Author: litmag_admin

FROM ‘THE SAILOR’

I
Even with his prayer
Still moist on my lips,
And in his presence,
’Bove gilded steppe,
Did he stand veiled
Atop the mountain
In astral navel fixed,
Watchtower awash
In primordial light,
Whose violet heights
We’d scaled, weightless,
With crumpled wings
In belated returning;
But I closed my eyes,
Still drunk with sleep,
Smiled all the same —
Blind to his face,
But happy knowing
That I would ever be
Within his shadow.

XIV
Her broken nose,
Gaudy lips, and all
Sink in the blaze,
Rise in clouds
Above the tenement
Before the eyes of
Her would-be boy,
From which she fell,
Loose ’n’ limber chit,
Headlong in a wink,
With floating sheaves
Of Delphic leaves
After dry spells
Long drawn out,
As sighs that Apollo
Out of songs
And swigs the last
Spanish draughts
In the ruins of the night,
At the end of the line,
In bleakest east.

XVII
This lonesome cella
Lies sprinkled with dust
That sticks to my feet,
Falls through my fingers,
The dust of stars
Born of dreams and
Blotted out by time.
No longer do I peer
From out the shadows
Or squander words
Better left unsaid,
But listen to the echoes
Of a litany of blessings
On that goddess
Of ravaged steppe,
Gone, like Babel’s babe,
As an ebbing glow
Now burns my eyes,
And I try to recall
The slant of hers.

XXV
Should I slip away
Behind my eyes
And wrest from light
The tail-end of a dream,
Or think upon you,
Giving thanks that,
She dies again as ever,
My calendula, and I
Live yet to see her so?
Not lit up on the lees
Of yesterday’s wine,
Nor a plaything of
Some blinkered thief
Who makes off with
What little o’wit is left —
I want to be to flesh
And earth unbound,
Feel those fingers,
Still now and warm,
Decked with gold
Of Rhages, running
Through my ringlets.
I’ve no longer the heart
For crescent moons
And candlelight.
O, if you could but
Give me the wings
That once were mine!

FROM ‘TURNCOATS OF PARADISE’

VIII
A wince at black magic
Spells the death of day.
I’m all out of words,
And I’ve said nothing
At the bright-lit bend:
Brown eyes and brambles
Still without a name.
Lo, here come the Ides
To turn me heathen,
Steal my sun-snatches.
And there go the swines
Of worlds old and new
With mouthfuls of pearls,
To the hills, out of sight;
And the witching hour
Leaves me with none
Of night’s sweet lethe,
Only weak of limb
And pinched of hope,
Bare ’fore hidden stars
And stillborn dawn alike.

XVII
Odalisques, wreathed
With wilted petals
Of the Orient plagued,
Await with traces
Of sand-speckled smiles
The laggard flames
Of psychic pyres.
Southwards we turn,
Disbelieving our words,
The laurel and the lyre,
And all those violet visions
Risen from blind alleys
Beneath our mountains,
Turncoats of Paradise.
Though the feathered ones
Can no longer gainsay
This bitter sun so bleak,
We won’t see our bones
Buried neath our feet;
And if the sky we can’t see,
Atlas’ shores are ours.
What a sendoff we’ll give
To our cracked idols,
Cast them out to sea,
See them on the breakers,
And never look back,
But find, with eyes of jade,
Our way home before dusk.

Reprinted with permission from the author. Find both collections here.

Deft, kinky and resolute, Birgül Oğuz’s prose sails into her characters and tenderly splits them open.  In “Revol” are displayed the inner worlds of working people, at marginal, insecure jobs in Istanbul, or any Aegean, Mediterranean city, and their wobbly, brilliant heroism. Oğuz’s prose is tactile; consciousness and experience are conveyed in language of the skin. A moment of love in bed before shifts cutting out the guts of fish, “a drop of bloody water” falling from a finger like the chiming of the hour, the honking of a ferry, the grim grind of misogyny and breakthrough of subversion. The terrifying scale of political demonstration and excoriating minutiae of everyday injustice, man-woman, capitalism-nature and… inscrutability.        

“Revol” is from Birgül Oğuz’s novel-in-stories Hah, among winners of the 2014 European Prize for Literature. It is being translated into fourteen languages; the English was done by a group of nine working together at the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature: Alexander Dawe, Mark Wyers, Alev Ersan, Arzu Akbatur, Abigail Bowman, Feyza Howell, Amy Spangler, Kate Ferguson, and Kenneth Dakan.

— Victoria Rowe Holbrook, author of The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance, faculty member of the Architecture department of Istanbul Bilgi University, and translator of numerous Turkish works

1.

My lover’s eyes are as clear as a summer night. In the curls of his hair I see caves of light brown. To nestle into them is to be rejoined with my own hollow. Each and every time I’m damp, tired, and tearful. On the nape of my lover’s neck I will gasp for air like a winged fish. How soft you are, he says to me, how moist. His voice ripples in my ears like a blondish bed of reeds. I place my hand in the warmth of his palm and say goodnight. His hair becomes silken rain spilling down onto my back. His lashes grow long enough to envelop us both. Light flows down the street like water, like a flood.

For me, for him, the morning mist is like cotton. Together we walk down to the quay. A blue minibus takes him to Çömlekçi Çukuru. I pass by the tea houses and buses, looking at the cargo ships. The sound of winches dissolves into the water. The ropes slacken, get wet, and are drawn taut again. The morning is so beautiful, like a freshly inked word, and it touches me inside, every morning, my spirit gleams, my eyes burn, ah.

I walk on the shore road, unhurriedly, softly, solitary. I sleep off the remaining half of my slumber all the way to the door of the Fisherman’s Market. When I enter, I change the cottony mist of my tongue into a blue smock. My mind splits at that moment, and one side of me pulls away as the other spills forth. In the palm of my hand the cold knife grows.

The fish have already been placed on the blue-clad wooden counters. How odd, how could so many have died that early in the morning I say, as they gaze blankly into my face. In any case, mourning must be sheer foolishness, the mourning of water, a yeast that will never bloom. I say to myself: What a sentence! ha-ha, what a thing to say so early in the morning, ha! Is there no tea?

The warmth that my lover left in my hands turns to ice as soon as they touch the first fish of the day. I hold the fish by the gills and slice open its belly. With my knife I cut out the organs, which are the purple of aubergine, and scrape them into the bloody basin under the marble counter top. I never let the fish look me in the eye, because at that hour of the morning their gaze is fresh and moist, and their eyes see as if never touched by death. Looking them in the eye slices me open from throat to groin, dripping drop by drop into the bloody organ-filled basin below.

From time to time I, too, rise up in revolt and look up at the clock on the wall, and he looks at me, and as the dead are scaled and gutted, and as the scaled and gutted dead are wrapped up, Meathead, sitting at the register, always stares at me, at my thighs, at my pink wet hands, at my cleavage. The cash register opens with a ring and is shoved closed with a thud, and money dangles from his fat snotty hands as he says: Looking forward to serving you again. Jerk, ‘serve you again,’ slimy jerk, syllables dripping with saliva cling to the sycophant folds of his mouth. My heart churns, my stomach heaves, and a droplet of bloody water always falls from my pinkie finger, plop! into the bag of the dead. And I place the bloody bag into another bag which is as white as a panty pad and adorned with grinning blue dolphins, and I hand it to the customer: Bon appétit.

