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“Am I talking too loud?” Winona laughs and rests her chin against her forearm, which she lays atop the plastic folding table that Jonathan told her he’d replace once Kyle was born. When Winona’s nose gets this close to the surface of the table, she is usually repulsed by the scent of Clorox wipes and pizza bites, but she is now on her third glass of wine and is unbothered. “I always forget how far my voice carries when I’ve had a little too much.” She motions her hand toward the bottle in front of her, which she has gotten for eight dollars at Trader Joe’s that morning. “I got this for eight dollars at Trader Joe’s this morning. Isn’t that incredible?”

“You said that already, Winona.” Jonathan gets up to drop his plate in the sink. Annie gets up to put her plate away and when she notices Jonathan’s dirty dish, she turns on the tap.

“No, no.” Jonathan waves Annie away from the sink. “I’ll get to that later. You just relax. You’ve had a long day.” Annie smiles and sits back down, moving from the dining table to the couch.

“Annie, have you ever noticed that when Jonathan says, ‘I’ll get to that later,’ what he really means is, ‘someone else will get to that later and I’ll forget about it in an hour?’” Winona laughs. It is a sweet laugh, almost childlike. Her cheeks are red, but neither Jonathan nor Annie is able to tell if this is from the alcohol or the humor. Neither Jonathan nor Annie laughs.

It is now 9 o’clock, which means Annie has been at Jonathan and Winona’s house for just about 12 hours. Annie’s parents always tell her that she should ask for compensation on nights when she is asked to have dinner with Jonathan and Winona, but Annie generally enjoys their company. She thinks Winona is funny when she’s drunk — she is what her mother would call a “loose cannon” — and Winona is always drunk on evenings like these.

Jonathan notices Annie looking at the clock. “Don’t feel pressure to stay, Annie. I know it’s getting a little late. I’m sure you have plans with friends tonight.”

“I don’t, actually. My parents came back from Sicily last night, so I’m supposed to go over and see them early tomorrow morning.” As silly as he knows it sounds, Jonathan always forgets that Annie has parents. Neither he nor Winona has ever met them. After 8 months of her watching Kyle, Jonathan likes to think that he and Winona have successfully integrated Annie into the family. Sometimes Jonathan thinks of Annie as an older daughter. Other times, he thinks of Annie as a younger mother to Kyle.

“How was the trip?” Jonathan sits across from Annie on an orange loveseat. It is the kind of loveseat that should really be marketed as a chair because it is so small. Winona sits beside him. Jonathan looks uncomfortable and crosses his legs.

“It’s Sicily, Jonathan,” Winona says. “Obviously it was spectacular.

“They did have a great time.” When Annie smiles she shows off her gums, which she has been told by Jonathan is her best feature. “Although they found it difficult to get used to the jet lag. Not that the time difference is even that significant — I guess they’re just getting old.”

“How old are they?” Winona asks.

“They’re 55.” Winona says nothing, although she is struck by how young they are, only 15 years older than she. Winona’s friends always warned her about having Kyle so late because of “geriatric complications.” Winona knew plenty of people who had had children at 40; she thought her friends just didn’t want her to feel bad about looking old at Kyle’s gymboree class. Which she does feel bad about, now that she thinks of it.

“Did you miss them, while they were away?” Annie begins to nod, quite emphatically, when she is interrupted by a soft thud in the direction of Kyle’s bedroom.

“Should I go check on him?”

“I’m sure he’s fine. He probably just dropped one of his toys.” Winona thinks Annie’s ears must be supersonic because of how easily she is able to pick up on every noise Kyle makes. It is impressive, if not slightly annoying. “My parents always wanted to go to Sicily.” Winona rests her hand on Jonathan’s knee. She tucks her fingers underneath her fist. They are still swollen even though it has been months since she had Kyle. She thinks they look like burnt sausages, which is her least favorite breakfast meat.

“My parents have compiled a pretty extensive photo album from the trip, which I’m sure they’ll subject me to tomorrow.”

“That’s sweet. They want to impress you.” Annie nods and fiddles with her hair. Winona watches her from the loveseat. She is petite, only just over five feet, but her short blonde hair makes her neck look long and elegant. Winona doesn’t understand how someone with breasts small enough to be unaffected by gravity can whisper nauseatingly sweet nothings into the ear of an infant so instinctively. Winona always tells Jonathan that Annie would make a perfect girl-next-door typecast, and Jonathan agrees.

“A trip to Sicily must have been expensive.” Winona takes a sip of her Trader Joe’s wine.

“It was. My father is an oncologist, but we also inherited quite a bit from his parents, who died before I was born. So we’re very lucky.”

“Were they good parents?”

“They were, actually. I mean, it’s not like my mom made home cooked meals every night or anything” –Winona glances at the microwaveable pot sticker resting on a napkin in her lap– “but I always knew they really enjoyed being parents. Which I think is kind of a rare quality to be conscious of all of the time.”

Jonathan nods and looks suddenly very serious. “That’s really beautiful, Annie, honestly.”

“I am very confident Kyle feels the same way about you both. Or he will, when he gets a little older and can make sense of his thoughts!” Annie laughs. “You both actually really make me want to be a parent. I know I’m still young”– Annie is 22 but looks all of 16– “but I just really want to love someone like a parent loves a child. I have no idea what that feels like — to have love for someone who weighs less than 15 pounds consume every fiber of your being.”

Jonathan is quiet for a moment. Winona guesses he is gathering his thoughts.

“I don’t mean to sound cheesy or anything, but love for a child really does fill you up. It’s almost an obsession. You don’t realize how weighty love is until you hold your kid and realize how that feeling has taken up so much physical room in your body.”

“I don’t know if Kyle filled us up in quite the same way.” Winona gestures to her stomach.

Sometimes when Winona rides the subway she wears especially tight tank tops to see if she will still pass as pregnant and someone will offer her a seat. She is usually successful.

“I didn’t mean Kyle the person– I meant the idea of Kyle. And the notion of human creation, and human creation of the tangible and intangible, and how frightening and wonderful it is that we not only have breathed life into a little boy, but also into ourselves and into this house.” Jonathan looks pleased by his intellect. “Sorry. I get carried away.” Annie looks moved, and cups her hand beneath her chin, looking at the couple with admiration.

“Does anyone want more?” Winona has begun pouring herself another glass of wine, her teeth having long since turned a muted purple.

“One of the perks of ending breastfeeding so early,” Jonathan laughs. Annie does too. When Jonathan decided to hire a nanny, Winona’s friends told her that they wished their husbands were as attentive as her own. Jonathan noticed that Winona was perpetually tired. Jonathan noticed that Winona could use help around the house. Winona isn’t quite sure if she appreciates how much Jonathan notices. “I can’t get away with anything now!” Winona always jokes to Annie and Jonathan when she feels them watching her with Kyle or watching her make dinner or watching her watch TV while she should be watching her son or the stove.

“I didn’t end it so early. It was six months. And everyone says that there’s really no difference between formula and breastmilk babies anymore anyway.” Annie nods. “Besides,” Winona continues, “my tits fucking hurt. I kept trying to get Jonathan to wear clothespins around his nipples so he would know what it felt like when Kyle’s teeth got in the mix.”

“That sounds awful!”

“For Jonathan or me?”

“Well, you. But I suppose also Jonathan, if he had been subjected to the clothespins.”

“Thank God I got out of that one!” Jonathan says.

“I guess there will be more opportunities to give him a frame of reference whenever you guys have another.” Jonathan and Winona are both quiet. Annie is embarrassed. “Oh, shit, sorry! I didn’t mean to presume there would be another, I was just–”

“Don’t apologize! It’s not presumptuous– I’m sure there will be another one at some point. We just haven’t talked about it yet.” Winona removes her fingers from Jonathan’s lap.

“I mean, it is a bit presumptuous though, isn’t it?” Winona turns to look at Jonathan. “Not that it’s Annie’s fault. But it’s a bit presumptuous of you to have such confidence in a two-child household.”

Jonathan licks his lower lip aggressively and his mouth curls into a half smile that either means

I’ve really dug my grave now or I do wish she would shut the fuck up.

“I didn’t realize that we had such different visions for our family trajectories.” “And what might your trajectory look like?”

Jonathan looks at Annie, who looks at the floor. She notices a spare pacifier that has rolled underneath the couch and reaches for it.

“Don’t get that, Annie. You’re off duty.” Jonathan touches her forearm as a gentle signal for her to sit back. Winona watches him touch her and moves her eyes to the pacifier, which is covered with a layer of dust that she planned on cleaning this morning. “We can have this conversation another time.” Jonathan moves from the loveseat onto the couch and sits beside Annie, who has begun toying with her short blonde hair again.

“I’m sorry. I feel like I made things uncomfortable” Annie says. Winona turns her eyes back to Annie. Sometimes Annie can feel Winona watching her, but she never says anything. She assumes it’s a maternally motivated thing, as if maybe Winona hopes that if she has a daughter she’ll wind up like Annie. “Should I go check on Kyle now?”

“I can do it.” Jonathan gets up from the couch, leaving Winona and Annie alone. It is silent for a few moments, aside from the labored breath of Winona, whose nasal passages always get blocked after her fourth glass of wine.

“Do you want to feel something weird?” Winona asks suddenly. “What is it?”

“Here. Come here.” Winona beckons Annie over. Annie moves to the loveseat, and Winona directs her to sit beside her. Winona can smell Annie’s lotion– it’s Jergens Cherry Almond. Winona uses Jergens Ultra Healing for Extra Dry Skin. Annie’s skin is never dry.

“What is it, Winona?”

“I wish that someone had shown me this when I started thinking about having kids.” Winona lifts up her shirt and reveals her stomach to Annie. Annie sits back, although there are no extra inches with which she can distance herself from Winona on the loveseat. She looks at Winona’s belly. It is pear shaped, and the lower half of her torso puckers out along the lines of her jeans. They are a size 27, even though Winona knows that she is now much closer to a 30. Her skin is wrinkled around her belly button, which looks sunken into her midsection. “Touch it, Annie.”

“No, thank you.”

