Category: Uncategorized

talk is cheap

but even at that

the dinosaurs have no cash

*

in Coco Chanel’s apartment

a giant meteor

and a puff of smoke

*

drifting toward sleep —

dark perfume

falling off a cliff

*

he rises

at night to write down

strange chords

*

even before

he could walk, his crib

floated on water

*

diamond —

a gathering

of windows

*

falling rain

reveals the mirrors

hid in clouds 

*

a treatment

for claustrophobia — to swallow

elixir of mirrors

*

toward my back door

slow as a glacier

a graveyard flows

*

a tiny uncharted island —

a place

to hide from Egypt

*

mummy cloth

in a few centuries

I’ll unwrap myself

*

to prepare

for the Sack of Rome —

tea and toast

*

guns grow limp

unable to get hard

they die out

*

changing tastes –

once-famous paintings

are melting

*

behind Mona Lisa’s

third eye a temple of glass

still under construction

*

wet or dry

the stones are happy

to be a cathedral

*

inside a marble head

there is no memory

of Ancient Rome

*

in Kansas City

in a house of glass

a banker consults an astrologer

*

reaching up

Gertrude Stein catches

a bird in any sky

*

Gertrude Stein is laughing

a ball is falling to pieces

who fly away

*

just when I almost

saw the wind’s face

it changed

*

in Antarctica

researchers hallucinate

in fields of snow

*

like the Great Pyramid

there are many snowflakes

I’ll never see falling

*

in Gertrude Stein

patterns emerge

as fish in flight

*

it’s too beautiful –

I cannot finish

the novel

The 2 doctors have determined that I’m 24 years old. (By my teeth, among other things. Making me feel like a horse. A mare.) & that I’ve had at least one miscarriage.

               Probably more than one: according to the mother figure of the team, Dr. Rachel Krotkin. The father figure is Dr. George Gamble Jr.. A junior who is pushing 50. I can’t understand why anybody wants to stay a son that long. Unless his father is a king.

               For the time being the 2 doctors have become my home base. My frame of reference. They could be my parents, if they were married. To each other. If they had been nonprofessionally attracted to each other some 25 years ago. & were claiming me as their lost daughter. Which they’re not.

               (Professionally they’re not attracted to each other. They treat each other with condescending politeness.

               Both married outsiders. & are the parents of other daughters. That are neither lost nor found. Dr. Junior’s desk is dominated by a set of silver-framed gap-toothed high school twins, & Dr. Krotkin is divorced, with an unphotographed daughter in college.

               Leaving me free to be anybody’s daughter. Sister. An orphan. A wife. A lover. Anything I want to be. Without a past, life, has almost unlimited possibilities.)

               Apparently my miscarriage or miscarriages was or were induced. Fortunately: for my teeth. (Again.) A maturing pregnancy, culminating in childbirth    especially one without early & continued medical surveillance    would most likely have left me with a mouth full of cavities. I have a calcium deficiency as it is.  

 

My mind trips to a long low room

choked in phlegmy white light.

A host of young men in gleaming white

jackets swarms after an old man’s bald-

gleaming head.

He leads them to a long low cot between

2 window slits.

He lifts a sheet off a long thin body,

sapped by long bluish-black hair.

He lifts the hair, revealing the dark

cavity of a skull emptied of its brain.

& a thin necklace of small pale-blue

beads at the base of a long thin neck.

The old doctor’s fingers travel down the

thin long body. Pause at the heart    the

lungs    the spleen    the liver. Wait for a 

student to determine the cause of death:

 

               Both doctors politely agree that I would not have subjected myself to early & continued medical surveillance    availed myself of: was the term used by Dr. G.G.jr.; not even for the sake of a new life    to judge by my overall physical condition. I obviously didn’t take very good care of myself.

               Perhaps I’m a doctor’s daughter. Worse: a doctors’ daughter. (Smiles. Smiles. Politely smiled acknowledgement: by Dr. Gramble.) & rebelled against my parents’ concern with health. Which I considered deadly. (Smiles: Dr. Krotkin has beautiful teeth.) A drag. Perhaps running myself down had felt like a form of freedom to me. The preparation for my eventual escape into amnesia.

 

My mind is driving down an endless highway.

There is a white string running along the

road ahead of me. Sometimes it runs straight,

sometimes in curves. Sometimes on the left,

sometimes on the right.

I wonder nervously if the string is attached

to a stick of dynamite. If the road is under 

construction, & I missed the detour sign. I

seem to be the only car.

I feel relieved when I see a trailer. With 

a red & white band: WIDE LOAD stretched across

the back. I can’t pass. I wave to the woman

who is sitting crosslegged on the trailer roof.

She waves back with a wine bottle. She

is singing: Sweet Wide Load…to the tune 

of: Caroline Rice.

She is Ariadne on Naxos, drinking herself

to death after Theseus dropped her off.

She is still holding on to the thread, with

the other hand.

 

               It doesn’t look as though I’d been too poor to be healthy. I had $2,200 — in my coat pocket when I walked into the police station. I wasn’t carrying a purse.

               They’re still guessing where the money came from. If it was my own. Which I had saved, & drawn out. To go away. To buy a car, perhaps, to go away in.

               It turns out that I don’t know how to drive. They tested me. They both think it unlikely that I would not have retained a mechanical skill. They both think my body would remember the necessary gestures, even if my mind has taken leave of my past. (I do remember how to ride a bicycle. Also how to swim.)

               They both deduced that I lived in a big city, where one doesn’t need a car to get around. I’m likely from New York.

               Dr. Gamble tried to make me into a cashier, a bookkeeper, etc., on my way to the bank. Who was attacked, but not robbed. Perhaps partially robbed; perhaps I’d had more money in my coat pocket, at the outset. Something/someone had interrupted my attackers. Who had, however, robbed me of my memory.

               Perhaps I stole the money. My co-workers’ hard-earned weekly pay. & so shocked myself in the act that I forgot everything about the dishonest bookkeeper I had become, & my conscience programmed me to turn myself in. Continuing to function on its own, like the legs of beheaded thieves, running around the execution block.

I have a sudden flash vision:

The chalk-white back of a chicken, standing

stone-still in the middle of a highway in

the middle of the night.

Cars are swerving around it on either side.

I cannot see the chicken’s head. It must be

hanging forward, all the way to the ground.

Perhaps its neck is broken. Perhaps it

broke its neck when it tried to fly off the truck

that was carrying poultry to a city market.

In the middle of a summer.

 

               The vision was associated with heat. My skin felt wrapped in a stinging cheesecloth of sweat.

               Both doctors made a note of it. They haven’t decided whether I actually saw such a chicken at one point    perhaps a crucial point    in my life, & my memory is trying to come back. (The association with heat points to memory: in Dr. Krotkin’s opinion.) Or whether I imagined it.

               The various reports of recent robberies which the police checked out don’t fit my story. & I did singularly poorly when Dr. Gamble tested my business aptitudes. I seem to have no relationship to figures. To adding machines. To the price of butter.

               My hands show no trace of a manual occupation. I don’t seem to know how to cook. I type: with 2 fingers.

               Only that I used to bite my nails. (I’ve stopped.)

               Perhaps I’m still in college. & the money was meant for my tuition. Dr. Krotkin is sending photographs & descriptions of me to every college in America.

               It is both doctors’ educated guess that I’m American-born. Upper middle class: to judge by my way of speaking. From New York. Or Boston. Perhaps from a larger city in California. (Although most Californians know how to drive.) Definitely not from the South.

               My ethnic background is most likely central European: to judge by my bone structure. &    once again    by my teeth

               My mother was mostly likely born in Central Europe, anyway between Danzig & Grenoble. Probably after the first world war    between 1920 & 1930    & raised on skimmed milk and rutabagas. Which produced the calcium deficiency which she passed onto me.

               Dr. Gamble (jr.) would like to include Ireland. My mother might very well have been    might well still be    Irish.

               On the other hand, I might have been born in Europe myself. & the after-effects of the second world war cumulated with those of the first, in my teeth.

               I may have been born in a concentration camp, toward the very end of the war. Perhaps a surprisingly resilient 28, rather than a neglected 24.