How time slips past—hours, seasons—between my fingers, cold and slippery, falling from the wet counter top with a plop and the basin fills, only to be emptied by the bucketful, carried off and emptied into the grate, down into nests of rats, piling up, piling up and slipping off their wet backs, churned to foam by the grinding of their teeth and clacking of their jaws, down into dark hollows and then deeper down into that pit where light congeals and thickens, and the darkness is terrifyingly blinding. How it flows; the greasy bulbs swing, plastic bags rustle. I fix my eyes on the wet counter top and think. I think about seeing eyes that know nothing of death. With my own eyes I see the eyes of the dead as they lie there glaring, their gaze fixed on the pit: their gaze is snared like a fish-hook on the soft belly of that hollow. They gaze not toward a distant destination but at the ruins of a time that toppled down long ago. They don’t blink. They have no will to blink. They have no courage. They have no time. There is no time for them, none.

At this point, the fish about to be emptied of their insides are piled up in the basin to my right. The cash register is shoved closed with a thud. Meathead eyes my cleavage wolfishly. I say that he too has eyes, for years he’s had eyes, he has them too. In the split of my mind a long sentence switches tracks, shuffling off the present tense and toppling down into a time that is frozen in place. My knife shrinks, withers and droops. A hand burns in my palm. Bloody water drips from my pinkie finger. I say: Bon appétit.

On the afternoon break, the world smells of damp towels and disinfectant. But the tea is misty and desolate. Unhurriedly, I console myself with two slices of bread and some feta cheese. I eat and think of my lover Memo’s warm, slow hands at the workshop in Çömlekçi Çukuru.

2.

He sits slouched in the light seeping through the greasy window. Aluminium dust rains down onto his hair. With the sound of pounded rivets, drilled aluminium, filed plastic and the whizz and whir of a drill, his insides shudder. The bluesmocked man to his right hands him a circuit board, which he solders and hands to the blue-smocked man to his left. The smoke from the melting solder makes his eyes water. From time to time he looks up from the smoky water, a fish of curiosity with big clear eyes—how quiet and pensive people are, quiet, pensive, dusty, teary-eyed.

Used oil flames in the furnace, leaving the air dry as bone. In the heat of a dry wind their blue smocks shrivel like leaves. The dark dry withered men in smocks never come eye to eye. On occasion they toss glances back over their shoulders. But not at each other; they are looking at the possibility that, at one time, they could have been soldered together. They are looking at the ruins of a sentence that has long been out of currency. Then they become the same man: seen from the outside, a man who’s been dispossessed. Inside, as they hurl the ruins of the past at the present, there is a resuscitated ghost, a feast of unending mourning, a profusion of dust, soil, and seed.

Memo gets up from his chair and walks toward the window. Salman, the simit seller, is going down the street, and there are flocks of children, Bully Cafer, scrap collectors, and Pepe surrounded by clusters of dogs. A part of Memo’s mind is spinning like an empty tin can. In a hundred years, he says—the men wearing blue smocks look up and gaze at his back—Salman the simit seller will be dead. As will the children, scrap collectors, Bully Cafer, Pepe, and the dogs. We too will be dead, along with the bacteria of the yogurt we’ll soon be dipping our bread into and the mulberry tree at the corner of the street and the birds that perch in it. All the hearts that are beating now in the mud of Kurbağalı Creek, in the abysses of the Atlantic, in the crater lakes of Kilimanjaro, in the pistachio orchards of Nizip, in the hollows of the caves of the Yellow Sea and in the eggs laid in those hollows, in incubators, in the coffee houses in Ergani, in an orange grove in Serik, in school toilets, in the register office, in train stations and at the poles of the earth, and what a misery and miracle that they are beating now at the same moment, but uh! they will beat no more. The circuit of the beats and thumps that binds us all together will cease to be. This photograph will yellow in a nasty way.

The light that shines through the greasy window and specks of dust tracing lazy circles in the air freeze in place; the furnace falls silent, the sounds turn cold. That’s when the planet that Memo observes through the window begins to plummet like a piece of fruit falling from a branch, falling down, down, further and further down. Whoa, Memo says, look how it’s falling, hah, it’s not going forward.

He looks back over his shoulder at the men in blue smocks, at the pink paint being added to polyester, at the empty plastic receptacles, at the circuit boards being put into the receptacles, at the circuit boards being lined up on the massive metal tray, twenty-six by twenty-six. They didn’t even come to repossess what’s inside me, he says.

The 676 pink regulators look like jam-filled cookies when the polyester is poured over them. The polyester quivers. It quivers and then congeals. The transistor inside is fossilized like an ancient three-legged insect. Memo can measure the distance between himself and the transistor with a teaspoon. But its clock has stopped, he says, it has stopped, while mine keeps on going. The letters R, T, and L on his smock tremble. My lover can’t measure the distance between himself and the transistor.

3.

Hurry, Papa was saying, hurry.

The bellies of those filthy fascists were bursting with all the blood of the workers and peasants they’d swilled but day had broken and we knew the truth. I gobbled down a piece of bread slathered in jam. With a milk moustache, and joyful that we were going out, I strode into the street, head held high. My hand is a brown egg in Papa’s.

So many birds! May this be a good sign for the month of May. My mouth agape, I pointed at the sky, saying, Papa, look at the birds, Papa ha! and then I skipped forward with grave determination. Minute by minute the crowd swelled. The flag in front of us snapped in the wind, above all ours, a red uproar of cloth fluttering from the ground to the sky; such a flag! Papa was smiling, his eyes sparkling with pride, and he kept turning and winking at me; Look, he said, just look at this crowd of people, look. Even back then I knew that such a gathering of people was akin to victory. Tongues of flame, the churning of water, the howling whirl of wind, that’s what we were and that’s what we said, enough already! Closing my eyes, I was shouting as shrilly as I could: Raise your voice until libelation is ours, it’s your turn in this unstoppable struggle to be free, enough, enough, enough! Papa was all smiles, grinning as he placed his right hand over his heart; raise your left fist, not your right, he said. What a morning, ha! Libelation? Ha-ha! We still hadn’t arrived at the square; you couldn’t count us on your fingers, that’s how many of us there were, it was our day from the beginning, rat-a-tat tat.

Aha! Papa, look at the helly copter! I shouted, bumping into Uncle Metin’s belly, and Memo laughed, holding his belly, jerk that he is.

‘You jerk, what are you laughing at?’

‘How’s it going, little witch?’ Uncle Metin asked me.

Uncle Metin was holding Memo’s hand. Memo was wearing a red shirt and had hung a cardboard sign around his neck which read STOP CHYLD ABUSE. Idiot. Memo was lazy and fat, and when he ran down the hallway his belly shook. His palms were always sweaty, and he sat in the back of the class with Bully Mahmut, whose father was a doorman. Mahmut’s school uniform always smelt like eggs, cheap soap and mildew.

‘There’s never been such a crowd here,’ Uncle Metin said, lighting a cigarette. Papa nodded and said, ‘Isn’t that the truth.’ He also lit a cigarette. Both of them squinted, gazing with pleasure at the crowd.

I bent down and snarled at Memo, ‘That’s not how you write “child”.’ The smile fell from his face. Moron. When the teacher slapped him, Memo’s glasses would go flying. He’d bite his lip, trying not to cry. At lunch he always ate bread smeared with tomato paste. By the end of the day, his snot would get greener and slimier. Snotty jerk.

‘You’re snotty!’

‘No, you are!’

‘You are!’

