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1.

(Foreigner, “I Want To Know What Love Is”)

I wake into darkness. The morning is still night. The windows are black as black ice. I know outside there is snow on the ground. It is January in Massachusetts and I am a child. In the hour to come there will be a bowl of maple brown sugar oatmeal in a warm kitchen, then moon boots and a parka with a zipper that sticks, an hour on the bus to Swallow Union Elementary in Dunstable, Massachusetts. But not just yet. Blurry red numbers glow 5:50, the only light. And there is a sound, a low hum that could be the sound of a church organ underwater. Then a sprinkling down of chimes. I understand the clock radio has flipped on and pulled me awake. The song is “I Want to Know What Love Is,” by Foreigner. I breathe and come to full consciousness, come to a moment in my life I can enter even now, many years later. A choir is singing: “I want to know what love is. I want you to show me.” What did I know about love? What did I know about anything? It was like being haunted by the future.

2.

(Phil Collins, “One More Night)

The phrase “soft rock” is an oxymoron that you can hold. “Rock” implies rebellion and freedom and ecstasy; “soft” suggests safety.

Soft rock is “The 80s.”

Soft rock is “Valerie” by Steve Winwood and “Right Here Waiting” by Richard Marx.

Soft rock is synthetic, but not robotic. Anguished, but controlled. Expensive but not high-class.

A man with long curly hair and a sparkling aquamarine blazer is playing a keyboard in the rain. A woman in sunglasses drives past in a gleaming black Corvette, a single tear trickling down her cheek. A flicker of lightning briefly illuminates a high school parking lot, but there is no thunder.

Soft rock is any song you can imagine being played on the radio after a song by Phil Collins.

3.

Soft rock was the ambient music of my suburban childhood—it was the mall with its skylights and escalators, it was the dentist’s waiting room, it was in the car on the way to soccer practice, or to Donelan’s Grocery Store, or to Sacred Heart Church. I don’t mean to imply I was a prisoner of my surroundings. The truth is I didn’t merely tolerate soft rock, or even mildly hum along to the songs that happened to be on; I loved soft rock. I chose to listen to soft rock, and often. I picked the radio station my clock radio would flick on to in the morning; I laid in bed on weekend mornings listening to the Top 40 countdown and hoping favorite songs would get into the top ten; I resisted offers to get ice cream at Doc Davis’s Ice Cream Stand so I could stay home to watch the top ten on Solid Gold.

4.

Survivor’s “The Search is Over,” and especially its video, is an illustrative example of the themes and implications of the soft rock genre. The song begins with piano and voice, confident melancholy. Gradually, keyboards swell, filling the empty spaces with a sympathetic hum. The drums, when they come in, are emphatic and simple; they exist to declare, every other beat, “I may be sad, but I also rock; in fact, I am so sad that I am rocking, gently and deliberately.” The video is a man wandering in a city at night, alone in pools of purple light and shadow, with his memories of a lost love: a beautiful woman in a white room in shiny white lingerie on shiny white satin sheets. The song and the video is the pleasure is of being a man as alone as a cowboy or an astronaut expressing your important longing and the whole world not only acknowledging and understanding that longing but amplifying it. You are the center of the world; the whole city vibrates to your song.

5.

Of course there are any number of legitimate criticisms of soft rock as culture, as art. The (white) masculinity it offers is openly emotional, but also cliched and absurdly narcissistic. The smooth musical surfaces that allowed soft rock to exist in department store elevators so I could encounter it in the first place were not accidents of artist preference; soft rock was not merely the music of the suburbs—it was the music of the bland and insidious corporate consumer capitalism that sought to organize and direct life in those suburbs. The romantic loneliness, the treasuring of your own longing—this was the way to be an adult, to be a man. These luxurious layers of keyboards are the bed for you to rest your troubled head in. Soft rock offers an image of adulthood manfully disconnected from the world, an image of material wealth—shiny cars and expansive hairstyles–divorced from struggle and history. Soft rock was used to calm shoppers jittery from work and traffic into a dreamy state of mind, to prepare them to attempt to satisfy their lonely desires by splurging on a new set of never-to-be-used faux-leather luggage.

6.