               Which Dr. Gamble (jr.) doubts: I don’t look Jewish.

               I would, if he knew I was: is Dr. Krotkin’s coolly smiled opinion.

               Perhaps my American-born, definitely upper middle class    probably intellectual    parents failed to give me the proper attention. For whatever selfishness of their own. I probably come from a broken home.

I have a flash vision:

Long black hair hanging out to dry from a

French window, above a garden of weeds.

In the weed lie the weather-flattened

bodies of 3 one-day-old kittens.

They have been lying in the weeds for a long

time. A month or more. They look as flat as

cardboard cut-outs.

The face under the hair is round & white.

It is watching a German shepherd that has 

jumped over the wall into the garden. & has

picked up one of the cardboard kittens. &

is shaking it from side to side, like a

slipper. With laughing teeth.

 

               It turns out that I speak fluent idiomatic Spanish. With a Latin-American inflection.

               They’ve been testing me on a number of languages. So far, I seem to know Spanish, Portuguese, & French. But no Italian. Also Dutch; but no German.

               Dr. G.G. jr. suggests that I went to school in those different countries, as a little girl. Perhaps I’m a diplomat’s daughter.

               Dr. Krotkin has a different suggestion: My knowledge of languages is psychic. I don’t really know any of the languages they tested me in    except upper middle class American English    but am able to pull them out of the collective subconscious under test conditions.

               Perhaps I’m a medium. Who suspended her personal consciousness once too  long    once too often    while going into a trance. & came out with no recollection of myself.

               Then how does she explain the fact that I neither read nor speak nor write nor understand Italian? Or German?

               By the fact that the manifestations of mediums are as subject to the law of hit or miss as the diagnoses of doctors.

               I’m beginning to like Dr. Rachel Krotkin. At least she isn’t pompous.

               I wonder how the unphotographed daughter feels about her irreverently smiling doctor-mother. Perhaps she is going to college mainly to be away from her mother. Perhaps most girls think that they would rather have most other girls’ mothers.

               But not most other girls’ fathers. The gap-toothed high school twins open wide for no one but their daddy.

               Who is beginning to direct his professional irritation with Krotkin’s beautiful teeth against my defenseless past: Perhaps I’m an escaped mental patient…

               Who was kidnapped by one of my divorced upper middle class intellectual diplomat parents. Who felt guilty about my being institutionalized. Or refused to admit that any daughter of his or hers could be anything but the sanest; professional opinions to the contrary notwithstanding. & sneaked me out of the institution, to take me home. & now feels embarrassed about having lost me somehow somewhere along the way.

               Too embarrassed to notify the Missing Persons’ Bureau.

               Perhaps he or she is glad to be rid of me.

 

               My tested reflexes & reactions appear to be those of a “normal” approximately 24-year-old “female.” Who has, however, lost her memory. & presents a somewhat baffling mixture of knowledge and ignorance.

               The Missing Persons’ Bureau was called immediately. While I was still at the police station. None of the missing “females” on record fits my description. None of the missing “females” on record fits my description. They’re either too young, or too old, or too fat, or too tall.

               The closest, so far, is the missing 21-year-old granddaughter of an ancient woman from Staten Island who refuses to go home until she has had a look at me.

She raised the girl, apparently, to permit her own daughter to pursue a career. Or to remarry. The missing girl’s mother has not appeared so far.

Dr. Gamble would like to allow the ancient woman to take a look at me. Even though the photographs she brought with her

a stack of baby pictures; most of them against a garden background

a sequence of classroom photos of an increasingly plump schoolgirl from 7 through 10; of a fat girl of 12, hiding in her hair

a family reunion of 3 generations of seated women under last year’s Christmas tree: the lost overweight granddaughter wedged between a slim wan-eyed mother & a bone-sculptured grandmother

have nothing whatsoever in common with the photographs they’ve been taking of me. Which the old woman has seen.

               The lost granddaughter is a plump sullen girl of 21    still a virgin    with a thick black braid halfway down her back. I’m a skinny short-haired blonde (of 24?) with a wide & ready smile. (& I’ve had at least one miscarriage.)

Nonetheless Dr. Gamble favors a confrontation. He feels sorry for the ancient woman. Who is blaming her lack of vigilance for what happened.

She is convinced that I am her granddaughter. (Who has my height apparently: 5’5”.)

That someone abducted me. & altered my appearance. Better to hide me from her. & that I managed to get away from my captor with what he had left me of my once very good mind.

(& with $2,200.—in my coat pocket?)

& ran to the police for protection.

She is sure that she will recognize me the instant she sees me face to face. By certain subtle traits that cannot be altered. Certain little gestures & facial expressions that don’t show on a photograph.

               Dr. Krotkin does not favor a confrontation. At least not just yet. She fears that it will depress me. Unnecessarily, since I’m obviously not the missing granddaughter from Staten Island. The coincidence of height    an average height of 5’5”    hardly constitutes sufficient evidence. Her daughter measures 5’5”, too.

               Dr. Krotkin also feels sorry for the ancient woman. But would hesitate to risk delaying my recovery for the sake of compassion. She will resist becoming sentimental about grandmothers. She believes in equal rights for the young.

She has been known to side with her daughter against herself, on occasion. When her daughter was still in her teens.

               Dr. Gamble has difficulty conceiving of a parent-child relationship that furnishes occasions for taking sides. He would hesitate to deprive his twins of the loving authority all children need. & crave. A father’s warm firm hand, to point their noses in the right direction.

               He senses a lack of loving paternal authority in my upbringing. Perhaps I’ve been raised by a “modern” mother. Who prided herself on her tolerance. Which was the modern euphemism for permissiveness, more often than not. The justification for lack of interest.

               Perhaps my uninterested, selfishly tolerant modern mother had boarded me in a convent. Where authority was predominantly female. Where the father-figure wore a skirt.

               Unless she ha turned me over to her own mother… If I had been raised by my grandmother… the ancient woman from Staten Island… 

               I felt dizzy all of a sudden. I thought I was going to pass out. Every coil in my brain seemed to be pulled in a different direction.

Dr. Krotkin made me sit down. & fed me a protein wafer.

Dr. Gamble produced a liverwurst sandwich & a glass of milk fro ma small icebox behind a glass partition.

They watched me eat. Decidedly, I didn’t take very good care of myself.

…Because someone else had ceased to care, perhaps?

               Perhaps the money in my coat pocket was a parting gift. Severance pay, from a fatigued lover    the father of my (last) induced miscarriage    who wanted to be free of me. Like another one before him. another one before that one, perhaps.

Experience    which was, after all, based on remembering    had taught me what to expect. & made me apprehensive. More vulnerable. My mind refused to accept another rejection.

Or rather: my mind, too, rejected me. It rejected the 24 years during which I had grown into what I was: REJECTABLE. & my calcium deficiency    aided by an empty stomach    supplied the chemical way out.

Dr. Krotkin thinks that my amnesia is most likely the result of starvation. The cumulation of years of emotional malnutrition. To which I later added not-eating.

               Out of adolescent laziness, at first. Until I discovered that not-eating induced a certain state    of trance    into which I could escape. From situations that were not to my liking. Which I lacked the strength to handle in a healthier, more constructive fashion.

               My loss of memory was my most radical attempt at escape. It was not unlike a suicide attempt. Which was why she would prefer not to expose me to the ancient woman. At least not for a while. In case the ancient woman managed to turn herself into the grandmother who had raised me. Who had painstakingly depressed my impressionable years.

               Dr. Krotkin did not approve of throwing a survivor back into the environment from which the escape had been attempted.

               & Dr. Gamble did not approve of sending a poor old woman home to Staten Island to sit in front of a blind television, imagining gorier & gorier details about the abduction

    rape/murder; Frankenstein surgery    of a missing granddaughter, if the granddaughter had perhaps been found.

               Dr. Krotkin finally, shruggingly, agreed to a compromise: They would let the old woman have a look at me through one of the glass doors to the hall.

               I stood on the office side, & the old woman stood on the hall side of the glass. She peered at me for a long time. From different angles. With & without her glasses. Coming up very close. Stepping back again, as from a painting. Sniffing at me with her eyes, through the glass.

               I gave her a wide smile, & she shook her head, & turned away.