We’d gone up onto the sidewalk, further away from the bustle. Uncle Metin and Papa were leaning against the wall smoking, and their puffs of smoke blew toward the groups of people. Unable to pull his eyes from the crowd, Uncle Metin said, ‘Probably fifty thousand people here.’ Papa said, ‘Fifty thousand? There must be more like a hundred and fifty thousand.’ Uncle Metin scoffed, and they made a bet for a bottle of rakı.

‘That includes meze.’

‘Bean paste and yogurt with dill.’

‘Dried eggplant in tomato sauce.’

‘And mackelel!’

‘Mackelel?’

‘Mackelel.’

Placards with photos of bedridden, emaciated revolutionaries were carried by. Lots of pillows and blankets. Iron bedsteads. Half-closed eyes. Fingers with knobby joints. Sideways victory signs. They couldn’t be seen in the pictures, but at the edge of those beds were tattered plastic slippers the colour of muddy snow. When the inmates put on those damp slippers and left the room, there was the stench of foul, shit-filled water. Hungry women and men shuffling through putrid water. When they walk, it sounds like the rustling of paper. This is our struggle, they say.

I also shouted: Unstoppable struggle! and made a sideways victory sign, lunging as if I were going to gouge out Memo’s eyes. He leapt back.

‘Put down your hand!’ Papa said.

‘Memo’s afraid of the hunger strike!’

‘I told you to stop doing that!’

‘I’m not afraid of the hunger stripe, you’re the one who’s afraid.’

‘Stop it now!’

‘Si-ssy Me-mooo!’

‘I told you to put down your hand.’

‘Son, it’s not called stripe.’

‘Memo, you’re a sissy!’

‘I’m not a sissy, you are!’

‘Am not!’

I put down my hand, balling it into a fist in my pocket. Helicopters full of filthy fascists buzzed overhead. Uncle Metin gazed after the photos of the faded men and women as they were carried away, and then he turned and whispered something into Papa’s ear. Papa’s fist unclenched and he held out his hand as if he were weighing something disgraceful, and then it dropped like a shot bird and his fingers twined around my own. Come on, he said, we still have a long way to go before we get there.

Uncle Metin’s moustache grew larger and larger, and his eyes and nose retreated inward. One night, Uncle Metin wept at our house, and that night his eyes and nose pulled inward as well. His belly was shaking, and the table shuddered as though an earthquake had struck. Memo was staring at the tomato paste on his plate and hunkered down in his chair. That’s what Memo would do when the teacher slapped him, and then he’d bite his lip. When he didn’t do his homework, he’d say, ‘Teacher, Mahmut tore it up.’ Dirty liar.

We were still so uh! far from the square. Ahead was our flag, we were sweating. Two helicopters full of filthy fascists swooped low, and just then we heard the crackle of a radio and someone in the crowd said, ‘Three dead!’ The bodies of three life-gone revolutionaries were taken away!

When they said that, Papa squeezed my hand hard and then there was a crack. Smoke the colour of egg yolks filled the air. Papa said, ‘There are some dirty agitators among us,’ and he squinted at the swarm of people. ‘Filthy murderers,’ Uncle Metin spat. Memo gulped, the sissy. At that moment, the ties holding the crowd together bang!
                                                                                        snapped ap aaart! Huurry!
                                                                                                                                                                                      Papa shouted and then bang bang bang! Papa tugged me by the hand as we ran for it clippity clop Uncle Metin pointed toward a street up ahead and then from behind we heard Memo cry out
                                                                                                                                                                                Pa-paa! Pa-paa!

Uncle Metin’s eyes bang! bulged and at that moment, I, as the crowd surged and swirled, I saw Memo clenched up rooted to the spot just over there oy! oy! a prickly pear in the desert oy! a frog with a placard, his throat puffing in and out

ribbit ribbit

where is heeeeee!

Metiiiiin! booooy! Papa shouted, but the stampeding crowd was pushing us further and further clippity clop down the street. Unclemetin oy! had already turned around and was wading through the crowd, splish splash, his belly bouncing as he waded against the rush of people and as he called out

Me-MOOO! Me-MOO!

                                                                                      some windows were broken punches were thrown and w’re gnna kll yu al sid a man wit a gun hs eys ful of bloodred htred n the crwd was wippt into sch a fury that thit tht wht a fury it was a raw yelow smoke flled th air swallwing Memo and Uncle Metin

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffhwp!

my eyes started wuhwuhweeepng yellow tears and Papa said
                                                                                                     DON’T be scared!

                                                                                                                               our flag up ahead we packed into that street pushng n shoving each othr everyone was shving everone else, we wre wuhweeeping yelow tears and we still had so far to go to reach the square and w’re going to kll yu al they wre sying 

(but everyone knew where they weren’t going to go. (Because everyone knew that the state was a chariot lowered on strings from high above, lurch by lurch.) Everyone had a soft belly thirsting to bleed (pressing their giant hands to their unravelled stitches, unravel ling wounds (meaning everyone had a soft belly thirsting to bleed)). Everyone had a strangled corpse they paraded around inside them (inside everyone, all of them), everyone had a corpse that marched up from their stomach to their gullet and from there to their mouth. People pinched their lips tight (these were sealed parentheses, they’d closed the circuit long ago). But still the dead had risen as far as the peoples’ mouths; now they were pushing their swollen, knobby fingers between the lips and then, as if sliding up a window (pushing and shoving between tongue teeth palate), opening those mouths. They were opening those mouths and sticking out their scarred, dented heads. As soon as their heads were out, they were propping their elbows on people’s molars (on the molars of the people), resting their chests on the mouths’ ledges (on the ledges of the mouths of the people), and waving to the other dead who’d stuck their heads out of other mouths, saying what’s up? isn’t this a beautiful morning, so, have you gotten used to being a corpse?)

Nothing was happening. But it was terrifying, this nothing. My head grew clouded with dust gas breaking glass and cries and he was squeezing my hand so hard Papaa Papaa!

Whatever happened, this is when it did, another shot sounded, things got ugly at the head of the street. The crowd clenched up like a cramping calf, exhaled, sucked in its stomach and puffed out its cheeks and oof 

thump! something went off in my ribcage, the eggshell of my hand crunched, my eyes rolled back into my stomach: It’s okay, Papa was saying still, it’s okayy just don’t be scared it’s okayy! And inside Papa’s mouth was a man watching me from the corner of his eye. He propped his elbows on Papa’s molars and stuck his head out of Papa’s gaping mouth when it opened to say it’s okay and stayed that way, a dark dry dire cute man, a man not afraid of anything any more, staring out at the street, staring without blinking at the dust gas breaking glass and cries. And Papa was saying don’t be scared!, it’s okayy don’t be scared it’s okayy honey it’s okayy don’t be scared it’s okayy just don’t be scared and he was looking at me from the corner of his eye, dark dry dire cute, like all the pain of the world had piled up in my face, like he didn’t have the will, the courage, the time, to blink.

4.

One time, Meathead followed me home. I pretended I didn’t notice, and he pretended he didn’t notice that I was pretending I didn’t notice. I turned right at the underwear store and then left at the local diner, he kept coming after me, jerk, even though I was taking my time, wondering how much longer he’d follow me. I went inside the herbalist, I looked at the dried plums and blueberries, I cracked open an almond, I stalled. Meathead was standing at the produce stall kitty-corner from the herbalist, hands in his pockets, one eye rolling toward me, the other gazing thoughtfully at the potatoes. I felt like laughing but didn’t. I told the herbalist 200 grams of cinnamon sticks, please hurry.

I left the herbalist in a rush, pretending to be fed up and busy. I stopped behind a white van near the meat shop and squinted over at the leeks. I looked and Meathead is scooting toward me, ‘heey,’ he says, ‘heey …’

‘Heey, what’s it to you?’

