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“I went to the funeral home today,” her grandmother said. A beginning. She had more that would come. 

“Oh? And how was it?” Michelle was a world away from her grandmother. She was in California, the land of dry heat and crisscrossing six-lane highways, sitting one and a half hours from the beach in a sea of smog. 

“It was fine.” 

“Yeah? What was wrong with it?” Michelle felt her own nasal accent creeping in, bringing with it a polite displeasure she had hoped she’d left behind in the Midwest. 

“Well, nothing was wrong with it,” a pause. “It’s right in town. And it doesn’t smell dusty. You know how I’m always wary of places that smell dusty.” 

“Of course. Especially a funeral home.” 

“Right. Exactly. But, well, there was a funeral ending when I went over to check it out…” 

“Yeah?” 

“And the parking attendant––” 

“Nice that they have one! I wouldn’t have expected that.” 

“Well, they’ve got to. You don’t want people parking with tears running down their faces. It’s just that well––It’s that the parking attendant, he’s got one leg.” 

“One leg?” 

“Yes, he’s a young man. Now I don’t know if he lost it in the war or if he was born like that––” 

“Why does it matter?” 

“How he lost it? Well, it doesn’t matter much, something to be curious about, I suppose.” 

“No, that he has one leg.” 

“Oh, well. You don’t want it to, of course. But it’s distracting, and I don’t want people to come to the funeral, and all they can think about is the leg, how he lost it, how can he afford that bionic one as a parking attendant––” 

“He’s got a bionic one?” 

“Well, I don’t know if it’s bionic, exactly. But he’s walking on something, metal, and computerized looking. A fake leg.” 

“Wow.” 

“You see? It’s distracting. I’m sure people would be sitting there wondering about him, instead of thinking about––” 

“Yeah, I see. But you don’t know if he works every day.” 

“Oh, I’m sure he works every funeral. They only have them once a week or so.” 

“Will you look at other places?” 

“No, no. I mean, where else would I go? All the way to Racine?” 

“You could.” 

“It’s not worth it.” 

“Okay. When do you need me on a plane?” 

“I gave them the deposit for Sunday, so as soon as you can, Shells.” 

#

Michelle’s plane skidded to a stop, with the back-left wheel bouncing once, at 6:32 on Saturday night. 

She stood in the ground transportation area with her backpack slung over her shoulder as she waited for an Uber. She was half worried no one would come, but her Grandmother insisted that even Union Grove had joined the modern world. 

A burly man lit up a cigarette next to her. He was tall and thick muscled. He didn’t seem aware of himself. If he went to LA, Michelle knew he would lose whole percentages of his body fat and be sculpted into a knock-off superhero. He was the kind of guy they only grew out in the plains; the coasts didn’t have enough space, and the earth was too polluted. She watched him as he held his cigarette between his forefinger and his thumb, the old-fashioned way like Paul Newman. That was one nice thing about being home: people still smoked in Wisconsin. As her Uber pulled up, he gave her a cursory nod, and she was suddenly disappointed to be in sweats on her way to a funeral. She would much rather be climbing into the backseat with him. 

She kept her headphones in to avoid talking to the driver, a middle-aged guy named Mohammed in a Packers jersey. They only passed two cattle ranches on their way out. Not as many as there used to be, but there were still hundreds of cows. They reminded her of the ants in her ant farm she had the summer she turned seven, the first one she spent living with her grandmother. They were brown dots littering the landscape, squished and scrambling. She loved to watch them, to be in charge of something, to have something depend on her. She watched their little brown butts grow bulbous and thought: They’re full of the food I gave them. They were the only pets she ever allowed herself. Anything else might’ve gotten too attached to her. 

Back in California, people would refuse to eat meat from places like this. She was at a party once, in Silver Lake, with a vegan bent on proselytizing. She managed to keep her head down, to not draw his attention, but she still remembered his words: I’ve been out there, to the West, where they grow cows like bacteria in a test tube and butcher them like they solder bolts on their pickups, one after the other. You wouldn’t touch meat again if you saw it. 

Michelle went to Carl’s Jr. on her way home and got a double. 

#

“What room am I in?” Michelle asked after she greeted her grandmother’s three arthritic labs, their golden chins turned white since the last time she had seen them. 

“What a question! Your own, of course,” she put the kettle on, lighting the stove with a match. 

“I thought there might be more guests.” 

“Nope. You’re the only one flying in.” 

“Oh. Is anyone else coming tomorrow?” 

“Of course. Uncle Fred, all your cousins, and that man she dated for a while, what was his name? Bobby?” 

“Bodie.” One of the dogs scratched at Michelle’s leg, she reached down to pet him and realized she didn’t know if he was John, Paul or George. 

“Oh, sure. Yeah, he was real broken up about it.” 

“Was she seeing him again?” 

“Somewhat recently, I think.” 

“I’m gonna hop in the shower.” The clack of nails on hardwood told her she was being followed. 

“And your tea?” Her grandmother called after her. 

“I’ll be back in ten. It’ll still be warm!” Michelle said, making her way up the stairs. She heard a murmuring continue in the kitchen, but kept moving until she was out of earshot and under the sputtering showerhead. 

#

They spent the night watching TV, something Michelle hadn’t done in a while. Her Grandmother let her control the remote and move through the basic cable selections all she wanted. They went back and forth from SVU to a local report on speed traps, both of which felt familiar and comforting, and did their best to drown out Michelle’s grandmother’s questions about her future, her dating life, and if she would be home more often, now. 

She didn’t sleep well that night. The room was as sparse as she had left it. She had never decorated, even though she inhabited it from seven to seventeen. She was always ready, worried she would be pulled back into the mess of her early life. She didn’t want to get too used to anything comfortable. 

Her grandmother had left it like that, white walls, childhood dresser from Walmart. Michelle knew that if the walls had been pink, and there had been posters of Destiny’s Child and Panic! At the Disco, they would have remained until the tape that held them to the wall yellowed and weakened. But she played it safer than that. 

#

She put on eyeliner but avoided any lipstick, knowing her grandmother would think it was gaudy. She had brought one black dress with her, a wrap dress, classic and simple. But wearing it now, in the second floor of the farmhouse, she looked like a High Schooler in a Good Wife stage dramatization. Still, it would have to do. 

“You ready?” Her grandmother called. 

Michelle’s heels click-clacked down the hall, readier than she was. They were oxford pumps, and she had finally managed a perfect bow. 

Her grandmother was at the foot of the stairs, hand on the railing, expectantly. 

“Hey, Grandma,” Michelle forced a tight smile, trying to reassure them both. 

“You’re not wearing those shoes, are you?” 

Michelle looked down, making sure they were talking about the same thing. She wiggled her toes in her vintage leather pumps. “I am.”  

“You’re going to wear red high heels to a funeral, Shells?” 

“They’re not red. They’re oxblood.” 

“I bet ox’s blood looks like bull’s blood. I’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. It’s red.”  

“Oxblood is just a term, Grandma, for this dark burgundy color.” 

“I don’t care what they’re called. Take them off.” 

Michelle’s stomach swirled, “I don’t have any other shoes besides my sneakers.” 

“Oh, for god’s sake,” her grandmother turned around and walked towards the door. “Get in the car, then.” 

# 

“I told you. He works every funeral.” 

Michelle looked up from her phone to see a man in a yellow traffic vest wearing a Brewer’s cap and a three-day scruff. He had a prosthetic. It was the kind Michelle had seen on National Geographic covers, like that runner turned murderer from South Africa had. It looked fancy. Her grandmother pulled closer to him. 

“You here for the funeral? It don’t start until noon,” he said. 

“Yes, we know. We’re the family. Wanted to get here early. Is there a special spot for us?” 

“Oh, sure. Closest one to the entrance.” 

Michelle gave him the expected smile, and he tipped his hat. 

Her Grandmother parked and started unpacking things from the trunk. The parking attendant came over to help. The metal of his leg caught the sun, and Michelle had to squint to look at him. Her grandmother was handing him two-gallon jugs of pop and iced tea lemonade. He was walking back to the funeral home, arms full and swaying when her grandmother gave Michelle a display board with dozens of photos taped to it. It was the kind of thing that was always at funerals, but somehow Michelle hadn’t thought it would be at this one. 

“Take it in,” her grandmother said as she filled her own arms with totes full of plastic cups and styrofoam plates. 

Michelle just looked at her. 

“There’s a table by the front entrance. We’ll be setting up the display there.” 

Michelle followed the parking attendant, and she tried not to look too closely at any of the taped pictures. One kept flapping. Even though she’d only peeked at it from the corner of her eye, she knew it was of her grandmother, her mother, and her at a haunted house. The McFadden’s made a haunted house out of their old barn every fall. Her mother loved them, and Michelle did for a while too. It was one of the few family outings. 

#

Bodie sat in the front next to Michelle and her grandmother and cried his eyes out. Big, heaving sobs that turned into hiccups. Michelle hated that her chair was next to his. She hated that her Uncle Fred and all her cousins might think she had condoned her mother’s disastrous relationship with him or anything about her mother at all. 

But this was it. This would be the last time they would start speaking about her mother and then stop, knowing Michelle was near, and slide their eyes over her pityingly. There was nothing left to feel that way about anymore. No failed mother-daughter relationship to fix. 

She didn’t speak. Only the pastor did, and he said generic things. Life everlasting guaranteed to anyone who would believe. Michelle wished that they had cremated her mother so she wouldn’t have to stare at the casket. The mahogany shined and smiled. 

During the reception, Michelle parked herself in front of the table of food. She had three baby carrots dipped in ranch, and then one celery stick just as it was, to wash down the ranch. She wasn’t hungry, but she didn’t know what else to do with her hands or her mouth. 

“Moments like these are so hard, but I find the only thing that helps is food, well, and family,” suddenly her cousin Cyndi was standing next to her—talking to her. 

“Oh,” was all Michelle could manage. 

“I’m so happy Grandma feels like she can count on all of us at a time like this. She was so busy with so many things.  There’s so much to do when someone dies. Honestly, I hadn’t realized. It reminded me of planning my wedding! I was over yesterday, before you landed, just checking in, you know? And she had pulled out all the old albums to make that photo board. Have you looked at it? There’s a cute one of us when we were little, in Grandma’s backyard. Not sure if it was after you went to live with her or before.” 

“How’s my hair?” Michelle asked. 

Cyndi looked at her blankly. 

“In the picture? What hairstyle do I have?” 

“Oh. Pigtails, actually. A little messy, but you were very cute. My hair was just––” 

“If I had pigtails, I was still staying with my mom. She told me to wear pigtails every day. No matter what. She wouldn’t do my hair. She’d have me do it myself and pigtails were the thing I could do best.” 

“Oh, well.” 

“And then when I moved in with Grandma, she would do my hair. Mostly she’d gel it back in that sleek ballerina bun, or sometimes braids. She was terrified of lice.” 

“Really? I don’t remember her talking about lice.” 

“Well, it was different for me. Living with her and all.” 

“Sure. And who knows, maybe you had it when you were with your mom. I remember Dad and I picked you up from this one place, all the way down in Minneapolis. I had never seen anything like it. Dad and I didn’t go in, of course, but one of the windows was missing, and they had just taped a garbage bag over the hole. Do you remember?”

#

Michelle closed the door behind her and caught a breath of fresh air. There was a small bench on the porch of the funeral home. She sat down and unlaced her shoes, slipping them off and stretching out the muscles in her toes. She hadn’t worn heels in months. 

The parking attendant came around the corner of the house and leaned against the wall. “What happened to your shoes?” 

“I took them off. My grandma hated them.” 

He shrugged, “Not many red shoes in there, huh?” 

“Nope.” 

He kept leaning, and so she felt she had to keep talking. “Do you work every funeral?” 

“Yup,” a pause. “So, you’re family then?” 

“I’m the daughter.” 

“Didn’t know Mary Jo had a kid.” 

“She didn’t raise me.” Michelle wondered how he could know her mom, but her grandmother wouldn’t know his story. Usually, if you know something about somebody, they knew everything about you. The obvious answer was that he hung around the same kind of people as her mother did, but his forearms didn’t have any track marks. 

He motioned for Michelle to move over on the bench, and she did. He took a seat and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You smoke?” 

“Sure,” Michelle nodded and reached for a cigarette. “You local?” 

He looked at her as though she should know the answer. “Out by Bohner’s Lake originally. But I’ve been in Union Grove for a couple years now.” 

“You knew my mom?” She realized she had taken too long a drag of her borrowed cigarette and her cherry had grown to an inch. She told herself to slow down. 

“Not really. Sometimes I pick up a shift at The Temptation.” 

“I’ve never been in there.”

He raised his eyebrows, “It’s the only bar in town.” 

“I didn’t like running into my mother.” 

“That’s awful sad,” he said, turning his eyebrows into a triangle on his forehead. 

“Not really.” 

“How’s it not sad to avoid your mother your whole life?” 

“I mean, yeah, it’s sad. But it also, maybe, in another way, could be funny.” 

“Funny?” 

“Yeah. It’s easier that way. Like Cyndi’s big smile watching everyone eat the celery sticks she brought.” 

“I don’t know who Cyndi is.” 

“Really?” 

He nodded. 

“Anyway, usually teenage girls are sneaking off to The Temptation, right? Kind of funny that I was running away from it. Avoiding the popular kids ‘cause I worried they might have seen her there.” 

“Hard to avoid her in a place like this, no? Bar or not.” 

“I live in LA. I don’t come back here much.” Michelle looked up at the stick straight blue sky. Even through her cigarette smoke, she could smell the fresh grass that grew firmly out of every pore on Wisconsin’s skin. 

“Shame. It’s a good place to call home.” 

“You ever lived anywhere else?” 

He shrugged. “I did the rodeo circuit for a while. Went all over the West. And a couple of army bases.” 