“Come on, Annie. Please.” Annie watches Winona grab a fistful of flesh.

 “Don’t you want to know what motherhood feels like?” Winona nods toward her midsection. “This is it. This is what you’ll feel every time you put on a pair of jeans or run your hands over your body with soapy fingers in the shower. This is what your husband will feel every time he’s fucking you.” Annie thinks it must be painful to squeeze one’s skin so tightly and wonders if she should tell Winona to ease up so as not to cause any bruising.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Winona, honestly. You look great.”

“So feel it, Annie. Feel it and tell me I look great.” Winona shakes her head.  “I wish someone had offered me the opportunity to hold maternity between my fingers when I was your age.”

“Really, Winona, I’d rather not.” Winona’s gaze, which was not unthreatening to begin with, has turned into eye contact so imploring that Annie realizes she must either look away or reach a hand below the folded line of Winona’s shirt. She decides to go for the belly. As she lightly touches Winona’s flesh, Jonathan emerges from the bedroom. Though Jonathan has often wondered other things about Annie, he has never wondered what she might look like touching his naked wife.

“Winona, what the fuck?”

“What, Jonathan? It was normal for people to do this when I was pregnant, wasn’t it?” Winona turns to Annie.

“Winona, put your shirt down.” Jonathan looks at Annie apologetically. Jonathan had noticed Winona examining her body in their mirror earlier that morning but had decided not to bring anything up because he didn’t want to start a thing. Winona was an expert at making things out of everything.

Jonathan often felt like he was responsible for un-thinging Winona’s things. When they were first going out, Jonathan described this as Winona’s flair for dramatics.

Jonathan yawns. “I am exhausted,” he says. Annie yawns, too. “Me, too.” She says. Winona rolls her eyes.

“You know what’s worse than sleep deprivation? The fact that I literally don’t own my body anymore because it belongs to a creature who can’t even feed himself. That’s exhaustion.”

Annie feels sorry for Winona. There are some people who just don’t want to be happy, and end up reveling in their unhappiness, but Annie knows that Winona isn’t one of those. Annie thinks Winona is just unhappy. “I could always spend a night here if you want to take a night off. You guys could stay at my place, if you wanted. I have a spare room for when my parents come to visit.” Annie is so nice it sometimes makes Winona want to vomit. “I think I’m going to vomit.” Winona leaves the living room and sounds of retching can be heard from the living room, where Jonathan and Annie now stand with their arms at their sides.

“I should probably go.” Annie gets up. This is not the first time she’s felt tension between Winona and Jonathan, but it is the first time she’s seen Winona’s stomach. She’ll never say anything, but it does gross her out a little bit, seeing the way Winona’s stretch marks form a sort of ghoulish face against the brown of her skin.

“I mean, of course. It’s tough for every new mother. All of the hormones and everything… it’s a lot.” Annie has no idea what hormones are or aren’t released after pregnancy, but she likes to sound smart in front of Jonathan. Annie often finds herself trying to sound smart in front of men she finds attractive, but if she thinks about this too hard she feels rather unfeminist. She reaches for a strand of her short blonde hair and pushes it behind her ear. Winona emerges from the bathroom.

“Sorry about that.” She wipes her mouth, suddenly incredibly self-conscious. “At least I don’t have to worry about anyone suspecting I’m bulimic anymore.” She laughs her sweet, tinkling laugh and smiles hard enough to make her cheeks block her eyes. “Are you headed out?” She watches Jonathan retrieve Annie’s coat and help her put it on.

“I think so. I’m getting pretty tired.” Annie gives Winona a hug. She wonders if Annie will give Jonathan a hug goodbye, too. Annie does. Jonathan returns to the living room.

“Are we going to talk about that?” “About what?”

“That episode?” Winona ignores Jonathan. She is good at selectively hearing him. Jonathan is quiet for a while, but Winona cannot tell if this is because he is angry or hurt or humiliated.

“I think that you should be happier than you are.” Winona does not know what to say to this except, “I am happy.”

Sometimes Jonathan worries that Winona might leave him. Jonathan doesn’t love every part of Winona. Jonathan is the type of person who hates the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Harry lists all of Sally’s horrifically annoying habits as reasons why he actually loves her. Jonathan dislikes a lot of

things about Winona, and has no trouble admitting it. But Jonathan is sure Winona dislikes a lot of things about him, too, which is why he likes her. She’s no bullshit. She’d never pull a Harry.

“I bet Annie looks just like her parents.”

Jonathan doesn’t know how to respond to this, so he doesn’t. Winona walks to the fridge and fingers a wallet sized photo of Kyle at gymboree. “He looks nothing like me.”

“What are you talking about? He doesn’t look like anyone. He barely has a face. He’s not even a year old.”

“He doesn’t look like me, Jonathan. He spent nine months in me. He ruined my body. And he doesn’t even look like me. He’s so…”

“He’s so what, Winona?”

“No one thinks I’m his mother. He ruined my body and he looks nothing like me and now all the proof I have of producing him is my disgusting stomach and my swollen fingers. Motherhood is supposed to be the greatest thing in the world. If this is the greatest thing I can expect from life, then–”

“Then what?” Jonathan hopes Winona doesn’t try to kill herself before Kyle is out of the house.

Winona gets up from the loveseat.

I’m going to bed.” Winona goes to her bedroom and undresses. Winona’s throat feels like she is near crying, but Winona doesn’t want to cry, so she shuts her eyes instead and slips under the covers.

When Jonathan comes to bed about 20 minutes later, Winona opens her eyes and turns to him. They have sex, but it is nothing spectacular. It hasn’t been in what feels like a long time, but Jonathan will never say anything to Winona and Winona wishes so badly she didn’t notice that she doesn’t say anything to Jonathan. While Jonathan is on top of Winona, he makes sure not to graze the soft flesh around her navel with his hand. He thinks that if he does not touch her, she will forget that Kyle has ruined her body and he does not look like her and she is tired from living for him alone and she can never go back. Winona sees that Jonathan’s hands do not leave the pillow from behind her head. She wonders if, behind the faint fluttering of his eyelids, he is imagining she is Annie. If he tries hard enough, can he picture Annie’s short blonde hair grazing the nape of Winona’s neck?

________________ 

The sun has not yet risen but Winona is awake. She has found herself in Kyle’s room, which she often does at 3:30 in the morning. It is dark, but she can just make out the outline of Kyle’s chest moving as he sleeps. She has the urge to rest a hand atop his silky belly and feel his sweet warm breath tickle her fingers, but she does not touch him. Winona watches him instead, because she’s always thought that beauty is best left undisturbed, and boy, is he beautiful.

An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. – Henry Miller 

Ella is sitting on her couch with her iPhone, researching venues for her show before finishing more than one painting for it. There’s no excuse why she can’t do more. Work has been light at the boutique media agency in Soho where she acts as Head of Sales. She’s in her living room taking up space, “working” from home. The blank canvases are right over there, leaning against the modern glass coffee table with an abstractly shaped oak base. There were lines of coke on it last night, which could’ve been used to fuel her creativity. Instead she opted for the routine paranoia trip: staring through the peephole in the front door every ten minutes to check if someone was outside—cops or some sort of sexual predator. With sweat-soaked straight black hair and bulging eyes, she sustained her manic watch till the wee hours of the a.m., which resulted in zero home invaders, per usual.

This has been going on for months, dare one say years. The Boyfriend learned long ago to refrain from protesting his girlfriend’s temporary schizophrenic actions, let alone trying to comfort her physically. Like he did on countless other weekend nights, he simply sat on the couch thumbing through Instagram (and, occasionally, secretly sexting a coworker, having once been too loyal to act on it in person) till daybreak when the coke was gone and Ella had no other choice but to come down and eventually fall asleep beside him.

Ella, now in her late thirties, realizes she can no longer blame anyone but herself for her bad habits and creative block. When she was in her twenties, she covered the familial inspiration in her raw, visceral paintings. The uncomfortably personal themes of her shows (with decent reviews and nonexistent sales) came from stories about her alcoholic dad who’d been imprisoned for murdering her mom and her older brother who’d been killed attempting to break up a drunken brawl, as well as the escorting years, an endless string of bad relationships and an assortment of mostly self-inflicted abuses. Nothing in her present life is inspiring her, but she still feels compelled to paint… something, anything.

During weeknights after work and every weekend, she can only focus her tired and/or hungover body on the couch, what’s new on the good ol’ Fire TV Stick and which Grubhub meal to complement it. Or when the next cycling class is scheduled at Flywheel, offsetting the overeating and keeping her body lean and toned. Or whether she has enough funds left to buy yet another pair of shoes from Vetements or Off-White (her favorite designers) after paying her quarterly dues to Soho House and the monthly fee for an all-access membership to Equinox, among other bills and whistles. And cocaine. She loves cocaine more than she cares to admit to herself and others.

FRIDAY

The Boyfriend already left for work, and Ella is waking up again from another micro-nap. Moseying into the kitchen, she pours herself a hot cup of coffee—he makes six cups: four to fill his to-go mug and two for her—cooling it with a healthy splash of almond milk. Holding the cup in her left hand, she sips the lukewarm drink while perusing Instagram on her phone with her right. She fingers the profiles of gorgeous male models William McLarnon and Matthew Noszka and influencers into extreme sports such as Dylan Efron and Jay Alvarrez, wondering if she’d be happier with a man like one of them: otherworldly sexy, superhero strong and Insta-famous. I’m still beautiful, she tells herself in the mirror, checking to see whether the Botox that’s been hiding the wrinkles in her forehead is wearing off (not yet, thankfully). If I were in some sort of social setting with these guys, I’m sure I’d catch their eye. She considers the fantasy for a few more seconds, an even mix of the familiar guilt for superficial, adulterous thinking, an always-on ache for what she can’t have and the growing unsurety of her love for The Boyfriend (very good-looking, much younger than she and great in bed when she’s in the mood) overwhelming her physically like the freezing Peconic River on Shelter Island in early June—their first vacation nearly three years ago (they stayed at the very chic Sunset Beach Hotel).