(Bon Iver, “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”)

(Bon Iver, “Beth/Rest”)

(Weezer, “Africa”)

(Mike Masse and Jeff Hall, “Africa”)

Listening to 80s soft rock (and the music it inspired) in 2019 is complicated. By removing the songs from their cultural context, it’s much easier to contemplate the hidden speakers in the department store elevator, but it’s also possible to better appreciate the unfussy melodic lushness.

The most obvious example of a contemporary artist who appreciates the beauty in the songs is Bon Iver. Their versions of soft rock slice away the food court and transform the sound into something new.

The cover of Bonnie Raitt’s soft classic, too-good-to-be-lumped-in-with-Richard-Marx, “I Can’t Make You Love Me” is lovely. The singing is as confidently melancholy as in the original, yet with stylistic flourishes that anyone would notice if it was coming from the ceiling of a bathroom at an Applebee’s. But soft rock is music that you wouldn’t notice if it was coming from the ceiling in the bathroom of an Applebee’s if you weren’t listening to it.

The warm glowing keyboards on Bon Iver’s “Beth/Rest” are indebted to soft rock—the song is enveloping as a cloud—but the song also ultimately fails the Applebee’s bathroom test. The layers of sound are not designed to support the lyrics’ emotion—they are the point itself; it’s hard to understand the lyrics and what lyrics that can be made out are impressionistic and surreal, not greeting-card-clear sentiment. “Beth/Rest” is soft rock of a different species, for a different audience. It’s music you wouldn’t notice if it was coming from the ceiling of a hip fashion boutique selling 80-dollar T-shirts.

Weezer’s half-ass cover of Toto’s “Africa” comes from a different angle. The band is faithful enough to the melody, but the delivery of the lyrics is filtered through a useless irony. There is pleasure in guilty pleasures, their performance says, but only if you not only admit your guilt but wallow in it.

Much better is the viral whole-ass version of “Africa” by two dudes in a random pizza shop somewhere in Utah. They hunch over their instruments. They both seem to be wearing cargo shorts. They play the song straight, nailing the harmonies, convincing us that they believe every word. In this context, the song is not designed to make you wish or imagine you are living in a different, better world. It is not the performance of longing; it is longing itself. It’s going to take a lot to take you away from him. There’s nothing that a thousand men or more could ever do.

The song doesn’t transform anything. It’s two dudes singing in a pizza shop. It gives the world as it is back to us. It’s foggy outside. Through the window you can see people are walking out to their cars in the parking lot, going on with their lives, and the song is a part of them.

7.

I don’t believe that the only way to enjoy soft rock as an older and wiser listener means to insulate your ears and soul with irony. Though neither is it enough to treat the songs as free-floating sound-waves. Music can’t be removed from the world, but it can be moved through it, and it can be followed deeper in. Soft rock is forever the terrible awkward expensive false luxury of the suburban mall. And it is also the people moving through that mall, ordinary meaningful terrible beautiful human lives, not only my own. I’m a father at the kitchen table, watching YouTube videos on a laptop that’s on a stand to avoid neck strain; in a few minutes I’ll have to go upstairs to sing my daughter to sleep. I’m a second-grader waking up in the pure dark of winter; in a few minutes I’ll take my seat in the back of the school bus with my friends, other children warm in the cores of their marshmallow-soft parkas. I still want to know what love is.

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!

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.

 

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death In Her Hands is a wry, toying tailspin of a book. It begins with the finding of a note: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” Its discovery sends the newest of Moshfegh’s eccentric narrators into a psychosomatic spiral of homespun sleuthing and self-realization. What results is an insidious meta-mystery that launches the protagonist on a twisted quest for justice, identity and erratic female independence.    

The novel tells the story of Vesta Gul, a seventy-two-year old widow who, after her late husband’s death, has picked up and moved to the rustic town of Levant with her dog Charlie. “I felt I needed to hide a little,” she explains. “My mind needed a smaller world to roam.” Her new home is a cabin on an old, abandoned Girl Scout camp. She has little company there besides her dog, her late husband Walter’s ashes and an evangelical public radio personality named Pastor Jimmy, whose show Vesta listens to every night. She hikes with Charlie each morning, reads, cooks and drinks wine—just generally “finding things to do to pass the time.” That is, until she comes across the mysterious note in her birch woods (“Her name was Magda…”). Just the note on the ground—no body or murder weapon or lingering clues. Nonetheless, Vesta is quick to assign herself the role of amateur detective, excited to have her mellow routine ruffled by the note’s unsolved mystery.