Michelle nodded. “Were you in Iraq?” Her cigarette was over already, but he was still nursing his. 

“Sure. But I don’t count that as living somewhere. Nowhere that the army sent me was really living, it’s just hanging out in a place and getting ready for the rug to be pulled out from under you.” 

Michelle swallowed. “I can imagine that.” And then, because she couldn’t help herself, she asked: “Is that where you lost your leg?” 

He laughed. “Nope. I lost it doing rodeo. I was trampled by a bull. In front of a big ol’ crowd, too.” 

Michelle raised her eyebrows. She wanted to laugh too, but she felt she had to double check that he was the rare Midwesterner who had a sense of irony. 

A voice pulled her attention away. “We’re getting ready to go to the cemetery, Michelle. You’d best come back in, now.” It was Cyndi, of course. 

“Oh, sure.” She bent down and slipped her feet back into the pumps, the stiff leather laces bending slowly to her will.  

#

Michelle, Bodie, and her grandmother rode over in the funeral home’s black town car. 

Bodie looked out the window, loud manly sighs escaping him every few seconds. Michelle felt her grandmother’s whispers in her ear, hot and wet, “Red shoes are better than no shoes, Michelle. Cyndi told me she saw you with your shoes off smoking with the parking attendant. Really, now! I was not expecting that when I said he was distracting. Really! Michelle!” 

Her grandmother’s assumptions made her want to go to The Temptation tonight, nothing to fear there anymore, she supposed. 

The minister spoke again, this time in front of a smaller crowd. The dirt was dumped quickly on top of the casket, and the prayers were murmured.  

It was over. Bodie kept crying. Michelle surprised herself and cried too. It had been about three years since she last laid eyes on her mother. They were in the Chili’s where they had celebrated one nice birthday and kept returning. It was if they both thought it might be magic, that the atmosphere might hide their resentments. Perhaps, because it was a place they had laughed together once, those walls, tables and waiters knew it was possible, and would help them laugh again. It hadn’t worked that time. Michelle couldn’t even quite picture what her mother had worn that day, or what color her hair was. Michelle thought her hair had been their shared natural brown, but it could have also been the dusty orange her mother dyed it sometimes. Bodie was there, brought out as evidence of having her shit together. Michelle didn’t see it that way. She didn’t remember anything they said to each other. It might have been Bodie who did the talking. He always said that Michelle and her mother belonged together. He would say it like that, in front of them both. Michelle would feel guilty then, about not wanting to see her mother more, but she imagined that at least it was a feeling they had in common. 

Bodie saw Michelle’s tears and reached for her, “She talked about you all the time, kid. All the time.” He pulled Michelle closer, and she pulled back, her heel catching on the Astro Turf that was there to welcome them to the gravesite. 

She tripped. If she had leaned into Bodie she could have caught herself, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Her hand sunk into the fresh grave after she felt her knees hit the ground hard, popping at the contact, and people gasped. She was picked back up by her elbows, suddenly, like they were about to carry her away. 

Her handprint looked desperate, picturesque. She stared at it as her grandmother brushed at her knees. It was about three inches deep, a perfect impression. It reminded her of the kind of thing you’d see in a horror movie trailer, the sudden appearance of a handprint, and the scream of the audience. 

“I’m so sorry,” she found herself saying, looking at her grandmother in the eye. “I didn’t mean to. I’m so, so sorry.” She looked over at Bodie. He was shaking his head. 

The minister led the congregation back to the service and to God. No one brushed the handprint away, at least not while they stood there. Michelle bit her lip so she wouldn’t laugh. The whole thing was too absurd. She couldn’t look away. 

And for the first time since landing in Wisconsin a few days before, Michelle missed her mom. Her mom, who loved scary movies, and who would have cackled hearing about someone tripping onto a grave during a funeral. Michelle could hear her voice inside her head, “Well, Shelly, if your knees are already dirty, you may as well have some fun…” 

Michelle would never have engaged. She would have turned her head away. She would have felt rage pool in her belly. She would do her best not to think of her mother for months. She would have tried to destroy the very memory so it didn’t keep her up late at night, angry at someone who probably wasn’t thinking much about her at all. She would run away and not come back for years. She would have said that’s not how mothers were supposed to talk to their daughters. But her mother would have kept laughing, and told her to lighten up. Michelle wasn’t sure she knew how, but she thought she might try. 

1

I have to leave the apartment on Allston St today, building number 198, on the hill, apartment 12a, the top floor, the third, in the city of Boston, the state of Massachusetts. I must move out by eleven o’clock. as always, something holds me back, I can’t pack my things, several shirts, various pants, some underwear, books, my laptop, I look around, the walls are a pale color, woodwork white, the windows are covered in a thin material with vertical stripes, there is a glass table by the window, a white entry door, across from which is a short hallway, with a bathroom on my right, and across from it is a bedroom with a double bed, covered with a dark-blue bedspread, on both sides is an unpainted wooden night stand, the wood practically unfinished, two boats with a blue sea between them. on the walls there is nothing, only the walls themselves. if you just walk past the bedroom and bathroom, there will be a kitchen, there will be a window, with a table the length of the wall in front of it, and to the right, a small kitchen, an old refrigerator and a Kenmore stove, this is New England after all, everything here must be named with the customary endings,  -more, -shire, -ton, if you turn around and if you walk out of the kitchen through the hallway, you will see me, sitting on the armchair with soft patches of a bright red color. I am naked, in front of me on the black square table stands a white bowl with apple oatmeal, which I drowned in boiling water about a half an hour ago. I like apples, and also bananas, they are cheap fruits, they grow, usually, wherever I am, these are from California for sure, though I’ve never been there. anyway I’m sitting naked, I was getting ready to shower, but I sit, I plan to eat my oatmeal, still not cold. at one o’clock my bus departs from South Station for New York, I won’t make it. but I don’t know this yet, like a lot of other things, that could happen to me in the future. and maybe won’t happen. it doesn’t make sense to make any predictions. one way or another, my oatmeal should be swallowed, my things should be gathered, the apartment should be vacated, turned over to anxious hands, empty and unoccupied, god willing, by the time Pamela, the owner, returns. 

Pamela will probably find Sandy’s cold body on the double bed, on the left side, on the left side of the bed, because she lies on the right side of her body, turned towards the window, I stabbed her in the back with a knife, slowly thrusting the blade between her ribs, her skin separating, like the opening of a pocket that you reach into for a key, while standing in the dark hallway in front of the door to my apartment, in the softness of a pocket, a warm place. I was ready for her to wake up at any moment, I even wanted for her to wake up, this slowly growing desire lasted for such a long time, without butterflies in my stomach, without any soul flying out of her body, her soul slowly flowing from the wound, like thick blood, no, I didn’t want her to wake, I wanted, instead, to find out about her last dream, furthermore, if she started to wake up, I would try to hold her by her pinkies, my mother told me this in my childhood, that if you hold a sleeping person by their pinkies, they will answer any question that you ask, but why? I never asked myself why, not myself, not anyone else, but who could know, my brother Viktor and I tried this trick out on Agatha, our grandmother, we slept then in the same room, we were teenagers, and she was an old woman, in general, she had always been an old woman to us, so she was an old lady, that is how I saw her then in old photos, young, in old dresses, and then she smeared her face with sunflower oil before bed, so that her skin would be soft and younger looking, her pillow always smelled of that oil, thick and yellow, almost orange, like spots of urine on the soft white linen, spots of urine with the scent of sunflower oil. maybe I was remembering this when I plunged in the knife. it’s possible, because really, I did it very slowly. And Agatha would start talking in her sleep. it was like turning on and off the sound of a television, imagine, that its screen is facing the wall, or is covered with a blanket, you can’t see the image, you turn the sound on and off, you hold the round volume button with two or three fingers, or that slider control that you have to push left or right, you turn it and slide it, that way the night’s programming continues, and you hear only parts, with which you can put together the approximate course of events. it was worse with my brother, the moon outside his window often grabbed him by the pinkies, eventually we started to cover the windows tightly, with a very thick material, one time he stood up in the middle of the night, we slept together in one bed, he stood up in the middle of the night, Agatha asked him:

“Viktor, where are you going?” (by the way, why wasn’t she asleep at that time?) “where are you going?” 

he slowly walked halfway across the room, from the bed, which was next to the window lit by the moon, covered with a net formed by the shadows of three pines, slowly rocking, the windows were age old guardians, then he stopped, she said his name sleepily in a surprised voice again: 

 “Vitia?”

then he continued to the door and I heard him put his hand on the door’s lock, the ceiling was high, so that sounds in the room were very clear, he put his hand on the lock and said:

 “I’m going to get a shovel, I’ll get a shovel and lie down next to my brother.”

 “Vitia, why do you need a shovel,” she asked. he became lost in thought.

so he stood still for some time with his hand on the lock, no sound was heard. I would have thought he had fallen asleep, but he was already asleep.

“go to sleep, Vitia,” she said calmly. after some time, not a long time or very short time, he removed his hand from the lock and silently turned back towards the bed, he pulled the covers over himself, I think we had separate ones, and he continued sleeping. he was also sleeping when he went for the shovel. dreams. nothing is simple. nothing is so simple on some particular night. they say that the day of your death is the same as all others, but shorter.

and Sandy didn’t wake up, she should have been dreaming about the warm blue sea, about lying in the water and slowly going under, because blood had poured over her back, her nightgown was painted by the waves of the sea, the sea had already cooled down and didn’t flow anymore, in other words it didn’t ebb, because the sea wasn’t a river. there were times when it was not just seas that separated us, but entire oceans, sadness is a quiet song, sung only at a distance, and the greater the distance the fainter your song, a thin stream of your sadness, then memories become transparent, you peel away memories, like an onion, with each layer of skin you want to cry more, you really don’t want to, but there is some kind of juice that gets into your eyes, so that you can’t help crying, memories are like the juice of the onion, it gets on your fingers, it gets on your hands, and you always touch your face with your hands, touch your eyelids with your fingers, then your eyes burn and you cry. the main guiding principles of our lives together are cause and effect, like for Shevchenko. you tear off the skin, and then you cry, never in reverse, you push in the knife, and then you die. this was our life together, now we’ve hit a wall here, because you are dead and not breathing, and I am sitting naked starting the introduction to a story. my brain just naturally generates an endless supply of images, it’s possible there are gaps in my memory, I carry a box with old photographs, so that if its bottom breaks apart and one, or two slides fall out at a time, bent slides, black and white and colored photos, then if someone wanted to hunt me down, they could track me by these clues. if they track me down and arrest me, I will have to say that the body stabbed itself with the knife. that I am not guilty of your death, Sandy, it wasn’t my intention, if you were alive you would support me, you would say that I only wanted the best for you, that I could be found guilty of many things, some of which are really awful, but there are just some things that have an unintentional side effect resulting in the ending of an existence, in other words, death. I ran away from my grandmother, I ran away from my grandfather. I will run away from you too, o, the knife in your back.

you are still a child, a teenager, at least you look like one, your hair is straight or wavy, your overall description can vary, but your body is slender, everything you are wearing fits you perfectly, it suits you, your body suits you well, your nose is in the right place on your face, your shoulders are the correct width and are perfectly aligned, you are thin enough not to desire to gain or lose weight, in the morning you drink coffee and most of the time eat an unknown amount of random food, so you can say that you don’t eat breakfast, you can be compared to a sparrow, who in essence is prettier than you, your hair works in a number of styles, almost all that you have tried out, but I like it best when it is gathered on the top of your head in a large or small bun, it is like a ball of thread on your head, that you can’t buy in a store for seamstresses, your hair is so thin that you could easily thread it through the eye of a needle, the threads only capable of sewing through the thinnest fabrics, which would breathe, your body covered with the thinnest fabrics, would flutter on your bones, usually, like the sails on small boats, the sailboats docked. the sail boats rocking far from one another in the open waters on a clear day, the shore not visible, the sail boats swaying so that there is no great need to know the day and time, your bones warmed by the sun, the skin of your body tightly stretched out in the sunlight, evenly tanning. your voice, it seems, sounds a little lower than I expected, but after a few sentences, usually of short and simple construction, because that’s how you speak, it immediately begins to suit your mouth and appearance in general, your voice suits your clothes, your gestures and your way of walking, you walk softly, in your walk there is something disturbing because it captures my attention and holds it, in other words. there is something hypnotic about it, maybe you are a serpent? maybe you are Eve? maybe you are the apple? most likely neither, because you are yourself, and so you can’t be anything else, at least everything that you do seems to suit you, so that  you fit into the landscape of your life quite naturally. how could you fall asleep just like that at such an untimely moment, lying on your right side, so that all your blood would flow closer to the bed, occupying the empty spaces according to the forces of gravity, which now I have set free, like bunnies from a cage for the first time, they ran around the yard, but, not knowing what to do next, they finally fell asleep not far away, even though no one returned to the cage. I tried to gather them with my hands and herd them back into your body, nothing worked, I only made things worse. you always knew how to wash away red stains and I didn’t even try, because I always knew that it was impossible.

2

the knowledge that God doesn’t exist didn’t come easily. and how could it have been otherwise, I never considered that he didn’t exist. he, it, she, them, not anyone/anything and furthermore. from early childhood you believe that he exists, that Santa Claus exists, and other important characters. I always knew that Mr. Winding exists. he lived in the vents in the kitchen, on Kasarniy Street in Lviv, where I grew up, on the attic level we had a kitchen without windows, its entrance was under the roof of the old Polish building, third floor, with a spiral staircase, the third floor was enclosed in darkness, which sometimes made it scary to enter, the ceiling was low, right above your head, on the right there was a door to the kitchen, straight ahead, totally covered by darkness, was an old mop, or a twisted broom, or one or the other, on the left there was also a door, secured with a prehistoric an additional padlock, grandpa Steve was the only one who had the key. that meant that the key really hung on the door frame in the kitchen, on a grey, at some point white, shoelace, it hung available to everyone, but I knew that key belonged to Steve. behind that door was the attic, behind the door was the oldest part of this building. it was there that old Agatha told me, that Mr. Winding lived. he kidnapped small naughty children, his voice could be heard through the kitchen vents, maybe through the 30 centimeters wide pipe, which, for ten or fifteen centimeters protruded from the ceiling above the kitchen cabinet, they were separated by maybe 10 centimeters of kitchen air, it was enough space for us to look at the black round form, from which sometimes echoed a sad and sinister howling, “listen, Sasha, Mr. Winding is howling after you, if you’re naughty, he will kidnap you.”  