On the kitchen counter lie a bunch of bananas spooning each other inside a clear plastic bag with the Chiquita logo. Dressed in perishable goods, Miss Chiquita smiles festively, ready to perform the calypso dance leap. Once vibrant yellow, the fruits’ skin is now dull and freckled, foretelling their rot. But The Boyfriend’s ask via text remains unfulfilled: Would you do me a big favor and peel the bananas I left on the counter and put them in the freezer? That way they’ll keep for his weekday (and semi-weekend) smoothies. The making of which are an ongoing, unwelcome wakeup call for Ella prior to one of Amazon Echo’s more appealing alarm sounds. That unnerving jackhammer noise of a “Magic” Bullet Blender pureeing assorted fruit, ice and almond milk is anything but enchanting to her ears.

They live together in Williamsburg in a two-floor loft with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The luxury building includes amenities such as a state-of-the-art gym with indoor rock climbing, simulated golf rooms (plus a mini-golf course on the roof), a bowling alley, two pools, three hot tubs and much more unlisted here. Some of their neighbors have children and dogs, both of which The Boyfriend wants too. Ella doesn’t think of herself as motherly and has never been a big fan of animals. This isn’t to say she’s a bad person, just selfish, and at least she knows it.

But lately she’s been struggling with her somewhat lavish, arguably heretical lifestyle, thinking she should be spending her money and time with The Boyfriend in healthier ways. Perhaps it’s biological; her birthday is around the corner, as is her body’s inability to make babies. Despite The Boyfriend’s smoothies and other behaviors that only annoy her because she’s irritable from the coke comedowns, he’s kind and understanding of her idiosyncratic, addictive and neurotic personality. Lovers of the past provided an obsession and coinciding rush similar to the drugs (a TV actor, a banker, and a lawyer, all of whom were a year or two older and a zero or two richer than she), while never showing her love, which is what she thought she wanted for oh so many years. But when The Boyfriend came into her life unexpectedly and gave her just that (after hitting her with his bike as she ran into the bike lane rushing to the office one sultry afternoon), she accepted it begrudgingly and has been battling herself from rejecting him ever since.

She finds herself more preoccupied with the fear of his imminent departure now that she’s hungover again, nearing old age and getting crazier by the nanosecond. Moreover, her name is the one and only on the lease and other legal agreements tying her to this time and place financially. He could just get up and go anytime. A slice of her, the demon inside, craves this, as it’ll allow her to fully revert to the life of the manic art slut: hard-working by day; partying with a different “date” every night; painting her lonely paintings during tear-soaked, suicidal in-betweens. But the rest of her is well familiar with how that old song and dance eventually ends. Peeling and slicing The Boyfriend’s bananas, she prays un-denominationally that she can sustain her current commitment to him. She stores the mushy fruit in a plastic container and tosses it in the freezer.

SATURDAY

The Boyfriend keeps three tabs of acid in an empty dental floss case on the bottom shelf of his gunmetal nightstand. Each piece is the size of Ella’s pinky nail and advertised by the dealer as extra strength. Flashbacks of her goth-girl-teens arise whenever The Boyfriend tries convincing her to trip with him; while hallucinating, she’d learned her life’s vocation is to paint, accepted the deaths of her immediate family, fallen in love for the first time and realized her best friend was anything but (swiftly thereafter ending their toxic relationship). Consequently, she’s fearful of an LSD-laced epiphany that their relationship isn’t for the long haul. But her intensifying self-reflection is prompting her to finally discover the truth her own way.

She rises early on this sun-drenched Saturday morning, slipping out of bed softly to avoid rousing her recovering lover. He spent last night drinking with old college friends till the wee hours of the a.m. anyway, so it’s unlikely he’ll wake easily. These circumstances are usually flipped: traditionally she’s the one sleeping off a night of indiscretions while he’s already up and at ‘em, starting the day right with a smoothie and two-mile run to the waterfront and back, then gently nudging her conscious at about 3:00 p.m. with three Advils, a tall glass of ice water and no questions asked (her last time out was less than two weeks ago). But lately he’s been gradually assuming her behavior. Seems the end may have begun, and she needs to act now to ensure their best possible future, whether that’s together or not.

Once soft, the bananas are hardened when she pulls them from their cryo-slumber along with a bag of generic-brand frozen berries and two handfuls of ice, placing them on the crowded, coffee-stained kitchen counter. A collection of half-eaten takeout and countless empty beer bottles dominate its marble surface. Shaking a near-empty gallon of refrigerated almond milk, she’s pleased there’s enough left for two smoothies. She tosses everything into an oversized blender cup and switches on the “Magic” Bullet Blender with its familiar, unnerving jackhammer noise that’s anything but enchanting to her ears.

As she pours the mixture in two glasses and tops off each with one-and-a half tabs of acid, she hears sheets rustling, a snorty mumbling and the creaking bedframe. The door to the bedroom slowly opens, The Boyfriend emerging naked with a yawn (he overheats at night, no matter how high the AC), his average body exposed and dirty blond hair disheveled. Hey hon, he greets her in a throaty voice. Whoa, you made us breakfast?! Thanks, sexy. Just what I needed. He gives her an alcohol-and-rotten-fish-smelling kiss on the cheek. She stirs each glass with a bent spoon (they’re in dire need of new silverware), allowing the secret ingredient to fully envelop their healthy meal. Yeah, well, I didn’t break up the fruit enough in the blender, she white lies, handing over one of the glasses. Drink up! It’ll help with the hangover. Take these Advils too. He chucks the pills down his throat and chugs the smoothie. A burp, then he’s off to the bathroom for a shit.

Quickly slurping down her serving with a stainless-steel straw (plastic ones are hard to come by nowadays, and the cardboard kind on her lips gives her the chills), she uses her pointer finger to pull out the soggy tabs stuck on the side of the glass. Sucks them off and swallows. The only thing left to do is wait, so she flops down on the couch and ignites the good ol’ Fire TV Stick and the latest episode of Euphoria.

The faint sound of a toilet paper roll rattling around the holder means he’s finishing his business. Materializing again, he lets out a deep sigh, dragging his body next to where she lies, bringing with him a waft of Febreze and the stench of a hangover shit. He burps again and chuckles. There was this homeless dude inside the bar begging everyone for money, so weird, he shares randomly. Oh, I’ve been thinking we should go to Portugal…

SUNDAY

An impressive Sunday sunrise. Life has already moved on from yesterday’s trip, but Ella’s certain she never will (not completely, anyway). Via the bedroom window blinds (she desperately needs to buy blackout curtains), the 6:00 a.m. daylight bleeds into her eyes like a vampire’s worst nightmare. Sleep is always brief for her the night after taking LSD; the overwhelming visual effects she experiences while high never disappear when it’s time for shut-eye. Instead they’re more intense. For an hour or two before dozing off half-conscious till the a.m., she’s stuck watching a cartoon of Dante’s Inferno on her eyelids, starring characters from The Simpsons.

She rises unconcerned with the sound of sheets rustling and the creaking bedframe. The reason to keep quiet has been eliminated with her relationship; The Boyfriend left her yesterday. He didn’t take too kindly to her dosing him. At first, he found it arousing, achieving perhaps the biggest erection she’d ever seen him have. He was giggling uncontrollably at the second episode of Euphoria, during which Nate (played by the gorg Jacob Elordi) beats a guy to a pulp and rapes him. As the visuals kicked in, so did her libido and the realization of how much she loved this man, how passionately generous and unconditionally accepting he’d been with her for years. All her bad habits and emotional baggage, the bold selfishness, ignored. While he looked the other way on countless occasions, she was searching for fulfillment in every direction but his. How insanely mistaken you were! she scolded herself. Rushing to her knees, she yanked down his sweatpants and devoured him. The howls he made as she orally coaxed him to completion were magnificent.

Holy shit, hon, oh my god. That was so wild. What’s going on, everything is vibrating. Barely pulling on his sweatpants, he darted for the bathroom and knelt over the toilet puking. She walked to the sink beside him and rinsed her mouth. Checked herself in the mirror. Watched as the wrinkles in her forehead became white worms, slithered off her face and flew away. Feeling beautiful and perfect, she finally divulged she’d dosed him.

We’re on the acid, hon! I put it in our smoothies. I’ve just been so horrible lately, pushing you away. You know I’ve been scared to take it because of the revelations I have on it. But it was worth the risk! I now know I love you so much and I’m so sorry. I’m going to be better to you, to us. He looked into her with incredulous eyes. You did fucking what?! Are you kidding me, Ella! My parents are coming to the city today for my dad’s birthday. What the fuck is wrong with you?! 

And that… was that. A few more harsh sentences (one of which was We’re done for good, you crazy bitch!), a packed bag, his snubbing her pleas not to go out in public high or leave her there alone and on drugs, an exit with a slammed front door. Sobbing and hallucinating, she texted him nonstop for hours (but never called for some reason). Eventually the blue iMessages turned green, which meant he’d blocked her or shut off his new iPhone (he’d just gotten the 11).

Ella enters the living room overcome with sadness and regret. She glances at the blank canvases leaning against the modern glass coffee table with an abstractly shaped oak base, then texts her coke dealer.

THE END

These remarks were written for a memorial service for Kevin Killian, which took place on August 19, 2019, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. — Robert Glück

I suppose I have known Kevin longer than anyone here except for his siblings.  But 40 years turns out not to be such a long time.  I am older than Kevin by five years, and it was fully my plan for Kevin to speak at my memorial, rather than my speaking at his, which still is shocking and unreal to me.  Like most of us, I have been rereading Kevin’s work in the light of his death, amazed that a consciousness of such splendor and exuberance has been stilled.  The death of a loved one strips us of the notion that our present life is a dress rehearsal rather than the one and only performance, though I think Kevin was always aware of the shape of his own life in his grand gestures and also in his scrupulousness, like his attention to archives.  