I felt relieved. Even through the glass the sight of her had made me feel heavy. Morose. Unwilling to assume the duty of being alive.

               Which was made up of an orderly sequence of derivative duties: Such as breathing. Brushing one’s teeth; one’s hair. Cleaning one’s body. Feeding it. Exercising it. Giving it sufficient rest. Never overexerting it, be it in work or in play. Least of all in play. In order to keep it in good functioning order. In order to go on breathing brushing cleaning feeding, etc., in order to etc. . A dutiful virtuous circle that beckoned me to be its center.

She had made the whole day look shabby.

               I said I felt sorry for the old woman. & I meant it. Her back had looked defeated, when she turned away. I almost felt like knocking on the glass to call her back. To let her make me into the granddaughter she is looking for.

Whom she might reject, when she learned about the miscarriage(s): Dr. Krotkin laid an arm around my shoulders. She would have permitted no such thing…

 

They took my fingerprints, at the police station. I didn’t seem to be on record. I’m neither wanted. Nor a naturalized American citizen. Nor a civil servant.

The policeman who turned my fingers    one by one    in the black ink commented on my bitten fingernails: Why would a nice-looking chick…

               Later, Dr. Krotkin commented on my toenails. Which also looked bitten. She made me sit on the floor, & bring one foot up to my face. She laughed when I hooked both heels behind my neck. She asked if I wanted a book to read. I looked so comfortable in that position. 

mother’s onigiri

Without warning my mother tells me, “I was orphaned at your age.” I look into her marble eyes, and they seem to be asking me if I understand: the pain. Do you feel the pain? Of course I do. I feel all the pain. I unlock my eyes from hers and look down at the table, in between us are stained, empty plates. Only moments ago, the plates were filled with food that we’d cooked in the small kitchen together, the apartment filling with the smell of salted salmon, fresh white rice, vegetable and tofu soup. They are all gone now—things are so fleeting.

“She died when I was 29. Your age,” my mother continues. “Can you imagine losing me right now?” A tiny bomb sets off in my ribcage. Just a few nights ago, I had a dream that my mother was a stranger. She did not die, but it felt worse. The woman looked familiar, but I did not recognize her as my mother. I woke up terrified, the feeling of not having a mother lingering in my body for a moment before my consciousness reminded me that I had a mother still. Her marble eyes are still looking at me, into me, so I mutter a broken “no.” I cannot imagine her dying now. Or ever. “She died when I needed her the most,” she says. I do not know what to answer.

There is so much space in my brain for memories with my grandmother. My brain contains none. My grandmother knew me for a little while—just for a few months before the cancer got to her brain. She held me, she fed me, she changed me, she sang to me, she bathed me, she rocked me. But I don’t remember.

Lately, when people ask me what I am writing, I answer, “about my dead family.” I tell them, “It’s a way for me to bring them back to life. Or at least to remember them. I don’t have them anymore, so I need to write about them so they’re not gone.” It is an act of desperation. I have more family members who are dead than alive. I don’t know how to cope with that. I miss them—even the ones I never knew. Even the ones I never met.

My mother and I move over to the kitchen to clean up and prepare our lunches for tomorrow. We both go into work a few times a week: my mother to her office job in midtown at her Japanese bank job; me to two different college campuses for adjunct teaching jobs. It’s strange to be preparing lunch again, after a year of just eating lunches at home. Before COVID, we’d make semi-elaborate bentos out of leftover dinner, but the rhythm is gone now and usually, we scrummage through the fridge for something edible to bring, or when we remember to, we make onigiri.

I fill up the glass bowl with scoops of still-hot rice from the rice cooker and add in the onigiri mix. While I mix with a rice paddle, my mother washes the dishes. She glances over at me to say something. She is always saying something to me.

“I used to hate the onigiri my mother made for me when I was young,” she says, the warm water running over her hands in the sink.

“What, why?” I ask, still mixing.

“All of the other girls’ moms would make these really small, neat triangular onigiri and pack the seaweed separately, but my mother would make these giant balls pre-wrapped with seaweed. They looked like black baseballs.”

I can’t help but laugh. I can picture my mother in middle school sighing as the two big balls of rice covered in black stared back at her. I can see the girls sitting around her smiling politely but also widening their eyes a little at the intenseness of my grandmother’s onigiri.

“I would give anything to have one of those now, though,” she says. I stop mixing and look at her. I look at her hands. My grandmother was younger than my mother is now when she died. Her hands were younger than my mother’s. I imagine my grandmother’s young hands cupping and shaping rice into balls for her children. I imagine that her movements were fast, just like my mother’s.

“And you know why she wrapped every square inch with seaweed?” “Why?” I ask her, curious. “Her brother was a seaweed maker. Actually, our entire family was seaweed makers. It was in her blood. She loved seaweed, and she wanted to make sure we could taste the sun in every bite.” “The sun?” “How do you think they dried seaweed?”

I nod in silence and continue to mix the rice. I do not cup them in my hands like my grandmother had done because I have an onigiri mold, and using a mold saves time and effort. I scoop some rice into the mold and press it with the top piece until it becomes a nice triangle and I pop it out of the mold. I make four onigiris in total—two for each of us. I then open the freezer to take out two sheets of seaweed. I roast them directly on the flame of the stove to get rid of the freezer taste. This is my favorite part: I like watching the sheets stiffen and take on a bluish hue. The smell reminds me of home, of my aunt’s house in Japan made of ancient wood. It was built by my great-grandparents, and my grandmother had moved into it as a young woman to marry my grandfather, despite the neighborhood gossip that my grandfather’s mother was the meanest woman around. My grandmother didn’t care—she was in love and full of hope.

Much of my childhood was spent in this home, despite it not being my own. It had been passed onto my aunt, who married and had two children—my two older cousins. We’d have dinner there two, maybe even three times a week: my aunt, my uncle, my cousins, my mother, my sister, me at the table. The smell of old wood and tatami was constant and everywhere, and it would mix with the delicious aroma of my aunt’s cooking. On special occasions like New Year’s or a birthday, we would have hand-rolled sushi. A big, wooden bowl of rice mixed with vinegar as the centerpiece; two plates of sashimi on each side with tuna, salmon, salmon roe, octopus, squid, shrimp, mackerel. Sticks of cucumber on smaller plates; a bottle of soy sauce and a small tube of wasabi, which I hated back then. And of course, the seaweed cut into neat squares and stacked on top of one another like paper. Before everything was ready, before everyone was seated at the table, my aunt pulled out sheets and sheets of seaweed and roasted them on the open flame while the children played in another room. The smell found us, causing us to pause briefly to revel in the excitement of a special dinner. Life was simple like that. My sister and me in our cousins’ small bedroom playing next to their bunkbed. In the other room, a Buddhist shrine and framed photos of our grandparents and great grandparents—everyone who had lived in this house before us watching over us.

When the seaweeds are roasted, I slowly rip them in half and wrap the onigiri. I make sure that all the rice is covered. My mother is distracted by the washing and doesn’t notice what I am doing.

“Look,” I tell her when I am finished, just as I used to when I was a little girl showing her something I’d drawn with a crayon.

“Hm?” she looks up, smiling widely. Whenever she looks up at me like this, she glows like the orange sun melting into the horizon.

“Fumie-nigiri,” I tell her. Fumie was my grandmother’s name.

My mother pauses. She looks at the seaweed-covered rice balls. For a moment she looks to be on the verge of tears. But the moment is gone, and she smiles again. “Wow, you don’t know how happy your grandmother would’ve been to have an onigiri named after her.”

It’s true, I don’t know how happy she would’ve been. But the thought of being able to make my grandmother smile the way my mother smiles is enough.

This is how I will keep her alive.

Now

The alarm goes off for the second time. N reaches around J, hits the alarm, sits on the side of the bed. J hides farther under the blankets. A gray morning.

We have to get up, N says. You have to go to work. I have to pick up the dog.

Fuck work, J says into the pillows, Fuck the dog. Fuck you. 

We don’t have time for that, N says. 

N goes out to the kitchen, starts making coffee. There are strange sounds in the living room. N pours two mugs of coffee and carries one into the living room to see what’s making the sounds. 

It’s a baby. 