Mr. Winding lived in the pipes, sometimes I heard him howl and fear seized my small mischievous body. I was afraid of walking up the steps, there usually was no light in front of the door, you had to screw the lightbulb into the socket above your head left of the stairs, it would crackle for a moment and then pour yellow light through the glass of the lightbulb, most of the time the lightbulb would burn out from the cracking and the area would become dark, sometimes for entire months, I walked up the stairs, holding on to the old railings painted in a wine or brown color, was it them that supported me, on the right was a wall, which also went severely upwards next to the overly steep stairs, the walls were half green, later blue, and half white, the colors converged at a red stripe that both united and separated them somewhere at the level of my shoulders, the stairs were severely steep, day light illuminated them through open doors of the balcony, which were across from the first stair on the second floor, then there was a winding turn to the left, the adults were forced to bend their heads and walk into the darkness, the darkness of two doors and one wall, mops and a twisted broom, and also a metal bucket without a bottom, we lived to the right and to the left lived Mr. Winding. I never saw him. but maybe I did. In those strange dreams of mine, when it’s as if some pillows latch onto me, one after another, engulfing me like a snowball, when I cry out his name in the mountains, who was in front or who behind, the pillows flew at me constantly getting closer, at night I couldn’t sleep and ran out of my room on the second floor, ran through Grandpa Steve’s and ran upstairs, because past the kitchen was, my parents’ room, separated by a door that was never closed, on its the frame hung Steve’s key to the attic. I ran upstairs and yelled for my mother to save me, my father never took part in this, she told me to say a prayer, to read “Our Father” together with her, she didn’t really know the words well herself, but we read in unison, “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” then she chanted some spells and said some words, made some gesture with her hands, as if she was chasing small flies from my head, from my left ear, from my right ear, from above my head and from my face. she said, “now you’ll fall asleep,” and I believed that I didn’t have any other choice. how could I not believe in God. later, I turned to God on my own, when I had nightmares and even wept, I put my hands together and raised the window shade, I sometimes looked between the branches of trees into the sky and in a trembling quiet voice, or even whisper, read “Our Father” and like always the fear went away, amen. now I know that God doesn’t exist, now I don’t have nightmares anymore, nevermore. 

so, just yesterday I was reading the introduction that Bohdan Rubchak wrote to the book, “Ostap Lutskyi: Young Muse,” he started writing about his views of Edgar Allen Poe and his literary criticism in “Poetic Principles” and the “The Philosophy of Composition” in the essay “The Philosophy of Composition, for example, Poe asserts that the death of a beautiful woman is without a doubt, “the most poetic” theme in the world…here we should remember, that however generally applicable the theme is, it is only a literary theme of a “poetic creation.”

suddenly I stopped thinking and remembering. someone was knocking on the door.

3

different versions of who knocks on the door. Pamela’s neighbor knocks, I go to the door and open it, turn the lock one time and remove the chain, at the bottom of the door there is a strip of plastic that makes a terrible scraping sound, when you open the door, the strip is supposed to prevent drafts, but it only clatters ominously when the wind blows from the open window in the hallway, this time the strip scrapes also, before me stands a woman about 70 years old and smiles warmly, she looks like all the friendly neighbors down the hall, out in front of her, at the level of her breast, she holds a freshly baked apple pie with both hands, it releases its beguiling scent, she says:

“I came to see how you killed your Sandy, can I glance into the bedroom, just for a quick peek? Pamela said that I could go in.” 

she smiles at me very warmly, the pie smells very tempting, I can’t help myself from letting her look even longer. then the three of us eat pie and laugh with one another. no. 

I open the door, a man stands there, he is about forty, in a cheap gray suit with a wide tie, with bright colors, it doesn’t matter what colors when he sees me, he smiles insincerely and forces a wide smile and in a practiced and calm voice he starts his spiel: 

“good day, sir, I represent an international window company, we noticed, that you don’t have windows in your apartment! I have an amazing offer for cutting holes in the walls and installing wonderful noise and light blocking windows! they will look totally like your walls, when you look at them, you won’t notice any difference, here look at our samples and convince yourself – I just slam the door in his face, not wanting to listen. no. 

suddenly I hear someone knocking on the door. I slowly approach it and ask:

“who’s there?”

I wait for some time. I listen, try to hear an answer, it seems, no one answers, I ask “who’s there?” one more time, I turn my head and place my right ear to the door, so that I can try to hear an answer, because usually after a knock on the door and the question “who’s there?” there is the answer to who but again I don’t hear anything that is like an answer. then I raise my right hand, look at the door, knock on it myself and listen again. from the window on the right, a faint crooked light falls onto the door. after a short while I hear a knock in reply. I am surprised and ask the question again. why didn’t I just open the door, if I hadn’t asked, who’s there, I would not have hesitated and would have opened the door a long time ago but a lot of things happen randomly, suitcases are checked randomly by airport security, they randomly search people, not according to their sex, conductors randomly check tickets on trams, one time I say good day, another how are you, sometimes I just open the door, sometimes, like now, I ask, who’s there. there is no answer. I start to get annoyed and worried. I decide to open the door and find out, turn the lock, take off the chain, listen to the scrape of the plastic strip, which is attached to the door so there wouldn’t be a draft.

the door opens. Sandy stands in front of me. but that’s not exactly right, I stand behind her, or rather she stands with her back to the door and to me, and to the whole apartment. and to the hallway, and to the glass table, and to the light from the window, and to the couch, and to the apple oatmeal in the bowl, and to the kitchen with all its contexts, and to herself, lying on the bed in the bedroom, turned towards the window, in a puddle of her own blood. I can smell her skin, the scent reached my nose with the draft. she stands unmoving, calm. I see her dark wavy hair, I see her clothed shoulders, her arms hanging freely at her sides, in her left had she holds a knife. a large knife. I freeze where I stand, I slowly look at her figure, I just don’t understand what is happening. she is lying in the bed in the bedroom. I turn around, let go of the door and run into the bedroom, it was about seven steps away, I look into the open door, the breeze from the draft moves the shades, Sandy lies on the bed without any sign of life, the bed is red around her. I turn my head left and throw a puzzled glance at the entry door, where Sandy stands with her back to me, nothing makes sense, she stands there with her back to me, but she is lying on the bed. I must have been sweating because I find that my hands are wet, and something is dripping down my cheeks, and I also realize that I am crying, but I don’t question any of these versions, it totally doesn’t matter to me, what will happen to my body now. I turn around and go to the open entry door, holding myself up by the walls, the backs of chairs, as if I am on a rocky boat, or a train car, although a train car can rock very fast because of its small amplitude, two steps from Sandy, I stop, I hold onto the back of a chair with my right hand, I hold my left before me, as if walking in the dark, suddenly I let out a ferocious cry.

 “Who’s there?!”

but I completely recognize this figure in the doorway, with her back turned towards me, my question doesn’t make sense, or maybe it does, maybe I just don’t trust myself, and there isn’t anything strange, who would believe it, my body becomes a question mark. then my body emits a frightened prolonged wailing, my brain sends such a crazy command of desperation to my vocal cords and throat, I start to approach Sandy, I slowly step out into the hallway and walk around so that I can see her face. it is calm, her eyes are closed, her muscles relaxed, she is calm. I ask:

 “Sandy?”

with intonation that is normal for a question, but I really just state her name. Sandy opens her eyes and just says:

 “seems so?”

up to the time that I walked around her, I was calm and even happy that she was alive, but in one quick second, a second that was never so fast, I become enraged as the Russians say “I become disembodied,” I become disembodied in a flash, I grab the knife from her hand and start to stab her with an unimaginable hate, simply start to stab her indiscriminately all over her body with the knife, I am disembodied, my body flies downward from a great height and all possible emotions flow out of me, red petals of blood begin to fall on all sides, Sandy’s body falls to the floor, I continue on without any control over my hands to dig out pieces of muscle and blood from beneath her clothes, smearing them across the whole hallway, the rug, the white doors, the windows, the walls, the nearby stairs going down and those to the right coming down from the third floor. for some reason no one looks out from the doors of the neighboring apartments, no one comes out when they hear my cries, when I stop and catch my breath for a while, for some reason I don’t hear the sounds of sirens outside, no help is coming from anywhere.

I drop the knife in my hands, drop down on, I breathe hard, with both hands I wipe the blood and sweat from my face, because this mixture has started to get into my eyes and burns. I look around, a familiar silence surrounds me, nothing special. so what now, I had to kill the same person twice in two different ways?

you could describe my appearance in various ways. am I old? am I young? fat or thin? do I have all my fingers? what kind of hair do I have? what kind of teeth? are my eyes narrow? and lips? broad shoulders, or not really? hunched over? I, by the way, sat naked then, when someone knocked on the door, as you remember. was my body hairy? was my skin pale, or dark? or what? could you see my penis? what was it like? what other aspects of my appearance can you remember? after some moment, I hear someone walking up the stairs, but not quickly, just the opposite, very deliberately, it was Sandy, I caught sight of her after a moment when her head and then whole body started to emerge from beneath the level of the floor to the right revealing more of her body, step by step, to the left, until I could see all of her. she asks me.

“why are you sitting on the floor in the hallway? go inside,” she says this all calmly, not even pausing and enters through the open door of the apartment, stepping over her body, which lies with its head inside the doorway, the body in the hallways, left leg dangling down the steps, a hand dangling in the air above the highest step. I hear Agatha’s voice in the building and the scent of apple pie. what should I do? should I just pretend that there aren’t any bodies here? and then later clear everything up? or leave everything here, as it is, since it’s not bothering anyone? so now there isn’t any necessity for descriptions of internal monologue. as Panas Myrnyi said, “to clear up dirt, to create order in many places. you need to provide everyone with the means to wash, dress their children, make their beds, clean their houses.” in houses, in other words, in apartments, they used to say this.

Several years ago, unable to rent an apartment, I sublet one in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I didn’t bring much, — some clothes, random papers, German tea, flax oil, hair conditioner I’d been rationing for seven years.

The sublet included a cat — black and white, long-haired and over-sized — basically, a stuffed skunk. She had a small splotch of permanent blood in her left eye that made her look emotionally injured. Her name began with “the,” like a title. I was subletting from a novelist, and so I understood the titular nature of the cat’s name. The introductory article was followed by a popular and sophisticated female name, which made her fit right into the surrounding baby infinity.

I’ll call her The Sophie, as she is still alive, and I don’t want to get sued for infringement. I trust the novelist is quite capable of this, as her English is fluent — her paw-written English, that is. A lengthy note was posted on the kitchen wall citing the duties the care-provider must perform in order to earn his or her stay, and satisfy The Sophie’s needs. The note concluded with the lengths one was to go to if something dire were to happen to The Sophie while her mommy was away.

The Sophie didn’t possess feline aloofness, independence, nonchalance. She’d follow me around the apartment, waiting for me to perch somewhere—which she heard as the tolling bell to begin her love ritual. She’d start on my lap, sinking her claws into my sweater and pulling her way, rung by rung, up to the summit — my neck. She’d wrap her front paws around it and burrow her head into its side, purring. The Sophie’s purr reminded me of the sonic percolation of my father’s foot pressing the gas pedal into the car floor, waiting patiently to take me to church. He was pre-punctual, which I, in those days, interpreted as his wanting to beat God.

As soon as The Sophie settled, she’d begin licking my face, sticking her tongue in my ear canal. Her tongue was not smooth. This gesture brought me uncomfortably back to childhood, when I’d rub my nose and cheeks with sandpaper, in efforts to erase my freckles. I’d carried this desire with me into adulthood, morphing it into a love of sloughing dead skin. I had left my (now extraneous) exfoliant in my former apartment. Exfoliant wasn’t the first thing I lacked.

The temporary apartment didn’t have any nice mugs, which stunted my coffee habit. Some were the wrong size, they were all the wrong shape, no awakening colors. This depressed me. How was I to perform my energizing morning ritual without lamenting the mug’s sick shape? I went for a walk to cool off. On my way up the Slope I saw a box on the sidewalk with its cardboard tongue sticking out: FREE STUFF. I stopped and looked inside: two mugs of a peppered mustard color, with bellies of constrained voluptuous roundness peered up at me. They had the remote and casual expression of a dog in the pound, the kind who knows that if he looks at you with too much want, you’ll pass him over. I looked around. In the distance I saw a figure in an over-puffed coat hiking up the hill. I bent over and took the mugs — since the figure was too far away to watch the poor, pitiful person take free stuff, I lacked embarrassment.

There were also books in the box: “How to Raise a Smarter Child, The Baby Whisperer”; there was a dinosaur-looking Mr. Coffee machine, cords and plugs and computer mice. But I didn’t pay attention to the other stuff. I couldn’t believe my luck.

A couple mornings later I found myself on my way to a coffee shop. There was one uphill, one down, one north, one south. (I’m referring merely to the ones at spitting distance). Neighborhood-wise I was on vacation. Work-wise, I was not. I decided on the uphill one, as it was nearest the bank where I’d have to stop pre-coffee to decrease my balance. Why are you spending money on coffee when you have some at “home”? You have likeable mugs! You pig! Why waste two bucks? I withered my shoulders against the wind, made sure I didn’t step on the cracks. There’s where I saw something stuck and papery, scraping along its folded creases. Recognition (my eureka (not the best one yet)) must have flashed across my eyes in the same instant they met a man’s walking towards me. I dropped to my knees and collected the dollars (two), ironing them friskily into my pocket. The man smiled wide. He seemed happy for me. Either that or he was laughing at me.