I spent the most time with Kevin during the era of my workshops at Small Press Traffic, where he met Dodie.  He says he joined them in 1982.  Of course he must be right, though it seems a little late to me.  In his vast generosity, he proposed other projects through the years.  He offered to edit my collected essays for example, and he offered to work on my archives.  He did come to help me with it just three weeks before he died.  We went to Office Max.  I had to say Enough, he would have worked on them forever.  Another time he said Bob, I have an idea—let’s write a story together, both of us completely naked in a room.  The most pressing of the insecurities that proposition called forth was the awareness of how slowly I write.  It seemed like a very long time to be without any clothes.  

Through the years, Kevin would sometimes say with a wave of his hand, “Bob taught me everything I know about writing!”  It created in me—as it does in this moment—the feeling of anxious hilarity.  “God bless you for your enormous, skilled, intuitive intervention into my life.”

Did I ever teach him anything?  Or, more to the point, what did he mean?  In the workshops, I would make a few comments and suggestions about some brilliant poem or story.  (For Kevin, pleasure and safety were opposites, and his work turned on the moment when our hero sees the broader perspective of someone who wants to damage him.  Then he gains, not value, but lack of value.  Sexual invasion and danger are accepted and the little that remains is ready to be entertained by death or romance.)  The next week, Kevin would exclaim, Bob I followed your advice exactly, but the improved piece, equally brilliant, would be totally different from the one he’d read a week before, unrecognizable.  Was this sincerity, ridicule?  Where is Kevin coming from?—I often asked myself.  In fact, I used to say Kevin was the only person I ever knew who possibly could have come from a different planet—an enigma who possessed superhuman knowledge, baffling productivity, and later, super-human kindness.  He seemed to possess the secret of happiness—maybe that’s the meaning of his work: that meaning is not in short supply—there’s meaning everywhere, everything is somehow connected to everything else, and you must surrender without restraint to the matter at hand.  Even that is too prescriptive—because Kevin delighted in possibility and the penetration of all kinds of barriers, including the body itself, the mind itself, and our culture itself.  

A few sentences from “Santa,” my favorite story.  “I’m content enough, like a bubble envelope.  I lie down on my back and my hands are taped with black stickum gum, “relax now.”  I tell them where I live and how I used to watch Santa Barbara every day.  On the ceiling there’s some famous stars or windows of the far night.  I’m breathing in, not breathing out.  The air’s a faint blue, the color of speed and peace.  I did not write this, this was my life, or vice versa.”

“I will bring one more . . .”
—God, Exodus 11:1

The plague descended suddenly. It caused no surprise.

The towers downtown became polymer and styrene spires. Cars plasticized to opal propylene as their tires fused into the cement of coast routes.

The women dancing in the Jelly Julie on Sunset monstrously thermoset before the horny men, as the petrochemical bane reached the Central Valley. It hesitated at the edge of the migrant towns and great vale of farmland as if to weigh how the urban populace met this change. When the people continued the old lifestyle, merely titillated by this novelty world of vinyl and epoxy, the polymerization surged on through cropland. The film moguls and actors and club musicians, porn titans and courtesans, drank piña coladas under acrylic palms along Malibu sands and Mulholland lawns of emerald isobutyl. The plague hardened the San Joaquin Valley to an inedible breadbasket of decorative fruit.

Famine set in. Others followed the fused strippers: Melrose sidewalks crammed with mannequins in aspect of shoppers, peering into jewelry store windows. The skin carameled in the California sun into dulce de leche, the eyes shining.

Those who could afford horses fled northeast into the Rockies, but seemed to bring the plague. At the ends of shotguns they were turned from mountain towns, the road an eel of crisp resin at their heels. At the east base of the American Cordillera, the Armed Forces erected a battery to halt the movie moguls and stars, haggard advertisement tycoons and champion surfers, whose wealth and love of good living kept them before the blight. The Rocky Mountains vulcanized under their tired feet. Their horses hardened. Ice slopes glacéd. Tors—Bakelite—reflected the sun like knives of obsidian as their clothing fused into their necks. The cursed Californians stared from ledges amid rubber pine, a long show-window of alp trekkers between seasonal shipments; they stared, doleful, across the rolling living grass of the Great Plains, from which their forbearers brought crop to the Central Valley and to which they ushered death. Slowly, bodies catalyzed and howitzers fired upon screaming mannequins wobbling down interstates.

The plastic blight ended at the Great Divide. As the nation mourned the West, agleam every sunset like a derelict candy land, the Midwest and East Coast conceded the logic of such a plague coming from California.

A gold blight hit New York. The silver hypodermic of the Empire State pushed gold into the sun. The Chrysler Tower and architecturally vervy investment banks in lower Manhattan rippled and shone. The auric creep pursued investment bankers and commodity men through Ohio. Heavy artillery eliminated them in the rolling corn.

Southerners and plainsmen thanked Heaven for its benevolence. Two years later the black flesh was there. Remaining Americans waited. Shined eyes stared from softening skin and dimmed.

It didn’t sound too promising at first. The man on the other end of the line said that he worked with dancers, and he wondered if I might like to come over and maybe dance for him. Our terse conversation on the phone felt guarded on his end and measured and suggestive. We talked about beauty, and the voice said that he had been beautiful once but that he was “a ruined beauty” now. This intrigued me, as did the roughness of his authoritative voice. It was not the sort of voice you usually heard on this phone line. Everybody tried to sound butch-er than they actually were, and I was no exception to that. But if this guy was also masquerading, it was one of the more convincing attempts.

My dance man and I made a date to meet at his apartment. Again, I wasn’t expecting much. I had already met a lot of people in Manhattan who claimed to be directors, photographers, actors, designers, and they were anything but. They were just poor, neglected people who had hung on tight and who might have wanted to do something in those areas twenty or thirty years ago and had made a few stabs at those treasured dreams, but it all came down to a review in the Times from 1986, or an extended run in 1973.

So I entered the building after my dance man buzzed me in, and I went up in the elevator, and then I saw the name on the door. I didn’t know anything about dance then (I still don’t know much), but even I recognized the name on the door. This was not just some dirty old man who had once directed a terpsichorean evening at P.S. 122 in the mid-80s. No, this was a man who was among the few famous choreographers of the day.

The door opened, and the man who had opened it acted like he did not want to be seen, but he did want to be heard. He gave me commands; go there, move here. The apartment was smallish and dark, a large studio, with windows that showed off a view of downtown. There was very little furniture, but it was handsomely appointed. It was immediately clear to me that this wasn’t a primary residence but “a place in the city.”

“Take your shoes and socks off,” the voice said, and I obliged. The hardwood floors felt good under my feet. “Now your shirt,” the voice said. I was breathing heavily and I pulled my shirt over my head, and my heart was pounding because I was so excited. “You’re very thin,” he said, impersonally, appraisingly. “Take your pants off.”

I took my pants off fairly fast and stood there in front of him and I was very happy in the dark and the silence. I was so at home in this situation. “You have big calves,” the voice said. “Your legs are good.” The voice was far less impersonal now, almost excited, and it wasn’t really a sexual excitement but more of a feeling of possibility.

“Now, if you want to get into my company, you’re going to have to show that you can take direction,” he said, sitting down on a low couch. I could feel him staring at me intently, and I started to make him out in the dark. He had longish hair and a leonine kind of head, and a quality of nobility. He was set apart. He was a king. 

He just looked at me for a moment more and then got up and put on some jazz music, Duke Ellington. I started to move—I had taken dance classes before—and he stopped me right away. He was so totally a choreographer that he took everything related to movement seriously. This was just a sex scene role-play we had set up through a phone line, but he took the time to explain certain things to me about dance.

“You’ll be my pony boy,” he said, and this made me smile. He started the Ellington music again, and then he came back over to me and showed me how to move subtly against the rhythm of the music. His hands were around my waist and then on my shoulders and he was gently moving me like a puppet around the darkened space of the studio, and I let myself be led, because I was obviously in the hands of some kind of master. 

Finally he sort of tipped me over and pulled my underwear down and got on his knees and went to work, and this was as extraordinarily awkward physically as the dance and dance direction from him had been so very graceful and suspended in time. I had to position myself in totally ungraceful ways for him to get what he wanted, but I didn’t mind, for I liked and trusted him right away.

When he was finished with me, I put my underwear back on and draped myself on a chair with my legs stretched out for him to see, and we talked for a time as the light faded and faded until we were really sitting in the dark, and all I could hear was that low, rumbly voice of his. I pretended I hadn’t seen his name on the door, because that’s what he wanted, I could tell.

He talked a bit about former lovers, with an appealing sort of reticence. I had listened to so many drunken guys at bars babble about past loves; they wanted to tell me everything all at once, and they ruined whatever might have been interesting about their lives by being so unselective, so garrulous. My choreographer held things back, to be protective of himself, to be mysterious. I tried to be at my best, high energy, lyrical. I told him about my writing on the theater and on film, and a little bit about my photographer friend Ben Morrissey. He knew Ben’s work, and he knew the photos Ben had taken of me. “They’re everywhere, aren’t they?” he asked, kindly.

He got up and enquired if I’d like a glass of water, and I said yes, and I watched him move through the space. It was clear that he had been and still was a real dancer; it was a pleasure just to watch him walk across a room. He was rooted to the ground and moved decisively, like very masculine men do in bars, right shoulder forward, left shoulder forward, almost like a sailor, a rolling walk, but the difference with him is that his knees were slightly bent at all times, so that he might take off and spring into the air or sink down to the floor at a moment’s notice. 

After I left and went home, I typed his name into Google and found out that he had lopped almost twenty years off his age on the phone line, but that was to be expected. He was an exceptional person, and so what was twenty years? Especially if you could control the environment in a darkened apartment. Why not? Nevertheless. I have sometimes taken two years off my age, as Katharine Hepburn did most of her life, for Hepburn was sensible or right about most things. Knocking off more than two years is pushing it, I think; lopping off twenty years is nothing if not bold, but he was so dishy still that he got away with it.

I had gotten a pretty good look at him in the light as he opened the door of the studio for me to leave, and he wasn’t a “ruined beauty” as he had said, at least not to me. He was the most attractive, magnetic older man I had met at that point, and his charisma was very different from any I had encountered before. This man was a closed fortress, with armored guards. 