‘Uhh, uhhguhh …’ His mouth a bit crooked, taking a gulp here and there.

The grocer weighed my leeks and went to hand them over. I was just about to take them when the creep reached out and took my leeks. ‘Give me those,’ I spat, stepping toward him to grab the sack. ‘Hey,’ he said, wagging his finger back and forth, ‘how nice, she thought of her boss.’ And he didn’t give back my leeks.

There was a contention between this moron and me, its roots reaching back into God knows where. This situation was forcing the birth of, not a relationship, but a relation. To be honest, Meathead wasn’t even the last person I’d want a relation with. But this loom was plenty old, its knots had been tied long ago. Which of us was the deer and which was the hunter, who had herded me into this place of ours where so many deer have drunk, where’s the door I should leave from, how could I know where it is.

I went yech! when I first saw him. I’d stopped at the door of the store, pointing at the sign in the window. Meathead was sitting inside. He started checking me out, my thighs, my breasts, my knees. My stomach cramped and all of a sudden my heart leapt into my throat. And right there I clenched up like a stubborn stain. I should have listened to my stomach. I should have cleared out of there as soon as I felt my heart in my throat. But I clenched up. I still don’t know. Why did I walk into that store with my heart in my throat? I ask. It wasn’t like I needed money or anything. I wanted the blue smock, that’s all. A blue smock. That’s all.

Later on, every time I looked at his stupid face and pursed my lips with disgust, I shuddered with the thought of the law that held us together in the same place. Whenever he looked at me he got a look on his face like someone picking their nose, thinking they’re alone. His teeth were disgusting. The fuss of his tomato-pasty hands to and fro during the lunch break, the stupefied look that came over his face as he scratched his belly, the hairy pinkie finger he held in the air as he drank his tea, the spittle accent from who knows where, it was all disgusting. There was nothing strange about loathing him. Who wouldn’t loathe him? The problem was me loathing him. Me, as much as anyone. Because of this, every time I looked at him I saw the scissor marks in my own soul. This creaky soul that despised others with great pleasure, despised and groaned, growing larger as it groaned, no longer fitting in its membrane, its shell, this was my soul. I didn’t have a lick of patience for day-to-day language. But on the other hand, I was a day labourer to the hilt of my knife. And if I started not to loathe Meathead for even a second, we would wither the world.

‘Wanna sit down and get a tea over there, huh?’ Meathead was saying. They opened the back door of the white van and started to haul the cow and sheep heads out of it into the meat shop. I’d never seen cow and sheep heads uncooked before, not decapitated like this.

‘Let’s get a tea in that little corner, come on, nice n’ hot, huh?’

I’d seen them cooked plenty of times, inside ovens lit up with greasy bulbs to whet the appetites of those walking by, brown grease drips off their noses and they look just like smiling, eyeless goats.

‘Dontcha think there’s a spark between us, come on, let’s talk you and me, drink a tea, glug glug, nice n’ hot?’

Their eyes were moist and bright, just recently deadened, clearly in a terrible way, their bodies still trembling and clenching up, dangling on iron hooks from the ceiling of a slaughterhouse far away but there are no eyes there, the eyes are here, they’re looking around, what is this place where’s my body what is this place where’s my body.

‘At least let’s move to the side a little, baby, don’t wanna get in the way of these guys,’ said Meathead. I felt like laughing again, but I think I was slowly but surely losing my mind.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I won’t move an inch and I won’t drink tea with you and I’m not your baby and give me back my leeks.’

‘Why’s that?’ he asked, laughing as he asked, stomach jiggling as he laughed, leaning back a bit as his stomach jiggled, the sack swinging as he leant back.

‘Because,

I said and a deadened cow passed between us, resting its cheek on a bloody smock and crying

‘those leeks are mine,’

the bloody-smocked man came out of the meat shop swinging his arms, passed between us huffing and puffing, and got into the white van

‘Besides,

I said and a deadened ram passed between us, resting its forehead on the bloody smock and crying

‘are you my soulmate or something that I have to drink tea with you, give me back my leeks.’

‘Look at youu,’ said Meathead, and his mouth twitched. ‘A sharp little tongue, but I love me a sharp tongue, I wanna love that sharp tongue of yours.’ And shik! he was clicking his tongue, shaking his eyes to and fro shik dada shik dada shik shik.

It felt like the inner wall of my stomach had burst with rabid foam.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘are you giving back my leeks or not?’

‘And what if I don’t?’ he said with a click of his tongue, the little shit.

‘What’s going to happen if you don’t?’

‘Uh huhh … what’ll happen?’

‘You’re asking what will happen if you don’t, is that right?’

‘Uh huhh … what’s gonna happen?’

‘What am I gonna do?’

‘What are you gonna do?’

‘Take one guess what I’m gonna do.’

‘What are you gonna do then?’

‘Oh, I’ll do something …’

‘That’s great baby but what, what’s gonna happen?’

‘Something, something’s gonna happen.’

Meathead was laughing and shik! clicking his tongue, shaking his eyes shik dada shik shik dada shik.

Now I was pumped up and pissed off. Meathead’s teeth were wet and growing larger. The door of the white van was shrinking, shrank as small as an anchovy’s mouth. The market’s lights blurred together. Fruit, vegetables, and the white van all dissolved pssst bit by bit in that tangled light. I could have killed him off. In a flash, in the blink of an eye. I could have killed him off, everyone knows. But me, I’d wanted the blue smock. That’s all. A blue smock. Hah!

‘Eey, what is it, let’s see?’

‘Shake it baby …’

‘What?’

‘Shake it baby. Shake.’

‘Uh, shake what?’

I raised my arms out to the sides, clicking my fingers shik dada shik dada, and gave a shake of my hips, left right snap.

‘Now click your fingers like this! Watch! Oh oh! Snap ’em!’

‘What the hell are you doing …’

‘Pull up that smock and rock my world! Oh oh! It hurts, it hurts!’

‘Would you shut up.’

‘Pat-a-cake pat-a-cake baker’s man, shake me a cake as fast as you can, snap it and shake it and mark it with a B …’

‘Cut it the hell out.’

‘Pull up that smock! Grab it! Grab it, man! Enough! Gimme whatcha got!’

‘Here, take the leeks.’

‘Snap baby shake and snap!’

‘Take your leeks, you psycho.’

‘Swiing! Theem! Hiips!’

‘Take your damn leeks!’

I took them and screamed shithead! in his face. Without flinching, I jabbed my finger into his heart. It was empty, it really was, but that’s not quite all of it.

5.

I can’t even call it a room, but inside a fire’s burning. I just want to hug my knees to my chest and shrivel up in a corner, but no, I say, not like that. And who put that fire there.

A cool air hits my face when I come out into the hallway, but it’s humid. The walls are mossy, streaked, wet. They quiver when touched, like meat. Who the hell would make a wall like this.

I feel like rising up into the open air. I look, a window’s ajar. Forget the door, I say, the window’s best. Then when I’m in front of the window I realize the door is better. But it’s too late. They had set the table long ago. Potato stew, rice and pickles. Come on, Papa says, hurry it up.

I don’t want potato stew. I don’t want rice. I don’t want pickles. Papa hands me the salt. No, I say, not that either. I feel depressed. The table sways.

Ah, I say, Unclemetin’s here. He’s crying so hard, weeping and weeping. Memo’s tossing nuts at my plate. Don’t cry, Papa says to Unclemetin, you have to forgive yourself. Your papa is a little traitor, I say to Memo.