I’ve earned my coffee shop coffee! It’s an omen! Good things are going to happen to me! My smile was splitting my mouth. You’ll probably head off to a coffee shop every morning thinking you’re going to find money! You’ll wind up in debtor’s prison! Prison without coffee! Prison with Mr. Coffee! You’ll spend money looking for money! I brushed my pocket with my palm, turned around and crept back to the sublet, where I made my already-paid-for coffee, in my found mug.

The precision of my first two finds, the answer to my specific desires, began to form a strange feeling in my mind. I couldn’t believe the wealth and steady up-grading of the Slopians. I wanted — through juxtaposition, through osmosis — to ingest the neighborhood that was not mine. I wanted to experience Park Slopianism’s side-effects through affect and fakery. I wanted to worm my way in, eating its dirt. I certainly couldn’t enter straight-forwardly, by handing over a large, penta-digitus check.

I remembered a friend whose book became a best-seller telling me that this had come to pass through visualization — how he pictured his book on the store shelves between Barbara Kingsolver and Rudyard Kipling. And so I’d leave each morning on my way to work picturing what I needed, what I couldn’t afford to buy, or what I no longer understood why I should buy.

I’d never owned a blender, but loved mushy food, and so I pictured one whirring. The next day I found one in its manufacturer’s box on top of a trashcan alongside some wet pillows and desiccating wreaths. I lugged it home. I visualized an elderly hand-mixer for mashing the potatoes I wanted to mash once a year. A few days later I found a prehistoric one, with white ceramic bowls attached. I thought in the near future I’d need a chair (I pictured a lonely corner in my unforeseeable apartment). I found three — one whose wooden back formed the shape of a child splitting his legs and lifting the world with his hands. I found a wicker laundry basket (I hadn’t pictured that, but it was too cylindrical for me to pass up). I found a crate to hold my merciless papers; a lamp with a green translucent face; a series of wooden frames with the declension as Russian nesting dolls; a cork board; a full-length mirror; a table; a pressure-cooker; countless printers that looked brand new (which I soon stopped carting home, as I came to terms with the fact that I didn’t need more than one, and was overwhelmed by their size and plastic ugliness).

I also began to acquire a wardrobe. The brownstones of Park Slope are gated, with spikes pointing to the sky. People hook their unwanted, ill-fitting, often brand-new clothes on them. I found a pair of dark jeans with wide ankles and a metallic British flag attached to its back pocket, an antique summer dress in sky and sea pastels, a soft pair of musk-green tights. I found a pair of mossy suede boots, a blue corduroy mini skirt, a sweater with roses, a black summer dress with vertical lines that shimmered as though black were an assortment of colors that complimented each other. I found a pair of jeans with foot-long cuffs and fuzzy back pockets. I couldn’t tell if they were designer or home made. At first I liked their kookiness, but after a while, worried that I looked like a middle-aged hare. I found a pair of Keen shoes. I didn’t know these were expensive and wanted by the middle-aged Park Slopians. But due to the jealous disbelieving looks that fell straight to my shoes when I wore them, I soon Googled and discovered they cost about 100 bucks. I feared these shoes would ruin an economically- challenged person like me, as they were so comfortable, how could I return to my twelve dollar warehouse sneakers? But I also wondered if when women stared at my clothes, it was because they recognized their discarded junk, finding me pathetic.

I found paintings — some good, some horrible. It didn’t matter; I dragged them all back to the sublet, decorating in my mind the home I could not find. It saddened me that people threw out their paintings. I felt that by carting their work home I was saving parts of their forgotten souls. I found record albums that felt like parts of mine.

I was overwhelmed by the number of books I found on the street, as well as the number of them that lined the inside skin of the sublet (not to mention the number of framed literary advertisements and paintings that featured female breasts). At first the endless choice seemed wonderful, but soon my nettled inability to decide what to read felt much like trying to select olive oil from Olive Row at Whole Foods.

The Sophie’s mommy collected the work of contemporary writers — Jonathan Safron Foer’s complete collection, for example, Roberto Bolano’s entire opus. I found myself retracting into a former self, wanting to re-read books from my past, books that were not there — V. S. Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas,” for instance. Naipaul was too old for The Sophie’s mommy’s competitive assortment — it would be like finding Velveeta inside the city of artisanal cheese. So I sat on the floor and pictured the book, visualizing what my mind had sculpted as Biswas‘ house: dry and derelict expanse of land, cheap house-building ingredients, his small unhappy wife, sarongs wrapped around dark-skinned women with tikkas between their brows.

The next day I found Naipaul’s “Half a Life.” How close, I thought. At first this seemed like a good sign, but I didn’t like “Half a Life”. I didn’t know if I should trust my dislike of the book, or if this was a sign that I could no longer accept anything besides exactly what I wanted. I recited some Biswas aloud in hopes of bringing it closer. The next day I found “Frankenstein”.

I pictured Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” because recently a friend had argued that my dislike of it was wrong. So I wanted to give it another try. I visualized it. I pictured the words of the title in a nice font with the author’s name hovering close. The next day I found Ondaatje’s “Anil’s Ghost”. I pictured “A Hundred Years of Solitude,” and found “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. I couldn’t tell if I was refining my powers, or if they were breaking free.

At some point in my book-haze my sublet expired and I under-rented again in another Brooklyn neighborhood, followed by several others, landing about a year later in a studio for which my partner co-signed the lease. It was in Park Slope, and had a way-below-average rent for reasons that were not explained, but became evident as time moved on. I had all but forgotten the way things had been in this hood — what I’d expected to find — though I’d lugged all my finds from sublet to sublet, furnishing my new home.

Initially my Park Slope rental life was the same as my subletted one: I found a green plate that wasn’t round or square — with gold Baroqueness and steppe depressions, a pink mug with a cat’s face hiding inside its design, a dark dresser whose age made light decoration on its surface, a ceramic planter, a wooden frame with carved wooden flowers inside, a straw lampshade, a tea set, a map of the world, a water-proof pair of calf-length boots.

I began to picture the object I actually needed — the appliance I hated to use but had to, the cleaning machine I spent each Saturday of my youth paralyzed in front of, trying unsuccessfully to startle myself into un-comatization: a vacuum. About six months went by — my apartment freeloading on hair follicles and dust bunnies. Then one morning I got a call from a friend informing me that he had just seen a vacuum on a street close to my apartment. I ran out. It was there: a friendly red upright Dirt Devil. I pushed it home, receiving dirty looks from everyone who passed me by. Were they annoyed at someone collecting things off the street? Or was it the irritating scrape of the vacuum’s wheels against the sidewalk?

I plugged it in. It revved. I felt I’d entered the final frontier. But soon I found myself criticizing the vacuum: It had no hand-held nozzle. It was clearly made for a much larger apartment, and one with lots of rugs! It had a female voice, which reminded me of my youthful paralysis. It was red!

A few weeks later I found a better fit, receiving the same dirty looks as I scraped it home. In the weeks to come, my finds switched to the vegetal: a pear with brown scars sitting on top of a mailbox. I rubbed it clean and palmed it home; an isolate brussel sprout that I put in my pocket and rested on the window sill. And one rainy day a tiny white brain swam past along the gutter. I watched it go. I didn’t take it home.

Looking back on the course of my finds, it seems to me now that it was something like beginner’s luck; that plus the investigation of a newly-found neighborhood. How enamored I was with brownstones and expressive trees — things that I took for granted after living in the studio for two years. At the start I walked along intricate and spontaneous pathways; then up and down the same street every day — that’s what I think launched me out of finding so much stuff.

When I first moved in I lived Off the Slope; a little while later, I lived On it. Now I live in a Brooklyn borough in which my finds are trash and dog pooh.

Three Sea Poems

Two Seaside Poems

I invented God in the late afternoon in October. The light came in at an angle through the pine trees, and someone was making dinner.

I invented God on a day in October, not long after my grandfather died.

My grandfather had collapsed the way they imploded the old casinos in Atlantic City: first, the sound of explosives, and then, the building crumbling in on top of itself. Where it had stood, rubble and dust, a sense of something missing, a hemorrhage.

I invented God on a day in October when I was seven or eight years old. I knew the story where he called out to Samuel in the middle of the night, and I decided he should have my grandfather’s voice. Later, I discovered I could talk as much as I liked. He would never reply, never stop me in mid-sentence to tell me I had it wrong. And, if he reprimanded, it was only my own voice, assuming what he would say if he were going to say it. Eventually, I forgot what my grandfather’s voice sounded like, and I never heard it coming from him.

That afternoon in October, I was sitting on the red brick steps outside the house, trying to remember my grandmother who’d died before I could speak and a great aunt who’d lived in New Mexico. Nobody bothered me at times like that. I got as far as remembering my great aunt’s room when she was sick, that it was green and the shades were drawn. My mother had taken me to visit when I was so young that memory and what I’d been told were mixed together.

I invented God in the late afternoon in October. The light came in at an angle through the pine trees, and someone was making dinner.   

A Seaside Poem

“Who would like to start?” Michael says as he taps his pencil on his notepad. 

Alexandra reaches into her purse, grabs a journal and holds it triumphantly into the air and exclaims, “I will start.”

I recognize my journal and sink into my chair. The journal contains an idea I once had for a work of satire, maybe for the theatre, perhaps the big screen. I was sure my Orwellian piece would go further than my now estranged wife using it against me in couple’s therapy.

She shows the cover to Michael, our therapist, and I cringe. What must he be thinking as he reads, “The Butt Sniffer.” written in black marker.

 “Nick told me,” she says in a voice that sounded rehearsed, “I don’t know, what’s it’s been now, for close to a year, huh, Nick? That he was going to stop paying his credit cards go so he can work on his writing, to follow his dreams, to show our kids what it means to sacrifice for… what did you call it Nick? A higher vision? What was it Nick? That without paying your credit card bills you would have more time to write?” 

 “Michael, can we start with a feeling check in?” I say. “Maybe we can all begin with “I” statements. Here’s mine: I feel violated… give me my fucking journal.” I spring from my chair and snatch it out of her hands.

“See Michael, see this is Nick. It’s scary.”

“You bring my journal into therapy!”

“Alright, alright, everybody, let’s calm down. Let’s regroup.” 

“She thinks this notebook is some kind of indictment on my character. Why don’t we read it out loud, so we can all be the judge  –“

         “I don’t – “ Michael says. 

“No.” I say, interrupting him. “Thank you, Michael but no. This is client-driven therapy and I will read my journal like Alexandra wants.”

         Alexandra folds her arms and looks at me like I am filth.

I begin with my Acknowledgement Page. Thank you and fuck you very much to Care Credit – you predatory-lending, high interest bastards so I could get my teeth fixed. Fuck you and Thank you Costco Card for all the diapers and baby wipes. Thank-you Visa Platinum and any creditor I forgot. Debt is an illusion and means nothing to me. I shall not pay thee.

Dedication Page. I dedicate this work to my children. Kids, it is more important to be creative than kill yourself working to pay off credit card debt.

  I clear my throat and begin with both pride and trepidation.

There was this… this creature… this girl, this woman running around with a child having fun, laughing, swinging, playing. I knew right away she wasn’t the mother because what mom at Lafayette Park in Low Pac Heights acts so spontaneous, free and joyful? To be fair, what dad does? And she had these–I don’t know what they were–some kind of workout pants or something. But they outlined a young, round healthy backside and you could almost, well you could damn near see her ass through her pants. 

I witnessed three dads in the span of a half an hour stumble over to where she was and strike up a conversation with her. Yeah, whatever, not me. She said something to my Angela. And then to me. I remained (seemingly) aloof. We left. 

That night I thought about that ass and prayed. I prayed earnestly to Jesus. Not to the evangelical Christian Jesus but to the mystical Jesus who whispered into the ears of a Jewish, atheistic Professor of Medical Psychology. That persistent, nail-biting Jesus whispered into the good doctor’s ears for a period of over seven years in iambic pentameter until the metaphysical masterpiece A Course in Miracles was completed. Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God is what Jesus said. Meaning this world ain’t shit. 

I went to the bathroom and got on my knees resting my arms on the toilet clasping my hands together in the prayer position. Oh Lord Jesus, I know that that sweet ass does not truly exist. But I sure do believe it does. Please show me the way through that butt. Amen. And Jesus, if the way out of the butt is through the butt, well, I will accept whatever mission you have in store for me.

The vibe in the room is riveting.  I think I have captured my listeners’ attention.  Ha.  Reading my notes for a screenplay in therapy!  I win again.  Oh, how I love myself. 

I clear my throat: 

The Butt Sniffer by Nick Freeman.

Synopsis: The city of San Francisco is plagued with fear and chaos thanks to a demented, maladjusted techie. A coder or developer (it is believed) has been going around the city pulling down the pants of women or lifting their skirts, smelling their asses and running away. He usually strikes during morning commute times and it is believed that after he commits his crime he then runs to a waiting Facebook or Google commuter bus and makes a luxurious, air-conditioned, Wi-Fi enabled getaway to Silicon Valley.

I look up and Michael is looking down writing notes. I hope he doesn’t think I am the butt sniffer and is deliberating whether or not to report me to the authorities. Who would pick up Angela at preschool if I were in jail? I continue:

The mayor has seized this opportunity to divert the public’s attention from the housing crisis and growing income inequalities which make the city unaffordable for the working class, teachers and, public servants. The mayor holds press conferences relating to The Butt Sniffer, admonishes the tech community for their culture of sexism, praises the SFPD for their progress on the case, and thanks to the good citizens of San Francisco for coming together and rallying against The Butt Sniffer.