I went up to the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library and asked for a video of his work, and I sat down in a cubicle and put some headphones on, and then there he was in a black leotard in 1968 performing his first dance. First he was down on the floor like he was about to do push-ups, and he did do a push up and lifted his legs as high into the air as he could get them in back, and from this position he fell gracefully down onto his left shoulder and somehow got himself instantly back up on his knees, as if by sleight of hand. He did not have long legs himself; in fact, he was somewhat short. He had been wiry as a younger dancer, and the man I had met was stocky and barrel-chested.

He reached up and up with his arms in this 1968 dance and then seized back into himself, as if he had been mortally wounded, and then slowly he opened his arms back up and stretched his arms and legs out, trying to get upright again until he did a neck stand, and then suddenly he was standing, and I have no idea how he got up off the ground to a standing position so quickly. He was like this beautiful toy that could do anything. I later saw the French dancer Jean Babilée do a similar neck stand in filmed bits of the dance “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort,” and I wondered if my choreographer had somehow seen this. 

At the end of this early dance, he swung around with his arms out in a quasi-Chinese manner, and then he fell to the ground and did a backwards somersault onto his left shoulder—his perfect little body shot right up into the air from this left shoulder—in a straight line!—and then he collapsed to sit on his tailbones and extended his pressed-together-legs and moved them right and then left…right and then left. This movement with his extended, closed legs was so don’t-touch-me sexy that I got hard right there at Lincoln Center, where erections are frowned upon.

I went over to “audition” again, as soon as I could. He put on Debussy this time, and we talked about Nijinsky. He showed me how Nijinsky had “humped a scarf” during his notorious dance to Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.” I was in my underwear (green print Lycra from H & M, $12, and worth every penny) and bare feet, and he started getting really into my Nijinsky impersonation as I undulated around the space with my palms up, like the Nijinsky photos I had seen. He got up from where he was sitting and said, “Now move your hips in slightly wider circles, can you do that?” I moved my hips more decisively. “Huh,” he said, studying me. 

He barreled over to me quickly and roughly pulled down my underwear to my knees and I took a sharp excited breath and my erection throbbed, and as he was walking away from me he turned his lion head slightly and grunted, “Take those off,” over his shoulder. I did as I was told, and I stood there naked and very very happy. He went into a closet and he came back out with some emerald green tights and a cunning little hat with all sorts of thingamabobs hanging off of it, and he placed the hat on my head so that my face was framed by green fringe, and I sat down and put the tights on; they were sheer and almost see-through, but not quite.

When I stood back up in these tights, I felt different, like some sea creature. He was seated, watching me intently, ruminatively, as if he were smoking a cigarette without a cigarette. I stayed upright and moved my arms a lot and rolled my hips in ever-widening circles to the Debussy music, and he just watched me.

“Okay, this is good, actually,” he said, like he was somewhat surprised. “But you need to think about working on different levels. You need to be able to work on the floor.” I tried to sort of float down to the floor as I had seen him do in his dance, but it didn’t quite work. “Here, you’re not trained, that’s OK, but let me show you some tricks,” he said, getting up again and coming over to me. 

He guided my body down to the floor and told me to think of myself as not solid but liquid. He said that I didn’t have any bones, not really. I found myself down on the floor, with his strong hands on my neck, and the tension that I always carried in my shoulders began to disappear. I was on my back, moving instinctively to the Debussy music, with the rhythm and then against it, and I lifted my legs as high into the air as I could get them and then closed them tightly and made the movements I had seen him make on the tape from 1968 at Lincoln Center.

It was dark in the studio as always and getting darker, and I let the coaxing of the oboes and the muted horns in the Debussy piece lead my body all around the floor, with his hands sometimes guiding me. I slipped far, far away from him down the floor and extended my legs and my arms in a very angular position, and he cried, “Hold that! Stay with that for a few seconds! Let me look at that, that’s unusual!”

I did as I was told, and I felt that I could hold this pose on the floor forever because it felt so right, so decisive, so theatrical and aggressive. “Now get up onto your knees and extend your left leg out for me,” he said. I did this and held my balance. He crouched down and ran his hand up my leg, from foot to calf to inner thigh. “Slide back down onto the ground on your stomach,” he said in his lowest gravelly voice. “Now lift your chest off the floor.”

I did that, and it was a yoga pose, almost, and his hands lifted my torso as far up as it would go. “Stay like that for me, just stay there!” he cried, and it sounded like he was trying to restrain his excitement, and I found this extremely attractive, both the excitement and the attempt at restraint. 

He roughly yanked the tights down in back to my knees. “Stand up and take those off,” he said in a very heated voice, and then he went back to his closet, and I heard him saying, “This dance should really be done with almost nothing on, just your cap and some glitter and body make-up and something in front to cover your cock,” he said energetically, as if he were creatively as well as sexually stirred. “Put this on, it’s a posing strap,” he said, handing me a tiny bit of material.

I put on the posing strap for him, and it barely covered me. I loved that he was dressing me up and treating me seriously as a dancer. He dusted me with a little gold glitter all over my chest and my legs. “Can you repeat what you just did, starting on the floor, with your legs together extended and move them like you did?” he asked, very seriously, all business, professional.

Did he realize that I was repeating one of his moves from his 1968 dance? Maybe he sensed it as I got back down and repeated this move and did the angular position on the floor that he liked with my legs extended and my arm in a claw-like pose, and then I got on my knees and extended my left leg. “That’s good, but you don’t know how to get off the floor in one movement,” he said. “Here, let’s practice that.”

And so we did, over and over again, until my slight awkward fumbling up, with its wobbly stages, became a much smoother transition, not as smooth as a dancer’s, or as smooth as his in 1968, of course, but smooth enough. “You’re as good as anyone in my company,” he said, off-handedly, but his impersonal tone let me know that he was actually being somewhat serious about this. I think. Then he got out a long scarf from the closet and staggered the material in the middle of the floor.

“Okay now, lower yourself as slowly as possible onto the scarf,” he growled. I sidled over to it and tried to kind of relate to it in an animal way, and he let out a light chuckle. “Good, you’re a horny little faun, now lower yourself down onto it…that’s it…stick your ass out so that the audience can see it…it’s a nice little ass, let them look at it.”

I was very hard in the posing strap; the sound of his voice was so arousing to me. I got down on the scarf, like Nijinsky had, and he said, “Now hump it…really hump the scarf….” I was close, and he knew it, and he tipped me over and jerked me off into his hand and then smeared the result all over my chest and picked me up and dropped me in a chair and tied my legs up on the chair and my hands on the arms of the chair and put his mouth on me, making little growling sounds. It took a while, but I climaxed again, and then he left me there, tied up, for a little bit. He walked around the space with his sailor walk, looking at me, and then he put his mouth on me a second time. I could barely stand it, it was such fun.

I was more than spent when he untied me and I stretched my legs out for him over the arms of the chair. He got me some water, and I put my shirt on. “Leave your pants off,” he said. We talked in the dark, and he was still very guarded. It was clear to me that he had been through a lot, and he had a stoicism, a dignity, that I found extremely winning. He was the opposite of a complainer. Keep things to yourself. But if you have things to give, give them selectively. Don’t be stingy, but don’t unload everything onto people. Don’t be needy, be a warrior, and you’ll have a better time.

He talked about a few of his major relationships. “Don’t ever be competitive with each other,” he said, and this thought landed with me, for it was the useful advice of someone who usually didn’t give advice. When I got up to leave, I spilled water on my shirt, and he went into the bathroom and got a hair-dryer and dried me off with it. This felt like a romantic moment to me. It was intimate, almost domestic.

He wrote me an email the next day, and he wanted me to come over again right away. He had one of those anonymous accounts for sex stuff that I never bothered with. It was artdad at something dot com. He was the sort who had an enthusiasm and wanted to go as far with it as quickly as possible. So I showered and went over to his studio in the evening again, around 6PM.

“We need to test your flexibility some more,” he said right away as I came in. He was still doing our agreed upon role-play, me as a dancer auditioning, he the dance master. I stripped to my underwear again (this time an almost see-through blue print from H & M). He put on the jazz again, Duke Ellington. That must have been what he was working on at the time, and I think he might even have been working out ideas about it, using me as a model.

I did my best. I moved against the rhythm of the music, which suited my instinctive perversity. He let me go and go and go. I was up, I was down, my legs were in the air, extended out, my hands fluttered a little but then made decisive stops, and then I got down on the floor and stayed down there, making movements as if I were trapped but didn’t give a damn. “That’s right,” he said finally. “You can stay down there. No need to get up. Stay down there, on the floor, use the floor.”

I moved and moved, and I felt that I could continue for as long as he wanted me to as the music got sexy. It was “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and there was good humor in this Ellington sexiness. He got up and pulled me off the floor and stood behind me and put his hands on my hips and we moved together slowly for a bit, against the rhythm of the music. That dark studio of his, always getting darker. He let me make my own movements, but he also maneuvered me into his headspace for the movements that were his. It was a kind of breakthrough in my mind, my body (they were the same thing right then). It was what I was looking for. I was in a euphoric state. Sex wasn’t the whole answer to what I wanted, but sexual energy was.

Eventually he sat me down in a chair and tied my hands and feet to it and went to town on me two or three times, and it did nothing for me one way or another. He liked it, I suppose, and I liked dancing for him and with him. I liked learning. As I looked down at the top of his lion head, I remembered the exceptionally beautiful boy I had seen on the tape from 1968, and it gave me a thrill when I thought, “You’re doing this with that guy.” I found this double consciousness—my attraction to him now and my attraction to his 1968 self—enormously exciting because it was so erotically mental, like I was getting two very different hot guys in one.

As I thought more and more about this, I began to imagine being with him at many different ages…at 16 at school in the hallways, where I took the lead with him…at 21 after a dance class, where we struggled for dominance…at 28 very drunk at a bar…at 36 in a dance studio (he was at his physical peak in his sea-green tights, and he let me take full charge)…at 42 in our apartment as boyfriends…at 48 at a hotel when his body had gotten thicker…at 55 in the middle of the night at his dance studio, and somehow this was melancholy…at 60 in a hotel after some grand reception for the sake of nostalgia…and then I was with him now in his apartment, young me and older him, and all this began to feel like an orgy with one supremely attractive man. At the same time, I knew that if I had met him when he was my age my choreographer wouldn’t have given me a second look. My youth and his age were the only things I had going for me in this situation.