A baby is strapped into a car seat in the middle of the living room. It’s watching dust particles in the air and making odd noises. N stares at the baby. The baby stares at N. Then the baby goes back to looking at the dust. 

Come look at this, N says.

J stands in the doorway behind N, takes the coffee.  

I thought we agreed not to have kids.

Where’d it come from?

They look at the baby. The baby looks at them. The baby cries. J passes the coffee to N and picks up the baby. The baby stops crying.

Aw, look at it. Can we keep it?

Is it house broken? 

N goes back to the kitchen, sits at the table. J sits at the table, holding the baby. 

Where do we report a found baby?

N shrugs. They drink coffee. 

What am I supposed to do today, if they don’t believe the dog was lost?

Make it convincing. Take this baby.

We don’t have a baby registered.

They both look at the baby. The baby cries. N takes the baby from J, pushes up its sleeve, looks at its forearm. 

This baby isn’t registered.

J finishes drinking coffee, gets up. 

I have to get ready for work. We have to leave. Everything’s going to be fine. 

J kisses N, then kisses the top of the baby’s head.

Don’t do that. It’s not ours.

It’s not anybody’s. And it showed up in our living room. 

J goes into the bedroom.

You can’t be thinking about keeping it. 

N follows J into the bedroom. 

Really. We can’t keep it.

The baby is still crying. J is getting dressed.

It’s probably hungry. Do we have milk or something?

Just creamer. 

Try giving it that. 

J grabs a bag from the floor, keys off the dresser. 

Look, I’m sorry, but what else are we supposed to do? It’s not registered and you’re already listed and now they found the dog. If we report it, one of us will probably disappear. Now let’s go.

N puts the baby in the car seat, grabs the dog’s papers from the counter. They get in the car and J drives to the city. J and N don’t talk. The baby cries. They reach J’s office.

We’ll figure it all out tonight.

Right.

Try not to make problems.

Right.

The car door slams and the baby stops crying. N looks at the baby. The baby cries again.

*

N tries to hold the baby like someone used to holding a baby, but the room is cold and the minor official is making N feel uncomfortable. The baby is making the minor official feel uncomfortable. The minor official doesn’t get many babies in the office. The baby is crying and hiccupping. N pats its back and bounces it up and down like N’s seen people do with babies. 

I know losing a pet is painful, the minor official says, And I don’t want to make it any more painful for you. But illegally disposing of bodies is serious. It gets people listed.

I’m already listed.

The minor official grows more uncomfortable.

Yes. Well. Make sure you file the proper paperwork this time. And if you know who might have buried your dog, contact us. I just need you to identify the body.

Of course.

An orderly rolls a cart covered in a plastic sheet into the room. Under the plastic sheet is the dog. N looks at the dog. It looks worse than it did when J and N buried it last week.

Yes, N says, That’s our dog.

If you could just sign here? the minor official says.

*

N waits in line at the city exit with a baby strapped into a car seat in the front, and a dead dog wrapped in plastic in the back. The security officers look suspiciously at the car, but once they see the baby and smell the dog they wave N through.

Make sure you file that burial report correctly, one of them tells N.

Right, N says. Thanks.

If you don’t, they’ll send you to the middle of nowhere next time. 

The officer is leaning against the car, one hand on the roof.

Right, N says. Thanks.

Just file it correctly, the officer says, still leaning against the car, And there’s nothing to worry about. Not like those feral cats. Always got to worry about them. 

The officer laughs. N laughs.

Right, the officer says, smacking the top of the car, Have a good one.

N drives back through the gray countryside with the unregistered baby wailing in the front, and the illegally disposed dead dog smelling in the back.

*

 It’s night. The baby is in blankets in a box. The dead dog is in plastic in the garage. N and J are in bed but awake.

A burial permit is expensive, J says, And the burial spot is insanely expensive. 

J doesn’t say that they can’t afford it because N isn’t allowed to work now, but they both know that’s why.

You can’t pull any strings?

I used up all my favors at work, J says. 

J doesn’t say, because of you. J rolls over and puts an arm around N. 

But I was looking at burial permits, and I think we could forge one pretty easily.

They’ve flagged the file. They’ll be waiting for it.

Yeah, but they won’t check at the place itself. Not for a dog.

What will we do with it, though? It didn’t work last time.

The baby grunts in its fake crib. They’re silent.

How do you think they found it?

I don’t know, N says. The same way they found me. The same way they’ll find this baby. 

The baby cries. 

*

It’s late evening. J is driving. N is in the passenger seat fooling with the radio. The baby is in the backseat. The dog is wrapped in plastic and tied to concrete blocks in the trunk. They’ve been driving for a long time and the smell of the dog is seeping through the trunk and into the car. The baby won’t stop crying. They stop at the checkpoint. A security officer walks to their car.

Evening, J says, and passes over the forged burial certificate. 

N tries to look like someone on a family outing to bury a dead dog. The security officer looks at the paper, hands it back to J, asks something. J can’t hear because the baby is crying. The guard shrugs and waves them through. They pull away from the booth and N turns up the radio. They pass a mansion with a giraffe in the floodlit front yard eating the topiary. They reach a picnic spot by the river. J and N look at each other. The baby stops crying.

I need a fucking cigarette.

They climb out of the car. The baby cries.

Christ, J says, and lights a cigarette.

J passes the cigarette to N, unstraps the baby from the car seat, takes back the cigarette, tries to rub the baby’s back with the same arm that is holding the baby. N lights a cigarette. J sits with the baby at a picnic table shaped like a stegosaurus while N gets the car seat out of the car. They leave the baby in the car seat on a slide that is a brachiosaurus tail while they get the dead dog out of the trunk. Something drips out of the plastic wrapping. They drop it on the ground and finish their cigarettes. Clouds cover the moon then scuttle off, hiding and showing the wide-eyed faces of wooden pterodactyls and velociraptors.

Let’s check out this river.

They walk down to the river, leaving the baby in its car seat on the slide. They walk along the bank until they find a place that looks suitable. They can hear the baby making almost crying noises, so J goes back to the playground and carries the car seat down to a log at the edge of the water. N and J go back to the car and pick up the dog again. It’s too hard to carry the dog and the concrete blocks at the same time, so they untie the concrete blocks and carry just the dog to the river, then N goes back for the concrete blocks. They tie the concrete blocks back onto the dog, and wrap more rope around the plastic and the blocks just to make sure. Then J wraps duct tape around the whole thing, too. 

Its ear is sticking out.

J tapes the ear to the plastic with more duct tape. The baby watches. J and N pick up the dog and fling it out into the river. Their throw is bad, and the dog lands close to shore. One of the concrete blocks sticks out of the water. 

Fuck, J says, and lights another cigarette. 

They share the cigarette. 

Water’s fucking cold.

Fuck.

They finish the cigarette, then take off their shoes and socks and roll up their pant legs. The baby watches them. They wade out to where the dog is sticking out of the river. It’s hard to pick it up because there’s a current. J slips and they both fall and lose their grip on the dog. It sinks. N helps J stand up and they look at the spot where the dog disappeared. 

Stay this time! J shouts.

They wade back to shore. The baby is still watching them. N lights a third cigarette. 

Don’t smoke, N tells the baby, It’s bad for you.

*

It’s morning. J is at work. N finishes feeding the baby, opens a beer, and tries to figure out what they should do next. A long time passes. N drinks more beer, then calls J. Instead of J’s voicemail, there’s a pre-recorded message: 

The line you have reached is no longer in service, please check the number and dial again.

Fuck, N says. 

The baby laughs. N turns on the laptop and tries to connect to the internet but their network is unavailable. 

Fuck, N says again, and opens another beer.

When J gets home, the baby’s sock is hanging out of its mouth and it’s crawling under the coffee table after a beer can and N is sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching porn using an illegal internet connection. J picks up the baby and closes N’s laptop.

Look, J says, but isn’t sure what to say next.

At what? This shitty house? Your disconnected phone? Our disconnected internet? The fucking baby?

J doesn’t know what to say to that.

Shit.

Yeah.

We have to leave, don’t we?

Yeah.

J looks around the shitty living room with holes in the floor and mildew on the ceiling and the empty dog bed in the corner. J finishes N’s beer. 