The Chief of Police introduces the lead detective to a room full of patrol cops–a transgender (F to M) from Germany who speaks four languages and is on methadone for chronic hip pain. A former child and teenage prostitute in Berlin, Detective Lamb is mocked by his peers.  Detective Lamb stands, introduces himself and when he addresses the nature of the crimes, he involuntarily twitches his nose. This involuntary action of Detective Lamb will become uh… the butt of many jokes among the red-blooded butt patrol officers. 

The national media has been camping out at City Hall, The Mission and SOMA, interviewing victims, witnesses and residents. One male reporter from FOX News is ostracized for asking one of the victims who was wearing a skirt at the time of the incident if the perpetrator actually touched her. “So, when he put his head underneath your skirt and sniffed did he make any skin contact at all?” The impetus being perhaps a crime was not committed. Is it really a crime to approach a skirt, peer underneath and inhale through the nostrils? FOX News, under pressure, fires the reporter but he quickly lands a job with Breitbart.

 I clear my throat again. Michael is looking at me and I think, but am not sure, that he is smirking. I feel so stimulated by my screenplay pitch. I am actually grateful Alexandra brought it the session. I decide not to embarrass her by asking her if she sees the irony in her bringing my screenplay to the session when she, not too long ago – before my credit was shot to hell – asked if I would finance a pair of butt implants. It’s all coming together now. Like butt cheeks squished in a pair of yoga pants:

Somewhere in the city, a client has told his therapist that although he is a highly paid tech employee, he does not know how to interact with women and wishes he could just make out with their sweet asses. Like ‘just make out with a butt for like an hour,’ he says. And talk to it. He feels he could really open up to a woman and make progress as an individual if he could just process his fears and insecurities while kissing and licking an ass. The therapist does not know if he should report his client to the authorities and makes a mental note to confer with a colleague.

         I look up at Michael.  “Divinely channeled material, everybody.”  I’m such a liar.  Well, maybe everything is channeled from an abstract collective mind and downloaded to our individual brains.  Through that lens, I speak the truth.  Alexandra’s arms are still folded and her legs are crossed.  She looks at me like I am the anti-Christ.  I look back at Michael.  I get the sense he is deliberating on what to say. Meanwhile:

Kim Kardashian has come to town in the name of activism, social justice, and me-tooism. She publicly taunts the butt sniffer to come do his thing in The Mission after she eats a carne asada burrito at a Taqueria. This causes a backlash, as…

          “Okay, Nick, I think we get the picture.” Michael says loudly. 

“No.” I say, “Alexandra wanted this.  We are going to finish.  And it’s very therapeutic for me to do this. I have never shared my idea with anybody until now. And ultimately it is about looking at my own thoughts, attitudes and, beliefs in order to become a better man and father to my children, my daughter especially.”  I say. 

I’ve got the decoupling therapy session in the palm of my hands.  “As an example of my growth, I used to resent Alexandra for watching The Kardashians. Then I realized it is all simply material for my own change, creativity and, transformation. Thank you, Alexandra.”  I say in a pious voice and bow my head, again redirecting my focus:

A gay men’s group has petitioned City Hall demanding a public park be opened that makes it legal for consenting adults to sniff each other’s asses. The lesbian community is outraged and old wounds between the two communities are reopened. The Detective Lamb of dog jokes make the rounds.

A group of citizens filed a billion-dollar class action lawsuit against multiple tech companies. Their claim is that they do not feel safe on the city streets and have developed PTSD-related symptoms. Tech, the lawsuit claims, has allowed a toxic, sexist culture to thrive, and it has oozed out into the streets and created The Butt Sniffer. A group of mental health workers hired as expert witnesses for the case has demanded the American Psychiatric Association add PTBSD (Post Traumatic Butt Sniffing Disease) to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

Copycat Butt Sniffers have surfaced and now the city has multiple young white maladjusted techies going around San Francisco smelling women’s asses.

A feminist group plans a parade with blow-up butts and signs such as ‘Come smell this’ with a big turd coming out of a giant inflatable ass. 

The far-right attorney general is licking his chops as discussions in Washington involve sending in the National Guard to keep San Francisco safe from all the butt-sniffing going on around town. Once the Guard is in San Francisco they will have no problem infiltrating less liberal cities and the dystopian vision of America as a totalitarian police state will be closer to fruition. The deep state toasts The Butt Sniffer.

         I stop reading, spent, awash in a scene of achievement with even greater potential. “You get the gist. It is actually a pro-feminist, a pro-social justice piece of umm… satire.”

“It’s ridiculous!” Alexandra says, “And such a waste of time.  There is no way a Hollywood studio would ever want to turn your disgusting little screenplay into a movie.”

         I ponder sharing my film production company idea. BackItUp Productions. A collective of progressive filmmakers who are committed to their craft, who take the principles of movements seriously, while maintaining a general attitude of irreverence towards anything of this world. Non-dual filmmaking.  

I look over at Michael and am pleased to see the corners of his lips curl upwards and for half a second, he actually chuckles. I win again. I am not a loser.

         “Michael! He’s sick. He is so sick.” Alexandra says, her face red with anger. 

Michael looks stumped.  I feel a little disturbed.  Are we hopeless?  Have Alexandra and I reached a point where a therapist can’t even help us break up? Did he just give us up by laughing?

“Nick, you will eventually be looking for an apartment or room to rent soon.  How do you think your now low credit score will affect you getting permanent housing?” Michael asks.

“Yeah, Nick, how do you think this will affect our children? You blowing off your credit so you can write screenplays about guys going around smelling asses. What is wrong with you?”

Stimulated by the first public reading of my unfinished screenplay, I check out of the session and daydream of new scenes. I hope Michael doesn’t try to steal my idea.  Maybe I should not have abandoned it.

Tiziano Colibazzi was in my class at The New School this spring. He was doing a dual degree in poetry and non-fiction in the M.F.A. program. Early on, I learned that he was a psychoanalyst. We spoke briefly, once, on a street corner, about his life, but that now seems like a luxury. Covid hit; we were on Zoom. In those squares. I recall Tiziano gesticulating that he was losing his mind, with the kids home all day—home schooling—he had seven-year-old twins he shared with his ex-husband.  If they come out of their room,” he said, “I may have to go to them.” And they did. “They are very very curious,” he said. I recall heads bobbing up and down, just below the threshold of the screen. Eyes wide open. Sometimes, they fell asleep there, on his lap, one on each side, as class continued into the night. I’ll never forget those squares—it felt as though we were all on a lifeboat, through the roughest of seas; if any one of us seemed to be falling in, arms would reach to pull them back… And all around, there was so much suffering and death. 

“Shoes” was Tiziano’s final piece for the class. It took my breath away. He beautifully invents a form when words fail, when a trauma is so deep, so obscene, it cannot be held… There’s something astonishing in the movement of the piece, as it enacts the experience of post-traumatic stress. And he reminds us of what happens if we do not remain vigilant–act up, speak out… As I read it, I returned to that place where as a child, I could not find words. And then I experienced waves of grief, for lovers and friends—and humankind—through AIDS and Covid…

—Zia Jaffrey, author of The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India, professor in The New School’s MFA program, and contributor to Toni Morrison: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (forthcoming, Melville House)

“Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends“

“Black milk of the morning we drink it in the evening”

— from “Todesfuge” by Paul Celan

I. Beginnings

Mine is not a fetish, yet my relationship with shoes is older than my memories.

I would call it a strained relationship, occasionally acrimonious, with its ebbs and flows. It has fallen prey to infatuations and fads, family conflicts and bouts of masochistic self-deprivation.  I have suffered blisters and taken them in stride as a price to pay for elegance, I have rebelled against the unspoken mandate to keep the heels from showing the stigmata of use, the gnawing at the edge which exposes the wood under the rubber, and belies the sloppy moral fiber of a neglectful attire.

At least that is what some people say in Italy.

My mother used to say—and still does—that I go through shoes like rolls of toilet paper. She used to blame my posture and way of walking or standing, supposedly inherited from my father in a straightforward Mendelian fashion, for the fact that after a month one heel was considerably more worn out than the other and that the tips where damaged.

“You keep dropping and dragging the tip of your foot!” All my sins were on display. I guess she thought she could fully understand people’s personalities from their shoes, in the same way that the old phrenologists classified characters by looking at the shape of someone’s head.

Despite, or rather in opposition to these injunctions, I proudly owned only one pair of shoes throughout my last year of high school. The left rubber sole had a hole right where the arch was supposed to find support, a capital sin in the world of flat-footed people. I am not sure what drove this experiment in Franciscan virtue, beyond my wish to push the lack of financial means we suffered during those years to its limit so that it could become a sign of honor.

When I moved to the US, my relationship with shoes slowly became more practical. The winters were harsher and it was not possible to wear shoes conceived for a Mediterranean climate in the arctic temperatures of Chicago winters. The snow would wet the flimsy hand-stitched soles, seep through them and imbibe my socks, which would end up feeling like frozen gloves. I had no other choice: I would put my Italian shoes in a bag and change once I got to the hospital. I opted during my commute for a pair of white Adidas, which jarred with my suit as I waited on the L platform. I felt thrilled by this freedom: nobody seemed to care or to look at me with disapproving glances.

I could not escape the fact that I was born and lived for twenty-five years in Italy, a place where shoes are a proxy measure for being a “put-together” human being, that my father’s family comes from that region of central Italy mostly connected to shoe-making, the Marche region, that my aunt owned for some time a shoe store in one of the banlieues of Rome and that my cousin Francesca, her daughter, was deprived of “real” shoes as a child, having to wear “corrective” ones for years, supposedly to address her flat foot problems. Of course, these therapeutic shoes did not come in fashionable designs or pleasing colors. Rather, they seemed to be manufactured with the sole intent of mortifying vanity, a modern equivalent of the hair shirt, looking like a leather black box promising future salvation in exchange for present suffering.

Francesca used to look on with envy and frustration like the Little Match Girl in Andersen’s story when new samples of women’s shoes would arrive at her mother’s store. She’d touch the glossy heels, draw slingbacks with her crayons during the boring afternoons doing homework behind the counter. She is an attorney today. Last time I visited her in her new apartment, once we had finished dinner, she proudly walked me to what she’d call “The Room.” A long walk-in closet of curved shape, such as you can only find in old buildings in Italy, stacked up to the ceiling with shoes, arranged like books on shelves, none of them in boxes, with the only purpose of being admired and of providing a belated revenge to their owner for her childhood torment. I thought, why not put some exemplars on a coffee table in the dining room, like one of those Taschen books which saves one from stale dinner conversations. I asked Francesca how often she’d wear them. She picked up one of her favorite pairs, some leather shoes with crisscross black and white stripes, heels covered by a print evoking an inverted Tour Eiffel: stroking it like a pet, she said wistfully: “Maybe once a year, I do not want them to get ruined.”

Shoes fall into the category where we put parts of our life that are essential and never think about until we lose them: parents, water, marriages, and health. Just like with everything that one takes for granted, the most fundamental aspect of these chiral man-made objects escaped me. I never fully appreciated their tragic side or the survival advantage they confer, till I went on a trip with my sister Carmen in 2012. Carmen wanted to relocate to Berlin, due to the lack of job opportunities in Rome. I had planned to help her, hoping that with my financial and moral support, she would eventually find her way in Germany, whose economy was booming.

At that time, I had begun to read books on the history of same-sex relationships. I bought my first one the previous winter after I visited the Homomonument in Amsterdam: three pink triangles commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. I do not remember much of that particular trip. I have been to Amsterdam multiple times since then. I know it was freezing because my feet kept bothering me. I know I thought of buying sturdier shoes there but preferred to ride out the discomfort and go for books, as if books and shoes, head and feet, had to compete with one another.

I told Carmen I was going to make a point of visiting each Denkmal in Berlin as well as Sachsenhausen, a KZ, or concentration camp, known for its sadistic treatment of homosexual prisoners, also known as pink triangles, during WWII.  These were the Schuhläufer, prisoners forced to soften the boots and shoes produced for the German army by marching for hours along the inner perimeter of the KZ. The experience of one of these KZ prisoners, Joseph Kohut, is the subject of the memoir Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel  (The Men with the Pink Triangle) written by Hans Neumann under the pseudonym of Heinz Heger and published in 1972. Few remember today that this is the reason why the pink triangle later became the emblem of the LGBTQ+ community. Young men, raised in the comfort of Mitteleuropa, were arrested under the infamous Paragraph 175 that punished  homosexuality in the German Reich, frequently tortured, and then shipped to the camps to be Schuhläufer.

II  Schuhläufer

A Denkmal is not a memorial, and it is not a monument. It is the embodiment of Time which has become Thought and occupies a finite portion of Space: Denk (thinking, thought) + Mal (time/s). This composite word strikes me as very German: you do not re-member an event. You need to think about it.

I pick up on my way out from the Sachsenhausen KZ a copy of Heger’s ’s book. A passage strikes me as the kernel of the story of the “pink triangles”: forced fellatio. Forced, as it were, because fellatio is really what the prisoners wanted after all. Every homosexual prisoner, or any homosexual for that matter, should feel honored to suck any straight man, even a convicted murderer. And, of course, a few beatings may make one more compliant.

“Mit Püffen und Schlägen zwangen sie mich dann, da ich mich nicht freiwillig dazu bereitfand, abwechselnd an ihrem Glied zu saugen, das sie in meinem Mund pressten.” 

“Then they forced me with blows and beatings, because I was not freely willing to suck, taking turns between one and the other, their member, which they pressed in my mouth.”

III  Après-Coup

Carmen and I come back to Berlin. We have spent an entire day in Oranienburg, where the Sachsehausen KZ is located. Exhausted, yet unexpectedly unperturbed, we decide to head for a restaurant in Gendarmenmarkt.