He was done finally, and he untied me and my legs ached. I love a sore, worked-out body, because that’s what a body is for, not to workout at a gym but to be tied, moved, posed, displayed, felt, desired, thought of in its absence, then thrown on the trash heap when you’re all worn out and done. He was sitting opposite me now and saying that he used to be able to see those buildings from his windows, downtown. He said it the only way you should say that, gruffly, respectfully, moving right along, let’s not linger over it. He talked about Isadora Duncan. He said that the New York Times had it in for him, but he said it politely, reasonably, as he said everything. The Duke Ellington music was playing on repeat. 

I went over a fourth time, and it was much the same, Duke Ellington, tied to the chair, and so forth, and he said that he’d like me to come see one of his dances at some point. I was excited by this prospect. I wanted to see what he worked with, and whom he worked with. He sent me a discreet email invitation to his latest evening of dance, and I went by myself. 

There were two programs on the bill. The first was an old dance of his for nine male dancers, and it was easy to follow the theme—the men would group together and whenever one of them did something different or out of step with the others, this difference would be squashed and the dancer would be brought back into line with the group. The dancers were a bit older than was usual; most of them, I think, were in their mid-forties. They might even have danced the premiere of it, several years before.

There was one dancer who was younger, close to my age. He was dressed in a rather bulky black t-shirt and black pants, as the other eight dancers were. This was not a sexy dance, not at all. In fact, he was not a sexy choreographer, as a rule. His personal reticence kept his dances chaste, shy. You forgot that you were looking at bodies that might be sexual with each other.

The second dance was new, and it was between a man and a woman, and the woman flopped around in what seemed like drunkenness, and the man kept trying to catch her, but she got pulled away from him in the end by a well-meaning, repressive crowd. His work was filled with well-meaning, repressive crowds. He was intelligent enough to know that, though he was cursed, or blessed, with being well-meaning and repressive himself, it also had its uses. 

There was a reception afterwards in the lobby with champagne, and I downed three glasses in quick succession. Whenever there was free liquor, my thirst was not easily quenched in those days. I got that dispersed, fuzzy feeling from the alcohol and weaved slightly as I walked, but I was careful as I moved, in the time-honored overly careful drunken way as I downed two more glasses of champagne. I saw him enter the lobby. Everyone applauded, and he accepted their applause graciously. He was in figurehead mode, the director of a company, and I got self-conscious and didn’t want him to see me.

For about an hour, I kept grabbing more champagne and avoiding him, which wasn’t hard to do. Everybody wanted to talk to him. I slipped along the walls and into corners and hid behind the dresses of women and the shoulders of tall men and the hubbub of it all, but then the crowd surged a bit, there were more people coming in, and I was swept along until I was face to face with him, and I grinned, helplessly, and his face was set in a granite smile. He looked at me but didn’t seem to see me. After a moment, with courtly charm, he reached out and patted me on the shoulder and then moved along to talk to a group of dressed-to-kill moneyed women.

I wrote him an enthusiastic email the next day, and he sent me a very brief email back saying that he was done with me and that he had had enough of me. It was pretty brutal. I was in my twenties then and looking as good as I ever would and he was in his late sixties. Being rejected by a man so much older really stung me. But he attempted to console me slightly when I expressed my surprise. “You do something like this, and then you move on…aren’t you like that?” he wrote me. I sensed a kind of paternal kindness and perplexity in this.

Years went by, and he got even older, but he still and always looked great. On Facebook, I kept seeing info about a fancy retrospective program he was doing, and I saw that there were ten-dollar tickets available, and so I bought a ticket and went. I was in a good mood. I was in a good place in my life, and so I enjoyed the dances, and the dancers, two of whom were very sexy. And I looked with what felt like love of some kind at my choreographer as he entered to sit in the back of the theater. He seemed a little smaller physically somehow, out in the open, in the light. I was happy to be there with him.

Afterwards there was a small reception, but much more modest than the one I had been to before, and everyone seemed to be over the age of sixty except for the dancers. I screwed up my courage and slowly made my way over to him. We made eye contact, and I could not be certain if he recognized me. I don’t think he did, but maybe a little. There was maybe a little bit of recognition in his eyes, but carefully repressed. “I loved it,” I told him, and I meant it with all my heart.

