairs to her studio, past some portraits of her and a man with a thick beard and small eyes; a deceased husband, I’d find out. I tried to catch the lines of her body swaying beneath her cardigan and skirt while her slippered feet padded up the stairs, trying to spy the soft spots where muscle once might have been, wanting to place an age on her frame. I was unable. I briefly forgot I was there to be taught to sing, instead wondering what she would have looked like if she were my age, if she were someone in one of my classes.

She stopped a moment. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I caught sight of her panty-line.

“Listen, buster,” she said, shortly. “I know your mother.”

My heart caught in my throat. She turned her head a little, nose up, as if sniffing the air. I was scared, and stiff with surprise—did she know what I was thinking? How?—but she continued into her studio without me, as if already over it. After that point I was sure Mrs. D’Amico had psychic powers, making me wonder every now and then if she knew all my other unrepented transgressions—like the way Penelope would sometimes ask me about the things I thought about when I wasn’t with her: “Space shuttles,” I’d lie. “Sports cars.” I’d list off everything except what I was really thinking about: losing my virginity. “What about God?” Penelope once asked. “Yeah,” I lied again, “Him too.”

And it was as if Mrs. D’Amico, like Penelope, always secretly knew when I wasn’t telling the truth.

℘

Strips of snow glaze the limbs of the naked, angular oaks along this street where I used to live, and dark ice clings to the undersides of their boughs like stains of sweat. I came back to this town for a friend’s wedding, and I find myself wondering if snow, like rain, is supposed to be good luck. Isn’t prayer is a form of asking for luck? The priest at the ceremony asked the guests to pray for the marriage, and out of old habits, I faked it.

Later, after I found out Penelope was there, it seemed fitting.

I’m standing at the top of a hill I used to sled down. Somewhere in the distance and out of sight, a branch crackles under the weight of the ice—and then again, and again, like deep, sharp breaths being drawn one after another.

℘

Mrs. D’Amico’s office was far different from any other room in her home, and I remember being glad for that. It was like an oversized broom closet with walls blanketed by hundreds of pictures, newspaper clippings, and portraits hanging in congested alignment; it looked like an improvised quilt of memories. Over half of the photos were of Mrs. D’Amico when she was young, starring at operahouses in cities I’d heard of—Budapest, Vienna, Prague—but couldn’t place on a map. After a few lessons, I learned to stare at the portraits on the wall as I sang. Mrs. D’Amico called it engaging the right half of the brain to stop it from interfering with the left brain’s singing. She accused me of thinking too much all the time. Don’t get in the way of yourself. I used to keep a collection of those sayings of hers, but I lost the notebook in a move.

On afternoons when Mrs. D’Amico was trying to teach me diction—I couldn’t sing my O’s or my diphthongs properly in slow, sad songs—I’d distract her enough until she would tell me about when she was younger. She’d describe how her dress once caught on fire during a production of Turandot—how that wasn’t even the first time something like that had happened—and I’d wonder how Penelope could ever become this woman’s age. While Mrs. D’Amico seemed to emanate history, Penelope’s faith had made it seem like she would be a naive seventeen forever, crusading through life armed with her ponytail and pink lip gloss, suspended in time by prayer. Meanwhile, I’d been feeling years older than I was, and had finally become lonely in the company of her impregnable juvenescence.

Months after Penelope and I had broken up, and I’d quit going to mass at Sacred Heart, my mother would ask me what she was still spending money on voice lessons for. I’d tell her Mrs. D’Amico said I had a nice voice and could always use something like that down the road. I didn’t tell my mother I’d stopped practicing and would go just to drink (sugarless) tea and listen to Mrs. D’Amico tell stories.

She would allude to things like the affair she had once in Prague with an older tenor she’d long admired, and its quick demise, lamenting that sometimes singing was “the only thing” some of her colleagues were good at. It should have been the sort of mildly ribald anecdote that made a student uncomfortable, but it wasn’t; in those moments, her eyebrows would furrow and she would plant her chin on her hand while she took on a wry expression of vacant, comic disturb. Her theatrical sense of humor again made me wish I had a friend my age like her. Sometimes we would stand in her office staring at each other and I would wonder if we were in a singing lesson at all.

“Back to your song,” she’d say, snapping out of it. “That ‘solitude’ in the first verse needs some work.”

℘

I walk from Mrs. D’Amico’s old house towards mine, breaking the virgin snow along the still-blanketed sidewalks there. The city’s snowplows have yet to make it out, just like when I lived here, but I’d risked the drive today anyway. We were always the last block on their routes, it seemed.

The houses are crusted over in sheets of ice and snow, but I can tell mine still looks the same, though the new owners have planted a tree in the yard where my swingset once went. When I look up the street, I see a dull light on in the front window of Mrs. D’Amico’s old house now, and as if on cue, chilled wind sweeps up the road.

I slept with Penelope last night.

I hadn’t seen her in four years.

It’s an unexpected dénouement, for me. Some of the guys I hang out with these days would say that it’s a good way to tie up loose ends, wink-and-a-nod, but as I shuffle along on the ice, I can’t help but feel some old-fashioned Catholic guilt. The Penelope last night, who’d had her nose pierced and left a bra dangling on the chair, changed her politics, drank too much, cursed more—the very same old Penelope who had lived a few blocks over, who used to read C.S. Lewis and speak softly and murmur It’s time to go whenever I got to the point she decided was too far. She’s a different woman now, but I feel like I’ve gone back and taken advantage of the same girl.

I’m not good at dénouement.

I arrive back at the sidewalk in front of Mrs. D’Amico’s old home, my toes a little numb from the cold. Looking at the house, even with just the one lit window, I can still recreate the photos on her wall in my mind. There was a time when I’d daydreamed what would happen if I were only twenty years older… that number eventually drifting down to fifteen, ten, seven, as my lessons with her survived my parents’ divorce, a couple hospitalizations, and my time with Penelope.

Mrs. D’Amico had moved away right after retiring from the university. The last time I saw her was the only time I ever saw her really sing, a few months after she’d quit teaching lessons; it was at the university concert hall, a farewell concert—a gala is what they called it—where she was to perform a Porgy and Bess medley with a baritone, the accompaniment arranged for wind ensemble. That night I remember being excited to finally see her on stage, and being overwhelmed by how beautiful the opening music was. For the first time, I felt the sound in all the ways that Mrs. D’Amico was only previously capable of describing in metaphor: a strange collage of colors, textures, and sensations, a jumble of exotic vocabularies Mrs. D’Amico had lodged into each other like aesthetic shrapnel. I’d always thought she was just speaking in hyperbole, and I felt ashamed for doubting her.

The jazz licks pounded off the walls of the auditorium and into my ears and I buried myself in the massive chords of Gershwin’s opening themes—the way I still would years later—immersing myself right up until Summertime started, one of my all-time favorite songs, and Mrs. D’Amico began to sing.

It was terrible.

Mrs. D’Amico sang like most other operatic sopranos, which is to say, shrilly, incoherently, with machine-gun vibrato, scoops, and alien-sounding vowels. I’m not sure what else I was expecting—Ella Fitzgerald, I think—and yet, there it was; the endgame of training. This was the wailing baby, the shout for help. And as the concert dragged on, in celebration of her retirement, I couldn’t help thinking it was also like a retirement of her classical technique, put to bed by Jazz, Pop, and Rock.

There was a long line of people waiting to greet her after the show, and I was near the end of it. Many of them were former students. Seeing her talk to them so enthusiastically made me wonder why she never told me I wasn’t any good, a lingering suspicion that would be confirmed when I wouldn’t win a college music scholarship anywhere. Mrs. D’Amico hugged me when my turn came, and it should have been a good, long hug, but I pulled away a little earlier than she did. Mrs. D’Amico paused for a moment to attempt a knowing smile at me, but I had just seen the same smile given to a dozen of her former protégés. Then, while we talked, a tall distinguished-looking man with grey hairs eating at his temples came and took her arm. “Keep in touch,” she then said to me, nodding gently, looking a little older than usual, a little more tired.

The auditorium had cleared out except for the last of the musicians. As I walked out to the parking lot, I saw them put their instruments into their cars and drive away.

℘

My breath fogs in the air. Funny; it almost makes me laugh just now, remembering that: “Keep in touch.” Penelope said the same thing to me when we exchanged numbers. Neither of us will ever use them.

A snow plow rolls down the road, finally. The snow sloughs off the scoop of the plow in a way that would make a surfer jealous, had it been water. The driver waves at me. He has bright red cheeks and a big smile. He looks younger than I am.

I wave back, but am stuck in a memory yet again: that winter after I’d had a few lessons with Mrs. D’Amico under my belt, when Penelope had gone walking with me after mass during December’s first heavy snow. I was making fun of her, her cheeks either ruddy from the cold or from blushing, and she tackled me, sending me falling to the soft down of the snow somewhere along this street. I feigned a diabetic attack until she took concern, and then I grabbed her arm and dragged her down. We rolled around. We made snow angels. At some point I then leaned over and whispered some corny thing, but sweet; it came out of nowhere, something that kid on the plow might have said had he been in my position, something a normal guy would say.

Penelope had laughed, and leaned in close, until I’d felt her breath on my cheek. She paused and looked me in the eye. In the falling snow, everything was silent and calm. Nothing moved. “Sing me something,” she then said, quietly. “…Funnyman.” I would oblige, only after taking a second to let the moment stretch out as long as possible.

Today, the kid in the plow disappears somewhere around the next street, and I feel a strange urge to wish him luck, though I don’t know why or what for. It just feels like I should—like it’s necessary. Then, taking a deep breath, and checking the banks of snow running along the houses I’d once known to make sure no one was listening, I stop a moment for a song, as if to see if this is still the only place where loneliness sounds strange.

Oscar

2007-05-21T21:40:00.000-06:00

*[honorable mention, 2007 Mahan Writing Awards]

It’s another July in the Balkans, and it’s hot. Jeremy and I ditch our Bosniak rags and stop trying to pretend we’re not journalists. It was pointless in the first place. An American smile here looks like it belongs in a movie.

We’re hiding in the cellar of the cottage belonging to Emira’s brother, eating dried fruits out of dusty jars and peeking through knots in the wooden door to see what’s happening outside. Emira’s brother crouches facing the entrance. He’s holding an old Nazi rifle that quivers every time a Serbian column passes on the road into town. We know things are bad because Emira has stopped sneaking off to see the Dutch Battalion captain. Still, I feel oddly relaxed, since Jeremy and I are not the ones the Serbs are after, so I’m not sure what makes me feel worse: when a Serb trooper will rattle the cellar door, or a Bosniak refugee. Doesn’t matter who they are; they’ll try the lock, give a futile kick and move on after we stay quiet. Except there was one Bosniak who started to jar the door so much that Emira’s brother shouted from next to me that he would shoot the man if he broke the lock. The Bosniak stopped jiggling the door, and pleaded to be let in—the whimpers that followed felt like they lasted hours, not minutes—but eventually his voice faded away to the growling of a Serbian troop truck.

Still, Emira is smiling. Like always. She has the same smile when she’s happy, nervous, upset—we’d thought maybe she was on drugs when we first met her scuffling around outside the Dutch U.N. compound a few weeks ago. She’d seemed distracted when we interviewed her, always looking over her shoulder towards the Dutchbat housing, but that smile was the Mona Lisa’s of young Bosniak women and something about that was charming. Jeremy liked her English. We gave her work as a translator. She’d at least always look friendly. But sometimes it disturbed me to see her smiling while she was terrified.

At the moment, she’s running her fingers through her nephew’s coarse hair. His mother disappeared sometime during the night. That made her brother distraught, and Emira has been talking just to break up the silence.

“You can buy anything in New York City, correct?”

Of course, I say. I can’t help but smile. Jeremy fiddles with his camera and snaps a shot of her with the kid. It never gets old when people ask me about the States. I love to talk about New York City, and I can tell Emira where exactly to find the best pastrami sandwich in all of Brooklyn. While I tell her about that deli—the one that was a block away from the apartment I once shared with Jeremy—I notice a faded photo of Ronald Reagan nailed to the cellar’s wall, hanging above a half-complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica stacked on the floor.

“I would go for the grocery stores,” Emira says. “Freedom of speech? That can be taken away. But to go to a grocery store? You don’t know how good you have it. I’ve heard I could buy anything in an American grocery store.”

Jeremy sets down his camera. His expression tells me he’s finally out of film. I ran out of paper a few days ago. There was none in the cottage, though the thought crosses my mind to start tearing out sheets from the encyclopedias for later.

“I went to Paris once when I was young,” Emira says, tugging on a lock of her nephew’s hair. We hear more vehicles churning on the road outside. “It would be nice to be married,” she pauses, “and to have that sort of lifestyle.”

I’m not sure what ‘lifestyle’ she is referring to. If she’s talking about Paris, I want to tell her that being a Muslim in France is not all that it’s cracked up to be; if she’s talking about a future with the Dutchbat captain, I want to tell her to brace for heartbreak.

One of those passing rumblings doesn’t fade, and the growl of a diesel engine chokes to a halt.

Voices come from outside. Jeremy cradles his camera in the crook of his elbow.

I learned from a stint in Lebanon that international law mandates military full-metal-jacket 7.62mm rounds used in military-issue AK-47s be designed to limit tissue disruption: to wound, not kill. Jeremy told me that’s why the crazies who shoot up playgrounds with assault rifles never tally big body counts. But knowing that does not stop me from cementing my hands to my head when they kick in the door. The sunlight spills in around the silhouettes of Serbs swarming in. They seize us and take us outside, and to my embarrassment the words that shrill out of my mouth are ‘American! American! Are we safe?’

“Cut!”

Guillermo Rosado pulls off his headset and puts his hands on his hips. A cameraman sighs as the Spanish-born director starts pacing around the extras wearing Serb uniforms while glaring at the ground. I try to ignore the soundmen rolling their eyes at each other, bored twentysomethings in khaki shorts and sweat-stained state-university t-shirts who hoist up boom mics for a living and shift their weight to kill time.

Take eleven, I bet they’re thinking. We saw this coming.

“What the fuck was that?” Guillermo asks me. “You have one line in the whole movie! Don’t make me get an actor.”

I take a deep breath and again try to block out the fact that everyone on the set is watching me, Jeremy especially—he’s been so serious since we’ve started filming. But I also become worried that Guillermo will find a more muscular, better-looking version of myself to play the based-on-a-true-story cameo of “Journalist 1”—that’s me—and that Jeremy would be stumbling out of the mock cottage with someone else, someone who hadn’t been there. For someone who has been there, I sure as hell can’t act like it. With each defective take—of many—Guillermo becomes increasingly agitated, and even sweet-hearted Jenny Orr, who plays Emira, is starting to lose a little of that strapped-on Emira-smile. In between takes she tries to show me the focusing techniques she learned during her collegiate track days. “Focus on your goal,” she says.

In spite of all this altruistic energy I have from making a movie to enlighten people on what happened in Srebrenica, I focus on sleeping with her. It’s a nice thought. She’s attractive. But former-Olympians-turned-star-actresses don’t sleep with skinny journalists-turned-amateur-screenwriters.

Jeremy slugs me on the shoulder just a little too hard for it to be completely friendly. He’s been very serious about the movie. After I finally nail my line, he walks off slowly towards the extras’ canteen without saying a word.

On a knoll just past the set and beyond the director’s trailer, a crowd of Slovaks thrum around a cordon, locals who are just trying to catch a glimpse of what is going on. They had been surprised an American film crew would come to Slovakia. The filming site has become something of a local curiosity. Next to the locals is a smaller contingent, but a more rigid-looking bunch, Bosniaks whom Guillermo has invited to watch the filming. Beyond those groups is a special cordon for the tiny collective of Serbian expatriates who are protesting with chants that the massacre never happened.

I was disappointed to find out later that their stance had become increasingly popular in Europe. It was as if the people hadn’t followed the coverage of their own war.

The spectators had been stationed much closer to the set earlier on in the filming process, having remained quiet and well-mannered until day nineteen, when an old woman standing near the Bosniaks suddenly burst out in the middle of a take that the extras playing the Serb troopers were dressed like Croats. It took Guillermo’s staff three days—three days—to verify that the woman was wrong, and that the appropriate uniforms were being used.

So the cordons were moved back, and filming continued marching on.

℘

We had just gotten back from Mauritania, from doing a puff piece on a Saharan ore train that had been made into an ad hoc mass transit system, when we got an invitation from Guillermo to come visit out in L.A. for a while. He took us into his home and told us that there was buzz about Oscar possibilities. We freaked out, obviously. After we had left, I kept telling Jeremy not to get excited, that we might not get nominated. I just had a nagging doubt, but Jeremy wasn’t going along with it.

“We should get some strippers,” he’d said.

But he fell asleep on the cab ride back to the hotel, and we settled for drinking when we got to our room. Tonight Guillermo had put us up at the same place that we’d spent a month writing the script in, and at the moment we were sitting out on the balcony drinking and watching the traffic on the boulevard below go streaming by.

From the balcony, you could see palm trees rising over the avenue that ran along the moon-dimmed coast, the waves of the Pacific throbbing against a beach that was just out of sight. In the room we’d written the screenplay in, it had been a clear view of the parking lot and the backs of a couple fast-food restaurants, and sometimes I had spent those early mornings before Jeremy woke watching the janitors take out trash to the dumpster below our window while a set of twin-brother busboys split a joint and kept an eye out for the management.