The detective narrative Moshfegh initially sets up plays freely with the hand-me-downs of genre conventions. Vesta herself has “seen plenty of murder mystery TV shows,” and as such her investigation begins traditionally enough. She brainstorms a list of suspects. She goes to the library and searches: “How does one solve a murder mystery?” She easily (and eagerly) conjures up graphic descriptions of Magda’s missing body, wondering, “was it so hard to come up with a description of her corpse, tangled in the brush under a fallen tree…her hands hog-tied behind her back, the blood from her stab wounds leaching into the ground.” Vesta, like any avid reader, is familiar with society’s favorite murder mystery tropes. Moshfegh has her fun with these from the get-go, setting our expectations up for an eventual slashing. She lines up parts of Vesta’s little world like game pieces on a chess board. Her lakeside cabin in the woods. Her mysterious neighbors across the water. A foreboding island in the middle of the lake, just a rowboat’s trip away…

Vesta herself is positioned as a potential Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher type heroine—a mellow old widow turned amateur detective, whiling away the back half of life solving local mysteries. Moshfegh lets her protagonist play to formula and fantasy, but she never lets things get too precious. Vesta’s trite conclusions ultimately reveal a lurking darkness to her character. At the very start of her investigation, Vesta casts Magda as the young, female victim—the mystery genre’s very own fetishistic version of the manic pixie dream girl. But Vesta soon becomes obsessed with acting the author and crafting Magda’s character—continuously morphing her looks, personality and backstory throughout her investigation. Her identity is entirely at the whim of Vesta’s oscillating mental state. One moment she’s a daughter-like figure, one the childless Vesta imagines nurturing. The next she’s a reflection of Vesta herself—a youthful, might-have-been incarnation that Vesta mourns the near-existence of. “It is easy…to find great affection for victims, emblems of vanished potential,” Vesta muses, thinking back on her marriage to Walter and its lopsided power dynamic. “There is nothing more heartbreaking than a squandered opportunity, a missed chance.” She sees her young self in Magda—the vulnerable victim in a man’s quest for control. After all, Magda’s murderer could only have been a man. “It seemed unlikely that a woman would abandon a dead body in the woods,” Vesta decides early on, “so I felt I could safely presume that the writer of the note, this me, this character, the I of the story, must be male.”

As Vesta’s role in the mystery turns more personal, Death in Her Hands in turn becomes increasingly meta. Vesta gets swept up in the romanticism of the crime and its telling, referring to the ominous message as an “invitation, or poem” and to herself as a “mystery writer.” She deems the story “a cozy little whodunit.” She remarks on the mystery’s pacing when researching at the library (“Let us hope [the killer’s] not presently strangling the lady librarian. If he was, the mystery would be solved too easily”) and invents a cast of supporting players to construct a more enticing narrative. “I still needed a strong male lead,” she declares as she brainstorms her suspect list. “Someone in his mid to late forties, a Harrison Ford type.” She fills out her cast and plot as only an author would, editing her narrative to bring her chosen reality to fruition.

Vesta’s god-like manipulation of Magda’s mystery allows Moshfegh to ironically remark on the authorial act of crafting a novel. Death in Her Hands is preoccupied with omniscient authority. God is always lurking, speaking to Vesta through a number of proxies—Pastor Jimmy, her late husband Walter, and the novel’s immense natural setting. Moshfegh—playing God—sets up the novel’s elements, but lets her protagonist manipulate them so that the reader can see the seams of Vesta’s makeshift narrative, the flaws in her reasoning. It would be easy to sum up Vesta’s investigation as the boredom or hysteria of an old woman, but just as we’re tempted to draw such conclusions, Moshfegh tips the novel’s tone from darkly comedic to downright disturbing. Vesta’s abandoned Girl Scout camp transforms into a scene of decaying girlhood—the perfect backdrop for the once demure and dutiful Vesta to succumb to the escalating madness of her mystery. Her actions, even simple ones like eating or dressing herself, turn primitive. The scattering of her husband’s ashes—an act Moshfegh heavily foreshadows—is handled bluntly, without ceremony. Just a sudden trip out in the rowboat at night. Not a laying to rest, but a dumping. The entire urn goes into the lake, its plunk into the depths not unlike the disposal of a body.