In Sachsenhausen the poplars shudder                      with their shawls of snow 

 

we looked at one another:                                   “We thought we’d feel much worse.”

 

A heavy air

                 drips

                           down

                                   on our

                                       restaurant libations: 

 

we were staring at the plates:                                                 our puny conversation

our meal

  

                                                                         had                                                         no

 

worthy                 

                                                                                                  purpose,

     

                                               no

 

                    meaning                                                                                            no

 

                                                      

       courage                                        no                        dignity                                           no

 

 

context                          or                                                 voice                                                   no

 

                                                                      rest. 

 

I’d left my ration of words outside 
the gate; I’ve none to spare.

Blood still trickles through the gravel 
in this neutral zone near 
the wall of bricks, hundreds of ashen
bricks kneaded by the fear 

of being shot through the feet,
then march in vain with boots
of plywood: wounds that will not
heal. It could have 

been me: a Schuhläufer 
marching and testing 
boots, till my feet are 
too maimed to be of use

                                                          to the shoe factories

How am I to approach the KZ topic? Verse, prose, a power point?  Some say we should not speak at all, let alone write, about these matters. How are we to never forget then? Illogically, being gay seems to give me a complete pass: I can write or speak with “authority” about gay victims —not the other ones, of course—without being accused of appropriating, misappropriating, banalizing, or even worse defiling other peoples’ tragedy.

It’s all about playing the “gay card.”

IV    Denkmal Pilgrimage in Berlin (2012)

I happened to be in Berlin with my sister Carmen. We just arrived, she from Rome, I from New York. We plan our day. My sister says, resisting my attempts to create a day schedule for our Berlin pilgrimage: “So very American” she adds, “always having to make the day  “PRO-DU-CTIVE.”

In fact, I tell her, the way to cope with terrifying chimeras has always been to make
them quotidian. That’s how people survive. The blending of triviality 
into memories renders them inoffensive, a vaccination of sorts against forgetting.

She doesn’t buy it. How can you make tourism out of it? Horror in a to-do list? I ignore her and look over travel guide suggestions:

Denkmäler: Saturday morning

Breakfast at our Luxury Hotel (Starwood collection)

1 Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen

Lunch break 12:30–13:30 on your own.

We recommend bringing a lunch box.

(Oranienburg is a ghost city, reminds me of Decatur, Illinois)

2 Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe)

3 Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen (Memorial to homosexuals persecuted under National Socialism)

4 Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus ermordeten Sinti und Roma Europas (Monument to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered during National Socialism)

5 Spa appointment, Sofitel am Gendarmenmarkt 18:30 – 19:30

6 Dinner at Lutter & Wegner am Gendarmenmarkt  21:00

The hotel staff gently advises: “We do not recommend visiting all these sites in one day. Your list is ambitious but I understand you want your day to be productive.”

V  Sachsenhausen

Leafing through Kohut’s memoir, I read the entire piece while I am on the U-Bahn. I read in a desultory manner. From the middle, from the end, never from the beginning and always without committing. Fragments flash before my eyes in a confusion of time lines. I am too overwhelmed by the KZ to even attempt to stitch all this into any narrative or care about verb tenses being consistent. Kohut’s story is just one of many I imagine: Heinrich, Franz, Ludwig, Stefan and countless others.

1937 Ludwig is from Münster. Thirty-two years old, architect, 64.0 kg, 1.64 meters. Brought overnight. Arrested under Paragraph 175—Der § 175 des deutschen Strafgesetzbuches—the law punishing sodomy. His ex-lover turned him over.

The paragraph reads: Die widernatürliche Unzucht, welche zwischen Personen männlichen Geschlechts oder von Menschen mit Thieren begangen wird, ist mit Gefängniß zu bestrafen; auch kann auf Verlust der bürgerlichen Ehrenrechte erkannt werden. (The unnatural fornication which is committed between persons of the male sex or of men with animals must be punished by imprisonment; also it can be punished with loss of civil rights.)

1937 Sanchsenhausen KZ; this ought to be a resting place: Ludwig crossed the iron gate. A motivational banner wrought in Gothic Script, the hope of freedom in exchange for labor.

“Arbeit macht frei”

The silent air of glass scratched rarely by sharp and lightning shrieks. Limes, Liminal, Limit, Great Wall, The Wall, Boundary, Hortus Conclusus, cloister of cruelty. What is commonplace outside, grows absurd inside. Absurd = Ab-Surdus. Out of tune, dissonant or deaf to reason. Not simply contrary to reason, but reasoning impermeable to sound and speech in the sense of Logos.

1938 Schuhläufer Kommando. The prisoners march along the perimeter of hopelessness, toeing the outer bound of an island of barbed folly. They are testing combat shoes for straight soldiers till the leather is softened enough by the blisters of their feet. Sores dried with the gravel and the ashen dust falling down from a grey infinity. Can they march with two left shoes? With a fractured foot? A gunshot below the heel? One by one these hypotheses must be tested. On them. At dusk, back to the wooden clogs. No socks. No blankets—in order to prevent sex in the barracks. Splinters of wood lodge under nailbeds. Open wounds are dull on hard wood. Maximum duration of stay for the Häftlinge is six months to a year. With one exception: the Pink Triangles. They die faster. Refractory cases are sent for medical emasculation or forced copulation with the opposite gender.

2012 Sachsenhausen Wet and cold feet. I tell my sister I should have worn better shoes, sturdier shoes. Nothing makes you feel lonelier and more naked than wet shoes and wet linen socks in November. A hole in the left wooden sole, right in the middle, soaks the entire leather. Primo Levi said that if you were given two choices in life, food or shoes, you always ought to choose shoes.

1945 Ludwig released from KZ to a Berlin in ruins.

1946 Stuttgart  Ludwig deemed not a real victim. His pension was denied. Compensation not applicable. Absurd to pay a non-victim. Either you are a victim or you are not. It’s quite binary. Since homosexuality is still punishable, he is still a criminal.

1947 Mannheim  § 175 Redux. Ludwig is back to prison under Parapgraph 175. Time spent in Sachsenhausen does not count towards his punishment for what brought him to the KZ. He must still pay. Therefore, he should go back to prison and do the entire jail time.

VI  Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen

2015 Ebertstraße, Berlin. Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas and right across the street Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen.

The Denkmal across this street                             is worlds away from that more official site

 

with spartan slabs of grey concrete                        waves for what remains of the murdered

 

hands of Europe. The other site grabs                  me from across the street, purposefully

 

absconded among the bushes.                               Inside the solid block are scenes of guilty

 

longings, silent kisses, cached                                recordings of illegal loves visible             

 

                               through the aperture in the concrete closet.

VII  Fire Island, Pines.

The high tea scene in the Pines is de rigueur. I have not been here in years. Today, I notice that the drag code has been democratized. One does not need the whole dress and wig thing, which is great but time-intensive. Some guys wear pashminas over a polo, others carry a fan or purse while dressed in an otherwise more gender-conforming style. A burly man is dancing next to me, while I speak to my friend Don, who notices that nowadays just a pop of drag is finally within everybody’s reach. This man’s eyes are closed, and he appears to be in mystical communion with Deborah Cox’s Remix playing loudly.  He is wearing a black tank-top and some swimwear, reminding me of a Tom of Finland image, sort of the hyper-masculine Pines beach butch guy. I look down at the floorboard and realize that he is pirouetting on a pair of vinyl crimson-red high heel shoes, proud to “mix it up,” wearing them like an amulet, as if whispering to everyone around: I do not give a fuck. After all shoes can also be subversive.

Bibliography

Triangle rose    Michel Dufranne, Milorad Vicanovic, Christian Lerolle. Quadrant Astrolabe, 2011

Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel  Heinz Heger.  Merlin Verlag

Triangle Rose   Régis Schlagdenhauffen. Éditeur Autrement, 2011

Images Sources

Image 1     https://joepwritesthehistoryofberlin.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/sachsenhau…

“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is: ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”

Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

Just past midnight on a muggy night in 1984, three Parisian squatters stood around a kerosene lantern plotting adverse possession in the leaky third floor of a tenement building in Montmartre.

“Where did you put the sign up?” asked Valery, tugging on his young, dark black beard as his elbow rested on a stack of several antiquated law books.

“I put a sign on a shopping cart in behind old number seven, that says that I own the property,” said an old folk artist with a cracked voice named Papa Gounod.

“Good,” said Valery, rattling his fingers on the scarred barrister’s bookshelf that served as a tabletop. He inwardly wondered whether the good Old Man had used the appropriate legal description, ‘Lot 17 of

Parcel 225,’ or latitude and longitude, or some other method to identify the exact location of Gounod’s adversely possessed parcel. He inhaled a lungful of marijuana and breathed it out voluminously. The vapors hung in the mildewy darkness as the lamp puffed fumes across the open brick room and toward an open window, through which a pale moon shown wanly through scattered clouds over a carnival skyscape.

“Well, your sign most likely won’t change the matter very much for us,” Valery said at last. In English law countries, that might make a difference, but in France, alas, it’s different,” explained Valery. “There is no reference to this problem in either the Salic Law, or the Napoleonic Code, of course. However, since we have been here for much longer than two days, our settlement cannot be considered a breach of the public order; therefore, the police cannot evict us, unless the City first resorts to the civil courts. That’s why old Gounod received his eviction notice. And while any eviction proceedings may be lengthy, the outcome could never be in any doubt, as his mere possession does nothing to establish his ownership to the property,” said Valery. “Ordinarily, we could be reduced to the usual settlement: agree on a bail precaire with our building’s rightful owners, or perhaps reach an agreement to legalize our settlements with the Minister of Culture,” he said. “But in our case, our situation may be even graver.”“What do you mean?” demanded Jean-Claude.

“They may even try to dissolve our organization ex nunc,” said Valery ruefully. “The aim that was connatural to the association when it was registered in 1960, the raison d’être for the coming-together of its members, was the operation of ‘Livres de Conscience’- the bookstore now operated by Heathcliff Waite- by the Committees of Conscience, on behalf of political prisoners. But the Committee stopped meeting in the early ‘60s, and Heathcliff Waite turned the bookstore into a conventional business.”

Weakly, dreadlocked old Papa Gounod tapped the lantern. “But I think I fixed that problem,” he wheezed, wiping off his dirty finger and pointing it at an open law book. “Since you told us that adverse possession \is the law in English countries, I put my sign up on Guy Fawkes Day.”

Suddenly, out of the darkness reared a fourth bearded man, Bougard, whose beard had grown yellow with lamp oil. “Connard!” he roared. “You heard him! You won’t last another year in this neighborhood, Old Man, ever since you took Clarence Darrow and her kittens. You’ve let the water run from the tap in that yard for almost two months now, and it’s breeding mosquitoes in the tire collection. You won’t last another month, with your shopping carts and your onion boxes! They say Butterfly Bill’s coming back! 

The foursome grew quiet at the mention of the adopted son of Heathcliff Waite, the bookstore operator. The smoking kerosene lamp swung silently in the smelly shadows.

  #

Early the next morning, a grim young man with a red beard and wearing a backpack debarked from a train at the Gare Montmartre. He passed the other travelers, en route to their morning espresso or to the metro. During his seven-year absence, the platform had been renovated in late 1940s style, and a loudpseaker blared the Rolling Stones version of ‘Love in Vain.’ Without pausing or turning, Bill Waite vomited into a waste can, and left the station. As he marched robustly along the boardwalk that ran beside the amusement park rides lining the Normandy shore, Bill gazed over the ocean, like some modern-day Constantine, at an image that seemed to hover above the horizon: the adoring face and long blonde hair of Dian Fossey. He had just left his mentor, murdered and now buried on a Rwandan mountain, a week before.

From the train station, Bill heard the refrain of the song: “All my love’s in vain.” Strutting past the rats that scurried among the abandoned carnival prizes, Bill came to a small concrete plaza at the end of the boardwalk. Peering over the guardrail at the end of the plaza, he could see some distance into the outlying reaches of Paris. There, in the distance on the side of Montmartre, lay the street on which Bill had grown up. Yes, there he could see it, just behind the Place Pigalle: Rue Maxwell, the birthplace of northern Europe’s electric blues scene.

Peering at the side of the hill in the distance, Bill began to wonder for the first time if he were well. He thought he spied an elf, in a powdered white 18th century barrister’s wig, standing atop a 200-foot-tall ladder, carrying two hefty boxes, one beneath each arm, at a great height. A bearded troll stood at the bottom, pelting the elf and cursing.

The troll spoke, and snatches of his words came obscurely to Bill’s ear, but the word ‘harlequin’was the only word he made out. Then the troll threw back his right arm and hurled a square object to the top of the ladder, which struck the wigged figure, who wavered, still clutching the two heavy plywood boxes, as the ladder began to vibrate. Bill ran breathlessly the last mile-and-a-half to the Rue Maxwell.

But when he arrived, it was not the faerie village of his childhood, both synthetic and whimsical, but a smoking ruin of hovels. The field of sunflowers had been razed, and the goldfish pond filled with motor oil. The street where he had been raised as a child was turned into a skeleton, like a set of punched out and broken teeth, blackened with tobacco smoke. In a corner of the lot Bill spied a very fresh-looking tombstone. The immense ladder that had been perched against the side of the ancient warehouse at 5112 Rue Maxwell had fallen to the ground. Books littered the ground, and Heathcliff was nowhere to be seen.

“Dad?” Bill said.

At that moment, his ex-roommate and fellow communard, Bougard, who looked like a troll, lunged around the corner with a fresh armload of books. “Ca va, citoyen?” Bill asked.

“Your putain father, that’s what, ‘Butterfly!’” taunted Bougard. “Think you’ll take all my books, eh? It looks like you forgot one last book, Jacobin. En garde!” He hurled a pocket size version of the Audubon Society’s ‘Field Guide to Butterflies,’ with its sturdy plastic cover, which struck Bill in the forehead, knocking him unconscious.