But now it was a pleasant L.A. night and we were bullshitting about award thank-you speeches. If people had a concept of what an Oscar-nominated screenwriting team looked like, it probably wouldn’t be anything resembling the two sloppy drunks who currently sat cross-legged facing the Pacific in some hour just before dawn. Not that I really felt like I could be an Oscar nominee. The screenplay had been reworked by the studio’s script doctors almost beyond recognition.

“I think we’ll win,” Jeremy said. “Did you see Venerable? Please. What a piece of shit movie.”

“Just tell me what you’d say,” I said.

“You know how they have best original screenplay before all the really huge awards, right? Best director, best actress, all that?” Jeremy said. “Well, it goes like this. They announce we win. One of us goes onstage to accept the award. Except when we give our thank-you-Mom speech, we instead say that we decline to accept the award. That the movie and the Oscar would not have been possible if tens of thousands of people hadn’t died. Then we say that we will leave the Oscar onstage to make a statement against genocide everywhere, Darfur, wherever. And then—here’s the kicker—we invite all of the other winners after us to leave their Oscars onstage next to ours if they want to say they’re against genocide. We set down the Oscar and make a big dramatic exit. And then who the hell wants to be the asshole who doesn’t set their award down next to ours and declare that they love themselves more than they hate genocide? They’d have to leave theirs onstage as well. And even if it’s just playing along, that is a huge message on the biggest of national stages, and—well, just imagine, we could be starting an entire movement.”

It was a hell of an idea and I would have been out of breath if I had tried to say all that, but Jeremy had always been a good talker. The first time I’d met him at an internship, he talked so much about the Mets and his ex-girlfriend that I hardly got a word in edgewise. It was only after we’d roomed together for a while that he’d cooled it a little. In those days, before we’d hooked back up with the same bureau, we’d be working ourselves to death just to get our foot in the door on a few lootings and minor crimes here and there. My favorite memories from back then were when we’d get home from work, exhausted, and sometimes we’d sit by the window and talk about all the good we were going to do by reporting the news—you know, that ‘truth-will-set-ye-free’ thing that most young journalists have. We weren’t unique in that respect. Jeremy would bring a joint, and we’d smoke and shoot the shit all night about saving the world from while watching peaceful life in Brooklyn go passing by from fifteen floors up. On nights like those it seemed like I could stay in New York forever.

And now we were thinking about how big names in liberal Hollywood would hate to have a genocide-sized dent in their reputations. I keep wondering how even stranger this is all going to seem when I get older. If Europe can have amnesia about a war, what stops my own history from sounding implausible? “The movie? Jeremy had come up to me one afternoon in Kuwait with a not-quite-plausible-at-the-time idea.” “We were going to change the world at the Oscars.” My life felt like hyperbole right now.

Jeremy rubbed his feet and ran his fingers up and down the neck of his beer bottle. My mind swirled with all sorts of complications with his Oscar plan: what if the conductor cut us off before we had a chance to finish our dramatic speech? What if they cleared the stage for some kind of absurd ballet performance and they had to remove our genocide Oscar? Worst, what if we stuttered a little too much in our acceptance, looked a little too insignificant, and we ended up like those kids in high school who planned the community service volunteer projects that no one went to?

But I didn’t say anything.

We sat there for a few minutes while the breeze drifted past us. Jeremy asked how I was doing, and ran a finger through his long blond hair, which he had grown out sometime before the filming of the movie. He said I’d been acting weird ever since we’d wrapped. I told him that we’d seen a lot of other people die in the course of our careers, and I didn’t know what Emira Arslanovic did to have her story deserve an Oscar.

He shrugged and stared out at the sea. His eyes were dulled over in the moonlight.

I’d been thinking about it a lot lately. Outside of her relationship with the Dutchbat captain, Emira hadn’t had much of a personality—the studio guys had filled one in for her on their re-write—and she hadn’t even been the first translator we’d lost. But one of the reasons she’d stuck out to me, outside of the smile—and now, outside of the movie—was that she’d never sat around talking about the ‘big question.’ Not the meaning-of-life ‘big question’—a lot of people around Bosnia still strutted around as if they already knew the answer to that one—but the other really big question, the one that was on everyone’s minds there:

Who had started the war?

What I had learned in Bosnia was that it felt like the sides had given up trying to compare atrocities to determine who was the most evil, and were instead endlessly debating whose fault the whole shit-storm was. And it was hard to convey that dialogue to the Western readership, because the discussion inevitably involved groups of people that the West hadn’t even known existed—Croats, Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks. It’d sometimes later keep me up at nights knowing that the closest the average American ever got to understanding the Balkan crisis was when President Clinton ordered airstrikes while being impeached: they just thought he was taking out his frustrations on some country that they’d heard of before. They only knew the word “Bosnia” because it was a drone-like hum in the background of their news, just insignificant enough to ignore, yet visible enough to recognize as being the name of a place they never wanted to fucking visit.

Just like everywhere else I worked.

This was my career.

A car driving on the boulevard below gave a long honk, and its pitch sagged as it passed. Jeremy shrugged again, and he said people were ready to hear the truth about what happened in Bosnia.

“The truth is Jenny Orr is four inches taller and thirty pounds lighter than Emira was,” I said. “It’s the Hollywood-izing of a tragedy.”

Jeremy smiled. “Goddamn athletes.”

He wanted to be the one who set the Oscar onstage. I just knew it. Maybe he deserved it. The whole project had been his idea anyway.

He said goodnight, and he went inside to bed to let the booze put him to sleep. I got a quick flash of those old days, though things obviously could never be the same. I sighed. At least I wasn’t abroad. Christ. I missed not knowing how fucked up everything was.

I looked back down upon the Hollywood boulevard below, watching the late-night traffic sweep by in anonymous little increments.

℘

Anonymous little increments, like the Bosniaks who stream past the sides of our troop truck as we pass by. The Serb troopers are taking us to downtown Potočari, where thousands of Bosniak refugees clog the streets. For each block we pass our view is paced by masses of living bodies. Some not living. The stench is overwhelming. Most are moving but not sure where to go. Bosniaks wilt away from the Serbs with rifles who walk unfettered through the crowds. I have seen this sight before—soldiers with guns, unarmed crowds afraid. The uniforms are different, but it seems like the inevitable outcome is universal.

The truck stops near a white house and the Serb captain tells us to get out. He keeps Emira’s brother on the truck with a sharp grunt. A line of Bosniak men stare at the ground at Jeremy and I as we get out with Emira and her nephew. Just past a row of guards we see Serb troopers resting on the lawn. The Bosniak men are herded into the truck. Sweat rolls down their faces under the July sun. We lose sight of Emira’s brother behind the new tangle of arms and torsos in the back of the truck. The Bosniaks in the truck look at us. Their lives end soon.

The Serb driver turns on his radio as he rolls away. I hear Elvis.

We walk past the squat buildings downtown and become a part of the masses we had watched while driving by. As we pass we hear rumors of torture. One story says a Serb cut a boy’s throat in the middle of a crowd. Emira holds her nephew closer.

I notice Jeremy has been talking the entire time. I’m not sure when this started. But he’s not speaking to anyone, just himself. The pitch of his voice gets higher each passing minute, like Hail Marys of increasing desperation. But when I watch Emira’s face his words become like part of the scenery.

Her smile has tightened into a smirk. Her eyes dart across the crowd. Initially I think she is looking for friends and family. But she is looking for blue helmets, the Dutch UN peacekeepers. There are only a hundred or so in Potočari. Every now and then you can catch a flash of their uniforms among the people. The refugees swarm to them, plead for help. But the Dutch are not permitted to intervene. The UN has deemed it so.

We pass by a pair of peacekeepers and Emira does not turn her head. She’s looking for a specific one. The Dutchbat captain. Emira picks up her pace. She seems to know where she is going now, and she moves quickly. We struggle to keep up with her on the stretch of road pocked by months of Serb shelling. She practically drags her nephew behind her. The standing Bosniaks near us weep. Some sit, stone-faced, as if resigned to their fate.

Single gunshots slap somewhere in the distance.

We approach an old home near the Dutch compound. Serbs have already cleared the UN base and are loading Bosniak men into trucks. Trucks heading to warehouses and schools already stained with blood. A Serb trooper watches us pass and smiles. I turn my face away. When we approach the house I see the Dutchbat captain looking on from the yard. He is armed yet his hands are on his hips. He does not smile as he sees Emira approach with her nephew.

Emira is always smiling.

They meet. The Dutchbat touches Emira on the waist, touches her like there is something special about her. This makes me strangely jealous. The Dutchbat looks over his shoulder almost coyly, as if to say: Is love a crime? He then turns and leads Emira and her nephew into the old house. Another peacekeeper smokes on the porch. Watches them enter the house. The door closes.

Jeremy is still speaking. I try to listen to his words. He is still praying. Even though he stands next to me I feel like I am eavesdropping. But then suddenly without pause he changes gears. Describes sights and smells. Commentates with the tone of a field reporter. Runs a finger through his hair. Narrates his experience to himself. He is shaking. A rumbling sound comes from up the road. A column of old buses pass. The Dutch near us watch. The Serbs are separating the men from the women. The women will go on buses to Bosnian-held Kladanj, the men will stay and go on trucks later. Trucks headed for fields with holes. With bulldozers waiting to move earth over the holes.

I don’t belong here.

The porch door opens and Emira appears, alone. She pauses, then steps off the porch. No Dutchbat. No nephew. Alone.

She tells us she has to go now, saying it through a smile of gritted teeth. She begins walking up the street and we follow her. The masses of Bosniak bodies are in motion. Serbs direct the motion. Women go left. Men go right. Jeremy’s words speed up.

Someone shouts at Emira. A Bosniak?

No. The Serb captain from our truck. I don’t understand what he says, but Emira’s expression offers a translation: Where is the boy? Emira remains silent. The Serb captain approaches and repeats while Jeremy and I observe. Jeremy’s voice quiets to a whisper as Serb guards circle Emira. The Serbs have never been this brave in front of Western journalists. Like a kid, I feel like I should close my eyes, or else I’ll have the image of them tearing at her clothing buried somewhere in my memory forever.

Serbs grab, push, grope, punch, kiss, taunt, laugh, grope again. She falls on the ground. A guard pushes her face into a patch of mud. The Serb captain reaches for the fly of his pants while another tries to restrain her. I wish I had a gun, but that’s just wishful thinking. All I do is watch. Watching is my job.

Bosniaks stream by. The July sun pours down on everything.

Emira breaks free. She runs. The men follow. I already know how this story ends.

Except—

Something strange happens.

As she dashes away, I see her legs flash briefly and peer out from the tear in her skirt. And then, again, as they churn and wheel over the mud-caked road towards nowhere.
Something about Emira Arslanovic is not quite human.

It is the way she runs. Almost like a Greek goddess. Like she is immune to gravity. Like she has wings. I look, and I am not entirely sure I see her feet touching the ground. Your imagination can do funny things to you. She’s kicking up little clods of silt, so maybe she is not flying, but something is not right. She is getting away.

Something odd happens to me: the feeling of joy. It is a miracle.

Tears flow down Emira’s face, down past her grin, and she blows by us, defying all logic, each stride seeming twenty feet long compared to the slowing steps of the Serbs behind her. Her legs shine again, pale and strong, their muscles expanding and contracting—

And with the soldiers hopelessly falling behind, Jenny Orr runs out of the frame of the shot, and right out of reality.

Guillermo calls cut.

Jenny trails off and crouches down once her legs stop pumping. No one in the crew moves. The extras playing the Serbs stop running, and they put their hands on their knees and gasp for breath. The air on the set seems to radiate silence.

Except for the faint sound of protesters shouting in the distance. We did not start the war.
Jeremy turns to me and sees my face and asks in a whisper if an Oscar would mean everything was worth it. I don’t reply.

Jenny hasn’t stopped her actress’ tears yet. Behind the camera, Guillermo puts his hand on his face. A twenty-minute continuous take has just been completed. Four months of preparation for the panoptic second-to-last scene. Finished. The next, final scene is planned to be tragic in its simplicity.

We wait for Guillermo’s word. Success or failure. It’s almost like he can’t make up his mind.
But then after what feels like an eternity he stands up—abruptly. Voice hoarse, he calls for makeup and says to make plans for take two. The air is let out of the crew and all the actors in a collective fuck.

But not me. I still can’t accept that those nights watching over Brooklyn are lifetimes away now, and that those chants are my future.

Guillermo Rosado walks over and kneels by the side of Emira Arslanovic, and we all look on as he caresses her mud-streaked hair and whispers in her ear that she has to slow down so the guards can catch up.

There's No Crying In Baseball

2007-05-21T21:32:00.000-06:00

Wrigley Field slumbers not too far away, but I won’t be seeing it tonight. We’re sitting on the roof of Sesame’s beat-up Buick Regal and she’s attacking her pack of cigarettes the way a nine-year-old would abuse a Pez dispenser. The windows are rolled down, it’s three in the morning on the North Side, and the stereo plays Al Green, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha, old soul pouring out of speakers, dissolving into the unseasonably warm spring night. I can’t really say how we got here or why we’re sitting on this particular street, but I know Sesame is chain-smoking because of her family, and I’m just another guy waiting for the right moment.

I’m not familiar with Chicago at all, but I think we’re safe. Two fragile-looking teens wrestle on a nearby stoop, laughing flatulently, and I can’t tell if they are flirting because they’re gay or high. I say this because Sesame and I had wound up at a gay-pride block party after hitting the bars, and we partied for a half hour before I figured out what was what. They were serving beer, what can I say? I like living on cruise control.

“Fucking Diego,” Sesame says in between drags on her fourth cigarette, the words flying out with the smoke of her breath like exhaust from the Buick’s tailpipe. “This is just like him, you know. I mean, you don’t know him, but this is just like him.”

“He seemed okay when I met him at the door,” I say. “Quiet, I mean.”

“No,” she says, taking another drag through those epic lips, “He’s an asshole.”

She’s right: I don’t know Diego. But the more she smokes and talks about her brother, the more I think he might actually be an asshole. I want her to shut up and listen to the radio and look up at the moon, I want to say that I’m sitting under the stars on the roof of a car belonging to a mystery Latina with great legs I’d met two days before the end of spring break, but the more I sit here, the more I realize that the sky isn’t as clear as in Iowa, that alien Chicago is just a backdrop for her daily routine. And she won’t stop blabbering about Diego.

But I won’t make a misogynist judgment on her character, because that was the sort of thing my brother would get after me for, and lately I’ve been trying to be better.

“You doing okay, right?” Sesame asks. She raps her fire-engine-red fingernails on my knee. “We could go party somewhere.”

“No,” I say. “This is fine.”

“So,” she sighs. She looks across the street towards the quiet apartment buildings with a few lit windows scattered across their fronts. “Tell me something I don’t know, Corbin.”

“Left-handed people live eight years fewer than right-handed people.”

“No, something about—wait, are you serious?”

“I don’t know,” I say. She offers a cigarette and I turn her down. I’m already past my limit. She lights another.

“Seriously though,” she says. “I like surprises. Surprise me. Anything.”

I’d like to humor her, but as usual can’t think of anything clever to say once put under the proverbial gun. There are a few interesting things, I suppose. Speaking of the gun, when I was twelve, I shot my younger brother Sam in the arm with a .22 (by accident). My first kiss was in the middle of a cornfield. My uncle won it big in the lottery and blew the winnings in six months. It’s Iowa stuff, and none of it surfaces—probably because I’m not surprising. Maybe I need to start keeping stock trivia about myself readily at hand.

“Yo, excuse me!”

One of the kids from up the street has gotten off of his stoop and called to us from a distance. He’s real skinny. His frame resembles that of my brother Sam’s from his picture on my mom’s mantle, immortalized at age twelve wearing a junior high baseball uniform and a shaggy haircut. The teen waves. When he comes under a streetlamp, I see he has Sam’s junior high haircut, too.

“Hey,” he says, stumbling a little as he nears. He looks high. “I was just wondering if I could bother one of you nice people for a light?”

I was going to lie and say I didn’t have one, but that seemed pointless with Smokestack next to me. I say nothing, deferring to her judgment: her city, her call. Sesame takes another drag and leans forward.

“Yeah, sure,” she says. “Come on over.”

The kid sidles up to the car and Sesame gives me her Bic lighter, which I hand to him. I see his eyes up close, big and brown and dilated. He can’t be older than eighteen or nineteen. God, he’s almost a dead-ringer for Sam—looks just like him.

“Thanks,” he says. He pulls out a joint with a shaky fist and fires it up. He puffs, and the smell slips into my nostrils, bittersweet. “Y’all live here?”

“Nah,” I say. “I’m from Iowa City. Just in town for the weekend.”

“’Y’all’?” Sesame pauses, furrowing her brow as if listening intently to the boy’s word as it rolls off her own lips.

I wait for her to say that she lives in Wrigleyville, but the admission doesn’t come. From the corner of my eye I see she’s staring down the street, at nothing. It hasn’t been like her to not be social, but then again I don’t know her well. If she hadn’t started talking to me first, last night at the bar, we wouldn’t have met at all.