Such acts make up Vesta’s desperate attempts to reclaim her own mind. Early in the novel, Moshfegh introduces the concept of “mindspace” or the sharing of a mind with another, which Vesta says she did with her late husband Walter. “Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way. I think it has something to do with sharing a bed.” The reader shares a “mindspace” with Vesta; Moshfegh offers us no relief with any outside logic. Her perception proves claustrophobic, both for the reader and for Vesta herself. Vesta is badgered by a chorus of imagined critics—the late, domineering Walter, the Levant townsfolk and even, on occasion, her dog Charlie. Her “mindspace” is a crowded one, turning her search for Magda’s killer into a crisis of self, a quest for her own independence. Yet the voices in Vesta’s head call into question her reliability—are they a yearning for companionship, a sounding board? Or are they proof of an old woman’s mental demise?

Moshfegh never lets the reader get too comfortable in our assessment of Vesta, preferring to let us fester in her protagonist’s precarious mental state. The author has always enjoyed plunking her readers into the mindsets of oddball characters—people you’d never think to share a “mindspace” with. Take her past protagonists—the alcoholic McGlue, the prudish, sardonic Eileen, the sedated heiress from My Year of Rest and Relaxation who’s determined to sleep for a whole calendar year. Moshfegh’s true talent comes from her ability to craft characters who swallow up the reader in their bizarre plights. We become one with their oddity, subject to their stream of conscious narration, until we eventually uncover the blunt humanity Moshfegh’s hidden beneath their peculiar facades. We begin Death in Her Hands summing Vesta up as so many others do: a mentally stale old woman stuck in her routine. We aren’t inclined to take her seriously. She is entertainment, for we are the reader and Vesta our protagonist. But as reality and fantasy begin to blur in Vesta’s world, so do our respective roles. We become one with Vesta in her “mindspace.” We piece together unsavory memories with her, make conclusions with her, feel the walls of reality close in on her (our?) fantasy. As such, Vesta becomes less and less of a foregone conclusion. She sheds her tropes like skins, exposing something darker, messier. Her memories of Walter lose their initial rose-colored tint, Magda’s death its romanticism and Moshfegh’s tone its irony. What we’re left with is the portrait of a woman forced to face the ugly truth she’s disguised from herself.

“[It’s] good to have a few secrets here and there,” Vesta muses early on in Death in Her Hands. “It [keeps] one interested in herself.” Keeping interest is not something Moshfegh needs to worry about. Her precarious balancing act between fantasy and reality gives the novel’s protagonist and her mystery—no matter how cozy or claustrophobic it becomes—staying power until its conclusion. We are happy to remain here inside Vesta’s “mindspace,” grappling for clues to assure us that Vesta’s lucid, Vesta’s right—because if not, we will go mad, trapped in the mind of this protagonist. 

But maybe it isn’t madness at all—at least, not in the classic sense. The quest for identity is a mad one. The struggle for self-realization can drive anyone to extremes. In Vesta’s case, it transforms her into a force—whether sound or not is up to the reader to decide. Death in Her Hands isn’t a “cozy little whodunit.” It’s a character study, a twisted tale of empowerment. Vesta’s liberation might be warped, but by the end of her mystery, she’s definitely not the victim.

I got arrested in Venice, Italy for taking a picture of a synagogue in in the ghetto. It was three-stories and catty corner in the square where a policeman was talking to a short man in an overcoat with a flipped-up collar. The pre-dusk light made for great shadows and I took a half dozen shots.

Henry and our wives showed up to go to dinner and I pointed at the tall synagogue to show Henry what I was shooting and there was a tug on my arm. It was the short overcoat guy. “Get rid of the pictures you took of me and the officer,” he ordered.

“I didn’t take any pictures of you,” I said. “I was taking pictures of the synagogue.”

“Erase them,” he ordered.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I told you to.”