And then I bang on the table tak takka tak with the handle of my spoon. Everyone goes quiet. That’s enough, I say, let’s cheer up a bit, come on, hands in the air! We all start together singing ka-kalinnnka maya! Papa’s clapping his hands, Unclemetin hits his fork on his glass. Memo sways his head back and forth. But they can’t keep the beat at all. No, I say, not like that. No. Not like that.

The door opens, two sweaty men in ski masks come inside. Black shafts dangle from their waists. Is it the Sivas crew? Yes we’re the Sivas crew, they say, come on, hands in the air! Together we all start dancing Logs Burn on the Banks heavy eyes awake / double wicks, one wound / can the heart endure.

Suddenly my insides twist up really bad, I’m not going to dance, I say, shrugging my shoulders. You’ll dance, they say. No no, I say, you don’t get it, I’m not going to dance. You’ll dance, they say. Come on Memo let’s go, I say. Come on, my Memo, my love. We aren’t going to dance, in fact. But that’s not quite all of it.

Then you’ll go to sleep, they say in unison. Then they grab their black shafts.

Memoo! I say, don’t go to sleep! Hurry, let’s get out of here, it’s nuts.

Papaa! Don’t go to sleep. This place is nuts! Nutsss!

But you’re the salt of the earth, don’t forget, says Papa, there is yet another revolution. He squeezes something really—really really—heavy into my hand. Then he skips off down the hallway. What the hell! Who would’ve thought, a papa skipping and running down a hallway?

I say Papaa Papaa! It’s nuts here!

It’s okay honey don’t be scared! It’s okayy! It’s okayy!

Papaa! Papaa! It’s so heavy Papaa!

It isn’t, honey, it isn’t! It’s empty, just empty!

It isn’t Papa it isn’t!

It isn’t!

It isn’t! 

6.

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Memo, ‘tell the water, not me.’

His voice rippled in my ears like a blondish bed of reeds. A misty, glacial-blue light was dripping in from the window.

‘It’s five o’clock,’ said Memo.

Under the blanket it was dark and warm. I nestled up to Memo. Yeah, I said, I won’t tell you. I won’t tell the water either. I’ll start over again, once more, from the very beginning. I’ll start again from the beginning.

I was letting myself slip into another dream, like a paper boat into water, and woke again to my own voice:

‘I can’t do it Memo, I’ll sink Memo, it’s so heavy Memo.’

‘You’ll do it,’ said Memo, ‘fear no more, forget, a handful of dust for you.’

It’s not just a handful of dust for me, Memo. Sissy Memo.

‘You’re the sissy.’

‘You are.’

‘You are.’

---

Reprinted with permission of the author.

 

From the moment in Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Crossroads, when Perry, the intellectual 15-year-old son of the First Reformed Church’s Minister, Russell Hildebrandt, walks into Reverend Haefle’s Holiday Open House, dips his cup into a cauldron of “Christmas gløgg for grownups,” and moves to the center of the room to pose questions to two clergymen about how to achieve goodness, I was hooked! Perry was known to deliberate on the essence of goodness and the immutability of the soul, for heaven sakes! So, rather than stopping for a chat with Mrs. Haefle, about the ingredients in the Swedish meatballs, I made a bee line for the center of the room where the action was set to occur. This kid’s questions interested me: “Can goodness ever be its own reward, or does it always serve personal interests?” And “if we can never escape our own selfishness, is such an act truly virtuous?” I was fascinated with what comes of being a minister’s son–resolutions to be a better person, friend, brother––even if self-interest does sneak in to compromise the purity of one’s altruism (and even if Perry did offer to stand in for his delayed parents at the party as a favor to his sister, hoping to buy her secrecy on his smoking and dealing pot). But then, it’s not unusual for sound philosophical thinking to be born of experience, is it?

Unfortunately, neither Reverend Walsh nor Rabbi Meyer abandoned dogma long enough to address Perry’s questions as he might have hoped. The preacher advises emulating Christ’s life to live virtuously, saying “Christ gives us a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions.” The Rabbi claims that God’s laws are guideposts for a pious journey. Neither answer addresses the reflective investigation with which Perry struggles. Their answers depend on a faith Perry doesn’t have, a comfort with obedience rather than reason for defining virtue, and the belief that goodness and God are synonymous. Their responses also don’t match Perry’s ability to think outside of the doctrine box, despite his return dips into the gløgg. I find myself flashing back to the joke about a Preacher, a Rabbi, and a Priest walking into a bar to answer a question about getting into heaven and wondered why the priest was cast as Edward Gorey’s “Doubtful Guest” here. But years of Catholic education suggest that Perry wouldn’t have been satisfied by the priest’s answers either.

I attribute my own desire to enter Perry’s conversation with the clergymen to an interest in ethics developed during graduate studies in moral philosophy and literature. That interest led to a career in education and a focus on literature dealing with justice––social and otherwise. Questions such as “Upon what do we base best determinations of virtue and why?” have always intrigued me: God’s laws? Platonic and Aristotelian effects of actions (inner harmony and a flourishing life)? Kant’s Categorical Imperative? Mom? The Golden Rule? A Social Contract? The “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” utilitarianism or “the lesser-of-two-evils guide to ethics” offered by a high school student of mine in 1993? What intrigues me more is the basis upon which the word best is understood. But, the impact of indoctrination is powerful and persistent, and I am not without understanding for its victims, having been one; and, I venture to say, most likely neither is Franzen. His story feels more like an invitation to wrestle with which roads, the combinations of roads, and/or which, if any, philosophical approaches above lead to a moral life, how suited one answer is for everyone, and how important religion is to the process?

The novel, Volume I of a planned trilogy called A Key to All the Mythologies (referencing Reverend Casaubon in Middlemarch by George Eliot) is made up of the individual and collective stories of the Hildebrandt family–Russ and Marion, in their 50s; Clem, 19; Becky, 17, Perry, 15; and Judson, 8– that cover the years between the 1940s and the 1970s. The church looms large in their lives and in their collective consciousness, though individuals feel free to modify beliefs and practices, including church attendance. Clem, and initially Becky, choose to not attend church at all but each tries to live a good and moral life, the ideals of which, for Franzen, seem to include “loving others as one loves oneself, and so forth,” if words assigned to Perry, are indicators. Sometimes they arrive at “crossroads,” struggling when desires for power, pleasure, concern for self/others, or religious principles, collide. Sometimes they get stuck at these “crossroads. In each case, the stories are provocative and insightful, often hilarious, and occasionally heartbreaking. 