“Iowa City, huh?” the kid says. “Home of the Cyclones!”

He laughs and spins around twice before losing his balance and going to a knee.

“Hawkeyes, actually.” I say. “I’m on spring break.”

“Nice,” he nods, lurching onto his feet. “I’ve been saving for junior college.”

When he drops his hand to his side, I see needle tracks, sores peppering his arms under the hard light of the streetlamp. Sesame sighs out of the blue, disinterested, saying nothing. We fall into an awkward silence. Looking at the kid’s black windbreaker, I space out for a moment, and worry about the end of the night. Sam used to ask me what base I’d gotten to, after I came home from dates. Even though he didn’t go on dates, sometimes he’d start laughing, and would say he could tell I hadn’t even been to first. That was a long time ago, so standards have changed, but let’s just say that mysterious existential sighs make my inner Sam question the likelihood of crossing home.

The junkie coughs and shields his joint away from the street as a police car creeps by, the officer driving giving us a sidelong glance.

“Your friend,” I say, pointing over to the stoop. “Is he okay?”

The guy in front of the brownstone apartment is sprawled diagonally on the steps, one hand grabbing the crotch of his jean shorts, the other pointing at the sky, wavering wildly. Gravity: a bitch to the inebriated.

“He’s having the time of his life,” the kid smiles, taking another hit.

“What is he doing?” I ask.

“Counting stars.”

“What about his other hand?” Sesame asks.

“Well,” he delivers a sheepish aw-shucks kick to the pavement, “Can’t be romance in everything.”

“Guess not.” She puts out her fifth cigarette but doesn’t go for another. “What’s your name?”

“Billy,” he says.

I ask Billy where he lives, and he points to the building above the stoop where his friend sits. He laughs—cackles, really—and for some reason, I want to ask him what shooting heroin is like. I don’t want to try it, just want to know. I’ve been having weird dreams recently, semi-historical fantasies of going to the ballpark with my brother, watching Hank Aaron sock homers that fly for miles, even though I’ve never seen Hank Aaron play. I want to ask Billy what can make that kind of high.

“Y’all wanna come up?” Billy asks. “Come party?”

“We’ll come up,” Sesame says, like it’s nothing. She slides down the front of the windshield. I watch her legs shudder along the glass, hypnotized. I’m distantly aware of being unsure what she’s leading me into. She squeals. By the time I’m off the car, Sesame is already halfway down the sidewalk with Billy. As I pull the keys out of her ignition, roll the windows up, and lock her doors, I think about the lonely train ride back to Iowa, starting tomorrow at noon, and regret that I couldn’t get my friends to come to Chicago with me.

I follow Sesame and Billy to the stoop, where we meet Billy’s friend. Billy introduces him as Evan and says he’s a mute, but Evan, on his back, grunts and shakes his head no as soon as Billy stops talking. Evan has long, stiff blond hair that covers his eyes, and just to shake my hand he has to brush it aside to see what he’s reaching for. In between swipes I see dilated pupils around electric-blue irises. Billy comes over and helps him to his feet, and I see that Evan must be even younger than Billy is, both looking to be in their late teens. Three summers ago I was washing cars outside of Des Moines for gas money. I hesitate to say ‘different strokes.’

Billy opens the door to the apartment building and leads us upstairs, Sesame close behind. The place is quiet, save for ancient stairs groaning under our steps. Evan is having trouble walking, so I lend him a shoulder. He smells strange and I can’t place the odor. Sesame’s hips sway in front of us, bouncing under her skirt as she sashays, giving a whiff of her scent—something like cherries—and Evan gives me the uh-huh look of approval. Sam would say that I’m going to get in even more trouble if I keep hanging out with questionable characters, and I had really been trying to be better about that.

We reach the fifth floor, and lurch our way to door 5D, adorned with a large smiley face sticker awkwardly placed over a fading Cubs pennant decal. While Billy fumbles with the keys, I realize that Evan hasn’t actually spoken yet. On a whim, I turn to him and say “hey,” and he just smiles back at me and nods happily. His breath smells terrible, like old tuna.

Billy laughs, apparently remembering that he doesn’t lock the door, and he turns the knob. A draft from inside slides across my face. As Billy and Sesame move out of the way and I see more of the apartment, the smell on Evan’s jacket makes sense.

Birds. A goddamn messload of birds.

A chorus of chirps and twitters comes in confusing stereo, as the voices of various cockatiels, canaries, finches, parakeets, parrots and cockatoos overwhelm the apartment almost as much as the powerful smell of bird shit. There are cages numbering in the dozens hanging from the ceiling and leaning up against the walls, shoved up against each other, stacked on top of each other on the hardwood floor; a few are covered with sheets, but most are exposed to the air, which I guess must make for few restful nights. Collectively the birds’ feathers make up almost the full range of the color spectrum, green yellow red white and so forth. The room’s only actual furniture was a rickety old dresser and two naked mattresses, hiding behind an island of cages on the far side.

“Sorry about the mess,” Billy says. “We’ve been trying to organize.”

Sesame shoots me a rather superfluous organize what look as Evan stumbles past her and sits gingerly on the girded home of a couple parakeets.

“This is ridiculous,” I say. “Doesn’t your landlord care? Don’t your neighbors complain?”

Billy shrugs. I presume there must have been some kind of miracle in order for him to get the lease. Evan gets up and starts walking towards the mattresses, giving Billy a hard smack on the ass as he walks by. I don’t know if that means they’re gay or not. Sam was gay and it was years before I found out.

I see a cockatoo flutter out of the corner of my eye, and I wonder if I’m going to see someone shoot heroin into their arm.

“You guys want to smoke a joint?” Billy asks.

“I don’t have any money,” Sesame says, poking her finger between the flimsy wires of a yellow canary’s cage. I wonder what she’s thinking about.

“No, it’s on the house,” Billy says.

He gestures for us to follow him towards the back of the room, where the glow of the streetlamps illuminates the ceiling through the windows. The cages are arranged so two paths run from the front door to the back, so tight in spots that Sesame and I have to shimmy through sideways between walls of chickenwire and aluminum. Empty bags of feed cover the floors, and I see that all of the cages are splattered with shit and seed. Sam used to keep a canary, and Dad had been all over him about keeping its cage clean. I had forgotten about it until now, but when Sam and I would listen to the Cubs play on the radio in our living room, the canary would get excited every time the stereo started cheering until one afternoon in September it got so excited it chirped itself to death on a home run call. The Cubs were winning, and after a reliever picked up the save we went and buried Sam’s bird in the backyard next to an old maple.

I look at a similar canary perched near Sesame, and try to remember the name of Sam’s bird.

The mattress Evan crouches on is ancient—the two of them placed side by side must be the apartment’s furniture as well—and I when I sit next to him, my ass hits the hardwood floor through the exhausted padding. Sesame comes to the head of the mattress next to me, and tests the padding with her hand. Maybe finding an errant spring, she swats my knee, and I straighten out my legs as she stoops to sit sideways on my lap. My blood warms as I feel her weight come down on my thighs. She’s not as heavy as would be expected. To help keep her balanced upright, I put my hand on her lower back, where her top has ridden up and exposed bare skin. My fingertips feel hard muscle, and I begin to think that I could easily take a vacation in the small of her back and not be heard from again.

“Here you go,” Billy says, using a Zippo lighter to ignite a joint he pulled from out of the beat-up dresser. He passes it to Sesame. She takes a long burn and holds it in, waiting, waiting, going so long that I think she could pass out, and then she slowly blows it all away, the stream churning in the air and drifting to the tall nearby cage of a molting green parrot. I expect the parrot to make an ironic remark, like it would if this were TV, but it just shifts its weight to scratch itself while getting bathed in smoke. Sesame stops a beat to admire her handiwork before passing the joint to me.

“You smoked before?” she asks.

“Once,” I say. “It’s been a few years.”

“It’s been a few minutes,” Evan says. “Give that shit to me if you’re not going to do anything.”

“Just hold on, man,” Billy says. “He’s cool, give him room.”

I put the joint to my lips and breathe it in. Sesame reaches for my hand on her back. I start to move it away, but she grabs it and squeezes, returning it to its place against her skin. A pair of cockatoos begin chattering loudly, and Billy smiles as he leans back against the dresser. It teeters behind his weight. I try to keep from exhaling, because—god—it’s all so much, and when Sesame squeezes my hand again I cough and the smoke comes out hastily, spilling out away from the green parrot’s coop and over the old bags of feed, splashing through cages and against the faded tan wall paint.

“Easy, cowboy,” Billy says, leaning over towards me. I hand the blunt to Evan, who takes it and does a leisurely drag. He adjusts his crotch as he smokes, and winks at me when he sees me watching.

“What?” he says.

“What are all these birds?” I ask.

“Give me a break, they aren’t really ours,” he says, as if offended. He rides the high and lays back on the mattress. “Well,” he stops, scratching his head with fingernails almost as long as Sesame’s. “Actually, they are.”

“But we didn’t get them,” Billy interrupts. “I mean, I still don’t really know what some of them are. Obviously this is a parrot. And those are parakeets over there. But seriously? I have no idea.”

I wish Billy would sit down. Sam was one of those standing types also, and while it’s cute that Billy resembles my dead brother, the similarities are becoming too uncomfortable.

“So how did you get them?” Sesame says. Evan hands the joint to her, and she takes another puff.

“I used to live here with my grandma,” Billy says. “I never knew my parents, so she raised me. She kept birds all my life, said she liked the way they talked, how they seemed to fill up the apartment. We never had this many. It was just a few, maybe four or five. But right before I graduated high school, she started buying more and more. I thought that maybe she was upset because she felt I was wasting so much by not going to college and she was buying all of these birds out of stress, but it turned out later that she had dementia and she didn’t really know what she was doing. She died a little while later.”

“I’m so sorry,” Sesame says.

“When was this?” I ask.

“She passed six months ago,” Billy says. “I had a little money saved. Landlord let me keep the apartment. Asshole never actually saw all this, by the way. I suppose he was just happy with getting a steady check. This guy moved in a bit later.” He gestures at Evan.

Sesame has been holding the joint, and she hands it to me. I take another pull, feeling much more relaxed this time—much more—and I wish the big green parrot next to us would say something.

“Couldn’t you have done something with the birds?” Sesame asks. “Like give them to animal control or something?”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Billy gives another aw-shucks kick to the floor, “I didn’t want my little guys getting put down or anything.”

I didn’t know they put down birds. I don’t think they do. I’m not sure. I hand the joint back to Evan, who has remained silent. It occurs to me that Evan and Billy still don’t know our names. It seems a little late to bring that up, but I keep getting this gnawing urge to blurt it out.

“You guys want do some blow?” Evan asks.

“Yes.”

Sesame speaks before the little warning siren in my head can even go off, the one that tells me coke is out of my league. But then again, I’m not so sure—tonight I might be feeling like a try.

Billy lifts an aluminum TV lunch tray off of the top of the dresser, pulling out skinny wire legs that let it sit off of the floor by a few inches. He sets it down next to the mattress and I see it’s covered with a big montage of famous historical hitters in baseball, Stan Musial, Babe Ruth and the like. Sesame gets off of my lap as Billy goes back to the dresser and opens a drawer—I wonder which one has the syringes, the heroin—and Billy pulls out a Ziploc bag filled with white powder. Evan has gotten up and is on his knees next to the baseball lunch tray.

The birds have quieted.

Billy crouches down and gets the coke into two lines while Evan rolls up a one dollar bill into a tube, and, with a lean down over the baseball TV tray, Evan does a line off of Ted Williams. He jerks a bit, and tries to shake it out. It’s kind of weird to see coke use in person. I’d only seen it happen in movies. Evan hands the single to Sesame. She goes straight down like she’s done this before, taking her hit off of George Brett and Willie Mays, but her feet spasm as she reacts, and I get the sense that she’s just jumping into this headfirst. Evan has leaned back against the mountain of parakeet cages and Billy looks at me like it’s my turn.

“Coke’s expensive,” I say. Billy nods. I come forward off of the mattress and crouch in front of the baseball TV tray. This kid isn’t saving up for junior college. I look at all of the empty bags of feed. Billy puts down another line across Hank Aaron, and Sesame hands me the rolled-up bill. I look at the powder. Sesame is sitting next to me, buzzing, and she’s leaning in so close I can feel the heat coming off her. The coke line forms tiny little ridges and bumps, so much like little cumulus clouds, and right now I just think to myself that I am never going to be able to think about baseball without getting an image of forty million cockatiels.

I pass.

I’m perfect where I’m at, because if Sesame gets much closer I feel like I am going to explode out of my skin. I hand the single to Billy, and he snorts the line without flinching. Evan just starts giggling, and he runs his hand down Sesame’s back. I reassess the possibility of Billy and Evan being gay—but then again, maybe it’s joy; Sam once said that out of all the drugs, even heroin, it was the coke high that made you feel like you were on top of the world.

Evan leans forward.

“All right, so check this out,” he says. His voice is gruff and deep for someone so young and skinny. I notice a little gold cross dangling from his chest as he turns to face me. “Billy. Recite Blake.”

Billy pops up to his feet, looking excited, with a wild look in his eye. He strikes a dramatic pose, hands up in a voodoo magic sort of position, and begins to recite.

“’Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

Sesame claps. I remember hearing that poem somewhere else before, but I’m still stuck on trying to remember the name of Sam’s bird.

“Okay,” Evan says. “That was too easy. Do Thomas.”

Billy skips in place for a second, and then recites again—god, he looks so much like Sam, and I hate it.

“’I see the boys of summer in their ruin, lay the gold tithings barren, setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; there in their heat the winter floods of frozen loves they fetch their girls, and drown the cargoed apples in their tides.’” He bows.

“How the hell do you know all this?” I say. “I couldn’t even memorize a stanza of Dr. Seuss.”

“Grandma used to make me memorize poetry,” Billy says. “Said it was a lost art. I guess we’re long-distant relatives of some famous nineteenth century poet.”

“I think it’s great,” Evan says. “So much bullshit goes on, in the world and such, and sometimes I feel like we’re the last living romantics.”

I can’t tell if he means “romantic” in the capital-R sense of the word or in the roses-in-the-middle-of-the-table way, but I’m not really sure how much that matters. I think I know how he feels. Maybe.

“Billy, the Kavanagh,” Evan commands. Billy doesn’t horse around this time, his expression slackening to be more serious. Sesame hasn’t said anything, but she’s getting jittery and she latches on to my arm. I look down for a moment, and think I’d feel a lot better if this mattress was a little cleaner.

“’To be a poet and not know the trade,’” Billy recites, “’To be a lover and repel all women—twin ironies by which great saints are made, the agonizing pincer-jaws of Heaven.’”

Sesame aaahs, orgasmically almost, and out of nowhere I suddenly want to know more about these kids, what makes them the way they are, and I begin to feel a sense of urgency since come noontime Chicago’s a memory. A strange feeling washes over me. It would be nice to make all of this stick before I go back to the sterility of home. I want to tell Billy my name is Corbin, that he looks like my dead brother Sam, and I want to know what happens to him when I leave. It could be like starting again.

“Enough of that pretty shit,” Billy says, his mood darkening. “Tonight is a special night.”

“Oh, what happens tonight?” Sesame says, unclasping and clasping her hand on my wrist.

“We set the birds free,” Billy says. “I don’t have the money to feed them anymore. And I’m not letting the City get them. I’m gonna let them go.”

“Seriously?” I say, feeling like that seems a touch dramatic.

“Will you help?” Evan asks.

I see they’re serious, but again, before I even really consider not doing it, Sesame has me on my feet. She twists and does a pirouette like Billy did earlier, and then Billy and Evan are on their feet, and then we’re going at the cages. I want to sit down, I am in a state of entropy, my body is trying to stop moving—but now the goddamn room feels like it’s spinning—and the birds, having settled since we’d arrived, begin to grow agitated with the activity.

I don’t want to free birds. I want to see Wrigley. Or maybe sit down.

And I don’t know what it is—maybe it’s the pot—but I am remembering a day about year or two before Sam died and before I left for college, a cool afternoon when we’d been sitting out on a bridge over the creek just outside city limits and drinking Dad’s beer since the folks were on vacation. The county sheriff drove by. Both of us jumped over the edge to the creek bed below as soon as he hit the brakes, ran like hell through the thicket that bordered the cattle farm, and when we came to a stop beneath a gnarled old oak near the tree line we stumbled across a familiar old rusted-out house safe lodged between the roots. It was a classic piece of discarded woods-treasure, a landmark for walks through that particular spot of the thicket. Years ago we had placed a baseball sticker next to the dial, and it had long since been washed away with the rain; all that remained was just a whisper of adhesive gum. So right there, standing by the safe, when we were still a little drunk and catching our breath, Sam came out to me: he was gay and always had been. I laughed and asked him if he’d gotten high when I wasn’t looking.

“Shut the fuck up,” he’d replied. I’d said the wrong thing.

It occurs to me that before tonight I haven’t thought about him in forever, and for a brief second it almost feels like I’m about to cry. But I hold it back easily.