#

He always hated to be called ‘Butterfly,’ so much so that in his adolescence he changed his name to ‘Bill.’ It reminded him of his Mere, Bianca, who left Marseilles in 1962 on a tour of European communes. She fell in love with the Rue Maxwell, but tragically, when she drove out of town on an errand a week after her arrival, she was killed by one of the freak tornados that occurred in that year. Mirabile dictu, her three-year-old son, Butterfly, was left sitting unharmed in the middle of the freeway. Butterfly was left with no memories of her.

You see, this is not a story about the Paris, France of ‘the Lost Generation’ or the Jazz Age, but it begins not far from there, on a small declining side street on the rear of the Montmartre slope. Have you ever been there? If you ever stood at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and looked over the City of Lights, then you were, as they say, within spitting distance of the Rue Maxwell. Down at the base of the hill is the ancient Market, and beyond that one of the city’s oldest learning institutions. Near the top of the hill is the block where Butterfly grew up, and if you’ve ever been to the Basilica, then you were only three short blocks from the corner containing the hot dog stand where he got a black eye from a squatter and decided to change his name to Bill. When he was growing up, Bill always blamed his abuse at the hands of the squatters on his gentle but incompetent father, a Quebecois immigrant named Heathcliff Midlothian Waite, who had himself only recently moved to Maxwell Street.

Heathcliff had arrived carrying nothing but a broom, a powdered white barrister’s wig, and a few sundry belongings. He had returned one spring morning in 1962 to a steam pipe in the bridge running over the Seine at the Isle de la Cite, which had been his long-time abode, only to find that the City had welded it shut. Thence, he wandered through the city for several days, until he came, by chance, to the Rue Maxwell, where he made himself at home in the commune that had sprung up in the abandoned buildings that surrounded a bookstore, ‘Livres de Conscience.’

At first, it seemed as if Heathcliff and the Rue Maxwell would get along famously. But at the time of Bianca’s shocking death in the tornado, he was overwhelmed with paternal feelings for the first time in his life and adopted the three-year-old boy.

Heathcliff immediately set about expelling most of the human rights activists who had founded the ecovillage and began to operate the bookstore as a conventional business, supporting the boy for 14 years by selling used books. But the vacuum was soon filled by squatters, crude and violent. With most of the activists gone, Heathcliff and the few remaining communards were powerless to prevent it. To these roughnecks, the Waites, pere and fils, were a funny pair. After all, Heathcliff was a Quebecois who wore a wig and operated a quaint bookstore, and his son was named ‘Butterfly.’

The day came when Butterfly bought a pair of dice from the boutique de conneries at 5118 Rue Maxwell, and moved out of the bookstore and into a building down the block with Bougard, a stubborn, middle-aged communard who had lived at the ecovillage since the old days.

What next? he wondered. Was he to become a cabaret singer, or a pimp? One afternoon he gazed in meditation on his surroundings, peering thoughtlessly up at the most prominent of Maxwell Street’s two murals, which occupied the entire side of the building that housed the boutique des conneries. The large mural, commemorating his mother’s death and his own arrival, read, ‘Bianca and Butterfly forever,’ in green, gothic swirls of white and aqua.

(The second, smaller mural was a wall-and-ceiling painting inside an abandoned ice cream Parlor that depicted the Count de Buffoon and Guillaume le Buffets, two physical comedians together called the Vaudeville Colleagues, who had gotten their start on the nearby Boardwalk decades prior to Bill’s birth).

Because Maxwell Street was labeled with the disfavored nominative ‘Butterfly’ so prominently, he concluded, he certainly had to leave. But where? Bill had been reading about the American zoologist Dian Fossey, and her brave and dangerous efforts to preserve the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. Now there was a woman! he thought.

He would go to her. Bill Waite would become a man. He would become an activist! Bill arrived at the camp on Mt. Karisimbi in the late afternoon one summer day not long thereafter; Dian herself had gone up on the ridge with some interns to check on a band of mountain gorillas that had split off from the main family. A young microbiologist named Heinz greeted him and showed him to his tent. Bill began to chop wood.

Half an hour later Fossey herself trotted briskly from the tent up to where Bill stood with his ax. “You must be Waite,” the American woman said in the faux British accent she had adopted as an ex-patriate. “Nice chopping. It gets cold up here at night.”

He would forever remember her standing freshly washed before him in her mountain fatigues. Contrasted against the mountain, Fossey looked even taller and stronger than her photographs. She was long-haired and beautiful against the sunset, but Bill noted that her unmade-up face was that of a middle-aged woman.

Bill’s heart would forever belong to Dian, unconditionally, starting from one particularly chilly, dewy morning when she taught him how to repair an electronic weather meter. As the two of them hunched down together in the freshly mowed mountain grass, Dian saw Bill shiver, justonce. “Come closer,” she told him. Bill leaned in closer to Dian, and for the first time, breathed the powerful Charlie perfume she wore about her neckline.

She finished tightening two of the bolts on the weathervane, and then handed it to him. Bill took the device in his lap, and Dian, leaning closer yet, placed her hand on his knee, and her chin on his shoulder. Bill tightened, and instinctively drew back again, his heart fluttering.

From that moment, Dian knew that Bill sought a mother-and-child relationship. She held him like an egg. Bill’s competence grew by leaps and bounds in her care, as he came to play his dutiful role in the camp, where the study of the endangered mountain gorillas and the struggle against poaching went hand-in-hand.

He was jealous nevertheless when he saw Dian flirting playfully with the other young men in the camp, including Heinz, Burton from the U.K., and even old Dr. Herwiger when he visited. She would ask any one of them to accompany her to the swimming pond, or to help her wring out her long underwear. The female interns and other women in camp seemed to ignore it, but the men present would giggle and exchange knowing looks, and then, when in Bill’s presence, would avert their gaze and fall silent.

One weekend in early fall, Bill had been instructed to serve as look-out for Twa poachers, encroaching with the change in season, from an observation post on a mountain across the valley. This was an annual event, He returned ahead of time, just before dusk, to exchange a damaged telescope, and to his surprise, heard muted screams from one of the storage tents, which was ordinarily off-limits and seldom visited. What was going on? Had someone been injured?

Bill stepped around a blazing fire pit, and pulled aside a thick leather curtain and a mosquito net. They hadn’t been there before. He saw Dian leaning forward, sweating in a maroon brassiere, her back turned to him. The shed was unlit save for a glowing brazier, which occluded part of the scene from Bill’s sight.

“I feel a heartbeat!” Dian said. “Is he breathing?”

Was she treating some wounded activist or poacher? he wondered. Maybe she was even performing heroic wilderness veterinary medicine on an injured gorilla. At length, Heinz appeared above the brazier, in spectacles and wearing a white smock.

Bill heard the creak of rusty wheels. Dian walked from behind the brazier with an ungainly step, fanning herself energetically. In fact, she was wearing nothing but a leopard print G string and a pair of black stiletto heels. Her hair, illuminated by the brazier, glowed like coils of the finest copper, and they spilled down her back in ruddy ringlets. There was not an ounce of cellulite on her body. She didn’t see Bill.

Bill was dumbfounded. Why was his icon traipsing around a shed, like a stripper nearly crippled by severe bunions, who is so clumsy she cannot even walk down a runway?

“Are they bringing the next one?” she asked. “Alright, hold on.” She donned a plastic American Halloween mask, depicting a green-skinned, warty witch. “Bring him on.” Dian hesitantly picked up a whip, woven of thorny nettles, flexed her toned arm muscles, then put it down, instead taking two handfuls of green American dime store slime in her hands.

Heinz wheeled in a vertical scaffold, on which was chained a Twa poacher. Dian lunged at the man, who immediately began screaming. She held the slime before his face, and let it ooze from her hands. The slime’s viscous verdure was opaque and seemed unholy in the light of the brazier. The Twa’s tonsils glowed from behind his sharpened, pointed teeth as he shrieked. 

Dian put the slime down and wiped her hands on a towel. “There, there, little fellow,” she said. “That’s not really the slime I want on my hands, is it?” As she removed the mask and tossed her curls about her, she caught site of Bill.

“Aren’t I every inch of me a whore, Bill?” she asked him.

“Non,” said Bill.

She looked slightly surprised. Heinz stood in a corner of the shed looking uncomfortable in his round glasses.

“Well, then,” Dian said, reverting to her expatriate accent. She reached behind her and removed the bra. “Now do you love me, Bill?” she asked, cupping her breasts in her hands.

“Non,” said Bill.

Dian pouted. Suddenly she looked at him sharply. “Go to the water tower, and return with two large buckets of warm water,” she told him. “And take your time about it.”

Bill took a step backward out of the shed and toward the fire, still holding on to the curtain.

“I hope you understand that if you ever return to hurt my gorillas,” she told the Twa, as she stepped closer to him, “I’m going to cast these private parts of yours into the blaze.” 

Bill stood in the doorway a moment, as he turned his head into the darkness and lowered his gaze, holding on to the mosquito netting and the leather curtain. I guess it’s easy to get conned into doing the wrong thing, he thought, when you’re thousands of miles away from home, and accompanied by some unusually confident, highly-principled person whom you adore.

He turned again to the doorway, suddenly tore down the curtain and rushed back into the shed, shouting, “Sainte Mere de Dieu, ma femme, attendre!” He threw the heavy curtain over Dian’s nude body and shoved her off the helpless Twa. Dian’s shoulder crashed into the wooden wall, her hand still covered with green slime as she cried out, “Get off me, you bastard, and leave me alone!”

Heinz turned his head to face the corner, like a donkey who sees its sibling being slaughtered, and knows it is next. Bill lifted Dian and carried the partially-nude woman out of the shed and into the darkness, crying, “Shanti Sena! Shanti Sena!”

Suddenly activists came running through the darkness from every direction. Within a few minutes, Bill, Heinz, Dian and the Twa were back in the shed, which was surrounded by dozens of Dian’s students, interns, post-docs, non-credentialled assistants, and volunteers like Bill.

“I told you already, we won’t tolerate you abusing the native peoples in this country,” yelled an undergrad, who had strawberry-colored hair.

“But we have to take action to prevent the poaching, to save the endangered gorillas. They call them demons; they have superstitious practices. They’ll go extinct,” said Dian quickly, for the one hundredth time, lowering her face.

“Then call the police!” screamed the strawberry maiden.

“They’ll kill everyone, they’ll kill all of us…” said Dian wearily.

“Perhaps you’re being paranoid again,” said a tall young female post-doc guardedly.

“We’re activists and humanitarians, not a bunch of sadists!” screamed the strawberry woman. “Get away from him!” she suddenly screamed.

Heinz had silently left his spot in the corner of the shed and had quietly worked his way over to where the Twa man still lay prostate on the horizontal scaffold. Discovered, he quickly backed away, weeping silently in fear. His glasses were fogged.

The crowd now turned to look at the Twa man. They were not pleased with him either, as he had been caught poaching the previous day, and a mother gorilla and two infants had been killed.

“What, if anything, would you like to say about all this?” asked the scrawny, mustached ecology intern. The entire crowd grew absolutely silent, except for Heinz’s nearly inaudible weeping and the sound of cicadas. Those gathered listened intently as the poacher made an effort to speak.

“I… only…want….be with my people,” croaked the Twa’s harsh, dehydrated voice. That was was the first time Bill realized that dysfunction existed in the world beyond Maxwell Street. Eventually, the entire camp returned to bed. The poacher was taken from the scaffold and locked into a utility building behind the men’s quarters, from which he was released to Rwandan police two days later. Things in the camp went on as though nothing had happened. There was never again any reference to sexual improprieties amongst the activities on Mt. Karisimbi.

Bill awoke in a sheen of sweat. He reached in the darkness of the camp for his alarm clock, but instead found his hand upon a fresh-seeming tombstone, and realized he was back home. To his side, the immense ladder still lay prone, but looking up, he saw his father dangling from the warehouse window, 200 feet in the air. He ran into the warehouse and raced up five flights of steps, then pulled his adoptive father into the building. Heathcliff stood bent over and gasping, then straightened and adjusted his wig. The entire building had been jammed with used books in storage.

“Dad, what’s going on here?” Bill asked.

“Come in here,” said Heathcliff breathlessly, gesturing to a little side room containing more books, as well as a wood stove and a few chairs. He tossed a handful of paperback books into the stove, and stuffed in some cardboard. Bill had forgotten how fast cardboard burned.

“It’s good to see you, ‘Butterfly’,” said Heathcliff, as Bill sat down. “Things have become a little disorderly around here. Affairs in the outside world have demanded my attention, so I haven’t been able to spend as much time around the ecovillage as I used to.

“You see,” said Heathcliff, “a few days after you left, seven years ago, I thought it would be nice to take a look at some of the old sites again. Bougard and Valery were standing in the bookstore one day, arguing with me about Boogard’s book, and Valery’s legal strategies, so I sort of spontaneously invited them both to join me on a helicopter tour.

“I couldn’t believe how much the city had changed while you were growing up! An entire epoch in French history passed. Why, the Rolling Stones recorded ‘Exile on Main Street’ in the basement of a villa not far from here when you were 11 years old, and Picasso himself died only two years later. Brigitte

Bardot became an animal rights activist who vehemently opposed immigration, and Jean-Luc Godard has seen his style evolve. Jean Paul Sartre died in 1980, three years after you left. Deplorably, now the entire country carries a torch for Serge Gainsbourg.

“I really became disillusioned with France after Sartre died. In the helicopter, I saw for the first time the skyscrapers of the ironically-named business district called ‘La Defense,’ at the site of the historic city wall, which the bourgeoisie had constructed during the years of your puberty. I reflected on how I could have had an altogether different life. I could have lived in a houseboat on the Seine and finished my dissertation.