At the time of the Haefle party, Reverend Russ and Marion are out on the streets of the Chicago suburb, New Prospect, at metaphorical “crossroads” that cause them to be late for the party: Russ is in a snowstorm after making Christmas deliveries to an inner-city Black sister church with the perky blond object of his current desire, Frances Cottrell. Marion, now frenetically smoking and starving her way to 110 pounds, is with a therapist, questioning her role in Russ’s wandering eye, and looking for reasons why she submerged her authentic self in her marriage. Becky has been set free by Perry to attend a concert where she is falling in love with Tanner Evans, discovering marijuana, attempting to rediscover God to land Tanner, and praying that (please God) she will come out of the high of her first experience with weed with her mind intact. Clem, the eldest, is just home from college for Christmas. Fresh from the decision to drop out of school, break up with his girlfriend, Sharon, and sign up for duty in Vietnam, he is struggling mightily at multiple “crossroads.” He has the “Is it love or Sharon’s sexual irresistibility that caused me to avoid all academic work this semester? blues,” some concerns about her compatibility with his family, and issues relating to his extremely close relationship with his sister, Becky. Lastly, his guilt for leaving poorer, blacker American kids to die in Vietnam is weighing on him as it is sure to result in a break with Russ, whose opposition to the war is legendary and unalterable. Judson, as yet unaffected by moral quandaries, is downstairs viewing Miracle on 34^th Street with the Haefle children. And, Perry, aware that he has little faith that he will know whether he is really “being good or pursuing a sinful advantage” becomes more concerned with each dip into the cauldron, that it is he who is in the wrong. “You’re all saved but apparently I’m damned!” he sobbed loudly at the end of his conversation. And, Marion, arriving at the party just in time to hear Perry’s outburst and Doris Haefle’s news that he is intoxicated and should be taken home, whispers into Perry’s ear, “You picked the wrong woman’s house to get drunk in,” as they left to walk home in the snow. Marion doesn’t suffer fools or prigs easily. And Perry is her dearest child. 

We learn that Marion had imbibed a bit as a teen herself, but not before we get to know her as a conservative mother of four and sometimes a force to contend with when seen through the eyes of her 17-year-old daughter, Becky. We also see her through Russ’s eyes, as a middle-aged wife who has let herself go, resulting in his lack of interest in her. She pales by comparison to the younger, thinner, though duller object of Russ’s desire, the First (though-not) Reformed, parishioner. She also pales in comparison with a younger, more desirable version of herself that captivated Russ and initially stole his virginity. Most of what we learn about her life experiences are revealed through talks with her therapist, affectionally called “The Dumpling,” in what struck me as the funniest chapter, possibly due to a history (that I share) with smoking, fad diets and Catholicism. It is the section, however, with some of the saddest reveals in the entire novel.

With Marion, Franzen succeeds in the creation of a well-rounded (in every way) character who has been to the “crossroads” and back, and with the possible arrival at another on the horizon in response to her threatened marriage. She’d been out of balance and stuck at a “crossroad” at least once with a breakdown in her early 20s, in response to a pile-up of unresolved psychic traumas resulting from the suicide of her beloved, though dismissive, father; her mother’s abandonment of her; a torrid, yet dead-end relationship with a married man; a subsequent abortion; and an eventual run-in with a sexual pervert whom she paid with her body for money to cover the cost of the abortion. She is drawn as the novel’s truly authentic and multi-faceted character–a mélange of opposing traits: self-determined and guilty, simple and complicated, capable and self-deprecating, independent and dependent–and “neither amazed nor disturbed by the apparent contradictions thereof.” She believes to have been saved by Russ’s love and her marriage to him, and a Catholicism strong on devotion though flexible on dogma. In exchange for this luck, she spent 25 years of marriage “keeping her mouth shut,” focusing more on others than on herself, and withholding from Russ all information about the breakdown, the affair, the abortion, and the pervert. She also invented a former marriage to explain her obvious sexual experience when starting with Russ, only to be shunned later by Russ’s Mennonite parents as a non-suitable wife. She is about to lie again –about tracking down the illicit lover –whom she has located after 25 years, to reconnect with her passionate self. Perry is a boy after his mother’s heart and emotional fragility and is understood and protected by her. Following their departure from the Haefle party, she shares her history with mental illness and institutionalization with him, as she is worried about his instability and wants to help him avoid the psychological problems to which he is susceptible through inheritance. Sadly, the confession increases Perry’s worry about himself.

As interesting as their individual and combined stories are–and they are interesting–the novel’s brilliance lies in its strategic organization of the storytelling. Especially with characters Marion and Russ, Franzen has assembled a patchwork of bits and pieces of their personal and family histories and woven them within and without the story’s sequential timeline. Through flashbacks, forwards, and retellings, he prompts a reinterpretation of events with facts that alter perception at strategic times to prompt us to rethink simplistic understandings of complex situations and characters. In doing this, he brings us into the action by inviting us to experience the twists and turns of moral deliberation in which he and the characters are involved. For example, in a section on Russ, Franzen flashes back to an incident involving the Crossroads teens calling Russ out for his treatment of Youth Minister, Rick Ambrose. Clem outwardly supports his father, though humiliated by what everyone, teens and readers alike, believe (and I, without question) –-that Russ, jealous of Ambrose’s popularity and “hip” quotient, pulled rank to boost his own advantage with the kids. The group’s call for Russ’ departure causes him to resign from Crossroads Youth Group work. For more than 100 pages, readers live with a lingering disappointment with and judgment of Russ that sustain negative opinions of him. Eventually in a flash-forward, while still in the story’s past, we learn facts that force us to revise our ideas on Russ and our attitudes toward Ambrose, who, it seems, withheld facts for his own self-interest. This turn welcomed us to join in Franzen’s meditation on the nature of goodness and wrestle along with him, aware that “doing the right thing” is complicated, as are the characters. We also see how judgments reify self-perceptions and perceptions of others, especially when they go unchallenged for long periods of time. The experience reminded me to postpone easy judgments of others in my own life, and to “deny myself the pleasures that harm others.” (The Golden Rule??)

The jury is still out on Franzen’s “definitive tenets for living the good life.” And, while he engages us in a more investigative approach, defined by openness rather than orthodoxy, he does present characters developing inside and outside formative and more dogmatic influences to guard against simplicity: Marion’s successful (even if watered-down) version of Catholicism, saved her life after a breakdown; Russ’s grandfather’s rejection of the family’s Mennonite sect to accommodate his new love is accepted by Russ and repeated for his own happiness, though he is true to the sect in its anti-war position. At the same time, a prayer-focused Russ tolerates a 60’s Kumbaya-esque guitar strumming Christianity that finds God in relationships and sees as much comfort in sensitivity-training sessions as in prayer vigils––because it brings in the kids. And, more remarkably, his paradigm shift, made as a young man on his first trip to the Navajo tribe, opened a new way for him to see the world, based on love for Keith Durochie and the beauty and spirituality of the Navajo people. He would stick with Christianity––he liked its standard practice everywhere–– even though Durochie jokes that Arbuckle’s coffee also is the same everywhere. But Russ would always carry the pleasure of the sweet Navajo coffee he came to love on the mesa and would assure its availability and that of Durochie and the tribe, through many return trips with the youth group, to the camps. Lastly, he would also carry with him, always, the mantra learned from Durochie and his grandfather, that “There are many ways to skin a cat”

So perhaps this cat mantra is a key to at least some mythologies? It also may be an important metaphor for interpreting Franzen’s preferences on the beliefs, attributes, and habits that lead to goodness, understanding how complicated life and people can be, and how difficult it is for some. Do we accept, then, that we are able to live a good life while trying to determine how, and what the good life is under complicated circumstances? If so, and again, What part God and what part Kant? What part Mom and what part Golden Rule? What part self and what part others? Or, are answers determined by a mix of these considerations? And, what about forgiveness?

Forgiveness. This seems to be where Marion comes in. Like Radio Raheem, who sports love/hate brass rings, Marion is aware of how “inextricably connected good and evil are.” And this awareness, based on her complexity, enlarges her capacity for self-knowledge, and heightens her understanding of and empathy for others–making forgiveness easier. The “Crossroads” at which she arrives through a family crisis, reveals that what hadn’t seemed important could be the most important thing, and possibly “the right thing.” And forgiveness another key.