My head hurts. I follow Billy down one of the cage-isles. Sesame and Evan have gone down the other. I’m a little tentative with the first couple of cages I open. I expect the birds to thrash, to fly out at me when I unlatch their little wire doors, but they don’t, as most of them cling to the backs of their cages, terrified that something is actually happening to them. I feel bad scaring them, but I get a little more confident as I go along, getting smoother, going at cage after cage while Billy is near me doing the same.

“I have this brother,” I say to him. “Sam.”

“That’s great,” Billy says, blankly, staring at a cockatoo who stares right back at him.

A few birds have gotten out and are starting to flutter around. Feathers will begin to collect on the floor in a minute. I feel something brush the back of my head. The chirping becomes deafening, but I still hear Sesame’s voice from across the room:

“…But my brother Diego doesn’t think I should go—“

Billy’s still expressionless, barely taking a second look at me when I call his name, like he’s focused on something a thousand yards away. He tries to coax a big reddish parrot off the top of a cage.

“—I told him, if I want to go to California, then I’m going,” Sesame continues.

Billy picks up a feed bag. All of the cage doors on our side are open, and the birds are beginning to perch on top of their cages and on the tops of the open doors. He begins waving the feed bags at the loiterers, trying to coax them towards the back of the apartment, towards the window. I pick up a bag and begin doing the same, not really thinking about the futility of herding a swarm of animals towards a two-by-four foot opening.

“I’ll do whatever’s best for me, because I’ll only live once.”

Sesame’s voice is dry and big, almost like Sam’s. I think about home, and right then I shout a “fuck” to try to keep the memories from reappearing in my head when I realize that they have started coming in swarms.

Sesame comes around the corner, by the door. Evan has disappeared to the other side of the room and the girl is talking to herself while a consortium of finches congregate on cages stacked against the wall next to the front door. Sesame stops speaking, walks into me forcefully, and she leans up to kiss me but is sloppy and misses my lips. I pause for a moment, like I’m watching myself, and I feel like the tinted sunglasses are off, like now I can see her for what she is: a tall pretty Latin girl dialed up on coke, not much older than the junkies. She kisses me again, on the lips this time, and I finally remember the name of Sam’s bird.

Casper. Named after the cartoon character—a dead kid, right?

“Do you have a hotel room?” Sesame reaches around me, and I feel her fingers clasp on my ass.

“Yeah,” I say. This is what I had wanted when I first saw her, isn’t it? “Why not your place?”

“Diego,” she says, and I see her eyes glaze over as she looks at me. “Hotel.”

I can’t even say goodbye to Billy and Evan; she has me out of the door before I can tell her that, suddenly, I want to stay. Even though it feels like time is speeding up, it takes us five minutes to make it down the five rickety flights. She’s all over me. Every time she plants a sloppy kiss I tell myself to stop the neurotic bullshit, that this is what’s fun when you’re young—right?—and I wonder what’s wrong with me that I’d be acting like I wasn’t interested in women. My inner Sam laughs at me. I shout “fuck” again, but this just puts Sesame into more of a frenzy.

I can’t help but wonder if this is how the junkie poets upstairs do romance. Then I realize I never figured out if they were actually straight or not.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

We’re outside, and I see birds everywhere. The silent green parrot rests on a postal box, and a crowd of small talkers chatter away up on the streetlamps. It feels like I’m rounding the bases to rounds of applause, a chorus of little feathered fans cheering me on as Sesame practically drags me to the car. I try to freeze Billy’s face in my memory, so I don’t already forget him by the next time I’m awake—but all I have is the image of my brother Sam, playing baseball at twelve years old.

I give up and let everything remind me of him.

Sesame starts the engine, scaring a little yellow canary off the hood ornament. A new music format, the dance music of the eighties, sings out of the car’s speakers and drowns out the street-side avian symphony. She turns the radio up and puts the Buick in gear.

Yet—after a moment, the car still hasn’t moved. I take a deep breath, and I smell her again, that perfume like cherries. Then I hear her cry a little.

If I would just turn my head, I’m sure I’d see tears starting to stream out of her eyes from some new-emerging trauma. But I don’t. I simply can’t twitch an eye her way. I’m staring at all the birds and aching for the days Sam and I had simply drifted along, aimless and fleeting navigators of a new world, the two of us almost like the ghosts that might pass through the shadows of Wrigley on some never-ending night like this.

Virginia Tech: The Unwanted Perspective

2007-04-18T19:36:00.001-06:00

It’s Monday, April 16, the night of the Blacksburg massacre, and I want you to do something for me. I want you to imagine that you are the as-yet-unidentified Virginia Tech shooter.

So, you’re dead.

Let’s back up.

I’m sitting here on my couch, watching CNN, and it’s approximately nine or 10 hours after you walked into the Norris engineering building on the Virginia Tech campus. Virginia Tech police Chief Wendell Flinchum is conducting a press conference in which he has just revealed that the police have a preliminary identification of your body.

On the TV, Flinchum is tall and tan, and while he seems like someone with a kind demeanor under normal circumstances, he looks uncomfortable in the glare of the camera lights, the outlines of his funeral-black officer’s uniform smothered by a forest of microphones on the podium. The faceless voices belonging to reporters bark out insensitive questions from offscreen, just like in the movies. “How does it feel/Why wasn’t more done/What went wrong?” they bleat, all at once. People will probably say that Flinchum did not show enough emotion during the press conference. To me, however, he seems like he could be in agony, but maybe just in a quiet suffering, not the kind that looks stirring in a video clip. I try to imagine myself in his shoes, and fail.

“I can’t hear,” he murmurs in a passive drawl, eyes down into the microphones, “Everyone is shouting.”

I feel sorry for him, along with everyone else involved. It’s an authentic tragedy. Yet, because all of it’s very dramatic, it goes without saying that the rest of us are drawn to the story. You’re still a mystery, and there will be some time when everyone is going to try and figure you out, what all the motives were, the background, were you not held enough as a child?, whether you kept a diary or left a farewell note. Facets of your story will be discussed at length by the appropriate groups: gun-control advocates will point to this massacre and call for stricter laws, while Second Amendment advocates will say that an armed bystander could have stopped the madness; psychologists will make you a case study and dissect your personality piece-by-piece, as if you were a science project; school administrators will look at the aftermath of Norris Hall and think about all the ways they can make a college campus more like a bank vault, simply because of you.

We’re just beginning to build your profile for posterity. And when it’s over, you will become a concept, a neatly-packaged topic that can be pulled off the shelf like a loaf of bread at a grocery store, and your name will be one that we can point to and say, “Yes, here is a terrible example of [this].”

But to call you “tidy” is inaccurate.

Sometime last week, before all this happened, maybe you picked up a photo off your shelf from when you were 10 years old. “That’s me,” you might have said, holding up the frame. “I looked unhappy even then.” Maybe you were posing with an abusive father, a foster parent, someone who didn’t love you. “That’s from my 10th birthday party, when my brother took my present away from me,” you’d said. “I cried later.” You’d felt a tingling of old emotions coming back from those little memories, and maybe you could see how you got from there to here. You turned off the lights and sat on your bed or you looked out the window for a while and you just found yourself looking back at that picture in the dark, feeling like you could understand everything.

But memory is unreliable; you know this. People forget and reconstruct their pasts all the time—I can barely remember high school, and sometimes there are gaps in my memory that just can’t be realistically plugged unless I get jolted into recollection. So, a week away from mass murder, you were staring at that photo and possibly making up an entire past from little images and fragments to explain how you’ve gotten to where you are now, just like the media will. You’re a collage of storylines, and, what’s even more terrifying than the prospect of us not ever knowing why you did it is that you could have had a normal, happy childhood, and you can’t even remember it. Or choose not to. It’s like someone once said, that remembering was an activity “so much more psychotic than forgetting,” as if it took an act of writing fiction to remember who we were.

We get to make a story about you too. That’s the other half of this bargain. Police will come into your room—hoping it’s not booby-trapped—and they will look at your photo and some caustic officer will say it’s too bad you didn’t kill yourself earlier. To them you become modern-day Satan. That’s a storyline. They’ll flip through your papers and maybe see that you wrote bad poetry or were obsessing over a girl. They’ll start putting you together, trying to create a composite sketch of what human failure looks like. When it’s over, we’ll have you pieced together like a personal-history Frankenstein, a photograph making an elbow here, an awkward encounter with a professor comprising a leg there, an interview with the family completing the torso. No one will give us the directions; we’ll just stitch you together.

You’ll get a name and a character flaw and an article in Wikipedia. Then, when enough time as passed, we’ll close your chapter and call you complete and try to forget you until the next one of you comes along.

That’s how it is.

Someone’s voice sticks out from the others’ in the chorus of needy questioners and asks Flinchum for the gunman’s identity; he declines to answer.

Here’s what scares me—since you’re as yet unidentified, you could have been anyone: an ex-con, an ex-marine, a student, a former student… anyone. What’s more, Virginia Tech is a campus not too unlike dozens of other middle-sized American universities—it even looks like my school—and your victims were taken indiscriminately. They were people no different from my classmates here. And while the media will blare headlines about the record number of dead, the disturbing part of this crime is that it is marked by its indeterminacy as much as it is by its severity: this could have happened anywhere, to anyone, for no reason at all. It was just as likely to happen here, to people I know, to me. There might never be an answer to Blacksburg’s cries of “Why us? Why here?” Because neither of those actually mattered.

That’s not much of a story. We prefer our plots to make sense.

But all of this is a lot of forethought. You’re interesting because you don’t make sense. You’re still a narrative in motion, and there’s still a lot that has to happen yet before the excitement around you is over. As I sit here watching the aftermath on TV I can’t help but think how people who know much about guns (plus your future copycats) will be darkly impressed; for you to kill 32 with a pair of medium-power pistols is a miraculous catastrophe. But what it tells me is that you were calm—it’s hard to orchestrate much of anything when you’re panicked—and the chains on the doors of Norris Hall also say that this wasn’t a spontaneous crime of passion.

I imagine you standing in a classroom doorway, emotionless. Your mind is still, like that of a Zen monk. Detached. You feel nothing but the weight of the pistol in your hand, heavy and recoiling with each thoughtless pull of the trigger. I want you to have a motive, but I can’t dream one up for you. I can only imagine you as empty.

And as I watch the people hashing and rehashing the various fragments of stories on CNN, trying to patch together some kind of semblance of cohesiveness, I see their frustration. Chief Flinchum and university President Charles Steger are already facing criticism for not responding quickly enough, but there was no way to anticipate that a double-homicide would lead to 32 dead. The simple fact is that you, Unidentified Gunman, could have happened anywhere.

Like at my high school. You might have come close, once. I only remember this because, today, you’ve now reminded me.

You—you were a friend of mine, a few years ago. My next door neighbor, a scrawny guy three years my elder. You were dark and funny and wore black trench coats to school, even after Columbine. A few days after those shootings happened—after my parents had sat me down with a newspaper with all the victims’ names and photos and told me they were concerned about the violent videogames I played—I remember sitting outside with you one afternoon, a cloudy day when the grass had just recently turned a deep green, and I was rocking on a swing set I was too big for and listening to you talk about the “tactical mistakes” Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had made. You described in specific detail how you could do it at my high school. Start in the front office.

Your father kept guns in your home.

I didn’t think you were serious—which was the fatal mistake repeated by many others many times over in the history of school and workplace shootings—but you graduated and let me off the hook, managing to make it into the military before you had your mental breakdown. At least you didn’t kill anyone. Outside of duty, that is.

That I know of.

I turn back to the TV.

So, you’re dead, and Virginia is still ready to scour your corpse for a name and a history and a reason why. But I think no reasoning explains away 32 bodies, the “senseless violence,” two words that barely mean anything, a phrase like an anonymous void, like the secret emotions of a 10-year-old who feels private joys and pains too new and too massive and too incomprehensible to have real names yet. You grew up, and, unlike the rest of us, simmered until you boiled and exploded, shattering into a thousand tiny pieces, leaving us to be at a loss for words while try to piece you together again.

“Chief!” a reporter barks. “What is the shooter’s name? His name, Chief!”

Flinchum, a lifelong Blacksburg resident, puts his head down, his badge glittering pointlessly in the glare of the camera lights, and declines to answer.

Main Event - nonfiction

2007-03-11T10:24:00.000-06:00

(Nick King photo, Columbia Tribune)

I’m one of the few hundred who have come to watch the Nazi horde descend on Columbia, Missouri. It’s a beautiful spring day. The sun feels great and you can almost hear the birds twit-twitting over the propellers of the news helicopters. Counter-protestors told everyone not to come. No one wanted a repeat of the Toledo riots. If we try to fuck up those Nazi pigs, they said, the cops would have to intervene and that would make the fascists looks like the victims.

But we came. Let’s be real: how often do you get a chance to see a Nazi rally? Of course we were going to go see the goddamn Nazi rally. It’s the political equivalent of a three-ring circus—well, maybe one that abuses its animals—and, as with three-ring circuses, fascism is not so popular since the mid-twentieth century.

People are packed on the corners of 9th and Elm so tight you can almost imagine getting teargassed because of the tweaked-out kid in the Che Guevera t-shirt standing in the front. He looks like someone who could make a bad decision. I move away.

It looks like everyone is waiting for a parade, I think. And then I remember that it is a parade, the Nazis have a permit and everything. Everyone’s standing around and peeking up each road, trying to see which way the marchers will be coming from, because no one knows. The last memory I have of people lining the streets like this was back at the homecoming parades of my hometown Cleveland, Missouri. Children would be swarming around like fruit flies and clutching cones of cotton candy in their sticky fingers right up until the moment they heard the bass drum of the marching band reverberating in their chests, and then they’d position themselves along the sidewalks, in front of all the mashed thrown candy that was too squished to be worth picking up, just trying to catch a glimpse of the source of the music coming from somewhere up the street. Their parents would look on with a Norman Rockwell-sort of contentment. Instant nostalgia.

Except now there are college students, not children. And we are waiting for the fascist swine instead.

Police are everywhere. Earlier, on the way to my morning run I saw them swooping up Hitt street. All kinds and varieties of squad cars. Paddy wagons. Motorcycles. Horses. It was like a scene from Blues Brothers. “I hate Illinois Nazis,” someone says. People laugh nervously. A squat-looking officer tells people to stay the fuck off the opposite sidewalk.

I look around. The makeup of the crowd: mostly college kids, but some middle-aged geezers too, and people in tie-dye t-shirts, blacks, Jews. A kid with a Marxist t-shirt and a mad-bomber-looking winter cap. It occurs to me that outside of the people in tie-dye t-shirts, the blacks, Jews, and Marxist party members, the rest of us are just here to see what the hell neo-Nazism is all about; the concept of it existing in the 21st century is so completely alien to me that I forget to be pissed off, as something so bizarre it’s hard to take seriously. It seems like I am not alone in this sentiment, as the crowd of observers here may not be linked by their common humanity as well as they could be by ownership of a digital camera.

Everyone’s got a goddamn camera. Forget the press, who are climbing up the fucking trees to get pictures. Even the cops have cameras. On the monstrous Christian Life Center looming over the intersection I would have expected SWAT snipers, but instead I see a lone police officer with a telephoto lens. Pictures must be important. We’ve got to make this moment stick.

A person looks east. Another person looks east. People look east. The crowd lurches.

Nazi bastards!

I see them in the distance, materializing from behind an apartment building, marching parallel to 9th street. Actually, I only see the signs bobbing up and down. Mob squad police trot alongside and block my view. The press sprints up the road towards them, like a 100-meter dash with a camera-bag handicap where gold medalist gets pepper-sprayed.

Then—

Oh, fuck. The Nazis aren’t coming to this intersection. They didn’t turn.

A little air is let out of the crowd. They were ready to go. But I don’t despair; I know the parade route. I leave the mob standing at 9th and Elm and decide to catch the Fascist monsters on University Avenue. I am surprised no one goes the same way I do. I’ll be able to get a close look. Sure enough, when I make it to University, people are sparse. Just a few look on from their apartment stoops.

I get excited.

I see the horses first. Cops with helmets on horseback telling people to clear the sidewalks. Then I see the press, keeping a few paces in front. Next, the teenagers with punk-rock haircuts who just walk alongside, being a part of the action, as well as a few black-rights activists silently holding up their fists.

Then I see them.

And in one of those odd little moments where expectation meets reality, I want to scratch my head.

There are only twenty or so Neo-Nazis. A few of them are dressed in Nationalist uniforms, and have shaved heads, but other than that, they look average. A couple dozen white people who look an awful lot like the people back in Cleveland, Missouri. I must have been expecting space aliens with Hitler moustaches or something. All of this hype for a few fascist boy scouts. They pass. I don’t shout anything. There’s no point. My excitement has disappeared. Disappointed, I begin to head back to my apartment.

But I stop. Pause a moment. And I turn to run. Towards 9th and Elm.

The Neo-Nazis aren’t the main event.

I take a back route. I get excited again. On the way I see three guys jump out of a car with a few six-packs of beer, laughing and keeping their hands on top of their ballcaps to keep them from flying off, shouting hurry up, we’re going to miss it!

I make it to the intersection. The waddling cop tells me to get the fuck off of the sidewalk. And right then, right as I cross the street to go be with the crowd, I can see everyone craning their necks, looking up the road, trying to catch a glimpse of why they’re all here.