And I, an everburning pilot, 
Lead forth the exhausted people, 
And neither peace nor battle 
Can I foresee ahead.

~~~

I started this review before the Russian invasion, so in avoidance of tone-deafness, I’d like to suggest you seek out humanitarian anti-war efforts.

I first came across Leonid Schwab’s poetry on the Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation site, wherein his first line is “I’m made out of cheese my head is that of an old man.” I immediately knew I was dealing with something special. Although the rest didn’t prove to be so surreal, I embraced the themes of the weary travelers and forgotten details. Schwab’s work embodies the open lens state while travelling, how we notice more as we journey through new territories.

When I heard Cicada Press was putting out a book of Leonid Schwab’s work as the collection Everburning Pilot, I quickly followed the trail. I can already say this is a great achievement, triumphant klaxons for all involved. The translator’s list is a long one, nearly 20 translators are credited here, for about 75 poems. From the translator’s note, these translations have been refined and discussed with great care during the Chicago Translation Workshop as well as the Your Language, My Ear workshop. I love reading about the path these translations took, the culmination of individual and group efforts. We can be sure that Schwab is in good hands.

The introduction to this book is a treat all by itself, In Memory of Memory’s Maria Stepanova (here translated by Sibelan Forrester) offers us “CELESTIAL ARCHAEOLOGY: On Leonid Schwab’s Poetry.” I have always enjoyed poetry intros, with their framing of frames, and Stepanova’s is no exception. Stepanova gives us poetry about poetry: “the powers of language, all its smart machines work to establish a particular temporal state on their own territory, to condense each line into a radiant amber concentrate of that very happiness.” The intro is a loving summary of Schwab and his milieu. Stepanova explains how Schwab’s work is emblematic of his group, the “new epos” poets, while being mechanically singular.

From a bird’s eye view, Schwab’s poetry concerns the traveler, locations, destination, and the moments of rest along the way. Schwab’s narrative moves along an undisclosed journey, noticing people, buildings and landscape, how they all form to create the voyage. This is a 20^th century Bashō moving through Bobruisk, Jerusalem, Russia, Mongolia, Pakistan and Manchuria. Zooming in on the lines themselves gives us brushstrokes of moments, modernist jump-cuts and all manner of temporal shifts. Some characters are zipping around, some are steady movers, and another is stuck at the airport.

These translations are finely wrought and attentive, with syllabic care throughout: “And supper, like the surf, comes over them” or “Dinners afield are no big deal”. I want to quote this whole book to you; every other line could be its own poem. Having this many translators on one collection gives us a full toolbox of techniques and diction. For example, I learned the word “violaceous” from this line:

Суп фиолетов, сельдь поет на блюде, 
Мужчина вилкой трогает укроп,
The fish is singing, and the soup – violaceous, 
The man pokes at the dill weed with his fork,

The above quote shows one of Schwab’s brainteasers, I find myself drawing crisscrossing lines between each noun. The many relationships of objects action and people create a blooming flourish in my mind: fish-pokes, dill-soup, man-fork. The temporal quality of Schwab’s work is also worth mentioning. At moments, a piece will feel timeless and then a cola will appear. Or a modern jet, helicopter, or cosmonaut pilot becomes the eponymous everburning pilot who is the eternal warrior defending the people.

Most people in this collection are named by their occupation; these are poems of house painters, wood workers, station clerks, subcontractors, and builders. As every object is in use, so are the humans. Schwab shows motion through the interconnectedness of action and movement, even locations are action-oriented: fenceposts, cellars, reservoirs, and a museum bench. There are no useless vistas, flora, or virtues; everything is employed. I’m also impressed that this collection spans from 1987 to 2016; Schwab has been putting out amazing work for four decades. Despite this, the collection is cohesive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me they were written all in the same year.

The spheres of poetry, translation, and contemporary Russian literature can rejoice in the arrival of Leonid Schwab in English. If Stepanova says that Schwab’s influence is now permanent on contemporary Russian poetry, I hope that we see that influence on more poets. Schwab, like Osip Mandelstam, writes poems that are both contemporary and timeless. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and look forward to returning to it for years to come.

Thank you to KGB Bar, Anastasiya Osipova at Cicada, and Olena Jennings for being ever supportive.

We all go by the same name.

Our name is Bill. 

Each of our dads’ names was also Bill. 

Our dads are dead. 

I walk on the ground and sometimes think, I am walking on my dad. 

I don’t remember what my mother’s name was. 

We have a body, a van, a house, a bed, some rope, and a strong will.

There are four of us. 

My friends and I are full of blood and semen. 

We see the world. 

 

 

Our home is not far from the mall. 

We go to the mall during the day a lot to walk around and look for what comes next. 

We have needs. 

The outside of the mall is white and screams in intense sunlight. 

In the mall there are places you can get food.  

I like beef and I like dough, though I try not to eat them. 

I try not to eat anything. 

Our van is also white. 

There were windows on the van but we painted over them with white paint. 

The windows are tinted. 

I am Bill 1. 

Bill 2 is my brother. 

Twins. 

We shared a bed for the first thirteen years of our lives. 

Now Bill 2 sleeps in the bed my dad slept with our mom in before we killed them. 

I sleep in the bed we used to share. 

It’s nice to have so much room now to move my body around however I want. 

I hate the dark.

I can’t sleep with any lights on because I like to see my body. 

I like to open my eyes and know exactly what is there. 

The skin around my cock is shaved. 

So are my armpits and my head and face. 

I would shave my arms and legs but my friends would shit all over me about it. 

Bill 2 looks better than me naked but I am smarter, which is why I always drive.

Bill 3 is the kid who always lived across the street. 

Now he lives with us. 

His parents are dead, too.

We helped him kill them. 

They were older than our parents even. 

They had a lot of money.

Now we have a lot of money. 

Bill 4 is our dog. 

He just showed up one day at the front door of the house we share together and we let him in and fed him and he never left. 

Bill 4 is ours. 

I would kill anybody who tried to come and take Bill away.

I would kill anybody. 

 

 

Today is bright. 

On days like now the mall gets so bright you can’t look at it. 

You have to look at the air beside where you meant to be going and aim at that. 

Even through the black glass on our car it’s hard to know where you are going. 

I am wearing a white suit. 

I bought the suit from Goodwill because I liked the way it fit me and I like how it seems to make me blend in wherever I am standing. 

I also like how my big cock looks even bigger against the fabric.

The pants are a youth size. 

We always video the things we fuck. 

I lift weights and work out a lot to keep my body looking good on camera. 

I wouldn’t want to be a big fatass on the recordings with my lard all flapping onto the other bodies. 

My physique helps me talk the women into doing what I want, not that I need them to want to do what I am going to do to them. 

In the back of the van we have bats and guns and axes and rope and gags and ether and pills and cash and gags. 

We have everything we could ever need right at our behest. 

We are prepared. 

We already know what we require to do what we will do, though often we don’t need any of it but our mouths. 

Our eyes and mouths.

Our eyes and bodies and hands and fingers and arms and ideas and our mouths. 

I’m the one who mostly does all of the talking. 

People like me. 

Always have. 

Even when I was a little boy I could finagle a woman into letting me do shit I wasn’t supposed to be doing like staying up well into hours I was supposed to be asleep or sitting on them or touching on them even though they weren’t my mother. 

I’ve always eaten anything I want and always will.

I’d rather die young without restrictions than old having always had to pay attention.

Despite the light the air outside the mall is cold. 

My skin reveals its ridges. 

 

 

I like big girls.

It’s their asses.

Also, it’s something about the way they look from upside down, the way their voice elongates in a different way than those with less to give. 

Bill 2 likes wives. 

He always looks for something glinting on a woman’s finger. 

Bill 2 was married once, which might have something to do with it, like he wants to take his feelings out on anyone who didn’t get cheated like he did. 

Bill 2’s wife died in a fire. 

He did not set the fire. 

I can’t remember Bill 2’s dead wife’s name. 

Bill 2 always calls her Dead Wife, then he laughs. 

It brings me sadness.

Knowing how much pain he’s in still, I mean. 

What he has suffered. 

Bill 3 likes fat girls also, but the young ones. 

Usually we don’t let him have the young girls because they’re not very smart and that’s disgusting to both me and my twin brother. 

Though sometimes if we can’t find anything else, we’ll give in and let him have his way. 

Close your eyes and what you have is what you make it. 

Bill 4 doesn’t get a say cause he’s a dog. 

Not that Bill 4 doesn’t have his preferences. 

 

 

The mall right now is nuts. 

It’s the sort of season people go to stores just to be going. 

It’s better than being outside. 

The air in the mall is loud in such a general way it’s like there’s no sound.

You can’t hear any certain sort of word in particular. 

People are screaming.

They don’t even know what. 

They scream because they can without alarm. 

No one responds to screaming in a world where pretty much everyone is always screaming. 

There are so many faces you can look dead on into their eyes and know you’ll never see those eyes again. 

It’s like a music. 

It’s the world. 

There are so many people you could begin most anywhere when you have ideas like I do. 

But the point is to get exactly what you want. 

We walk slow and close together. 

We look almost like a wall.

A human wall with three white faces and three cocks and six arms. 

It’s slow going at the beginning today, despite how much flesh there is I feel desire for. 

Everyone’s with someone else already.

Mostly we look for those who’ve come alone. 

Who had no one to come with or didn’t want to. 

The human mind is full of holes.

There are so many things to fill the holes with. 

All the stores are full of shit that you can buy. 

We go into a department store and browse the women’s perfumes, pretending to be looking for a gift for Bill 2’s wife. 

His dead wife did like perfume and wore it often. 

Bill 2 tells the saleswoman his dead wife likes Dior. 

She liked to spray it on her thighs, he tells her, grinning, when she could still do that. 

The lights inside the store are almost as bright as what’s outside. 

The woman doesn’t seem to notice he’s saying anything out of the ordinary. 

The other women’s bodies passing are all bundled up for the cold weather, obscuring their conditioning. 

Sweaters press their breasts flat to their chests.

Their skin is precious. 

Their hands are attached to their arms, the arms to ribcages, to necks, to skulls. 

Rings on their fingers, or not. 

Watches, or not. 

They all have their own memories and ideas of what they came to buy, how they got here, where they will go when they leave here, whether or not they make eye contact, for how long. 

I try to ask a pretty girl if she knows where I could find the men’s room. 

She pretends not to hear me.

Her face is filled with bone. 

Her ass is witchcraft through her stretchy pants walking away. 

I think about following her but I don’t. 

I’m always smiling. 

I tell another passing girl I’d like to buy her a special gift.

Any scent here on the glass tables, she can have it, no strings attached.

The girl hesitates. 

Her hair is black like mine would be when it grows out. 

I’d just like you to remember me, I say, when you will spray this on your body.

I see the blood flush up through the girl’s head.

Bill 2 and Bill 3 are watching me talk now from over by where they keep the men’s scents, no expressions. 

There are at least thirty mirrors in the room. 

The girl keeps walking. 

The floor beneath us both is gold. 

 

 

We follow the girl for a while from a slight distance, just far behind enough that she must realize that we’re there. 

The noise in the mall feels more distant now, having spent some time inside it, like it is swallowed in my flesh.

Like I no longer have to hear it, because I am it. 

The girl is never far away. 

She has no idea what she is feet from. 

I glare into the back of her head hard in such a way that were she to turn and look our eyes would lock on contact, open tunnels. 

She never does. 

Entering the food court, she disappears. 

When we find her again, she’s with her husband. Or her boyfriend or her brother. Or some guy she’s asked to stand beside her on account of who we are. 

The guy isn’t looking at us now, but she is. 

Looking at us so hard it might break her little eyes.

There are so many other people.

I love being alive. 

I love the feeling of seeing in my body beneath me and knowing there are parts of me I will never see unless reflected, which isn’t real. 

I love the inside of my face, how the curvature that lines the point between my inside and my outside seems made of polished chrome, with a low blue glow coming off it to bask my innards around the edges like the coming of a sun. 

I love the glass of the fronts of the stores in the mall that make as if they keep the air inside the store inside it and the air outside it out, who only from certain angles catch my image. 

I love everybody. 

I love hearing my skin grow. 

My nails. 

My new blood. 

I love being inside a man’s body.

I love feeling the meat between my legs knock up against my thighs when I walk, the balls there full of babies only waiting to be given places to be incubated, nourished, born. 

I love the belt inside the escalator, the slatted eyes of every step. 

I love to press my teeth together until they seem about to break. 

I love how when I think its like someone is there inside me reading a book aloud. 

I love how there is nothing in the mall I have to touch besides the ground. 

 

 