He walked a half dozen steps, turned, and faced me and two very large and strong policemen took my arms. “Do what he told you,” one said. I turned my camera over and erased a couple of gondolier shots instead and then I handed my camera to Henry.

He took a video of me waving my arms and yelling about being kidnapped as I was escorted off to a Venetian Police Station where they tossed me in a cell. “I’m thirsty and haven’t had dinner,” I yelled. The guard got on the phone and fifteen minutes later they brought me a covered tray and a bottle of red. It was my best meal since I was in Venice. My wife and our friends showed up as I was finishing my meal of pasta with black squid ink and most of the bottle of wine. Henry took pictures of me in the cell, mugging it up, grabbing the bars, and then I took pictures of them from the inside looking out.

The guard walked over, shook his finger, and said, “No photos.” I took his picture and asked why I didn’t get dessert. “I want Gelato and cookies,” I told him. “Enough for me and my friends.” He ordered and then I told him it was rude to have them outside and me inside, so he opened the door and let them in. I finished the bottle of wine and went to sleep with them still in my cell, but they were gone by the morning.

When I awoke I was visited by the overcoat guy who told me he was undercover keeping track of the Jews in the ghetto—a job held by his family and passed down since the fifteen-hundreds when they were the ones who won the “Name the area where we make the Jews live” contest. I told him he wasn’t funny, and I saw no humor in his story. “There is no humor in my story,” he said and told me I was free to leave as he unlocked my cell door. I picked up my camera and took his picture.

Out the window, the massive apartment building that has been of no interest for thirty-four years is being repointed or resurfaced or sandblasted, whatever it’s called, one by one every building on this block has been upgraded, spruced up, made new, though they are all unspeakably ugly and always will be, they’ve been freshened to reflect the invisible presence of money, the money of companies, all of them sinister, some of them under investigation, that have bought up the neighborhood from more artlessly grubbing slumlords now dying of old age, and this has instilled in those of us who have lived here a long time the identity of vanishing residue, potential targets for harassment or insultingly small buy-outs, we will either finish our days in apartments that disappear right after we do, or move somewhere stupid, and what did we expect, after all, in this restless world?  

That building has a single front entrance, but it’s covered in scaffolding overhung with dense grey mesh and from the window looks much larger than it is, it appears to stretch on endlessly down the block and resembles some maritime monstrosity, a freighter under repair. I assumed for a time that three or four houses were joined at their seams, after this mesh covered everything up, and I counted them, counted the stoops, and no, there’s only the one house, looking like several, because the scaffolding extends above the entrance of the building on the right and a window of the building on the left.  Surely in the past, the remotest past, I observed people living in that building, watched them through their grimy windows chewing snacks,  watching television, masturbating, going mad, at some distant moment I must have had some curiosity about what went on in those apartments, but what happens when you stay, and stay, and never really leave, though I’ve attempted many times to get away for good, is that you stop noticing, stop caring about little shifts and signs, and gradually start living elsewhere, namely in your head, and only belatedly, absurdly, for whatever reason, become cognizant one day that the whole environment has altered in a drastic way, as if it all changed into something else overnight, while you slept.  

The sandblasting commences at eight every morning, followed by air hammers, followed by the whooshing of a ribbed plastic hose that sucks dust and plaster and chunks of brick, a noise that has something weirdly human about it, like a giant wheezing, malefically, hoping to drive us all mad, drive us out of our houses into the street, where we would do what, exactly?  Wail, cry, gnash our teeth, overthrow the government, take back the night, or rather, the day?  Instead the days and nights slip by without a murmur, taking with them who we were today and yesterday, leaving a bit for tomorrow to dispose of.  One day the ruckus will stop, probably soon, and we’ll forget it ever happened, which in itself points to something dulled and habit-worn in the way we live, enduring things as long as we have to, forgetting them when they finish messing our brains up, and the same, I find, is true about people, for example Jill Ashford, who had a boutique in one of the basement apartments for six or seven years then moved away, replaced by a laundry, now the laundry seems to have been there forever, and but for a piece of misdelivered mail I found on the stoop this afternoon addressed to this Jill Ashford, I would have forgotten her existence altogether, who knows if she is still alive, or if so where she is, likewise the little gang of neighborhood thugs who terrorized the block for years in a desultory drunken way, employed as torpid building supers and avid spies for landlords, one by one they became more spectral and scarce and finally were no longer seen, having outlived their own malevolence and gone to wherever such people go when cities have no further use for them.  Florida, perhaps.  