Hundreds of people with almost one expression. I’ve never seen people in Columbia this excited about something. I’m stunned.

It’s like they’re stuck in that arrested moment that seems to exist just before every memory begins, and right then, it feels like it could last forever, Christmas morning in Hell, the crowd anxiously waiting to see what happens when Point A finally reaches Point B. And God, I wish someone would turn the cameras around, and catch the look on their faces right as the wild unknown prepares to step into reality—they don’t know it, but they’re the stars of the show.

Well-Worn

2007-01-01T23:59:00.000-06:00

*[this story published in "Epic", Spring 2005]

The well-worn shoes of a piano player. The tips settle in a permanent lift, with a deep crease in the leather where the toes raise frequently to press on the pedal. There’s a sort of understanding that the shoes will do their best not to get in the way of the wearer, that they will perform and continue to press up and down at command without complaint, that at the end of the day they will remain shoes and nothing more, nothing less. The well-worn shoes of a piano player.

Tie the knot. Tie the knot. Delicate fingers belonging to delicate piano players understand that as soon as the shoe is bound to its master that they are free to pursue other occupations, such as piano-playing—or tapping, clenching, groping, depending on their owners. Some piano players resemble musical pimps more than artisans. That’s how it is, how it’s been, how it will be. There’s a piano over there.

Press! Lift, press, hold. A quick glance at the brunette. She’s watching. Good. Piano players—talented, attractive ones, that is—are magnets for the other sex. Of course, it’s merely coincidence that those piano players are wearing shoes. Coincidences, like playing “As Time Goes By” or something by Donny Hathaway or whatever sounds pretty, even if it’s being written on the fly. Written On The Fly, for the blonde in the corner. Thank you (expressed in an attractive smile. Sex makes music so much easier).

Fingers, around the glass. Where do you work? Oh, that’s nice (want to go upstairs?). The fingers are dabbling now, meandering back to the piano. Easy chords this time, the attention is fully away from shoes and such and on the well-rounded hips sitting next to the maestro. Delicately… yes! Pull her hand towards the keyboard. Teach her something, that’s sexy. You see, this is a C major chord… move this finger… now it’s minor. Now, just keep pressing down on those keys. He plays some fun rhythm, letting her feel like she’s making music too. His shoes meander over to hers; a strange meeting. How are you? I’m fine, ready to begin? It was an “accidental” contact at first, but the worn soles will soon find themselves a comfortable spot touching hers.

Laughing, oh, she’s laughing, he’s got her now. He’s not looking for a relationship, or he’d be playing Gershwin or Beethoven or something—no, it’s a one-night stand for you. Thank you, Mr. Gaye, “Sexual Healing” on this piano will be over in a moment if you’d like to step in and say a word or two. Shhh, he’s dead, you shouldn’t say things like that. Giggle. She smells nice, he smells like cigarettes. The consummation of the two scents, sweet and bitter, covering up some mid-20’s emptiness, “no home to go to” and all that melancholy shit. Even though a shoe gets walked on every day, it has a purpose, some pedal to press, some crap to step on. When you’re 26, you think you want a little sex, but actually you really want a lot, and you’re hoping Mom doesn’t figure out what you’ve been using those piano lessons for.

Oh, she’s looking at him now; so it’s true what they say, Night Time really must be the Right Time. The piano is going to resemble a portable Vegas at this pace. He lets his left hand keep down on keys for the G minor, but that’s more of a commando distraction for his right hand reaching for her. The right shoe starts to press down on the pedal involuntarily as they share some meaningless kiss. Meaningless, in the sense that it’s like some formal declaration of combat, that these two will meet in battle, “lay down your arms / and surrender to me” and all that. They finish signing their declaration, the shoe lifts off of the pedal (with a creak. These old leather guys have been with him since his senior year. Mostly, they spend the day being crouched on as he’s fixing copying machines). They get up, the bench pushed back (he’s standing! He means business!), and the click-click up the stairs, the click-click past the door (just one click from the knob, it knows its place), and a clunk-clunk as a pair of old beaten-up dress shoes are ejected across the room.

Morning. The shoes are ass-over-teakettle on the wood floor. Familiar position, they take it every night. His mood can be ascertained by their trajectory through the air, their distance from each other. Scientists could write case studies about that sort of thing (but we won’t go there, this story is about sex and shoes). He’s sitting up in bed, cigarette dangling from his lips. He doesn’t have to go to work for another couple of hours, but he needs to head out before she starts wanting things from him—like a phone number, or an address. He needs to be real quiet, or she’ll wake up. Maybe today he would look for that better job, stop smoking, apologize to his mom, call his ex, whatever it takes to turn it all around—but first, he has to put on his shoes.

Savants

2007-01-01T23:54:00.000-06:00

I studied music at Hulston College in my years before the Army, and I remember that in the fall semester of my senior year it was a surprise to all of us in the piano studio when we’d heard that the famous autistic piano player kid, Jeff something-or-other, was coming to Hulston to do a recital towards the end of the semester. He’d been on a million morning talkshows to play piano and promote “his” book, a best-seller ghostwritten by his dad, who was also his handler. The reason the visit was a surprise to us was because our only musical claim to fame was that our piano studio owned the highest male-to-female ratio of students in Hulston College, which had only until recently been known as Hulston Women’s College.

(Some old rich widow, an alumnus, died a couple years before I enrolled, and in her will she made a huge endowment towards creating a scholarship program for piano players—the Yzerman Fellowship—stipulating that the school could give out as many of them as they wanted as long as they were equally divided between male and female students. This was a miracle I guess, because everyone had expected her to leave the money to her cat or something. But either way, I was one of these scholarship students, and when you met people at parties and it somehow slipped out that you went to Hulston—dear God!—you told them you were an Yzerman Fellow just so they didn’t think you were a queer for going to what was still basically a women’s college. But I digress.)

If I remember correctly, the autistic kid was already onstage when Lisa, Aubrey, Tiller, Eddie and me entered the small recital hall and piled into the back row of plastic seats; we represented about half of the whole set of Yzerman pianists at Hulston, and that was the regular group I ran with back in those days. The hall, which was the former chapel, was pretty full—it didn’t take many to fill—because there were a lot of older people in the audience we hadn’t seen before, community people who didn’t have any connection to the College and just came to see a big-ticket performer. It was a Saturday and none of us wanted to be there, but our attendance to piano events was a scholarship requirement—God bless that Yzerman money—so we drank a bit before coming, because there’s nothing quite like going to a recital on a good buzz. Our buddy Pollacks, another Yzerman kid, was giving a piano composition recital a bit later anyway, so we were hunkering down for the long haul.

“How long is this supposed to go?” Eddie asked. He was clutching a football, looking very Heisman except for the huge winter coat he was wearing. We shrugged. Up onstage the autistic kid, Jeff, almost looked normal; I mean, he was sitting up straight and everything. But it was the eyes that gave it away, the big spaceman eyes, electric light blue sapphires that were focusing on things a million miles away. And it was his hair, too, a pale blonde disheveled mess of hay that looked like he had just gotten out of the pool, which actually would have been kind of fashionable if it weren’t for the fact that he was a retard and he didn’t style it that way on purpose. (Autism is retardation, right?)

The kid’s dad got up to lecture, an older guy who looked about my dad’s age, and while he introduced himself the rest of us in the back bullshitted about what we were going to do for Christmas break. Tiller was going to visit family in Georgia, and Aubrey—who was cute, by the way, except when she smiled—Aubrey was going to New York for Times’ Square on New Years. I didn’t hear what Eddie and Lisa said what they were going to do, because some bluehair in front of us kept turning around and going shush! to us. She probably had an autistic grandkid; we looked one seat over from her. Yep.

(I’m going home to Philly, I whispered.)

To show the audience just how fucked up the kid was—for dramatic effect, I imagine—Jeff’s dad asked him all sorts of easy questions that he couldn’t answer, like “What time does your watch read” and “What color is my hair,” and every time it was Jeff’s turn to answer he’d just rock back and forth a bit, pause, and his dad would ask again, and then Jeff would shake his head and stammer out an “I don’t know.” His dad asked him if he could see any women in the audience, and Jeff replied “I can’t remember.” God, I remembered thinking, that really tore at your heart, but then I turned my head and saw Aubrey starting to nod off next to me. She was Inuit (not that that had anything to do with her sleeping). She would send me a letter once during my first Iraq tour.

The kid started to play a couple pieces from memory, a Mozart and a Chopin, and of course he was ridiculously good. You just don’t get your autistic kid on Oprah unless they’re some kind of savant. He’d rock back and forth as he played, and sometimes he wasn’t even looking at his hands, those crazy eyes just staring off into the belly of the Steinway as he played, probably counting the number of vibrations each string made per second after the mallets struck them or some Rain Man bullshit like that. Two seats down I saw Tiller scowling a bit, and then I remembered that the Beethoven Jeff started to play was the same piece that Tiller was struggling with at the moment.

“Goddamn retard geniuses,” I heard him say. “Fuck!” The bluehair in front of us shushed him, then turning back and stroking the head of the little grandson boy next to her, who was rocking back and forth and probably counting the fibers in the sweater of the blonde girl sitting in front of him. As Jeff was running through some of the piece’s arpeggio runs, much to our horror a little line of drool bungeed down from his lip and landed somewhere on the keyboard of our Steinway. We all groaned. Everyone had to play on that piano at some time or another.

After he finished the Beethoven, everyone roared in applause—I clapped—and his dad began what I would call the “stupid pet tricks” portion of the recital. He had Jeff get up from the piano bench and sit on a chair on the opposite side of the stage while he played random notes for Jeff to listen to. He’d then ask Jeff what note he had just played, and Jeff would rocket them out there, A-flat, C, F, D-flat, because he had perfect pitch. And then all of us instantly hated him, because in the music world having perfect pitch was sort of like being born into money, and no matter how hard you tried, you were always going to be the bank president’s son who hung out with the kids of mill workers. (Well, that’s not always true. One of the guys in my platoon, Pfc. Williams, is a bank president’s son, and we just know him as “Stiffy”—something completely unrelated to his socioeconomic status, I assure you.)

Following the perfect-pitch display, Jeff went back to the piano, and his dad pulled a small portable radio out of a canvas tote bag. He flipped it on and it crackled with static, which gave Jeff the shakes so bad the kid started to hug himself, but soon Jeff’s dad found a radio station that was playing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” which, ironically, used to be my father’s favorite song before Mom left to pursue her career. Jeff’s dad let the song go through the chorus and a verse before he flipped the radio off and told Jeff to play it. Jeff hit every note. Then he told Jeff to play it as if Mozart had written it. This got our attention. Jeff started playing, and somehow he managed to do it, and do it convincingly, adding all those delicate bounces and frills characteristic of Wolfgang. I finally admitted to myself that, yeah, the kid was better than I was.

The recital ended after a few more sickening talent displays and a couple sob-story moments where the dad talked about how hard all of it was; his wife had left him, sometimes he struggled to make rent, etc. When it was over we Yzerman kids wandered out of the hall as most of the audience members were mobbing Jeff and his dad with questions and even a couple autograph requests. I guess that’s what fame looked like. Lisa, a senior who’d later go on to teach gradeschool, said in her characteristically snobby way that while the recital was impressive, his performances “lacked soul.” Tiller ran downstairs, where the practice rooms were, and when he came up a couple minutes later I think I’d guessed correctly in assuming that he ran through the Beethoven just to make sure he could put more soul into the piece than the autistic kid had. Then all of us bashed on the Jeff some more for not playing with feeling, probably because we were trying to feel better about ourselves.

We saw Pollacks standing outside smoking a cigarette, so we went out to chat him up. It was about fifty degrees outside, warm for December, and the last of the streaks of ice on the pavement in front of the music building were melting away, the remnants from the freezing rain that had come through a couple days ago. Pollacks waved to us, but pointed out west where the sun was setting. We had a perfect view of it from the music building, which sat on a hill overlooking the soccer and football fields, and it was a sunset for the books, the clouds exploding reds and oranges against a mint blue sky. I wished I had a camera.

“You know,” Pollacks shouted, “I had never really thought about it, but think about how many people are looking at this sunset. I mean, everyone in the city should be seeing what we’re seeing.”

There was something profound and idiotic in his words, but he could have been right; I had normally thought of watching the sunset as being kind of a private moment. I sat down on the bench next to where Pollacks smoked and took in the view; it would later surprise me how similar the Iraqi sunsets were to the ones at home. Eddie jogged around the sidewalk holding his football, asking each one of us if we wanted to play catch, and when he asked me I made sure there was a condescending tone in my voice when I told him no. Aubrey said she would’ve except she had tiny hands—she couldn’t play Liszt, who had huge fingers, the bastard—and so she probably couldn’t catch a football. Tiller shook his head when Eddie asked, and then Lisa explained to the overeager freshman that no one was going to risk jamming their fingers a week before finals performances—though, I thought to myself, I wouldn’t mind not having to play accompaniments on the final juries for all of the school’s prissy goddamned singers. Eddie shrugged, laid down on the sidewalk and began flipping the ball to himself.

I had been thinking about the future a lot since I only had one semester left. I think I only got the Yzerman money out of blind luck—I didn’t really want to go to college in the first place, so winning the award felt like an accident, or a miracle—so I was going to end up with a degree in music performance that I didn’t particularly deserve. I didn’t belong in a music school anyway, where being “edgy” meant saying you preferred Beethoven to Mozart; where I grew up back in Philadelphia, being “edgy” was more like carrying a knife and threatening to use it. Dad had suggested graduate school over one of our talks on the phone; he had done graduate school back in the day to parlay getting shipped off to Vietnam. I had spent quite a bit of time down at the recruiter’s office lately, but I didn’t tell my dad that just yet because I knew he’d make me have second thoughts. Still, I knew even back then that there was just no way I could have stomached grad school.

Tiller was still going off about autistic-savants. He said he didn’t trust anyone who was gifted, because Nature had spoiled them rotten and that they could “sit on their asses and just do as they pleased while everyone else had to fucking work.” Lisa got after him once he started calling Jeff a “snot-nosed retard” over and over again. Tiller was not a very good piano player—though he’d gotten better recently—and I got the sense he was one of those kids who had gotten roughed up early, who would have a chip on his shoulder for the rest of his life because he couldn’t take it easy, and I felt bad for him because of that. He just wanted to make it, like the rest of us. But most of us weren’t autistic, gifted, whatever; we had no in. Tiller was going to kick around Hulston a couple extra years after his Yzerman Fellowship ran out, but the moment he graduated he fell out of touch with everybody.

Now, Pollacks, there was a guy with talent. On top of virtuoso playing he had a knack for writing nice tunes, so he was minoring in music composition since Hulston didn’t offer it as a major. I had tried writing music a couple times, finding chords I’d like and splicing them together, and I’d get real excited, like maybe this was the birth of something great, that I was unleashing the hidden prodigy from within, but then I would try to stretch out the genius of my one chord change over five minutes and then I realized my music was always going to lack the life and the direction of a real masterpiece. Then one time I sat in on Pollacks as he composed on the piano, and it was like watching fireworks—he’d sit there and tinker with chords and lines until all of a sudden they would explode with life and color and you knew that something deeper was happening, something vivid and powerful, but also a little bit temporary, because he wouldn’t write half of what he played into his music.

It kind of reminded me of this sunset, actually. Sort of.

Pollacks lit another cigarette, and I remember wondering why he was going to smoke up his suit thirty minutes before his family was going to come hear him perform his compositions. I wondered why he wasn’t warming up right then, since he was the most serious of us at what he did, and a little bit of my hero-worship for him was getting tarnished. Some guys like Eddie played piano just so they could have something they could use to pick up girls. Nothing wrong with that; Liszt did that and still was magnificent. But if any one of us Yzerman kids was going to get famous—for real famous—it would be Pollacks. Pollacks had perfect pitch. Not that that was everything; but it was still something. When he last wrote me, though, he mentioned that he was having trouble getting into good graduate schools because admissions committees were a bit wary of a degree from Hulston College.

The rest of the audience poured out of the doors and a few of them pointed at the sky. A couple of sax players we knew wandered by the front of the building, piss-drunk, on their way to someplace or another, and I was thinking I would be drunk all the time too if I had to play saxophone. There was no bigger waste of life than playing sax, excepting maybe playing bassoon. One of sax boys called for the ball from Eddie, who sat up and launched it as hard as he could for no apparent reason. The pigskin was like a bullet going through the air, a blur, and it hit the drunk in the chest, knocking him down, the ball tumbling down the hill towards the football field’s bleachers. The other sax player chased after it a bit before falling on his ass on his way down the slope and starting to roll. We laughed pretty good at that.