I decide it’s time I had a haircut. 

There’s this shitty little haircut spot at the mall. 

I get the idea after seeing the one girl in there cutting hair, a tiny blonde, with a body that makes her seem older than her face seems.

She reminds me of someone I saw on TV recently.

I don’t know who that was, but I can see her in my brain captured as an image. 

It’s like there’s two of every person in the world and here is one I recognize from somewhere else, and I can come near. 

I can interact now. 

Tongues and tits and all the layers. 

I go in and say I would like a haircut. 

I clearly do not need a haircut. 

My scalp just shines. 

The deskgirl is squat and ugly, a nose the size of someone’s fist. 

I can hardly hold my hand down from reaching up and rubbing it, grinning. 

The deskgirl tries to put me with a man. 

There’s a man there waiting to cut hair who has no one and the girl is already in the midst. 

The scissors look so large inside her hand holding the metal, bringing it around a person’s face. 

I say I’d like to wait. 

I say I’ve had this girl cut me before and her work was great, I’d like to have the same work done again. 

The deskgirl asks my name. 

I say my name is Bill 1. 

The deskgirl writes the name down: Bill. 

Her handwriting is sloppy, like a child’s. 

It doesn’t even look like my name there written on the paper. 

The deskgirl tells me, Thirty minutes. 

She fakes a smile.  

The world is ours. 

I tell Bill 2 and Bill 3 to go and look out on their own awhile, keep their eyes open, cover more ground, see what comes. 

I tell them I will find them wherever they end up. 

 

 

I sit and wait and watch the girl work. 

I hold a magazine open on my lap like I might read it but I don’t bother to look down. 

Every few minutes I remember and I turn the page just for the fuck of it. 

Every page looks exactly the same to me.

The glossy paper feels nice on my palms. 

The girl who is going to cut my hair doesn’t look over at me even once. 

She doesn’t know I can already see straight through her clothes. 

She doesn’t know what I have done to others like her.

My mind is full of blood, just like her body. 

She is chatty with the customer before me, an obese man wearing tan slacks and a white button up shirt. 

His coat is folded over on the seat beside the barber chair. 

The coat is red. 

I touch my thumbs together and hear knives becoming sharpened in space between my eyes. 

Dogs ripping apart sternums while being ripped apart by knives.

Meat in my dresser drawers, no room remaining. 

Beside the man’s coat there is a shopping bag from Macy’s. 

The white of the font on the bag makes my heart beat in my head. 

The want for wetness pounding through and through me. 

I imagine the bag is full of lice. 

The man’s body full of lice. 

His brain.

His lardy sternum. 

His hidden throat. 

The man watches the hairdresser in the mirror while she works on him, speaking to her reflection. 

She plays along.

I can tell she doesn’t mean to laugh when she is laughing. 

I make a mental note to buy a red coat someday when I am old and fat and fucked.

The man’s brown hair falls onto the floor around him, every inch I want to eat.  

I wait watching the girl: her hands, her fingers, her throat, her pants, her lips.

My brain is starving. 

There have been no eternities before now. 

 

 

Each time I close my eyes, it becomes night. 

There is no world there beyond the edges of me. 

Black elastics. 

The hidden planets squeal. 

I realize then that I am walking. 

I am awake. 

I look and see the sky above me framed with steel nails. 

Black round heads of nails each small as tips of pointed fingers. 

There are flowers in my pores. 

Sponges in the bread of my body growing thicker, drier. 

The air is covered up with zits. 

Where I move into them the zits pop and I can breathe them. 

It’s like a painting. 

It expands. 

It is buried in the sheen over the air of the room where I am sitting with the slitting sound inside my jaw. 

I am speaking and can’t hear what I am saying. 

I see a mirror. 

I walk until I come upon a shore. 

A beach unpeopled, kind of hissing. 

The water is bodies.  

The sand is chips. 

A thousand eyes all at the same time. 

There are so many worlds like cut on our world that no one wants. 

Hours burnt down into colors. 

Dreamless, ageless. 

A language I did not design, scripts I didn’t mean to model, sexual desires. 

The air is cake. 

I walk on the sand until I am covered over in the bodies, one of the bodies. 

I wade into their obesities, their cavities, their open mouths glued up with gravy. 

Their ticking flesh together crushed. 

Women and men. 

I have known them all. 

The sun above us never brighter. 

 

 

I find Bill 2 and Bill 3 having lunch. 

They’d gone back to the food court to find the first girl that we followed and got hungry, Bill 2 says. 

His mouth is full of red lasagna sauce and dough. 

There is a table of six elementary school aged girls ~5.5’ NW over Bill 2’s right shoulder, from my perspective, dressed alike. 

Each child will in time age to reach the age I am right now, though by then I will be much older, and they will keep aging past that immediately, unless they die. 

What happened with the haircut baby, Bill 2 asks. 

His voice is high. 

I tell him I can’t remember.

I honestly can’t remember, though I can see it in my mind. 

I know her hands holding the scissors had orbited my mouth. 

I know there is more sand inside my sternum than had previously been there. 

Glass waves, a muzzle. 

A dais beneath the sand. 

What happened with you? I say.

I hear me say it. 

I feel the words become absorbed. 

Bill 2 is saying something. 

Bill 3 is saying something. 

I am Bill 1. 

I am alive. 

There will be clearer times.

There will be new days.

Just not right now.

 

 

Back out in the van, we sit in silence. 

Every other car we see is also white. 

We are waiting. 

The pavement is white, the shrubberies are white and shining, the smoke that comes out of our mouths, the exhaust on the horizon, the glass refracting, all white as nothing. 

The grid on the pavement looks like someone slit the earth. 

Bill 3 is in the back of the van playing with the restraints, pretending to hang himself. 

None of us know what we are waiting for though we know we’ll know it when it comes. 

The clock in the van’s dash is broken. 

It always reads 88:88. 

That’s like four infinities. 

They won’t stop blinking.

 

Excerpt from OFF THE YOGA MAT © by Cheryl J. Fish

Forthcoming from Livingston Press/University of West Alabama, pub date Oct. 20, 2022

January, 1999

Chapter One “Inflexible”

Nate

“When others achieve success, how does that diminish you?” Nathaniel Dart didn’t care to consider this question from a talk-radio host. He was about to leave the apartment with a spasm in his back. His friend Gil, and his girlfriend Nora, had finally convinced him to take a trial yoga class in a studio a few blocks away. As he walked down Second Avenue with a slight shuffle, twinges running upward from his ass, the success of others gnawed away at him. A cash bonus Nora received at the end-of-the-year—she deserved the money for a job well done—but he hadn’t grabbed her around the waist or smiled in a swell of support. Nor had he taken her out to celebrate. And when Gil won a lottery for affordable housing nearby which meant more space and rent stabilization, of course Gil had the gall to rub it in his face, mentioning Nate’s dark studio apartment with moths burrowing in the closet. Nate had no choice but to resent him. One other victory throbbed against his bony vertebrate.  

His old study-group mate Monica Portman landed a teaching job in Boston, a position that Nate should have applied for, could have applied for, if only he’d finished his thesis. He struggled to accept Ralph Waldo Emerson’s credo that “envy is ignorance.”

He stopped suddenly on his walk to watch dumpster divers pick through garbage bins outside the supermarket. They’d cook what was still edible, and someone shouted through a megaphone about the futility of waste in New York City. Determined to find freshness in what had been declared foul, the freegans sorted through packages past expiration dates, found perfectly decent bags of bagels and cookies and cut-up carrots. He heard them complain about tossing food with hungry and homeless folks everywhere. Nate felt disgusted by the vast inequalities in society; they mattered more than revising his thesis on jealousy as an evolutionary trait in humans.

Nate’s research combined a trifecta of disciplines: science, literature, psychology. It sounded loopy when he claimed the existence of a jealousy hormone. Not only did it benefit species studied by Charles Darwin, like those blue-footed boobies on Galapagos, but Homo sapiens as well. Envious rage might motivate men and women to loosen their desire for control. The result could turn out for the better. Yet jealousy was no walk in the park—it caused primitive rage and destruction which Nate witnessed everywhere. In his thesis, he proved his point by examining jealous characters in Shakespeare’s Othello and King Lear.

How does their success diminish me? He wished he could put that thought out of his mind. Nate spent countless hours in his swivel chair; one could say he lived where he sat.

In the yoga class, a tingling numbness ran down his legs, pain and trembling too. He stood in a darkish room with a yoga teacher asking them to bend from their core towards the floor. He couldn’t reach past his knees, his whole upper body as stiff at age 39 as if he were 50-something. I am not a yoga guy, he thought—I have more in common with the freegans. I should have never set foot in this dusty old hovel. He felt others staring at him.

Nate contemplated his future on all fours doing cow and cat, rounding his back like a feline, or should he flatten it like a bovine? Who named these postures? The students stood in unison, placing a bent leg along their thigh for tree pose. He grabbed a beam.

“Focus on one point on the wall,” said the teacher, a strikingly fit woman named Lulu Betancourt, who welcomed them warmly and insisted they obey their own bodies. “Take a three-part breath and be mindful. Let air seep out like a leaky balloon.”

Nate smirked. He visualized a giant balloon emptying with farting sounds. He filled his lungs then exhaled as told. Relaxation could wash over him.

She soon introduced them to the series “salute to the sun.” A set of flowing movements that started with standing, progressed to rolling to the floor, then rising into the cobra and plank positions with a rhythmic grace, ending with an upward curl, palms pressed together in gratitude. A subtle choreography he punctured with jerking motions. If Nate could reach an inch nearer to his toes and roll down without collapsing, he felt like he would celebrate. His version might be called parody, not salute. He was determined to modify his moves, like the barnacles, finches and beetles Darwin observed.

“Melt into the earth with a rushing sensation, rain drenching fields,” Lulu said in a soft yet determined voice. She leaned against the wall, bowed her head.

Nate tried to experience rain. Instead, he thought about money. He benefitted neither from the loopholes in capitalism that let the richest prosper, nor from a critique of its corruption. I am an academic serf living on rice and beans, he thought, and no one could care less. He was deep in debt from loans. He should apply for another fellowship or take an adjunct position at a City University campus. He wondered about the job referred to by his advisor Offendorf in his recent nasty note. Offendorf had scribbled dismissive comments on the pages it took Nate many months to write, and even more months to find the courage to mail to the university down in Maryland, with Nora’s goading. Offendorf had the nerve to reply:

WAY TOO MUCH time spent on Darwin. It may be trendy to consider evolutionary theory, but I don’t care for that approach. Take out feminism and limit psychoanalysis. You’ve inserted too many footnotes. Let’s put this baby to bed. When are you coming to campus? Bring the revision−we’ll talk defense date. Oh, and I might know of a teaching position.”

As Nate considered whether the job was real or just another one of Oppendorf’s bluffs, he was instructed to twist his torso, knee cutting across his folded leg. That evoked the twists and turns of Nora’s desire.

“Let’s conceive a millennial child,” she said. Nineteen-ninety-nine high stepped like a marching band through her ovaries. Fear of her upcoming, their upcoming, fortieth birthdays felt like annihilation.

“Nora. I can’t give you a baby now.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Nora said. “There’s never going to be a perfect time.”

 “I’m not in the position to be a dad.”

“You’d be very loving.” She stroked his hand. “My salary can tide us over.”

His inability to care for a child felt like a character deficiency. He must finish his degree before procreating, not focus on the milestone of age forty. When his mom visited from Long Island the other day, she slipped him a wad of cash.

 “Don’t say anything to your father.”

“You don’t have to keep doing this,” he said, feeling sheepish and small. 

**

Nate’s spine cracked. Lulu headed over to his side during dandasana, a forward bend that segued into a seated wide-angle pose. She crouched. “Breathe into your stretch.” He noticed a beady-eyed frog tattoo near her shoulder—green and black, sinister. Lulu smelled of rose-oil.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“I can’t concentrate.” What made her want to ink a frog into her skin?

“Observe your thoughts. They’ll dissipate.” She touched his head. “Probably.”

How should he respond to Offendorf’s reign of terror? Say “I need Darwin like Shakespeare needed Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” the source material for some of the Bard’s plays?

While Nate rested in child’s pose, head on mat, arms and legs compressed like a floating fetus, a surge of energy ran from the tips of his toes into his calves. So, what if Offendorf demanded he cut one-third of all he had written? How did their success diminish his? Disappointments acquired territory. One negative experience attracted others, expanding into new fiefdoms.

His old study group mate Monica Portman applied for everything. “I invented personal literary criticism,” she said, convinced of her pioneering role. Wasn’t she coming to town? As Nate struggled to pick himself off the floor for the next posture, it occurred to him: send her the very same pages Offendorf trashed and ask for a second opinion. Monica’s instincts resembled a baby sea turtle’s—born in sand, hurdling towards the ocean. He should trust her to guide him to safety.

Then yogi Lulu announced to the room “return to downward-facing dog.” He bent over, and placing his hands flat, stuck his butt in the air.