It’d help if we could get a fake registration for the baby.

We can, N says.  

*

They leave the baby in the car. They leave the car in the darkest place that seems like a safe place to leave a baby. They skulk through back streets to the side door of the office where N worked before being listed. 

You’re sure H is working tonight?

Yes, N says, which is sort of a lie. Help me climb onto the dumpster.

J helps N climb onto the dumpster. N looks in the window. 

Shit.

A cat climbs out of the dumpster and rubs against J’s legs, purring. 

What’s up?

The cat hisses and scratches J’s leg.

Shit, J says, and jumps. 

N knocks on the window. The cat meows. Another cat joins it.

H is in there, N says, But not moving.

Sleeping?

I don’t know. Do you have a screwdriver?

Hang on.

J finds something that can work and passes it to N. N pries the bars away from the window, unlatches the frame, slides into the room. J waits outside, watching the cats. The cats watch J. Two more cats climb out of the dumpster.

Fuck off, J tells the cats, but the cats don’t do anything. They sit in a semi-circle around J’s feet. N’s face reappears in the window. 

Can you climb up here on your own?

You can’t just open the door?

It reads thumbprints.

Can’t H open it?

Um. 

N disappears, reappears in the window a few minutes later. 

Yeah, stand by the door.

J stands by the door. The cats stand by the door. There’s the sound of something being dragged on the other side of the door, then the door unlocks, opens. J slips inside. Cats slip inside. J trips over a body.

Get up. I have to make H close the door.

J gets up quickly. The body is soft but cold and not comfortable to lie on. 

Give me a hand with the arm?

J helps N push H’s dead thumb against the thumb pad. The door locks. N sets H’s body down against the wall and rifles through H’s pockets.

What are you looking for? 

A key card. Otherwise we need H’s thumb to get anywhere. Why are there cats in here?

They followed me in.

Do we have a knife?

Why?

I don’t want to carry H through the whole building. We only need a thumbprint.

No.

Would you rather carry a cadaver?

N opens a drawer next to a microwave by the sink. 

Think this will work? 

N holds up a steak knife.

You’re crazy.

Yes.

N starts sawing off H’s thumb. It takes a long time to saw the thumb off with a steak knife, but they manage. N washes the thumb off in the sink, then puts it into a plastic bag from the drawer under the microwave.

What if someone comes?

No one is going to come. H is the only one on the night shift. 

J follows N out into the hallway and through a couple of high security doors — using H’s thumb to open them — and into the cubicle where N used to work. N sits at a computer, punches in information, and the printer spits out some pages. N takes the pages.

We can go.

That’s it?

That’s all I did last time.

It didn’t work that well last time.

Yea, so I’m sure it will work at least that well this time.

They go back through the high security doors and the hallways and into the security room. One of the cats is curled up on H’s back. Two are licking up the blood at the stump on the side of H’s right hand. Another is chewing on H’s ear.

I guess we don’t have to worry about anyone wondering what happened to H’s right thumb, N says.

Fuck, J says.

They use H’s right thumb to exit the building.

*

Their old apartment sits empty on the edge of the city. No one changed the locks after they were relocated, so it’s easy to get inside. J feeds the baby rice cereal and the baby smears it into its hair. N takes things out of a large bag and places them on the kitchen counter. 

How long do you think we have? 

N takes a bottle of rubbing alcohol and another of whiskey out of the bag.

At least today. Probably tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

N lays a packet of razor blades and a roll of gauze next to the rubbing alcohol. 

It depends what their reason is: the dog, the baby, the forgery. You haven’t done anything else have you?

Not yet. You?

I’ve been the model citizen since you were listed.

They laugh, because that’s a lie. N takes tweezers and plastic gloves from the bag and puts on a pair of the gloves. 

Ready?

Wait.

J opens the whiskey bottle, drinks. N drinks.

Ready?

J takes another drink, grimaces, and puts the baby in its car seat. J and N sit cross-legged on the floor. N pulls up J’s shirtsleeve and rubs alcohol along J’s forearm. It doesn’t take N long to cut out the small piece of plastic with J’s registration on it. It’s something N’s done before. J sits still and holds a gauze pad in place while N washes off the tweezers and razor blade. J isn’t as experienced at cutting out N’s registration, and N winces and swears.

What do we do with them now?

I don’t know.

They drink whiskey and look at the registration chips. 

We could break them.

We could leave them here.

Frame them and hang them on the wall.

Throw them in the river with the dog.

Don’t disrespect the dog.

They laugh and so does the baby. They both reach for the whiskey bottle at the same time, laugh again, and kiss. The baby stops laughing and cries.

Fucking baby.

N breaks into a neighbor’s internet and finds hypnotic music videos for the baby to watch. Then, when the baby is sleeping, J and N drink the rest of the whiskey and watch porn and fool around a little and fall asleep.

*

N wakes up looking at the baby’s face while it hits N on the head.

What? N says. 

The baby drools on N’s face.

You’re disgusting.

 N reaches for a shirt. It’s J’s shirt, but N puts it on anyway. The baby smears snot across its cheek. 

Wake up J. The baby is filthy and we have to leave.

My arm hurts.

I know. My head hurts.

I know. 

The baby crawls around the living room and tries to eat pieces of the carpet while N and J get dressed. Then N climbs down into the alley and J hands out the baby, then climbs out the window and they walk to the car. 

Do you want to drive?

J pulls out a pack of cigarettes. 

Light? 

N lights J’s cigarette. J inhales, exhales. 

Thank god.

N lights a cigarette. 

Where’s the baby going?

Under the car. 

They watch the baby lick the back tire. N puts the baby in the car seat and finishes the cigarette. They get into the car and leave.

 

Before

It’s N’s birthday and H and the rest of the security department from work are throwing a party. N isn’t thrilled about it but it’s easy to get allowances for birthday parties. H and the rest of the security department from work are not N’s favorite people, and when N gets drunk N says things that shouldn’t be said. The bar here is great and N wants to get drunk and leave with a stranger. People keep showing up, friends of friends and friends of those friends. N decides the party needs to end soon. One of the friends of a friend’s friend is J. N checks out J from across the table. J sees, and smiles, and N acts like it was a mistake. N decides the party needs to end with N bringing J home. H stands up and proposes a toast, and then every other member of the security department stands up and makes a toast and while everyone is toasting, N slips off to the bathroom. Walking out of the bathroom, N runs into J.

Hurry and get back. The wait staff is going to bring you cake and sing, J says.

Fuck.

Want to get out of here?

Fuck yes.

They sneak out of the restaurant and drink in an alley after curfew, hiding from the patrols, and then finish getting drunk at N’s place. By the end of the night, J knows everything the security department can’t know, and by the end of the year they’ve bought a dog on the black market and more or less moved in together and are talking about registering as a couple. N doesn’t really hang out with the security department anymore, which bothers H a little, but is probably safer.

*

There’s still a hint of a chlorine smell despite the layers of dirt and piles of leaves and trash. There aren’t many trees in the city, but there seem to be leaves everywhere.

Last time I was here, I startled up a whole colony of cats.

Are they still here?

Probably. But they live in the rooms off to the side, so we’re okay in here.

N leads the way down the short ladder into the empty pool. The sun is weak, so the light that usually filters through the high, broken windows isn’t there and the pool doesn’t have any of its usual mystery. It’s just an empty pool filling with debris.

As long as you promise we’re not about to get attacked by cats, J says, taking N’s hand. They walk slowly along one of the long black lines on the pool’s bottom. J counts out the feet as they walk into the deep end.

Four feet. Six feet. Eight feet. Ten feet. Twelve feet. 

They look at the edge of the pool above them, at the bottom of the diving board. N lies down on the grimy pool bottom and pretends to backstroke. 

I don’t actually know how to backstroke.

J laughs and sits on N.

No horseplay.

 They make out in the deep end of the pool under twelve feet of evaporated water. A cat stands on a diving block and watches them, but leaves them alone. They laugh at their own gasps magnified by the empty room. 