Yesterday at lunch Marie-Louise asked if I go to a lot of parties, or go to the movies, hang out with friends, how did I spend my time?  I had gone to a party the night before, had even had several drinks, which I almost never do, but I don’t normally go to parties, I never go to the movies, I wanted Marie-Louise’s even-handed attitude to lever me out of the dreary matters stewing in my head but “heard myself say” (do people hear themselves say things?), “I hardly have any friends, almost all my friends are dead, at this point”, Marie-Louise laughed and said, “My friends are dead too, I open my address book and page after page, all dead, first it was AIDS, now it’s life,” then asked if I had seen a particular movie, which she described.  “Sometimes you see something good.  But why always want the best thing, sometimes when you get the worst thing that’s fine too.”  She meant this in a general sense, not only with respect to movies.

I had not seen the movie, set in the 1950s, I think, or the 1940s, in New York, it was a film about a writer who either believed himself a genius or was thought by others to be a genius, a writer who couldn’t control himself or contain everything he imagined seething inside him, who just wrote down anything that came into his head in torrents, in a state of galloping anxiety lest all the white man genius things inside him go unpublished and, more importantly, unrecognized; and a publishing house editor who calmly trimmed this Niagara of verbal incontinence into books he could publish.  Marie-Louise said the film was shit.  “But the photography was very good, showing people going in and out of Grand Central Station, the hats they wore, the shoes and so forth.”  I think the story behind this film still had some currency in my youth, which has drifted so far into the past that my mind only glimpses it in shreds.  And (yet?) there are moments when existence feels so motionless and my entire life so utterly uneventful that the shredded past and the static present might as well be the same thing.  I seem to remember something about a refrigerator, that this genius tormented writer, at one especially tormented juncture, perched himself on top of his refrigerator, writing the whole time in his habitual frenzy, like a bright chimpanzee.

The writer depicted in that movie still had books in print throughout my childhood, my adolescence, and then he was utterly forgotten about, so much so that another writer with the same name became famous for a while, completely erasing the popular memory of the first, except that the first was known as Thomas and the second one as Tom, so the slightly longer version of the name remained distinguishable, and vaguely recognized, as the name of a forgotten writer, and so on, by this time the second writer has also faded considerably from public view, a slowly evaporating totem of bygone times.  Now he’s remembered for the “dandyish” outfit he always wore, or wears, if he’s still alive, as the first, dead writer is remembered for having the longer first name, and for climbing on top of a refrigerator.  I think it would be possible, now, for a third writer, calling himself Tommy, to replace both Thomas and Tom in whatever mental space they occupied, in whatever minds.  

For some time I have been faltering.  Unable to see the path ahead, as if a path ahead existed previously.  I can only see what’s inevitable, but picturing the inevitable is a form of piling-on that does no one any good.  Sometimes we lose our nerve, lose it to all manner of unanticipated blows: damaged health, wrecked finances, even the untriggered onset of despair, which is always available, one doesn’t have to come up with reasons for it, the world is full of them.  Sometimes people squeeze despair like the proverbial lemon to make something wet and delicious resembling lemonade, quite often they just can’t.  Not everything is a matter of attitude.  (To speak objectively, if that’s even possible, I can think of at least five ways I’d change my life to make myself happier, if I were able to, and I’m not able to, not now, maybe never.)  But I have learned not to despise people who claim otherwise, such people seem wiser than those who make hopelessness their comfort zone.  

I don’t know how, for instance, George, who lives on this street, who recently turned 80, who once seemed robust, even offensively so at times, with his old-school tales of womanizing and vaguely right-wing attitudes, his sundown martinis and endless cigarettes at a restaurant around the corner, and now looks stooped and spectral on his brittle bones, would continue breathing in and out, much less hobble his perilous way down five flights to the street, to walk the Afghan hound that will probably outlive him, unless he believed, somehow, that tomorrow won’t be worse than today, that nothing new will go awfully wrong just yet, that his darkening eyesight won’t fail entirely or the final neoplasm announce itself with urinary blood or lumps on his pelvis, that he still has time before further calamity, to walk the dog and negotiate the sidewalk with the diminished gait that scares me when I see it, since I remember an earlier George, a George full of what he undoubtedly called “piss and vinegar.”  A George who was sly and full of rebarbative opinions and fitted his cigarettes into a sleek onyx holder, who sometimes wore black silk shirts open to the waist in summertime and still considered himself a dashing rogue, a George, in short, who wasn’t afraid. 