I saw Jeff and his dad leaving the music building through the side door. The dad had the canvas bag slung over his shoulder, and was trying to zip up Jeff’s coat as Jeff was swinging his arms back and forth as if in an effort to make the task more difficult. I had seen on one of the nighttime interview shows how Jeff would occasionally have an angry outburst, since I guess autistic kids always suffered from sensory overload and that real life was sort of like a constant state of trauma for them. Or something like that. I remembered Tiller had seen that TV special with me.
We all watched from a distance as Jeff’s dad had to assist Jeff to their silver sedan, at times prodding Jeff’s legs so he would keep moving. Jeff didn’t seem to have a care in the world. Suddenly they stopped, with a jerk, and the dad leaned over to look at something on Jeff’s slacks; and then when Jeff turned towards us we saw that he had peed himself. He didn’t ever change his expression, or even act like he knew we were watching him. And then I realized that Jeff was as old as I was. I had been staring right at him during the whole recital but it took me until now to recognize that he wasn’t just a kid. He was in his twenties. And then it hit me, that, somewhere along the way, without paying attention, I had gotten all grown up too, and sitting on that bench, I felt kind of silly without really being able to say why.

“Man,” Lisa said. “Takes any doubt out of my mind that the dad’s taking the easy road and milking him for money.”

“Fuck him,” Tiller said, and then he started shouting at Jeff. “Yeah, fucker? Piss yourself? Go fucking cry!”

The father and son ignored Tiller, if they could even hear him. Jeff’s dad maneuvered his son into the front seat of the sedan, getting a roll of paper towels out and drying off Jeff’s legs. We didn’t really know where Tiller’s outbursts came from until later, when he had his junior recital late the next semester and his family came, including his (surprise!) mentally disabled younger brother, who sat in the front row and made squealing noises all through Tiller’s Beethoven; and we knew that little brother Jacob was never going to be on Oprah, because he wasn’t the kind of mentally disabled that gave kids special powers.

It was sad.

Eddie got the ball back from the sax guys, and Tiller began jogging out a route, ready to play catch. The silver sedan rolled away. I tried to push what just happened out of my mind as Aubrey came and sat next to me on the bench. She was cute in that Inuit sort of way, except every time she smiled you were reminded that orthodontia wasn’t too high on the Inuits’ cultural priorities. But it wasn’t really the smile that was bothering me; I was starting to get fatalistic about my romantic career, knowing I’d be gone in six months and probably slogging it around the globe with the Army for three years while she was busy taking scale exams and going to parties.

But she bumped her leg up against mine flirtatiously, and it cheered me up. The rest of us watched the sky as it melted away, and Eddie and Tiller tossed the ball at each other as if everything was fine.

All of that was a few years ago. It seems strange to me to think about the Hulston years, because on some days it feels like maybe they didn’t really happen; at bare minimum, my time at college could only be considered a four-year-long holiday. This week we were searching for the mujahideen who made the improved explosive device that detonated and killed Pfc. Newman on Monday outside an Iraqi police station. I had met Newman once; he seemed like a good kid. It really feels like a lifetime later that I am kicking down doors in Fallujah—or maybe two lifetimes, as this is now my second tour.

On Wednesday morning we had gotten a reliable tip on a house that sat the corner of one of Fallujah’s dangerous crossroads, but when my unit raided it that evening we didn’t find anyone home. We checked around for booby traps, and then for bombmaking materials, but we didn’t find any; after a little more investigating, we concluded that we had probably just sacked a regular civilian’s residence.

The sky outside was turning to dusk when we were told to wrap it up and roll out. While SSgt. Baker and Pfc. Williams were taking a last look around—the last two of my good friends still in Iraq—I noticed an old upright piano in the corner, and I poked at a couple of keys with the muzzle of my rifle; as the barrel bounced off of the ivories, a warbled tone came out of the upright, immediately signifying that it hadn’t been tuned in years, if it had ever been tuned at all. I sat down my rifle and began to play anyhow, first some Jerry Lee Lewis, but then something from my Hulston days, some Rachmaninoff, and even through the tinny chords I think you could tell something beautiful was down there, hiding beneath rusty harmonies. It sounded awful, but it sounded great. Baker and Williams came to see what I was doing, watched me, and told me they didn’t know I could play. They didn’t know a lot about my life before the Army; no one did.

And then, I don’t know what started it, but Williams laughed, and kept laughing, and then Baker started laughing too, and finally I began to laugh with them so hard I had to stop playing. Tears were rolling down my face I was laughing so hard.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: those were not your regular garden-variety ha-ha laughs. Those were the kind of laughs that came from the dark side of you, the laughs that knew nighttime was coming and that the insurgents would be active soon, the I-know-we-could-be-dead-soon laughs. Maybe you could call them the laughs of knowing your insignificance; I don’t know. I just know that the regular kind of laughing doesn’t happen over here very much. Not as much as it used to.

Yet as the low Mesopotamian sun still streamed through the open window and the piano’s dying notes still vibrated in the walls, we stood there laughing anyway, like idiot-savants oblivious to the world around us. It reminded me of a memory from my second life, of that moment on the bench when Aubrey gave me an imperfect smile as I watched the way the light was reflecting off the clouds; I was just sitting there, trying to decide whether it was kind of sad or kind of funny how I had started to figure everything out—how that, no matter how much we practiced, it was beginning to look like none of us were ever going to be more famous than a given sunset, because people were suckers for the sight of a little radiance bleeding into the color-violent horizon.

While The Gods Dream, Apollo Waits For Morning

2006-11-30T23:15:00.000-06:00

I think I am dreaming.

I think I fell asleep at my desk while studying for the last final before Christmas break and I am now dreaming that my flight is touching down in Athens, Greece. I don’t like to fly, and my ex-girlfriend Becca is with me at the terminal.

Which is why I think I am dreaming.

The first thing we smelled when we got off the plane in Athens was cigarette smoke. I was expecting something different. Though I was new to foreign travel, I’d heard stories about how other countries had interesting smells as compared to the States—like the seemingly ubiquitous smell of dogshit in South Korea—so I was waiting to be greeted by a completely unexpected aroma, waiting for a surprise like some out-of-place waft of hummus drifting by the plane as we would step outside.

A throng of people swarm around the baggage carousel while Becca stands off to the side, waiting someone in front of her to make room, and after a while her mother gently tells her that she would need to squeeze in there herself if she wanted her bag soon; anyone who looks Greek doesn’t seem to have any patience for waiting in line. Becca looks over at me and sees me watching her, and she smiles. She gets her camera out of her purse and takes a photo of me as I stand next to her grandfather.

In the photo album, the old man will be blinking while tucking in his polo shirt and the tall Native American kid doesn’t smile.

The dream continues.

I dream we’re at the Parthenon, the throne to which Athens bows her head, regal Acropolis that keeps watch over the Aegean Sea. The Parthenon is a corpse of a building who’s left her skeleton strewn out in the open air to be kicked at by the masses of tourists who shuffle by. I saw the recreated Parthenon in Nashville, a fantasy of what once had been.

—I wish there were less people, Becca says.

—We’re kind of part of the problem, I reply.

—We’re not in a guided tour, though.

I suppose that did make us special.

Scaffolding lines the remaining upright structure as part of a restoration project underway to help sort out some of the damage from a 17^th century battle, in which an Ottoman stockpile of gunpowder in the Parthenon was detonated when struck by a Venetian mortar.

—Can you imagine? Becca says. Just look at it. It must have been the most incredible thing in its day.

I had heard the biggest threat to the Parthenon was acid rain from the pollution of Athens below. I try to imagine its columns melting to the ground in a few decades.

—No, I say. I think it’s tragic.

—Oh, come on, Becca says. Just use your imagination. She points to the structure like she were a tour guide. Imagine it’s the greatest building the world has seen. Imagine it’s the center of the cultural universe, and everyone is in awe of the society that can create such things.

—It’s falling apart, I say.

—You’re such a grouch. Becca crosses her arms.

I turn to look back towards the city, a thick haze of smog covering the claustrophobic city sprawl beneath the Acropolis—or maybe that’s dream smog—and I bet Becca probably thought I was like that Indian they used to put in the ads who would cry at the people who littered and trashed up nature, though I’d never touched a ceremonial feather in my life.

No. She probably doesn’t really think that. She knows me too well.

I see her camera flash out of the corner of my eye.

—Did you just take another picture of me? I ask.

—Yes, she says, gravely, checking the LCD display of the photo on the back of the camera.

—Give me that, I say. Her brown hair shines under the sun, like something out of a television advertisement, long and luscious, twisting in the light breeze over the Acropolis, and I snap her photo as she looks towards the Parthenon while two young boys wrestle on a rock behind her as their parents disinterestedly looked on.

In the photo album, the girl will stare off in the distance while a tow-headed boy behind her tries to remove an extraneous arm from the inside of his shirt. The girl’s large sunglasses cover too much of her face and it is hard to read her expression. She is young and slim and pretty.

She gives me a gentle punch in the shoulder, making the dream feel real.

The reverie carries us to the site of the ancient Olympics.

On a bus.

It is an overnight ride, because the drive from Athens to Olympia in Elis takes five hours. The plastic seats are the same as the ones I used to ride on during bus rides in grade school. I am a child again. Except now my legs are longer and I have to put my knees up against the back of the seat in front of me to fit, making my hamstrings tingle as they fall asleep.

Becca’s mother and grandfather sit in front of us, and I am next to Becca. Under the dim glow of a portable reading light she is paging through Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I don’t have the heart to tell her that Ovid was a Roman. I hoped she would notice that all of the gods’ names were different, but then again, I suppose that if this is my dream, then I get to make all of the rules.

Becca has given me her diary to read. The current page:

“I don't want people to feel sorry for me, I don't want people to feel awkward and not know what to say, I mean even after losing Dad I'm still at a loss of what to say to someone who has lost a loved one, crazy huh. I dread the ‘parents’ question above all others—I HATE leaving Dad out but I dread the looks on people's faces when I tell them that he died. Because I hate the image that gives them of him, because he was so alive, so handsome and the image you get when someone tells you of the dead is not vibrant or happy...it's sad and dark. And Dad wasn't either of those things. Anyways…”

A bump makes me look up from the red leather-bound journal. Through the windows, the black silhouettes of Greece stream by, and I swear I am seeing shadows of columns and statues and temples—maybe they are just phantasms—flicker past Becca’s head, which rests against the window. Her eyes droop to a close.

I like watching her sleep, but I get jealous. I do not sleep well.

I close the diary. Becca’s father died two years ago while running a charity five-kilometer race. He was an avid runner. He collapsed in the middle stretch, about kilometer three, out in front of the old county courthouse. His heart simply stopped beating. The paramedics managed to restart it, but his brain had gone over ten minutes without oxygen.

They took him off of life support a few days later.

Somewhere in ancient Greek legend, a man named Pheidippides lies dying in an Athenian’s arms, having run twenty-six miles to tell his countrymen that the Greeks defeated the Persians at the fields outside Marathon.

—Are you Indian? the woman in the visor asks me.

—Honey! Her husband interrupts. He may be Pakistani. Them two don’t like to be mixed up.

I tell them that I am Cherokee.

—Cherokee? The husband runs his fingers over his bald head. You’re a long way from home.

We are standing before the Ancient Olympic Stadium and I do not remember how I got here. My head is killing me. Small groups of tourists stand on the grassy embankments around the track, which looks like an elongated dirt soccer field bookended by two stone lines—the start line and the finish line—and the space between, a sprinter’s graveyard, a tomb of thousands of footraces buried in the memory of the ancient dust. I turn around. I do not see Becca or her mother or her grandfather.

The two Americans stand next to me and talk to me about home in Virginia. I ignore them. They are ignorant. I try to dream them away, but their cheap smiles stay with me, and the dirt track, in its huge historical significance, seems like a bit of a letdown when compared to the spectacle of the modern Games.

I went to public school outside of Atlanta. It wasn’t very big. There was one other Native American kid in my grade, Tommy, a Navajo whose father owned a fairly successful computer tech-support business. “Race me,” he said, standing next to me out on the playground, stretching up tall, “race me and we’ll see who’s the real injun.” I didn’t say anything, and then he shoved me, and I said I was more man than he’d ever be, and then we went out to the soccer field to race. The sky was blue, just like this one, the wind was blowing the same way as it is gusting over this track, and when Tommy said ‘ready set go’ he tore off, galloping hard, a foreshadowing of his days as a starting tailback on the varsity squad, and by the time he quit running he was fifty yards away and I hadn’t moved a muscle.

—Michael!

Becca stands by the stone judges’ stand at the midfield as her grandfather scuttles along behind her. I don’t know why I didn’t see them until now. The Americans wander away from me, and I realize I hadn’t heard a word they had said. Someone’s hand comes down on my shoulder. I turn around and see Becca’s mother smiling at me, the Great Negotiator while Becca and I were breaking up, a stoic woman of thirty-eight or thirty-nine. I wonder if she still aches over the loss of Mark like her daughter does, the daughter who belongs in an Attic tragedy, whose diary entries grow longer and longer as if the pain were reborn and unspoken right up until the words spilled out of her pen each night, like she were Sisyphus pushing the stone up the mountain for all eternity.

But surely it can’t last for an eternity. Dreams can last forever—spinning and repeating in their own little universes—but memories do not.

Becca’s camera flashes from across the way. In the photo album, two flecks will stand near the barren Grecian track, hovering above the gray mass of Grandpa Kelly’s shoulder wandering in front of the lens.

When you dream of Athens, you don’t typically dream of the Plaka; you’ll dream of columns and statues and Socrates in his underwear before the tourist trap of the Plaka neighborhood conjures itself in your head.

The Acropolis holds its chin up over the Kydatheneon and Adrianou causeways, the two main arteries that bleed tourists into various shops, jewelry stores, cafes and restaurants lining the streets of the Plaka. Two Japanese men slowly stroll in front of me as I walk next to Becca’s grandpa, whose stooped head never once turns left or right to inspect the stores that we pass.

—You know, he says, I never liked you much.

The Japanese men stop walking, and I have to sidestep around them to avoid a collision. Turning to see if Grandpa Kelly was still with me, I see Becca’s mother at my side. I turn around. Grandpa Kelly walks arm-in-arm with Becca thirty paces back. I wonder if I just imagined him beside me, if I was going crazy; but then I remember that this is probably a dream, so such transgressions can be allowed.

—This is a dream, I say. Right?

—What? Becca’s mother asks.

—Nothing, I say.

It wasn’t long after Becca’s father died that Becca and I became steady. I suppose I could be thought of as the ‘rebound’—the ‘next guy,’ in a way—but I wasn’t that good with girls and Becca was a catch. She was a catch to me, at least; I thought that the crying was normal.

Becca’s mother stops at a rack of postcards at the corner of Voulis and Apollonos. After Mark’s death, she wasn’t as emotional as Becca was—not nearly as manic—but she didn’t speak at all. I had been dating Becca for two months before she said anything more than “hello” to me.

She flips through the rows of postcards, and shakes her head. There is a lot of Becca in her face, especially in the eyes.

—None of these are in English, she says as she holds up a glossy reproduction of the Aegean.

—Can I ask you a question? I say.

—Shoot, kid. Becca’s mother looks at me, with the Becca eyes, with the same sympathetic tone she had when she was telling me that Becca wanted to break it off.

—Do you miss Mark? I ask.

It seems like a simple question—while dark—but it really runs much deeper, because those four words were a cover-up for the million-dollar ones, “is it normal that your daughter writes about her dead father every night?” I didn’t want to be the dumb Indian ex-boyfriend who thinks he’s a part of a family and suggests Becca needs counseling again—but maybe what was left was not much of a family at all, so maybe I had more of a say than I thought.

Grandpa Kelly putters by. A local on a Vespa nearly clips him while steering through the Plaka shoppers.

Becca’s mother keeps flipping through postcards, as though she didn’t hear me. I don’t repeat the question.

—Thanks so much for bringing me with you on this trip, I say.

—You’re welcome, darling.

She finds one she likes and tries to beckon the vendor, who ignores her as he chases a small dog down the street.

—You know, she says, I would take all that stuff about Becca wanting to ‘play the field’ at face value.

I’m surprised that she brings this up with me here, but I’m also glad.

—Maybe she’s just afraid of commitment, I say.

A couple comes up to the postcard stand, speaking German. I was fortunate to even be invited to go to Greece with the Tracy family, and I wonder whether I had Becca or her mother more to thank for that.

But suddenly I feel lightheaded, and I put my hand on the postcard rack to try to steady myself, spilling a few of the cards onto the ground. When the fog clears out of my eyes, I stand face to face with Becca. Her mother is nowhere to be seen.

—What is your new girlfriend like? Becca asks.

For the first time I contemplate waking up if I am able.

—I said, what is your girlfriend like? she repeats. I wonder if I had been even really talking to her mother.

—She’s very nice, I say. Very shy. She likes to cook.

Wake up.

—Is she pretty? Becca asks.

Wake up.

—Yes, I say.

I have problems with insomnia. Maybe I am not really dreaming. I don’t think it matters.

Becca’s fingers are on my back.

I’m a little bit drunk.

We made friends with a couple young Athenian cosmopolites while we were out and they bought us ouzo. Too much ouzo. The Athenian from the Plaka, Nikos, waves to me from the bar and asks me if I want another. I can’t hear him over the Greek hip-hop, thump-thump, but I know the word in his lips is ouzo.

The new girlfriend isn’t really anything special. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Jeannie just kind of is, always consistent, always the same. She’s also Navajo. I really want to believe that that’s a coincidence, that I like her for her character, but to everyone else—especially Becca’s grandpa—that will be a hard sell. I will remind them that I am Cherokee, not Navajo.