*

The room is dark, small and overly warm. There aren’t that many people, but it is crowded. It isn’t clear what the meetings are about, but they’re anti-government, which gets N excited and J finds that sexy. Every fifteen minutes or so N looks at J and J looks interested in what’s being said until N looks away. From the way everyone in the room eventually pairs off and slips away, it seems the only thing the meetings accomplish is getting everyone excited to have sex with everyone else. One night everyone gets so inspired that they don’t even bother to leave, just have sex in piles of people in the windowless room.

*

They are doing what they do most nights: skulking around the streets until after curfew then going to N’s place. They walk through the dark streets, sharing a flask and smoking. A patrol is heading up the street and they hide behind a statue of a raccoon. J pulls N close by the belt loops so they are both covered in the raccoon’s shadow but also so they can kiss. They stay hidden in the shadow long after the patrol passes, until a tailless rat or a guinea pig skitters out of the shadows and into the storm drain by their feet. It’s followed by a cat. There’s scuffling, a screech, and then the rat or guinea pig climbs out of the storm drain, shakes off, and scuttles back into the shadows. N kicks a glass bottle against a wall, grabs J’s hand and they run. They run until they are panting and sweaty. The night feels colder now. 

Almost there, N says.

 J laughs because N’s place is only a few blocks away from where they started, and they wandered pretty far. They get into the building the back way, just in case the alarms were fixed. They sneak past the giant anteater chained to the dumpster, climb up the fire escape and push open the fire door that never fully closes. There are leaves and empty cans in the hallway, and it’s hard to walk quietly but they try to be silent until they reach N’s door. The apartment feels even smaller than the last time they were there.

When’s your lease up?

Two months, N says, searching through the cupboards for something to eat. 

J sits on the couch and watches. 

We should register for cohabitation and you can just move in with me officially.

Or, N says, coming over to the couch with some stale crackers and a half empty bottle of wine, We can register as a couple and apply for a new place together.

J is surprised and tries to hide the surprise but fails.

You didn’t think I’d want that, did you?

It doesn’t seem like your style.

Well, N uncorks the bottle and offers it to J, It is. Now.

J drinks the old wine and eats a stale cracker and can’t stop smiling. 

You know what else we should do? We should get a dog.

We should totally get a dog!

*

Once, when I was younger, N says, I stared down a patrol. They sent me to a program that was supposed to make me want to join the patrol, but instead it made me think it was stupid.

Once, when I was younger, J says, A patrol drove right past me and didn’t even see me. After that, I started staying out too late. 

Once, I was trapped in an alley by feral cats. I sat and stared them down until a porcupine distracted them and I escaped. Then I stopped being afraid of cats.

Once, I skipped community class for the entire quarter and no one noticed. Then I stopped caring about community.

Once, I protested the protests. A morale officer saw me and forced me into the youth brigade. I never went to another protest.

Once, I lied about my registration number for a year on all my forms. I’d gotten some numbers mixed up. But it didn’t matter, and now I lie on purpose.

I always lie about my registration number, N says. 

*

The warehouse is empty. Industrial metal platforms reach the high ceiling. The aisles are wide enough for a patrol to drive down. Their voices reverberate off the rusting beams. Pallets are tumbled across the floor, stacked on the platforms. A forklift lies on its side in the middle of an aisle. N climbs on top of it, balancing on one of the tines.

Don’t fall.

Will you catch me if I do?

You’d knock me over if I tried.

Would you at least cushion my fall?

J laughs, lights a cigarette. Something moves in the shadows. N jumps down from the forklift, falls against J. J drops the lit cigarette and it rolls across the concrete leaving a trail of sparks. They fuck next to the forklift, until J’s head hits the metal guard bars.

Do you think you have a concussion?

I think I have a fucking headache.

How many fingers am I holding up? 

How many fingers am I holding up? J asks, and holds up a middle finger.

*

They are on their way to meet a black market contact and pick out a dog. N is excited. J is excited and also nervous.

Second thoughts?

No, I’ve just never purchased anything on the black market before.

It’s easy. And you don’t get in much trouble if you’re caught.

How much trouble is not much trouble?

I don’t know. I don’t know anyone that’s gotten caught.

That isn’t comforting. We should wait. What if I did a terrible job on the papers?

You didn’t. And we’re already here.

Soon they’re looking at rows of dogs in kennels and J doesn’t care if they get caught because there is no way they are leaving without one. A few days later they will both wonder if getting a dog was really a good idea but for now they are both certain it is the best possible idea of all time.

They’re fucking adorable, J says.

They’re beyond fucking adorable, N says.

*

The day is almost cold and sunless but not quite. There’s a light rain. J hands N the bottle of whatever they’re drinking. They’re at the zoo. J stops at the bear enclosure and leans against the rail, staring into the dim, overgrown cage. The bars are rusty. Something is creaking in the wind, a cage door maybe. 

There, in the corner, J says, and points to the pile of rotting fur and bones. 

How long do you think it took to die? 

J takes back the bottle, takes a sip.

Six days.

You’re just making that up.

Yeah. Weren’t there two? Do you think one ate the other?

Probably, N says and lights a cigarette. Where’s the dog?

J points down the path towards the prairie dog pen. The dog is worrying at something in the ground. N calls the dog, but the dog never responds to being called. J whistles, and the dog looks at them like it’s thinking about listening, then goes back to whatever dead thing it’s found. They leave it and keep walking. There’s water in a shallow pool in the tiger pit, with bottles and trash floating in it. Bones are scattered around the pit, but it’s hard to know if they are tiger bones or the bones of whatever made the mistake of wandering into the pit. 

I heard someone say there was a human skull in there.

I heard that, too.

Suicide, probably.

It’s growing dark, patrol lights cutting through the sky. N pulls J inside the shell of an old snack bar and they fuck against the freezers that smell like mold. The lights flash through holes in the roof and along the ground outside and over the scummy tiger pool and fade. The dog scratches at things in the corner until it gets bored, then jumps on them and licks their faces and they laugh and push it away. It’s awkward, the way sex is always awkward. 

Once the patrol has passed they climb into the mountain lion pen and lie in the mouth of the fake rock cave and pretend the sparks in the distance are shooting stars. They share a cigarette, then a second. They don’t talk. The rain is falling a little harder now, and the dog scrambles up and down the fake hillside and then stands over them, panting, and shakes water on them. Someone is fooling around on the old playground, blowing in tubing that makes animal sounds. For a moment, it sounds like there’s still a living coyote roaming the artificial grasslands.

Paris, that phantom, corrosive state of mind America dreams of, sometimes in bright lights, sometimes adrift in a lake of splendid isolation, is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its great communal uprising. A town that nurtures rebels, it’s in the water, the filthy, whispering Seine, down after its winter rise, assaulting the walls meant to hem it in and the air that, over the centuries, scours the faces of the great men on the buildings. The city reels disaster to disaster, terrorist attacks to bloody tussles with the cops, with Parisians sensing, quite rightly, that some new outbreak is just over the horizon. Not the Apocalypse, though, never the end of things. Paris has been around too long, escaped and embraced too many tragedies, to ever say this is it. I remember Avenue Montaigne in November ’18, during one of the first and most violent clashes between the Gilets Jaunes and the cops, standing there getting soaked in the encroaching dark, while a player sat on a heap of piled up barricades and picked his way through a tune, as carefree as a summer day. The rain was ricocheting off the metal, the sirens blaring, cop cars tearing past the chi-chi boutiques in what was now a war zone – it felt like time had come to a brutal pause, and there we were, stranded on a ruined stage in a moment of eternity. Maybe the guitar player was the last man – or the first.

Paris lost two of its sacrés earlier this year. Jim Haynes, born 1933, Ghédalia Tazartès class of ’47, ripe ages for savants in the arts game with all its built-in anxiety. One born in the eleventh arrondissement which he only left on rare occasions, and the other, Parisian by adoption, who took a circuitous route from Haynesville, Louisiana to rue de la Tombe d’Issoire in the 14th. Both men made their dent on the world and yet neither leaves behind a well-loved masterpiece, a stand-alone piece of art. They won’t be remembered for that.

Social media and instant communications supposedly bring us closer and, sure, the universities turn out their cultured, opinionated graduates but do readers know who Tazartès or Haynes were? Men and women who operate below the radar are even further away now. How would an American get here to soak it up anyway, who can even think about doing it in plague time, living precariously in an America on the cusp of civil war, everyone behind masks and aiming for each other’s throats?