That George was an actor, gainfully employed for many decades in one of the longest-running off-Broadway shows of all time, and the current George, for that matter, still finds paying work from time to time, on television, though the demand for octogenerian actors is limited to nonexistent.  George reappeared last week, with the most recent of four Afghans he’s had in the years I’ve known him, after two months in hospital and another month recuperating at his son’s house.  I don’t know where the dog has been in these months, and in fact never knew George was gone, until he showed up on his stoop a few days ago, shrunken, fragile, declaring himself thrilled to be back here.  He spoke of his return as if he had regained something truly wonderful. I imagined the grim horror vacui of decaying memorabilia, broken furniture, and old newspapers that’s been described to me as George’s apartment, and realized what a blessing it must be, in George’s situation, to find something like that wonderful.  We have been neighbors for half my lifetime, almost half, and in that improbably vast time I have learned this about George: he acts, he’s a hoarder, he was married a long time ago, and has a son living somewhere in Pennsylvania.  That’s it, that’s all.

I learned about the hoarding, which I might have guessed at, from Celia, the daughter of Emma.  About Celia I have little to tell, except that she looks like someone who has had drug problems, that kind of ruined beauty, and a rough life, whereas Emma, I think, has lived rather safely, in slightly eccentric, middle-class comfort, these many decades, lived within her margins, so to say, attached to fervent leftist views and astringently formalist aesthetic judgments, while holding various academic posts in the city. I would guess that Emma was beautiful in her youth, though that was mostly gone by the time I met her.  I would guess that her late husband had money, though perhaps not endless amounts.  I know even less about Emma than I do about George.  Emma is another resident of this block who has managed to live eighty years, a writer of some distinction whose mind is now in sporadic retreat from itself, causing her daughter to come from wherever she was to move in and look after her, into the five story house Emma prudently bought with her husband in 1950 or 1960 or whenever it was, Celia says Emma has good days or good hours followed by times when all becomes blur, and fog, and terrified confusion.  The house is falling apart, Celia says, there were even strange people Emma had collected living in some of the rooms when Celia moved in, she’s gotten rid of them now.  

I used to run into Emma on the sidewalk all the time, the same way I used to run into George, randomly, and like George, Emma clung to her opinions about various things as if they were extremely valuable, expressed them with such tenacity that I always agreed with anything either of them said, or tried to, since I never much cared about the things they considered important, and it’s nicer to agree.  Where do opinions go, when we’re gone?  I sometimes avoided running into George, over the years, I probably also avoided Emma on a few occasions, changed direction or crossed the street when I spotted them from a distance, took advantage of their failing eyesight, not always, of course, not even usually, but lonely people love to talk, and sometimes other lonely people cannot bear to listen, since the loneliness they have in common is the one thing they have to avoid mentioning and the only thing they really have to tell each other.

These details, the hoarding, the fog, the strangers in the spare bedrooms, have been forming a collage of the worst that could happen in my mind for quite a long time, a picture that sinks my spirits when it slips into view; when you’re young you feel immune to the common fate of all, later every glimpse of how the body loosens its hold on life becomes a cautionary tale.  Is this the right expression?  Caution implies certain outcomes can be avoided, but there really is only one way to avoid old age.  As Marie-Louise said at lunch, “People want a happy ending, but there isn’t one.”  Yet she seemed, as she said it, happier than most people, happy to be eating a vegetable roll and grilled chicken on a skewer, happy she could see the plate in front of her or the movie about the genius, happy she wasn’t dead like all the friends in her address book.  Maybe it does come down to a question of attitude, when many options have disappeared, perhaps especially when it’s unclear which options are altogether gone, what wishes still have a chance of coming true, and what’s a pointless fantasy.