Becca’s fingers are on my back, and I am not brushing them away. Couples bounce off of us, an elbow here, a hip there, and then before I really think about it, the question comes out, the one that had been on my mind all night:

—Are you coming to Emory next year?

I have to yell it, but Becca hears me. She mouths we’ll see, mouths it like she means it, but the instant her lips start to move I know it’s a lie, that she’s going to school somewhere far away. And then I think she’s a silly little senior in high school who’s never been without either me or her father in her life, the girl who won’t be able to pick a major, who won’t have anyone to read her diary when she has a bad day—

Ouzo.

Lots more ouzo.

After all, who needs to dream when you can drink yourself into levitation, make the bodies on the dance floor hover off the ground and tangle in celebration of the god Dionysius, where any one of them could spill their wine to the ground in libation and make the honorable dead walk the Earth; we could dream and pay tribute and drink until Becca’s father was alive again, make it like he were walking among us—but, as with drinking too much, a dream like that would be torture when you woke.

Becca presses her face up against mine.

I think I still love her, and that too will hurt when I wake.

Her camera flashes. I feel faint.

The photograph will not go in the “Greece Trip” album; it ends up in a desk drawer, buried beneath personal letters and other photographs of forgotten friends. The boy and the girl’s faces will dominate the frame, their skin overexposed from the close-range flash, their heads juxtaposed over the hazy black background. In some years, one of my daughters will find the print buried in a memory box next to a pair of stuffed animals, call my name from across the house, and the moment I walk in the room they will put the photograph in my fingers and ask me who the girl is.

—Relax, Becca says.

—I am relaxed, I say.

—You seem nervous, she says. And you look exhausted.

The plane sits on the runway, our red-eye flight put in delay due to thunderstorms and forty mile-per-hour winds. I seem nervous because I am nervous; I hate flying and I hate having to wait in the plane. Becca writes in her journal, and I know she’ll have me read it when she’s done. I wonder why she doesn’t just talk to me about it. In my head, I formulate the likely entry:

“Greece was amazing, truly a great experience… one of the best times of my life, easily… but I can’t help but think about how it would have been with Dad at our side, joking about the locals, the crazy shops—I just wish he could have seen this. I can only imagine what his stories would have been like later, telling them to the cousins, and maybe someday to my kids…

“And I want Michael to be happy, really happy, and I want things to be like they used to be. I want us to be close again. And I want to be with him at Emory”—

I take a deep breath; it’s nice to fantasize.

—Becca, I say, as a flight attendant moves by with the trolley. Are you coming to Emory next year?

She stops writing and closes the cover of her journal.

—I’m going to Georgetown.

If I’m dreaming, this could mean that it’s not true; but my stomach sinks, as I just don’t want to face the likelihood that I am awake.

—I won’t get to see you much, I say.

—I know, she says. If this were a nightmare, the plane would crash as soon as we took off.

I reach over to her lap, to her diary, but she stops my hand.

—What do you want? she asks. She adjusts her reading glasses and brushes back her hair.

—Your camera, I say. I want to see your pictures.

She hands it to me. I have not slept since we touched down in Athens; the colors on the camera’s back display run together, and I try to blink the blurriness out of my eyes. I flip forward through the images anyway. I know they’re there.

—Are you sick? Becca asks.

—No, I say, I’m fine.

—Grandpa Kelly says he never saw you sleep when you were rooming together. She touches my elbow. The dizziness returns. And he doesn’t sleep very much in the first place.

As if he’s a reliable source of information.

—Michael! Don’t be rude!

—What? I say, putting down the camera. Did I just say that?

Becca looks at me, like I’m crazy, like the way grandma looked at me when I told her I wasn’t going to take the scholarships from the Cherokee Nation because I didn’t need them—I wasn’t oppressed—and the old woman swore at the ceiling and at my mother and yelled “why doesn’t the boy take the money?”

—You should see a doctor when you get back, Becca says, stopping short of ‘so you don’t end up like my father.’

Maybe it’s for the best.

My cell phone vibrates in my pocket, and I check the caller ID. Jeannie. I had promised I would call her while I was in Greece. I didn’t.

The phone keeps vibrating. I don’t pick up.

Becca’s mother looks over her shoulder at me from three rows up across the aisle. I catch her eye, and she doesn’t say anything; and then, like a prairie dog, Grandpa Kelly peeks his head up over the seat next to her, and they both stare at me, silent, motionless, like statues.

Becca pulls Ovid’s Metamorphoses out of her carry-on bag as she puts her journal away. I wonder what it was like for the Romans, pretending they were the Greeks—the Trojans, rather, according to Virgil—stealing the Greek gods for their own, stealing their architecture, their art—

They are still staring at me.

I turn to say something to Becca, but her eyes are closed, she is already falling asleep, the Metamorphoses spread across her baby blue ‘I ♥ Ελλάς’ souvenir t-shirt. It’s not fair. She’s the one that should have restless nights, not me. I have nothing to worry about, other than watching her as she rests, hearing her inhale and exhale, seeing her turn on a side.

Her body slackens as she drifts towards sleep. She’s so still.

—Michael? She breathes.

—Yeah?

—Why don’t you kiss me anymore?

Her speech slurs, her mind somewhere in that space between living and dreaming.

—Because, I say, we’re not together anymore.

She murmurs, and then she is gone.

I imagine that I tell her I love her, and I imagine that she doesn’t reply. I pick up the camera and try to take her picture, but the battery is dead. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter that she goes to Georgetown, either, because she will always be running away every single night—like she does tonight, abandoning just another dumb Indian on some runway, leaving him to close his eyes and try to dream of falling asleep as he listens to the sound of the wind and the rain against the windows of the last flight out of Athens.

excerpt from "Spy Vs. Spy": a non-fiction

2006-11-30T23:13:00.000-06:00

*[this story published in "Epic", Spring 2007]

You and your childhood friend could not have any less in common; Asa, the conservative, volunteered for the infantry in the summer following his graduation from Midway High School, and constantly pressures you to drink. Your friendship, you reason, was borne out of a lack of friends to be had in sleepy Cleveland, Missouri, population five-hundred-something, and maintained by a mutual affection for videogames and complaining about there being no girls where you live.

You didn’t speak much after he left for basic training, and you were okay with that.

But Asa has been leaving a lot of voicemails recently, wondering when your spring break is. You don’t call back. Then your plans for a trip to California fall through. You will be home for spring break. Asa comes home to Cleveland one day and sees your car in the driveway across the street from his parents’ house. He calls you on the house phone. It doesn’t have caller ID. You pick up. He makes you promise, promise you will hang out with him while you’re home. He tells you he knows you’ve been avoiding him. You promise. You tell him Thursday.

Thursday evening comes and you drive to Asa’s apartment back in Warrensburg. The sky is overcast. Asa told you he had a new videogame that you have to try. He was going to make you try it. You park your car next to his Corvette, which is sitting alone in its corner of the small apartment parking lot. You walk up to the door. It’s locked. You knock.

Asa answers; he looks terrible. He tells you he’s sick. He invites you in. All of the lights are off in the living room and it’s near dark outside. No one else is home. He locks the front door as you flip the light switches. Traditionally college apartments have whitewashed walls and used (abused) furniture, the decorations consisting of empty alcohol bottles in rows and Jessica Simpson posters heroically trying to fill the empty wall space; but in this apartment, the Jessica Simpson is replaced by an Army ROTC poster, and the alcohol bottles are on the table, only recently empty, standing like tombstones among a smattering of nine-millimeter bullets. The room is filthy. Clothes lay on a mound in the corner. Guns are all around you, rifles and shotguns sitting on chairs. A hunting bow is leaned up in the corner.

Asa tells you he’s taken a lot of Nyquil. He pours himself a tall glass of a bright yellow alcohol from a still-full bottle on the table with a snake on it. You sit down on the couch facing the TV and he turns it on, along with the Playstation. He turns off the lights. He plays a role playing game for a short while, a sequel to a favorite you both had back in grade school. You watch his cartoony doppelganger smash monsters with a mallet. He reaches a jumping puzzle that he can’t beat. You watch him struggle with the puzzle for ten minutes before he gives up. He turns off the Playstation and goes to the kitchen. You get up and turn on the lights.

He comes back with a bowl of noodles from a stew he made yesterday. You sit back down on the couch. He tells you to pick up the shotgun that’s laying on the coffee table. You pick it up. It’s heavy. It’s a twelve-gauge. He eats a forkful of day-old noodles. He tells you to charge it. He mimics a pumping motion with his fork and his bowl. You are not sure if it is loaded. Shells are on the table. You slowly cock it. The noise is intimidating. Just like in the movies. He tells you how this shotgun is modified, how it can hold more shells. You think that’s illegal.

You set it down on the table, laying the barrel down between empty bottles of the snake-labeled alcohol. Asa gets up and walks around the couch to pick up the rifle that’s leaned against the chair next to you. You don’t have to have shot a gun to know what an AK-47 is. He tells you it’s Egyptian-made; something to do with the altered stock. He hands it to you; also heavy. You are holding the most popular assault rifle in the world. You quickly set it back against the chair.

You notice he has almost finished his glass of alcohol already. You didn’t even notice him drinking it. He puts his bowl of noodles down. You see his face darken before your eyes, eyelids droop, lips purse. He says that Sheila isn’t going out with him anymore. He says she’s going back to an ex-boyfriend. From the little you had talked to Asa over the winter, you know that he had been trying to do the most romantic things possible with her; taking her to nice restaurants, going on carriage rides, sweet-talking her. Asa says he will miss her little kid from her old relationship with the ex-boyfriend, whom Asa thinks is worthless. He utters a threat to fuck the ex up, something he has threatened to do to many since junior high. His voice cracks as he talks about how special Sheila is. He pauses. His eyebrows relax. He says whatever. He wants to show you the game he’s been talking about.

It’s a music game where the main character aspires to be a rock star. The controller looks like a guitar, only with buttons; you’re supposed to play the guitar-controller along with the music. Asa thinks you will be good at it because you play guitar. You remember how Asa has never liked the kind of music you play. You are good at the game, but not because you play guitar; you are good at it because you spent your childhood playing videogames instead of sports. Asa begins talking about Sheila again and how much he’ll miss her. He’s getting emotional. You are playing the game as he watches. He says he just wants her to be happy. His speech begins slowing down, like it does when he is getting dramatic. He pours himself another glass from the snake bottle. You beat the level and excuse yourself to the bathroom.

You walk up the stairs and into the bathroom. You shut the door and lock it. You do not wonder about the last time it has been cleaned or even think of the last time you were in it and Asa was so drunk he was catatonic. You sit on top of the toilet seat and pull out your cell phone. You text message a friend, a girl:

please. need u to call and pretend u want 2 go on a date 2nite. emergency!

You see your cell phone confirm the message being sent. You take a deep breath. You are getting nervous. Your anxiety is flaring up.

You give a fake flush of the toilet and go back downstairs. Asa has turned off the lights again. You notice. He is struggling with the game. It relies on the player to be in rhythm with the music, and Asa is sluggish from drinking. You watch him play for a while, and he begins to start failing levels. He hits pause.

Everything is quiet. You want to get up and turn on the lights, but Asa has turned towards you. He’s preparing to speak.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says. You look down.

“Don’t patronize me,” he continues. “I just want to… I just want to…

“I just want her to be happy. But… I’ve seen so much death in the world. Matt… I’ve seen death.”

Time begins to slow down, it seems. You’ve heard this conversation before.

“You’re so gentle, Matt. But you need to get ready. The world is not meant for us. You don’t know what I’ve seen. Do you know the truth of this world? Do you know the truth?”

You know now, that, given your luck, your phone will not be ringing to save you.

“What are you so afraid of? Tell me,” he says. “Tell me. What are you afraid of?”

He was always strange as a kid, always wearing black sweats, always energetic. Always dark. But he’s been so much darker since he killed the man that shot him in the groin over in South Korea. Your mind assesses the situation. Though you both sit on the same couch you are barely in the same room as him. You tell him you are scared of death. He gives a strongly disapproving look.

“Do you know what happens… when you die?”

You shake your head.

“What do you think happens when you die?”

You don’t tell him about the philosophy you’ve read. You don’t give him a guess about God. You say you don’t know.

“Do not be afraid, Matt.”

He grabs your hand. It’s a deliberate gesture. You never touch each other.

“But I’m scared, Matt. You don’t know the things I’ve seen.

“Once,” he says, and his grip on your hand tightens, “I saw the truth. I saw millions of people dying. Do you know what that’s like?”

You shake your head. Right now, every single one of your reactions is measured. Asa grabs your other hand. He grabs your left hand with his left, and your right with his right: he has your arms crossed. You’re vulnerable. He’s gotten considerably more muscular since leaving Cleveland for basic training. Your pulse quickens.

“It’s like this,” he says.

He tears your hands apart from each other and begins pulling strongly away from himself. Your muscles fire, and resist. Your arms are crossed in front of your chest. He is still pulling. You are keeping him from yanking your arms from their sockets.

“The truth,” he says, and pulls harder, “I saw a demon. And it was flying over the people.

“It had six arms. Six arms. It was swallowing everyone.” His arms begin shaking. Yours, too. Your hands are sweaty.

“And I saw its face,” he says. And then his voice drops lower than you’ve ever remembered hearing.

“Its face was mine.”

No time to go into panic: in a matter of moments everything is sized up. You know you’re all alone, so you don’t count on help. Asa is sitting between you and the front door, which is locked; you don’t consider going for a back door that may be through the kitchen, because you haven’t seen it. He knows at minimum eleven ways to kill with his bare hands. You specifically prepare yourself for an attempt to break your nose at an upward angle, which would lodge it into your brain and result in instant death. You know that you can’t get into hand-to-hand combat with him. At six-feet-one and a hundred and ninety pounds, you would think you could handle yourself, but Asa is no longer the fragile asthmatic you grew up with; you may only have twenty pounds on him, comparable in strength, and he is simply too experienced. Then if you get through the locked door, Asa’s car is sitting next to yours. If you get in a chase, you know that his Corvette easily outmuscles your coupe, and though you are a competent behind the wheel, he is a much more practiced aggressive driver. He used to give you rides to school before you got your license.

You mentally survey the guns in an instant. The Gewehr 43 sits across the room on top of a chair, the Nazi rifle he’s showed you time and again. You doubt the likelihood of it being loaded, since it’s an antique. The AK-47 is leaned against the armchair next to you, which is now at your back. You thank playing first-person shooters for showing you how they work. You remember the banana clip being in it, but you don’t know if it contained live rounds—and even if you got to it, you’re not sure if you could load it before Asa got to you. That left the twelve-gauge on the table. You could operate it, but you didn’t know if it had a safety that was switched on. And you would have to load it, since when you charged it you saw that it was empty. You discount the handguns you know are upstairs, and give a hopeful estimation that there are no pistols or knives in the living room that are out of view.

But you know that you can’t touch one of those weapons. Asa is drunk, and perhaps something worse; if you escalate the situation by grabbing the shotgun, Asa will automatically reciprocate by getting another gun, one that he really knows how to use. You know him. And then you can’t count on his rational decision-making to keep him from killing you. You begin to prepare yourself for being shot to death. You try to grasp the immediacy of being murdered. These might be your last moments and you want to be ready.

Asa’s grip loosens, and you feel his muscles relax. He drops his head.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says, voice breaking. “You need to help me.”

You ask him what he needs. He doesn’t respond. He then looks up. In the dark light of the room, his expression is murderous.

“You think you can help him?” Asa’s voice drops to an extreme low.

You don’t understand the question.

“You know you understand us. You can’t help Asa.”

Your heartbeat accelerates. You are just short of full panic.

“We are death.”

His grip tightens again. He begins to mildly thrash. You worry now that he will get a hand free. You manage to keep steady as you grapple, both still sitting on the couch facing each other. You are instantly gracious Asa introduced you to lifting weights years ago, something you’ve been doing at college.

Asa’s grip relaxes, his head drops again. You understand what is happening now. You let his hands free. You need to find a way to the door. You need to talk your way out.

Asa is crying. His voice gains a childlike inflection.

“I need you to help me—why aren’t you helping me?”

He puts a hand on your shoulder. It still seems forced. He is such an actor. You tell him you don’t know what to do. You tell him you are here for him. You are pretending to be sincere, looking him in the eyes as you visualize the door. His face tightens, voice drops.

“Bullshit!”

You feel his hand start to tighten on your shoulder again. You grab his wrist. He elevates his other hand. You think he is going for your neck. You catch him by other wrist before you find out for sure.

You are reminded of doing the same thing years ago, grappling with your hands on the bus as the two of you rode to grade school. Except that was play. And as you sit face-to-face, you feel like you are missing something. Like you are not really in the moment. And then you realize it. You are not prepared to die. You do not truly believe that he is going to kill you. You wrestle, and you try to imagine him with the AK-47, forcing you on yours knees, putting the muzzle to the back of your head as you wait for the trigger pull, bang!-black. But you still feel like you are missing the immediacy. You can only imagine yourself as a newspaper headline, as someone else being dead. You are not ready to die. You wish you believed in God, because you are scared to death at the knowledge of the loneliness of being totally in control.