“In a mood mixing melancholy with a spirit of new-found freedom, I meandered one morning down the hill and into the city, past the bridge that was my home long ago after I first emigrated from Quebec. I continued past the Isle de la Cite, to the tomb of the great Camus, my mentor, which for years I used to faithfully sweep every afternoon when I lived inside the bridge. Now, however, I carried not a broom, but a cane, and when, entirely on a whim, I decided to enter the house of the cemetery porter at Pere Lachaise, I found nothing easier than to become a docent at the same tomb I used to covertly sweep! 

Heathcliff grasped two more handfuls of American paperbacks, and bent over, preparing to heave them into the stove. Bill stood up and smacked the Quebecois emigrant as hard as he could in the side of the head, causing him to spill the books.

“You imbecile!” shouted Bill. “You’ll kill us! It must be 115 degrees in here!”

“What? Oh, another fire! Quick, get the fire engine!” said Heathcliff.

Bill followed his adoptive father down and out of the building, and around the corner to an abandoned art warehouse in the alley behind them, half a block up the hill toward the Basilica. Inside was an ancient fire engine.

“Push!” shouted Heathcliff.

The two men strained and struggled, and eventually pushed the fire engine by hand around the corner ‘til it came to rest before the warehouse at 5112 Rue Maxwell, where a fair-sized fire burned.

“Pump!” hollered Heathcliff.

Clambering into the cab, Bill pumped madly with his hardy legs, until finally water began to spurt from the hose. Holding his wig firmly to his head with one hand, Heathcliff used the other arm to point the nozzle at the fire, which was eventually extinguished.

The two men returned to the fifth floor of the warehouse. 

“Eventually, the growing prevalence of suspicious fires in the neighborhood compelled me to join a volunteer fire brigade, at which I excelled,” continued Heathcliff, breathlessly hanging his suit jacket before the wood stove, and shaking the moisture from his wig.

“Now one day a curious thing happened. Whereas in past years, before I adopted you, I was sometimes a figure of horror and revulsion to passersby in the vicinity of the cemetery, now, due perhaps to my cane and my age, I was looked upon with approval by complete strangers. A wealthy widow, a dowager who had once been a fashion magnate, took a liking to me. We developed a close companionship, and one day I spoke to her at length.

“‘Oh, Heathcliff,’ she said to me, ‘You live a life of such robustness for an older gentleman, volunteering in the fire brigade, serving as docent at the tomb of Camus, and operating a successful used bookstore.’ For she was attracted to the fact that I had become the model of a petty bourgeois.

“‘Why, mademoiselle,’ said I to the dowager, “That’s not all. I once served on the Council of Paris, and therein lies a tale.”

“‘Oh, Heathcliff, you’re a statesman!’”

“And so I told the dowager my history, of how I emigrated to Paris from Quebec to study under the great Camus, but my mentor died in a car accident within months of my arrival. Within weeks, he was interred in the Pantheon with the other great individuals of France, and just as suddenly disinterred and moved to the common cemetery at Pere Lachaise, out of French whimsy. I alone remained to faithfully sweep grave every afternoon and vowed to take up residence in the bridge over the Seine until Camus should be restored to his rightful place.

“‘Why Heathcliff, were you in Paris in the early 60s?’ she interrupted me to ask.”

“Mais, oui, mademoiselle. After all, that was the era when anyone could be a genius, even the bartender in the Manhattan Bar, who pours out Curacao with one hand and gathers up his gonorrhea with the other…[T]he gentleman in the raincoat, who is about to start his seventh trip around the world, even Chuck the Drunk, who goose-stepped through the alleys of Montreal, carrying a bottle of vodka and wearing his high school letter jacket and a Russian fur cap, talking to himself; and many other strange characters as well.”

“So, I told the dowager of my daily routine in those days, as mad as they were. I would clamber every afternoon out of my residence in the hollow arm of the bridge at the Isle de la Cite to sweep Camus’ grave. In the evenings I had a small business taking tourists on covert midnight tours of the Pantheon to show visitors the spot to which the great man would one day be returned. We were trespassing, of course, and because I was inexperienced, we would sometimes become lost. And even when we could find our way out, I was never able to direct them to the Closerie des Lilas, or the places where the night streetwalkers strolled.

“Then in the evenings,” reminisced Heathcliff, “it always seemed there was some fool who had insulted the honor of my mentor. So in the hours past midnight, I could usually be found scouring the cafes and bars of the city for a disrespectful sot, to whom I would have to teach the dignity of his heritage.”

“‘Oh, Heathcliff! Weren’t you frightened by all the violence?’

“‘Madame,’ I told her gravely, ‘In the words of Jacques Lacan, there will always be brawling among men- but one day Camus will be returned to the Pantheon.’

“‘Did you feel alienated?’ she asked.

“‘Madame, I was a Frenchman! I attended the industrial strikes, and I wrote letters to the editor of the city newspapers. Eventually, just by going about my business, I attracted the attention of a gang of Dadaist sans culottes, who decided to run me as their candidate for the Council of Paris. I was elected councilor; but my bill to re-inter Camus in the Pantheon was tabled. The next year, it was the La Pennist sans-culottes who chose to run me, and again I was elected. But as a politician, I could achieve nothing. The following term, there were bloody clashes between the Dadaist and La Pennist sans-culottes in the streets of Paris, and I lost my seat. Returning to my bridge at the Isle de la Cite, I found that the city had welded shut the steam pipe. I then wandered for some days until I came to Maxwell Street.’

“To make a long story short, the Dowager ran me for City Council again, and I won, more than

25 years after I once held the office, and I serve there still. In fact,” said Heathcliff to Bill confidentially, “both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited the Rue Maxwell after your departure and greeted me in the same old bookstore across the street.”

“Incredible,” said Bill.

“Butterfly,” said Heathcliff confidentially, sitting down, and leaning in close to his son, “the squatters of the Rue Maxwell have become a problem. I was never able to do anything about them while I was raising you, and now they want to burn down L’Academe, which has always been the fount and reservoir of the Committees of Conscience, from the time of the bookstore’s founding. Will you help me expel the squatters, and restart the Committees?”

Bill bit his lip and closed his eyes. He didn’t know how to solve the problems on Maxwell Street, because nobody had ever tried. But he would go down to the Champs Elysees the next morning and buy 30 or 40 of the strongest locks he could find.

“I’ll try,” said Bill at last.                                                                   

#

The next morning, as Bill was affixing a lock to the door of his old residence at 5106 Rue Maxwell. Heathcliff came hobbling up on his cane. “Follow me, ‘Butterfly’!” cried Heathcliff. “They’ve put up a barricade- the squatters are going to burn down L’Academe!”

“I don’t think we’re prepared!” Bill shouted, tucking in the tails of his flannel shirt as he ran after his father. He raced down the slope and through the historic market, following the bobbing white wig as it disappeared and re-appeared amidst the maze of sunken temples and broken columns among which cattle once grazed. He almost stumbled over a trio of young Frenchmen shooting dice and kicked the dice out of the pit.

“I run the dice games in this town,” Bill told them, as he leapt over their stupefied heads and chased the old Quebecois through the market.

Already, there was screaming in the marketplace, and the musicians at the bandstand, switched to a few chords of ‘La Marseillaise,’ before they disbanded altogether, threw their instruments into a pile and ran for cover.

At long last he came to L’Academe. Faces peered down through ivy-covered windows, far, far above the massive, featureless gray 12th century fortress wall. The gendarmerie, clad in riot gear, had cordoned off the face of the buildings, and shepherded the outraged squatters into a protest pen on the other side of Maxwell Street. Bill breathlessly caught up with Heathcliff. Already, the squatters had set up a barricade: shopping carts, overturned Yugos’ broken-up picnic benches, and the ticket-taking booth from a metro station had all been shoved into the middle of Maxwell Street.

“Save L’Academe!” shouted Heathcliff hoarsely, as he banged with his fists on the barricade.

“Fuck you, Petain!” screamed Bougard from across the street. “We’re not squatters- your Academe is the one that’s the trespasser!”

At that moment, another young fellow walked up to Bill and Heathcliff. He was between the age of the adoptive father and son, and had long hair, a sparse but disorderly goatee, and tortoise-shell glasses.

“Professor Heathcliff, I’m glad to see you are not standing over there, chanting with those retards,” said the newcomer warmly.

“This fellow is Frere Fructidor whom I know from the old days,” said Heathcliff to Bill.

“How are you, Jacques. How long before the National Guard shows up?”

Suddenly a buzzing sound emerged overhead, but its source was invisible. “Is that them? Is that the National Guard?” asked Heathcliff, keeping one eye on the squatters as he looked down a side street.

Fructidor unfolded a pair of opera glasses and studied the scene. “So many different uniforms,” he said thoughtfully. “Surely those are not French troops.”

“Alors?”

The trio were silent for a moment. “Could every country in Europe have sent their armies, just to protect L’Academe?” Bill asked incredulously, as he peered with his naked eyes at the distant scene.

“No, there are French troops, after all,” Fructidor corrected himself. “On the right, there is the East German secret police. It looks like they are being led by ‘Iron’ Erich Mielke. Overhead on the left, we have two Med-Evac squadrons of the Transylvanian Coast Guard. But they are all being led by the French National Guard, in the center. The government has sent the very best,” said Fructidor.

“The Three Musketeers Battalion. L’Academe is saved.”

“Well done,” said Bill. “Dad, let’s go.”

The entire crowd had broken into a riot. The squatters collided with one another and got hung. up upon the barricades and other wreckage which they themselves had hauled into the middle of the street.

“Come here, Dad!” said Bill, grasping his adoptive father firmly by the arm. Bill was trying to hold onto Heathcliff amidst the tumult, when he felt something soft strike him in the back of the head and fell to the ground unconscious.

#

That was the third time that Bill had been knocked unconscious, all within the last two weeks. The first had been in a swampy forest clearing at the base of Karisimbi: a perplexing denouement to an entire venture notable for the failure of the well-intentioned to mediate its dialectical contradictions, such being necessary for its success.

Bill remained with the camp on Mt. Karisimbi for seven years, notwithstanding the sexual abuse he uncovered that first fall. He grew to manhood serving on the anti-poaching team and learned to diligently protect the endangered mountain gorillas they had all come to love so deeply. Bill was fascinated by the contradictions which seemed to inhere so deeply within Dian, who was so dedicated to the gorillas that she sometimes lived in communion with them- but treated not only the Twa, but all Rwandan natives, with utmost disparagement.

Her contradictions summoned within him, over the years, feelings first mysterious, then contemplative, and finally inflamed. Bill was inwardly enraged that his mentor could devote herself to such good works, yet at the same time accommodate such malign acts in her spare time. Nonetheless, there being no more visible abuse, Bill remained a dedicated part of the anti-Poaching project. He never foresaw how the failure to address and synthesize the conflict between the animal preservation and human rights movements would lead to such imminent tragedy.

It was one of Dian’s own volunteers who initiated the violent conflict that apparently later claimed Dian’s life. A team of zoologists came upon the remains of one of Dian’s favorite gorillas, named Digit-a mere adolescent- on a mountain slope across the valley. Not long thereafter, one of Dian’s volunteers shot a herder, who Dian said was trespassing in the area, in the thigh with a high-powered rifle. After that, it was, ‘Katy, bar the door.’^[1]

A few days after, Bill was patrolling a mountain pass at the base of Karisimbi. Dian had come across a slope littered with gorilla scat, and since diarrhea was associated with sudden danger experienced by a gorilla family, she had sent the patrol to investigate. Poachers had of late taken to capturing infant gorillas for sale to zoos and massacring their families.

The team leader led Bill and his group into a forest clearing to get a view of a mountaintop and get his bearings. In the mistaken belief that the clearing was unoccupied, Bill followed, soon learning that it was marshy up to his thighs 

“Get down!” hissed Lukacs, the team leader. He quickly raised his rifle, pointed it across the clearing and pumped off several rounds. A scream issued from the other side.

“Don’t do that!” shrieked Bill. “Why are you shooting that man?” Momentarily, Bill felt the dart enter his flesh just above his waist.

He awoke days later, unsure how far he was from Karisimbi, or what time it was. Through daylight which hesitantly penetrated his chamber, he concluded after some time that he was in a Twa hut, lying on a blanket on a dirt floor. Across from him a withered, toothless old man sat calmly on his haunches, regarding him.

“I know you,” said the man, gumming a betel nut. “You’re the White who saved our people from the Old Witch Woman who lives on top of Karisimbi.” He regarded Bill, who remained silent. “Don’t worry,” he said at last. “Red Cross be here this afternoon. 

At length, the Twa elder lit a hashish pipe, which filled the spare chamber with intoxicating vapors. As the afternoon dragged on, a chorus of children began chanting traditional Twa songs. For some time, the songs seemed good-willed but untrained and rather atonal. Then they were interrupted by the sound of tires and a low engine. At length, guitar sounds emerged, and to Bill lying in the cannabis smoke, the Twa song was transformed into the most scintillating, buoyant Afropop.

In the mid-afternoon, the elder came and led Bill from the hut. Sunlight filtered moderately Through a forest canopy. He accepted a ride with two staff from the Red Cross, a Brit and an Australian.

“Where to, mate?” asked the British driver, once the Land Rover was safely en route.

“Karisimbi,” said Bill.

“What you going up there for?”

“I’m a volunteer in Dian Fossey’s zoology camp,” he explained.

“Fossey’s dead,” said the driver. “Murdered several days ago. The Rwandans want to charge an American student, but the consulate spirited him back to the States.”

“Better take me up to Karisimbi,” said Bill. “I’d better get this sorted.”

“Are you sure?” asked the driver.

Bill was silent.

“You’re a long way from a bowl of moules frites and bottle of Riesling, my friend,” said the Aussie. “Are you sure you don’t just want us to take you to the airport?”

“Fuck it,” said Bill finally. “Take me to the airport.”

#