Tazartès is the more difficult of the two men to place, and not just for Americans. The obituary in Libération suggested that apart from avant-garde circles, he was virtually unknown in Paris. Likely so, despite touring Europe in the later years of his life. Tazartès grew up hearing Ladino in a Judeo-Spanish family, one of half a million refugees who traipsed into France in the years after Franco seized power. A revered figure in the underground, Tazartès seems to have lived his whole life as a playful, dignified child. Without being a musician in the sense of formal training, he invented a territory where he could exist and sing.

When my grandmother died, I went to the woods and began to sing. I was singing for myself, for God. I hadn’t been very kind to her, and she was a saint, while I, as a young boy, was a little devil. When she died, I realized I had no more chances to be kind to her. That inner turmoil pushed me to sing.

A trip to the South of France in his youth led to an encounter with « some kind of beatnik, » who brought poetry home to him. He read voraciously, joined rock groups for a gig or two, worked with choreographers and created the music for a successful run of Godot, all the time unsure where he was headed. In 1979 Diasporas came out on a small label. It’s a feat to make a first record which so entirely resists being absorbed into the mainstream that forty years later it still sounds raw and strange and even unbearable, filled with the mad jumble of Tazartès noisy, homemade, multi-layered tapes. Halfway through you’re about to run out of the room when Tazartès glides into a tango with lyrics by Mallarmé. It’s a great record to listen to at high volume in a cold studio early in the morning but make sure your significant other has gone out for bread or cigarettes.    

For me, I wasn’t doing music at all. I was doing something with sound, painting maybe. You close your eyes and see abstractions, colors, maybe images, your own images. My idea was to do some immaterial art, not music in particular. I wasn’t thinking, I am a musician, because I didn’t play any instrument and never studied. It was pretentious to claim that.

It’s hard to describe Tazartès in concert. It’s very awkward until suddenly it’s overwhelming. A self-effacing man in a fedora stands in front of you, alone. He looks out of place, not exactly lost but as if he too were waiting for something to happen, his dark eyes surveying the audience when not staring at the floor. You feel like you’re in a train station, killing time. The night I saw him in Boulogne-Billancourt, he started with two harmonicas piled on top of each other, very ad hoc, which he then put down in favor of a vibrating metal bowl, chanting softly in an unknown language.  A touch ridiculous. And then it slowly begins to build into a something I now realize is called Alleluia. Not the Cohen song, but a voice howling and growling through a maze of menacing, multi-leveled sounds. I didn’t know what to make of it. Tazartès wasn’t a musician or a maestro, that was obvious. Dada? Throw in all the references you like. By the end of the performance, Tavares was covered in sweat, and the crowd was in a kind of rapture. They’d completely forgotten they had a train to catch. His music is mystery, a ceremony in the dark. It’s his voice, warm and yet distant, urgent, speaking in tongues – a ritual we’ve walked in to without any preparation, a sound from somewhere far away, expressive and operatic in an invented language. A little like a cantor but traditional and radical at the same time, belonging to no one.      

Oh, it’s really just my own language. There is no sense to the words, only their sounds. I don’t like singing in French—though I do it rarely, always with humor, like a joke. And in English, with my dirty accent? No way. But there’s also something more to it—my parents would often talk together in Ladino, and so we children were unable to understand what they were saying. Thus, if they could have their own language, I could have mine too. So I invented words. … If you sing in the opera, you have to work a great deal to get the voice coming through, and you have to learn many things. But I’m born with mine. It’s only chance, or something given to me. Either way, I haven’t been grateful enough.

Sometime in the early Seventies Tazartès had the temerity to take the stage at Café OTO, at that time a center of Parisian musical life. Backed by his homemade tapes, Tazartès closed his eyes and headed off into a trance, only to find himself face to face with an enraged François Bayle. An epic confrontation: Bayle, twelve years older, the head of Groupe de Recherches Musicales, a composer in the musique concrète style, who by his early thirties had already won Europe’s prestigious music prizes. Perhaps afraid that an inspired amateur was making off with his magic, Bayle took an instant dislike to the young nobody. He insulted the audience for giving the man the time of day. ‘How can you listen to this shit?’ Tazartès remembers him hectoring the crowd. One cannot imagine two men with more opposite agendas. One on the prosperous route of official funding, composing in an acceptable, if difficult, style, the other inventing a world out of his hat, making something with no name. Yet to attend one of his performances was to see someone transform – through the medium of his body and his voice – into a kind of – what? « Not a sorcerer, not a poet, not a sound painter, not a shaman, » he replied. « I’m flattered. A biologist of sound maybe. The resonance of the world is sufficiently rich… » Tazartès travelled Europe but in a sense never left his apartment. His shouted-sung versions of Rimbaud –what a contrast ! An older man, content all his life to babel in tongues, reading the heady, pointed poems of a teenager – are bull’s eyes, nothing aesthetic or Academie Française about them. You could start with those, or his soundtrack for the 1922 silent Häxan.

What used to be called Radical Lives may still be in abundance in secret corners of the world, so secret that even Paris doesn’t know their neighbors are cooking it up. It’s not the precious announcement on social media that counts but what you do with your freedom. Tazartès had to make money for his family but he kept the project going amiably, making sounds that weren’t considered music by most people and many other musicians.  

Apart from Paris, where, as far as I can tell, they never crossed paths, maybe what links Tazartès and Jim Haynes are the bulky old Revox reel-to-reel tape decks they owned at the same time. Tazartès used one in the early Seventies in his quest to produce multi-layered ambient noise and voice, while Mick Jagger gifted one to Haynes so he could produce the audio magazine, The Cassette Gazette, whose first issue featured Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski. In the seemingly unending stream of Haynes’ contacts, that led to passing interest from John and Yoko, as well as City Lights becoming one of Bukowski’s first publishers, back when he was unknown. But I digress…

If you had met Jim Haynes as I did, at one of his famous Sunday dinners in the alley off Tombe d’Issoire in Paris south, you might have had the same reaction, that he was a charming host who knew how to put people together. And if you were especially hungry that evening for whatever you could grab, that might have been as far as it went.

Haynes was an American who lived his adult life, close to 70 years of it, in Europe, much of it in Paris. Americans like to take credit for everything but some lives, even American ones, get lived elsewhere. By necessity.

I met Haynes numerous times after that, at his come-one come-all dinners and later around Paris. The man lived to 88, making a point to make friends. The biography of people he knew is a mile long, which acts as a kind of camouflage, because after reading all of it and being suitably impressed, you are still forced to wonder, Who the hell was this guy? Maybe we aren’t meant to know. Maybe he was determined to be a living embodiment of Deleuze and Guattari’s pure line of flight.  

Touring Europe, Haynes wandered into the epochal events of Paris May ’68, participating in the takeover of the Théâtre Odeon, occupied by protesters then just as it is now. He settled in Paris, and formed an enduring association with the radical free university Paris 8 in the Bois de Vincennes, where he taught Media Studies and Sexual Politics for many years. That catches my eye, so I stay up all night reading and rereading an anthology of the Free Love movement which Jim did so much to advocate. More Romance, Less Romanticism has some great people in it, like Betty Dodson and Germaine Greer (both still among us) but from the cover onward I can’t make sense of its put downs of Romanticism, when they mean the soupy-silly technicolor version of perfect romance Americans pine for. The contributors, Haynes included, don’t have much to say about our economic civilization, they just dislike its constraints.

Not really a vision of how this new, non-possessive society might work, Romance and Haynes’ Hello I Love You ! is better appreciated as a generation’s orgasmic cry of Let me out ! directed at the elders and conformists who run the neatly designed jail of monogamy. « We have a duty to pleasure, » Haynes says in one of the many homemade films that document his life. A smiling disciple of Epicurus to the end.    

 

Splitting his time between Paris and Amsterdam, Haynes, in the company of Greer and others, launched Suck, Europe’s first sexual freedom magazine, taking it to book fairs all over the continent. He later helped organize the first Wet Dreams film festival in the Dutch capital. Contrary to the banal clichés in circulation, it was hardly just a boys’ affair. Greer, both naked and clothed, made it clear that sexual liberation was very much for women.  