You tell him to stop. You lock eyes with him. He growls. You sense that he wants to dominate you. You’ve seen the same look from big wild dogs. You are willing to tuck your tail in exchange for an exit from this dark room. You tell him that he is hurting you. He thrashes again. You loosen your grip a little. And then he slumps.

“Matt,” he says, child-like, “why won’t you help me?”

Both of you drop your hands. He puts his head down again, and starts crying again. You tell him, come on, if he wants you to help him, the both of you need to get out of this room. You’re not sure how your voice is so calm as you feel like you are exploding from the inside. He puts his head on your shoulder, and anger seeps into your fear. You see his melodramatics. You see his little play. His sympathies remain someone else’s, and his split personality, his demon, all a cliché. Your insecurity about impending death is clouded by a doubt of real, actual danger. And it makes you even more uncomfortable. You feel unable to really defend yourself because you feel like he is not taking ending your life seriously enough.

You tell him to put his shoes on, that you should go for a walk. A moment passes. He nods, says okay. As you rise from the couch, you see your odds of escaping safely multiply, and it feels as though the weight of the world falls off your shoulders; and then you realize that the world is exactly the weight falling off of your shoulders when you remember you had spent the last half twenty minutes preparing yourself to no longer be a part of it.

You walk over to the switch by the door, and turn the lights on. You see Asa squirming into his shoes, and from his body language you see that his is acting himself. You don’t understand what is wrong with him, but are now concerning yourself with unlocking the front door. You fumble with the lock. You can’t get the handle to turn. You become nervous, thinking of what could have happened if you would have gotten into trouble and counted on being able to make it out the door quickly. Asa tells you the lock is sticky. He tells you how to work it. You need to get outside before he swings again. The lock turns, and you get the door open. He gets up. You now think that a walk would do you good. But deep down, you also know that if you walk, you are in a populated area and you could attract help if you got into trouble. You still focus on getting to your car without him following.

You step outside. The temperature has dropped considerably as the clouds have thickened and darkness approaches. You see your car. It is thirty yards away, not enough to make a break for it and make it. You see a light on inside the apartment next to Asa’s.

“Stop,” Asa says, and you turn around. He leans forward with the return of his other personality. You are standing about eight feet apart. He takes a step and you lower yourself instinctively. Things have escalated. Body language and situation is nature’s unmistakable form of communication, transcending words and ideas; the eight feet between you, filled with fear and antagonism, precipitates violent confrontation. He raises his arms up parallel to his shoulders, his fists balled. He looks ridiculous; it can’t be a military-trained fighting stance. He begins to advance on you. You are stuck in a no-man’s-land of fist-fighting for your life or standing down because he is not a true threat. You are an English major and you are critiquing him like he’s a plot to a pulp fiction; you wish you had been a football player instead. You have to make a choice now.

You cut out of the way of his advance and run over to the lit window of the neighboring apartment. You pound on the glass. You look at Asa. The demon in his eyes stares you down but is confused at what you are doing. You are still pounding. You turn and see someone moving around inside, a man. He comes to the door and opens it.

“Can I help you?” he asks. He is muscular and has a flat-top. One of Asa’s ROTC brethren.

“Um, yeah,” you say. “I’m a friend of Asa’s.” You turn around. Asa is gone. The door to his apartment is open. You see him staring at you from the dark inside, sitting in the living room armchair.

“Okay?” the man says. “Can I help you?”

“I’m just seeing what’s up,” you say.

“What’s up,” you hear Asa give a friendly call from inside of his apartment. The ROTC guy steps outside of his apartment and looks through Asa’s door.

“How’s it going, Asa,” he waves. He looks back at you. “What do you need, again?”

You begin to get frustrated as he does not pick up on the look of severe distress on your face.

“Nothing,” you say, still within earshot of Asa. “Just seeing what’s up.” You regret that you have nothing useful to say in this situation. The ROTC guy has no idea what is going on. Then you notice you are now out of Asa’s sight and you begin walking to your car, nodding at the neighbor to follow you.

“I think he’s going crazy,” you whisper, getting your keys out. “I think he is schizophrenic or something.”

“What do you mean?” the cadet asks, walking beside you.

“He’s losing his mind.”

“Has he been drinking?”

“Yeah,” you say.

“He gets crazy when he drinks.”

You stop at your car door and look at him; if he knows, why doesn’t someone do something about it? These are the people that live with him, work with him.

“It’s not just the drinking,” you say. “You need to get him help.”

You don’t stop to think about what it was you could have done six months ago—you get into your car, overjoyed, exhilarated by the tangibility of escape, unaware of the looming guilt that will tell you that you didn’t know how much danger you were really in, that you weren’t much of a man, that you couldn’t have broken his neck as he reached for yours.

The Vigilant

2006-10-31T22:08:00.000-06:00

I had carried Rose through my bedroom door because I was being a gentleman, because there’s something funny about chivalry and I am a funny guy. The people from the party downstairs thrum, their life buzzing through the floorboards and up into the limp shag carpet beneath my feet, my friends and my brother and the strange people from down the street—

I yank my Superman cape out from under the door, locking it so we can’t be interrupted. I set Rose down on my bed, and she, giggling, almost spills her drink. Rose, short for Rosealba, a De la Rosa—and usually a light drinker, so I’ve heard—stretches out, and I get a glimpse of her black hair underneath the blonde wig. The wig is coarse, reminding me of doll’s hair, of the twine around bails of hay in the barn back home, of Alice in Wonderland proper. Alice in Wonderland De la Rosa. It’s Halloween, and my brother Georgie believes tonight I will be getting lucky.

—I love your paintings, she says.

—I love you, I say.

She giggles again, and this time actually spills her drink, streaks of alcoholic apple cider seeping down the side of the mattress and dripping down onto the tufts of shag carpet. She called them paintings, but they’re posters, portraits of sleeping women by Matisse; I put them on the walls when I moved in at the start of the semester. This claustrophobic room feels like an ancient cubby, a once and future home to a hundred other undergrads, and since there are only so many ways to arrange a desk and a twin bed into seventy-five square feet of space sometimes it’s hard for me not to imagine that what I do in this room has been done before. Alice in Wonderland would likely be a first.

—Hey, Clark Kent. She tugs at the red felt S on my chest. –Tell me a story.

—‘Call me Ishmael,’ I say, setting the rickety desk chair down next to the bed and sitting on it backwards. —‘Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world–‘ and here Alice in Wonderland slaps me on the shoulder, spilling her drink again. The old desk chair wobbles under my weight, and the bedroom door groans as some passing phantom or dominatrix bumps into it on their way down the hall.

—No, she says. –A real story. Something that tells me about you.

—That’s priveledged information, I say. You can’t give away too much information about yourself, kill the mystery. But Rose turns away, looks at the Matisses, and I think to myself maybe I’ve been teasing too much. My brother says I always tease too much. Rose sighs, and I notice the way her frame fills out the blue dress, something found at Goodwill for five dollars, and the white dress apron covering her front gently heaving up and down with each breath, my eyes drawn down to the sash that wraps around the waist like a knot waiting to be untied.

—I saw a dead person once, she says.

—Like, in a funeral home? I say.

—No, she says. I’ve never even been to a funeral.

Someone turns on the stereo downstairs, and the pulse of the bass causes the room’s window to shudder. Rose rolls away from the Matisses, now laying flat on her back, facing up at the ceiling, balancing her red plastic cup on her midsection above the sash. She closes her eyes before speaking again.

—I lived alone with my mother in New York–

—Wait, I say. –Are you really telling a dead guy story?

Rose De la Rosa, the Alice in Wonderland with dark eyes, shoots me a look. Marcy used to give me that look, the reflexive are you a jerk or an idiot look, but that look came to an end because you can’t give your exes the look through phone calls and e-mails. I smile. Rose would be my first since Marcy.

—Yes, Alice in Wonderland says. –A ‘dead guy story.’

The look is replaced by some kind of nervous smile, a Mona Lisa thing, lips knotted up halfway with pleasure and condescension. Her eyes flit back and forth, because we’re too close together to see all of each other’s face at once. I take the cup of cider from her hands and drink.

—I lived with my mom in New York City when I was little, Rose says. The bass downstairs gets louder. –She had just divorced for the second time, this was the summer when I was twelve or so. Well…maybe fifteen. Give or take. Anyway, I wasn’t working and I was really bored most of the time, right? There was this old piano player upstairs that I decided to start taking lessons from—

Somewhere downstairs, the sound of a glass shatters in between songs, and I’m wondering what mother would giver her daughter the name Rosealba De la Rosa, thinking of the disambiguation ‘Rose Rosa.’

—That didn’t sound good, Rose Rosa says. –Anyway, I bugged the upstairs neighbor about getting piano lessons, right, because I used to play a lot as a kid when my dad was still around. I had been really good. I convince the guy to teach me. He’s this old invalid type, or at least just lazy-old, and all I have to do is buy him groceries and clean up a little and I get free lessons. Well—turns out—he thinks I have some kind of talent, he gets really excited and starts working me a lot, thinking if I really work hard I could have a future. Well, about this time I find out the guy’s been composing music for years. Not famous, or anything, never published. Just writing music for the hell of it, yeah? He has me play this really great sonata he’s been working on… god, I was so nervous I was shaking. This old guy, some World War Two veteran, is writing this really sad, god, this really pretty music. Melody was just wrenching, angry and—god, I can’t even talk. Look at me, it makes me shake just thinking about it.

Rose holds up her fingers to demonstrate the fact, looking pretty intensely at the nails and knuckles above her Alice in Wonderland palms; I don’t see the shaking, I’m looking at her eyes, watching her observe herself. With the tremors of the stereo, and the footfalls in the hall on its hardwood floor, there’s a weird kineticism about the room, the vibrations making the desk and the window and the walls speak in a stereophonic hum.

—Your turn, Rose says. She takes the cup from my hands. I see her following the outlines of my legs and the legs of the chair with her eyes, and I wonder if she notices the movements of the room. She drinks.

—Wait a minute, I say. You said there was a dead guy.

Rose’s eyes stop eyeing my Superman costume, and I think I almost literally see them glaze over. She looks down into the cup.

—I didn’t tell my mom I was taking lessons. I was doing it behind her back. I don’t even remember why. We didn’t get along so well back then. When she found out, she made me stop, and cussed out the old piano player for being a lecher. Rose takes a long pause. The music stops. The room lurches to a halt. –That’s what she said. ‘Lecher.’ So, while before we had been able to hear him playing piano through the ceiling, all of it stops after Mom made me quit. No music, scales, no sonata, nothing. He just stops playing. Finally one night I heard him play again, the sonata, when all of the windows were open. Beautiful.

Her hands shake again. I take the cup from her fingers. Our skin accidentally brushes together.

—Next morning, I’m doing dishes, and I hear shouts outside, she says. –I go over to the window. Right as I look down, I see someone throw a bedsheet over the pavement, over a pool of blood. And then I knew it had to be him. I never had a doubt. All I remember is looking down, just seeing the pale square over the maroon circle, outline of a figure—this sounds gruesome, I mean, god, but instead of thinking how I could have seen him falling to the ground from through our window, I was caught up in the way all the lines and the hues of red and white, just were, just sitting there on the beige of the concrete, curving this way and bending that—and here she just looks at me, lost expression—I don’t know what to say, how to say it. Just some shapes and colors, over the sound of car horns and shouts and sirens.

I spill the drink on the carpet this time, the cider splashing down my fingers as I put it to my lips. I keep thinking about how Marcy never talked like this, how she never thought like that, it was like I couldn’t even conceive a woman who existed in a way other than Marcy did. I look at the Matisses, glowing under the light of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling.

—I’ve got one, I say. Rose doesn’t turn to look. She’s also staring at the sleeping nudes on Superman’s wall, her beaked nose pointed at the ten-by-fourteen of the curvaceous brunette whose hips seem to disappear into the blue crosshatched background painted around her.

—Go ahead, Rose says distantly. I lean back and the booze goes to my head, the force of gravity coming from six directions at once. I stop to catch my breath before starting, waiting for the center of gravity to return.

—I grew up in Douglas County, Kansas, with Georgie and my dad—Georgie was my brother—and I was also a single-parent kid. Mom, I don’t think she was really cut out for farm life. There were no hard feelings between her and Dad. Basically shook their hands, and said it’s been real. Me and Georgie, Mom being gone didn’t bother us much. We only seemed to see her at night anyway, we’d be playing outside all day or working. The benefit to her leaving was that we’d get to take trips on the weekends up to Kansas City. That was like going to the capital of the world for us, Douglas County being a little—um—quieter..

I hear my brother’s voice downstairs above the crowd, over the boombox, and it seems like maybe Georgie’s telling people to go—but I hear people moving down the halls again, knocking on the door, trying the locked knob, and the faceless giggles move on down the hall like phantoms. I wondered what their costumes were. Halloween was always my favorite holiday. I go on.

—So we go to K.C. for the fourth of July, a big deal to us. No fireworks at home and all. We got to stay in Mom’s apartment while she worked at the hospital during the day, not getting off for the holiday on account of being valuable or whatnot. We were expressly told not to leave the apartment unless the building was on fire. Well, being boys and all, we imagined ourselves a fire, and found a reason to wander around outside a bit on the street.

My brother yells even louder now. More footfalls.

—The city was a little alien to us. Never seemed to really exist until we were looking right at it, like being something so big we couldn’t understand it except as being something outside of ourselves.

Alice in Wonderland’s hand finds my knee while I talk. Her fingers, hand, are small. Her eyes are still.

—We kept wandering around the alleys of Mom’s building, being afraid to wander too far. But, again, being boys and all, we couldn’t help ourselves but to dare each other how far we’d go. Down the alley, across the street, touch the building across the street, go in that alley, so forth. Finally Georgie dared me to touch the back side of the big grey building. I’m scared, but I can’t show it; he’s my big brother. I go. I crossed the street—look both ways—and start going down the alley between the big grey building and the brown one next to it. I was scared out of my mind, I kept imagining a big man was going to jump out and grab me, do all sorts of unimaginable things, kill me… but the more I walked the more I realized that the alleyway was completely still. I mean, like, there wasn’t the slightest movement—no bugs, rats, wind blowing papers, whatever. I get more confident as I go along, I feel invincible. Everything freezes on my approach.

Rose closes her eyes. It occurs to me that she might be really listening, that she could be seeing everything I’m telling.

—I reach the backside of the building, and I’m feeling so good, I start poking around. The dumpster is full of trash. There are cigarette butts on the ground. I put one in my mouth. I come across a pile of cardboard and newspapers, nudge it, looking for something I could take back to Georgie and play with. But when I kick at the pile my foot hits something solid, so I pull away the panels of cardboard. It was a woman. White, pale white, not breathing. Bloated. Naked. I froze, I couldn’t help but just stare at her. She was propped up on her side, arm slung over her front. She didn’t look that old; but then again, the more I see her in my head, the more ageless she gets. Dead. Her hips curve down past her privates, she was just all curves, being crushed by gravity. I never looked at her face. I was caught up in her just…being.

Flashes of blue and red lights spasm across the ceiling, from through the window, cutting across the Matisse figures at rest. The stereo silences downstairs, the footsteps in the hall and up and down the stairs quicken—somewhere in one of the other bedrooms, someone is having sex, we can hear them—and downstairs, Georgie’s voice rings out, calling for silence. The Alice in Wonderland puts her hand in mine and I feel the sweat coming off of her fingers.

—What did you do? Alice asks.

—I ran like hell, I say. –Back down the alley, back towards Georgie. By the time I saw him when I ran back, he shouted that he was bored. He wanted to go back upstairs and eat. And I realized I was hungry. We went back upstairs to Mom’s apartment and made sandwiches. We watched baseball on TV. Mom came home, and that night we saw the greatest fireworks I ever remember seeing.

—Did you not tell anyone? she asks.

—No, I say. –Not once.

An authoritative voice downstairs tells people to leave, the voice belonging to the red and blue flashing lights. The baritone echoes through every nook of the house, seeking out the phantoms that pass outside my door, the people hiding in Georgie’s bedroom, the lovemakers; everyone falls quiet, trying to hide. My faux-blonde reaches up for the lightbulb’s drawstring. We are pitched into the dark, but the figurines of the Matisses still find a way to stay illuminated, hips and limbs of figures at rest, hovering supernaturally in the darkness. The baritone shouts again. They are looking for the residents. My ears tell me Georgie is trying to cover for me. He sounds exasperated. He is a bad liar.

Someone outside tries the knob, and jerks it violently before sliding down the hall.

—Come on, the girl whispers. She tugs at my cape, I slide into bed. The dead woman’s hips crawl into my imagination. Heavy steps sound at the landing, coming up the stairs, the goblins and phantasms jitter at the approach. Alice pulls the blankets over us, and I shudder. And when I shudder, she shudders, the whole room shudders. She’s so warm, vibrant, frenetic—and then, at moment of quiet, I wonder why she’s never been to a funeral, having seen the pianist die; then I wonder if her costume is the least of her disguise. I kiss her.

Her hand slides around my shoulder as the heavy steps stop at the top of the stairs outside. We can be looked for, but I don’t think we will be found; vowing to keep the demons away, these sleepy portraits will sooner find us breathless on this All Hallow’s Eve, we cadavers on a flight of fancy.