Godspeed, Marion! And . . . whatever comes to pass, may you accept “The Dumpling’s” challenge to put as much emphasis on yourself in the future as you deserve, whether inspired by the “Love thy neighbor as thyself commandment, or a feminist perspective, which could possibly be more acceptable to you in Volume II of the trilogy, when, in the late 1970s and beyond, the Women’s Movement will clearly be a much stronger cultural force!

“What’s good?” from the other side.

Great news: I’m alive and well in living color… just not in the way that you are used to… and for that I’m sorry.

Did you get my message? The one left near the body I chose to leave behind?

It’s been lonely… and I might not be there now… but I’m always with you.

There are those boys-to-men whose slightened look seems built in, permanent. Are they beautiful through the sheer fact that they’ve been thwarted? With lithe, curtailed limbs and a taste for shiny, tailored clothes, they resemble jockeys. But when their heart-shaped faces are pinched by too many sleepless nights on the street, their wiry bodies take on a shrunken look. It is then one realizes that their delectable slightness may be the result of early drug use or their mother’s own libidinal activities during pregnancy.

Such a creature was Pinocchio, marked by inheritance to serve pleasure. His only known biological parent—his mom—was a homeless rape victim, caught in a park and taken against a tree. The foster parent who’d tried to raise him before he ran away was an old Jewish bookbinder who’d been thrown out of a Soho loft to make room for an artist cum investor.  

Playland, a video arcade of jingling games, digitized grunts and groans, became the truant place where Pinocchio and his runaway friends passed the time and plied their wares. With the good nature of those people who have no attention span, Pinocchio attracted his fair share of admirers. He wore silky tank tops over miniature muscles with gleaming gold jewelry on his satiny patina, against which the daddies never tired polishing their voracious, slippery tongues. He also had a rakish grin. But his unreliability earned him some enemies that resulted in a growing number of gouges and nicks on his splintery rib cage. Needle marks and knife blades then marred the polished blandness of Pinocchio’s underdeveloped looks. As times grew bad, his oversized pants slipped half-way down his nonexistent buttocks while his big aluminum elbow joints of a sallow color poked from his ripped sweatshirt.  

One day the most near-sighted and bloated of Old Fags came into Playland to beg. His dried-out pate was pitifully plastered over a greasy forehead. “Take pity on a man who has wasted his years and come back with me to my little Bowery room for a pittance,” begged he. 

Pinocchio’s pinpoint eyes sparkled with the fun of having caused such a sweet, needy reaction. “I’ll go anywhere with you for a slice of pizza piping hot and a new, smooth twenty dollar bill,” he said brightly. 

The Old Fag waddled discreetly to the door ahead of the giggly puppet. This was because a passing policeman could have been very disturbed at the sight of such an obvious couple leaving the palace of pleasure.

Out on the street Pinocchio’s ebullient impatience made him skip in circles around the lumbering john. They made their way toward the subway past Pinocchio’s cronies—runaways and petty thieves lounging against the grimy walls of the avenue. The thought that he had the power to throw some happiness unconcernedly the old whale’s way made Pinocchio sparkle with celebration. He flashed gallant grins at the filmy coke-bottle lenses of the trick, but from time to time also sneaked mischievous glances to his lounging buddies, who all snickered at the sight of such an old bag of moldy jelly wheezing along next to the clattering legs of a young, brave marionette.

The Old Fag’s room was just as decrepit as he was. Next to a lumpy mattress was a scratched desk and some tattered notebooks. And next to the notebooks was an old-fashioned ballpoint with a barrel made not of plastic but of some kind of metal. 

Pinocchio gave a cursory glance at an open page of one of the notebooks. Although he could not read very well, he was able to make out the title, which was, “How a Puppet Became a Real Boy.” Writers, who were often failures, made Pinocchio bored and uneasy. Like a leaf, he floated away from the drudgeful writing and onto the mattress, surprised that even his negligent weight made the springs creak. His pointed face with its hard lines still held its rakish smile, for he feared not the greasy touch of the failure’s lips on his little wooden knob. It had long ago become permanently stiff and practically insensitive, so used was he to poking it into slots that would yield some profit. 

Pinocchio fixed his eyes out the window on a fleecy white cloud scudding across the blue sky. He was sweetly oblivious to the drool leaking over his hard little thighs. That whimsical generosity that he had been born with made him hope that the Old Fag was experiencing pleasure. But then the trick did the one thing Pinocchio couldn’t tolerate. With the nubs of his blunt, ink-stained fingers he began to fiddle with Pinocchio’s hinges.

“Hold off, just a minute,” said Pinocchio pulling back the head of the trick with his own splintery hand. “Those are not rust-proof hinges. As you can see, they are built in to protect them from the rain. I told you I did just about everything, but that’s one thing I won’t. I can’t stand to be handled at my knees, ankles, wrists, elbows or other hinged places. It gives me a creepy feeling as if somebody were messing with my insides.” 

He who had seemed humble and needy before now became overbearing and greedy. With his much greater weight he attempted to bend poor Pinocchio’s legs over his shoulders so that he could lick the metal hinges that attached his thighs to his hardwood buttocks. But all the hinges in Pinocchio’s body slammed straight with the force of a rattrap and the tips of the man’s fingers, as well as the tip of his tongue, were nearly severed. 

The man sat up and pressed his throbbing fingertip against a forearm, and his bleeding tongue tip against compressed lips. The puppet had paled with rage and was almost the color of unfinished pine. “You’ve made a big mistake,” said the Old Fag, talking like someone balancing a hot potato in his mouth. “Though I wasn’t devoid of desire I was also well-meaning. You’re a sad wooden thing that never really gets to be genuine. Consequently, you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes for the rest of your life. But by opening yourself to your own feelings and treating others with the tenderness for which you so secretly long, you might one day become a real boy!” 

“I’m realer than you’ll ever be!” shouted Pinocchio. As soon as his lie had crossed his lips, his little nose, which up until then had resembled a smooth wooden button, grew. It became so big it could only have been the nose of some rare creature, an anteater perhaps, until finally it was so long and so big that it reached halfway across the room. And it was perfectly cylindrical– like a Ninja chuck. Whereupon Pinocchio, panicking, began to whirl, and his long wooden nose struck the Old Fag a rude blow in the temple. 

The man’s eyes bugged out, and he slid off the bed in a slump. When he did, Pinocchio’s face, which had grown harder than mahogany, glared with triumph. 

“I was lying,” he crowed, “for I’ve never been real and see no sense in ever being that. Real people must die, but wood is already dead and if it’s well kept will last practically forever.”

As soon as he told the truth, Pinocchio’s nose shrank back to normal. However, it is likely the man did not have the chance to hear his words or see the nose shrink because he had already passed away. Pinocchio looked quickly around the room, realizing that now no one could stop him from stealing. There wasn’t much, unfortunately, not even a shade on the window. He wondered if he should take the notebook with the writing entitled, “How a Puppet Became a Real Boy.” He stared at the scratches on the page, but they just blurred his glass eyes. And besides, it must have been a very boring story. What self-respecting puppet would ever want to become a sappy boy? 

As for money, in the man’s clothes and in his drawers was not even the twenty dollars he had promised, so Pinocchio grabbed the old ballpoint. He had suddenly thought that its metal barrel might make a good pipe. Off he skipped on his merry way, unscrewing the barrel of the pen and tooting on it in triumph, for although he had gained little from the encounter, he had his nose back and that was something to be glad about.

It wasn’t long before the rumor spread throughout Playland that the police were looking for a notched, nicked, nasty puppet, last seen with a derelict whose carcass had been found rotting in a dismal Bowery hotel. Pinocchio almost went mad with worry. He couldn’t go back to Playland because they were sure to look for him there. 