Around the same time, in ’71, Haynes hooked up with Garry Davis, an ex-serviceman who, out of remorse for bombing Brandenburg during World War II, renounced his American citizenship and invented the World Passport. Davis is just the sort of person politicians and their hangers-on hate, constantly reminding them of their many failures. His short, disruptive speech at a U.N. General Assembly put it succinctly. “We, the people, want the peace which only a world government can give. The sovereign states you represent divide us and lead us to the abyss of total war.” Alberts Einstein and Camus supported his efforts but, of course, no one’s heard of him in America. Someone had to do the putdown and it fell to Eleanor Roosevelt to mock his World Passport as a « flash-in-the-pan publicity » stunt. (Translation: pay no attention to the troublemaker mocking our relentless march to annihilation.) Haynes and Davis started manufacturing World Passports and opened their embassy in Haynes’ place on Tombe d’Issoire. They did business whenever anyone knocked, even in the middle of the night. (Who needs a passport in the middle of the night?) It sounds like awfully good fun – the passports got a few people out of jail and across borders – but authorities soon took notice and in ’74, the two men were on trial in Mulhouse, France, charged with counterfeiting and fraud and finally found guilty of Confusing the Public, a crime which, lamentably, they cannot claim all to themselves.

Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, Haynes traveled Europe relentlessly, publishing texts in defense of sexual freedom, a memorial for Henry Miller and poems by Ted Joans, a black American with whom he enjoyed a long friendship. If ever there was a poet who slipped between the cracks, whose life, lived between Europe and the States, needs greater attention, it’s Joans, and in 1980 Haynes founded Handshake Editions to bring out Duckbutter Poems. Meanwhile, to dive further into the history we all forgot, Dick Gregory, the comedian-raconteur, launched his own effort to free the hostages seized in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. Haynes was his go to man in Paris, on the phone with Teheran every day, as Gregory tried to do something politicians and diplomats couldn’t.

In ’79, the famous dinner gatherings started in what was already the most famous crash pad in Paris. They lasted for the better part of forty years, and from the biographies and advertisements scattered across the internet, you can see Haynes delighted in making connections between people. He was a guy who didn’t eat up the air all around him but gave everyone room.

That would be enough for most of us but in reality, it’s the second half of his European odyssey. It’s the part I learned first. Researching his life, I got the sense of Jim Haynes as the man on the spot, the born organizer, the genial wit who knew everyone and could pull almost anything together. I wasn’t too surprised when I found out that Haynes arrived in London in ’65, with an illustrious past already behind him, to run the Traverse Theatre. He produced Joe Orton’s Loot to acclaim, carried off the Whitbread Prize and gave Yoko One the stage for her first happening. Sonia Orwell (George’s widow) rented him a flat in her basement, while introducing the Charming American to the town’s artistic elite. London was already moving. It was about to start swinging.  

Borrowing five hundred pounds from a Paris friend, he and a small band of cohorts founded The International Times. Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine played the opening night festivities. The IT, as it came to be known, is the mother of the underground press, different from the chapbooks dedicated to jazz or poetry, an actual newspaper with everybody in it. It ran for several years, a small miracle in itself. In ’67, finding two connected warehouses on Drury Lane, Haynes resigned from the Traverse and created The Arts Lab, an instant success that all cool Londoners wanted to visit, for the cinema in the basement, the art gallery on the main floor, the theatre. Haynes says, «My policy is to try to never say the word ‘no,’» and he doesn’t. As the playwright Steven Berkoff put it, « Every eccentric maverick lunatic individualist came to the Lab to lay his egg.» David Bowie rehearsed there. In 1969, unable to come to agreement with the City of London over rental, he and others squatted the empty Bell Hotel across the way. This may be the first-time artists seized abandoned buildings and put them to creative use, a practice which quickly spread to the continent and continues to this day.

Haynes was meeting everyone, saying yes to everything and keeping a social chameleon’s ledger. His journal entry for the end of ’67 reads simply, « Meet Hercules Bellville. Meet Dick Gregory and a long and warm friendship begins. Later I am his European Campaign Manager when he stands for President of the United States. Meet James Baldwin. Meet the American Ambassador to Great Britain, David Bruce, and his wife, Evangeline. Meet the Cuban Ambassador, Madame Alba Griñán. Am invited to dine with Brian Epstein and The Beatles. » Enough name dropping for one year, wouldn’t you say? Does Haynes have nothing to say about any of these people? This is 1967, a pivotal year, when Epstein committed suicide… plus a few million other matters of consequence. Character cameos are not Haynes’ forte. He’s an instigator, not a diarist and everything remains resolutely present tense.

If the Hippie Phase, like the Sexual Revolution that came after, collapsed under the weight of impossible objectives projected onto a society quite content with Business As Usual, movements aren’t really measured by success or failure, by those famous Lasting Changes people bang on about. It’s a question of giving human beings oxygen and ideals and letting them live their lives with a dose of freedom.

Of course, Haynes didn’t exactly arrive in London an unknown. Why follow the trail backwards like this? I want to excavate the life of the man I met in Paris, whose past he only slowly revealed, in anecdotes. He wasn’t a show off and he didn’t drone on endlessly about the fabulous ’60s.

In 1956, after drifting out of Louisiana State University, «the country club of the South» without a degree, Haynes enrolled in the Air Force, managing to finesse assignment to the U.S. base in Kirknewton, Scotland.  

This is the moment that interests me, when so much is possible, when a human being’s antenna are up without knowing exactly what those marvelous possible things might be. It isn’t Haynes’ first trip to Europe but he’s on his own now, as if he’s standing on a moor, taking the long view through the clouds. He has to invent a life to go with his new-found freedom. Haynes didn’t waste time.

Within a few years, he’d done his military service, finished university and opened a bookstore in the Jekyll and Hyde-haunted stone labyrinth they call Edinburgh. The Paperback openly sold the still-banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as American imports the Village Voice and Evergreen Review.

A pious Presbyterian lady came around to purchase Lawrence’s novel, only to take it outside for a dramatic public burning. Scandal pays dividends of all kinds. Word got around and Haynes soon made the acquaintance of a portly Canadian with a family fortune in whiskey. He and John Calder ran thick as thieves and along with Ricky Demarco, they launched the original Traverse but not before giving Ubu Roi its UK premiere in a corner of the bookstore. Calder brought three French writers (Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Sarraute) to the Paperback where their willingness to talk about just about anything created a stir. Soon plans were afoot for a Writer’s Conference, which took place in 1962. The ground is shifting under everyone’s feet everywhere, and everyone wants to talk about it. Together they produced a line-up of writers that included Americans Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and William Burroughs, Scots Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan and Alexander Trocchi, as well as Lawrence Durrell, Stephen Spender, Rebecca West, among many others. The Conference was rife with open talk of drug use and gay sex, provided a grand huzza for Miller and launched Burrough’s career. It was inclusive, not exclusive, and overcame not only the objections of the staid Town Fathers, who were quite content with cozy classical music events. The 1962 festival, as inspiring as it was, was a distinctly different affair from today’s imitators, where it’s all about moving the merch, paying to hear an author for an hour before you’re hustled out the door with a signed copy. In ’62 there were day-long sessions dedicated to debate about Commitment, Censorship, Scottish Writing Today, The Novel and the Future, with parties into the wee hours…

Could Haynes have pulled off his lifelong escapade in the States? It’s not as if he, and everyone he worked with, didn’t face opposition along the way. The pressure to conform, to sell out, is just too strong in America. No, his life could only have been lived in Europe, among the European avant-garde with their openness to new ideas. Americans like to think they invented the Sixties, and maybe they did, in the form of a wandering American who criss-crossed Europe, opening doors and bringing people together for theater, for action, for sex and for life.    

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Jim Haynes and Ghédalia Tazartès were cremated at Père Lachaise within a few weeks of each other. Events celebrating the 1871 Commune of Paris at the Mur de Fédérés are now ongoing.

 

Tazartès quotes from interviews on electronicbeats.net (2012) and BOMB magazine (2017), plus translations from various French interviews. Thanks to the Jim Haynes Archive.

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