Before long he came to a large structure with a vast open mouth. It looked like a giant fish—a whale—with its baleens bared for feeding. And indeed, hundreds of figures, some that looked almost as important as minnows and others that seemed as insignificant as microscopic particles of plankton, were inhaled through these openings, while others seemed to be vomited out. This great fish’s hunger must have been insatiable, for the eating and vomiting was continual. Pinocchio soon learned that the giant fish was really a building known as the Port Authority, and it contained all manner of men and beasts in its bowels. Some remained in it forever because they couldn’t find their way out. No one, reasoned Pinocchio, will discover me here, for the stew of creatures is just too thick and perplexing. I’ll lose myself on the staircases and in the restrooms.

Pinocchio let himself be sucked through the huge mouth-like entrance and buffeted about by the streaming crowds, and it was a pleasurable feeling. But since he was a puppet of cured wood, he kept one predatory eye always open. One day, as he stood at the urinal holding his wooden knob, he was struck by an image of wealth in the opposite mirror. It was a tall, elegant individual in a dark suit, holding a briefcase. The individual’s skin had a heavenly or deathly bluish cast, and what was even stranger was that his hair was blue, too. From his eyes, which seemed glazed, floated a kind look of renunciation.

Pinocchio didn’t know it, but this was the Blue Fairy. The Blue Fairy had been lithe and attractive just a few months before and had loved every kind of pleasure—dinner parties and clubs, sex and leather. Then a spell had begun to transform him into an unwell, emaciated figure. But there was a look of purity to his ravaged body. In fact, it seemed worn and polished down into simple, elongated curves, much like Pinocchio’s. 

Pinocchio was very attracted to the Blue Fairy and very excited to be standing next to him. Without looking down at Pinocchio’s thing, the Blue Fairy glanced at Pinocchio and smiled sweetly. He wore a suit of such a perfect cut that Pinocchio was sure he must have lots of money.

Actually, the Blue Fairy was just as taken by the little puppet whose wooden knob stuck straight out toward the urinal but from which no liquid streamed. How wonderful, thought he to himself, to be made of wood and never have to worry about changing. And should you be reduced to splinters or even used as kindling, I bet it wouldn’t hurt at all. For by then everything hurt the Blue Fairy. His legs ached dully and sometimes felt like they were made of wood, and his feet always felt like hot, streaming sand or a swarm of angry bees, and when he moved his jaw it felt creaky as if it were set on broken hinges. 

Before long Pinocchio sat in the Blue Fairy’s penthouse and learned that he had been a stockbroker and still had a large bank account and very good disability and medical insurance. Weeks after that day, Pinocchio was still sitting there. He passed the time watching all kinds of cable stations on the big color TV. But sometimes he grew tired of this and his dry eyes ached because no one had given him lids and he could not close them no matter how tired he was. He even smashed the TV once, but the Blue Fairy shrugged it off as a tantrum and bought another. At other times, Pinocchio filled the big sunken tub in the bathroom with gallons of water and lots of bubbles. Then he would float on top of the water without sinking, like a piece of wood, staring—unblinkingly, of course—at the ceiling. 

As tired as Pinocchio became of the cable TV and the big tub, he stayed inside because he was afraid the police would be looking for him. The Blue Fairy, who didn’t feel that well, began staying in more and more, too. Occasionally, the Blue Fairy asked Pinocchio to get on the bed. Then the Blue Fairy would slowly remove the clothes from his own emaciated body with its polished blue vellum skin. Pinocchio would wriggle out of his tiny undershorts. The Blue Fairy’s bony pelvis would clink against Pinocchio’s beveled wooden hips. Their heads would bump lightly against each other and sound like someone knocking on the door, and the experience would really be quite pleasant.  

         

In truth, blank, insensible surfaces often long for decoration, in hopes of raising their status, which is probably the reason why Pinocchio soon began to yearn for a gold tooth. He had always fancied one to set off the polished sheen of his little heart-shaped face and its surly wooden mouth. He wanted it right in front, where everyone could see it. Unfortunately, the Blue Fairy thought that Pinocchio was already hard and durable and shiny enough, and as he got sicker he was beginning to wish for something softer and more enveloping; so he refused to get Pinocchio the tooth. This led to terrible fights that exhausted the Blue Fairy and left Pinocchio pouting.

Then, one day, the Blue Fairy went out. As soon as Pinocchio heard the key turn in the lock, he leapt from the couch and began rifling through the Blue Fairy’s drawers. And since he thought the Blue Fairy would be very angry this time and would never forgive him, he took all the money he could find. 

He ran to a jewelry store run by Chinese people in Times Square, which was still Old Times Square and no longer attracted many tourists. In the window gleamed a gold cap with a small diamond embedded in the center. The gold was very yellow, and the diamond glared brighter than a mirror. Pinocchio almost chipped his nose as he pressed closer to see and it bumped against the glass. He pointed to the gold cap and the Chinese man motioned him into the store. When Pinocchio had given the man half his money, the man took a large file and began shaving Pinocchio’s upper front tooth away. 

Pinocchio’s mouth filled with saw dust, and he was afraid he would choke to death. Finally, the man held up a mirror to show that there was a little wooden stub where Pinocchio’s front tooth had been. Then the man took the gold cap with the diamond and slid it over the stump and clamped it tight by twisting it with a large pair of pliers that sent sparks flashing through Pinocchio’s brain.

*

The next few days were a blur of pleasure as he paraded through his old haunts with the gold tooth always showing. He even got the courage to go back to Playland. No one, he thought, would identify him as the bad puppet now that he had the new tooth. The gold tooth was so spectacular that it made him look like a real person. And he was sure that people would pay much more to be with someone they thought was real, a realization that made him chuckle about his bright future.

In just a few days, the rest of the money was gone. Pinocchio still had the gold tooth, but his clothes were beginning to look rumpled. What was even more distressing was the fact that he had been trapped in the rain for a whole day. His shins and forearms were beginning to feel stiff, probably because of warping, and his joints made a creaking sound. The next day a whole gang of giant rats from the subway who had watched Pinocchio boast about his gold tooth and wanted it chased him down the Up escalator at inside the whale called Port Authority. The little puppet with the warped shins stumbled and went rolling down the escalator stairs with a crash. His head struck the railing, and the tooth popped out. One of the rats snatched it up and off they scrambled.

From then on, Pinocchio looked like a little puppet with a dizzy smile and a dark gap in his mouth. He never grew any bigger. Everyone knew he was a puppet, stick-limbed as he had become. What’s more, his warped shins and forearms made him move in a jerky way that some found charming but others thought was a bit pitiful and robotic. Now and then he remembered the manuscript that the man in the Bowery had been writing and wondered what it might be like to be a real boy. But he thought of the possibility less and less. Thus, little Pinocchio found his calling early in life. Even as he neared twenty-eight, he was still stuck mimicking the charm of the wobbly-headed playmate, easily influenced yet unpredictable, accommodating yet wooden.

 

If this story has made you a bit squeamish, recall that those born in misfortune and toughened by hard luck endure with little complaint levels of suffering that to most are unimaginable. Theirs is the blank smile of constant hardship, unmitigated by others’ pity and destined to repetition. Some become entertainers, because little wooden faces branded with sparkling eyes and shiny lips have been marketed as playthings through the ages. For a surprisingly long time, their noses and other aggressive appendages merely grow stronger and more insensitive the more they are abused.