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“What’s good?” from the other side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

 One. 

It occurred to him to make up his bed, throw the maroon duvet on and get under it, take a sleeping pill. It was 4.55pm and still light outside, his mind drifted onto a scene from Place Vendome, the 1998 film, directed by Nicole Garcia and starring Catherine Deneuve, as a rich, troubled, alcoholic wife of a diamond merchant; in the film she wears endless Yves Saint Laurent raincoats, a black one, a red one, then a grey one, she smokes incessantly and takes sleeping pills, attends dinner parties, secretly guzzling dregs from the other guests wine glasses. Every time she passes a mirror, she stops, tilts her head to one side and makes a little snort of self disgust … on the staircase of a clinic where she goes to dry out, in beautifully subdued lighting, the camera passes over the paper planes of her face and for about fifteen seconds she looks like Michael Jackson … 

Two. 

Something I’ve never noticed before in the photo of you in the metal frame on my bedside cabinet—I’ve seen that photo probably every day and night for twenty years and I’ve never noticed before … an orange glow hovering just above your left ear. In the photograph I’m always drawn to the eyes first, then to your sun browned arms leaning on the table, the sleeves of your white t-shirt and the blue of the thermal vest, they all seem to heighten, compliment each other: back to the eyes that are creased in a smile, I can see a pause behind whatever you were thinking at that second, then you fixed a friendly but detached gaze at the person taking the photo—8×5 fuji color snap; your left eye seems to twinkle with mischief, while the right eye reads worried … 

Three. 

Catherine Deneuve stands by the window in a green crushed velvet dressing gown, she’s smoking one those long dark cigarettes—a Nat Sherman, I think. She crosses to the bed, sits on the edge and rolls her tights down to a pile on the rug, lies back on the bed and mutters something like “le vache” then curls up in a fetal position and asks, “rub my feet, will you?’’ to a man in the room. She tells him she called him because she didn’t want to be alone, she was drunk and had taken a couple of sleeping pills. She does virtually the same scene again towards the end of the film in a hotel room by the sea with a different man: grey raincoat, cigarette, glass of water, takes two sleeping pills, telling the man, “Ah, but I won’t sleep.’’ He says, “Why take them, then?’’ She replies, “Oh you know, old habits.’’ 

It began with a few grainy photos captured on a night vision trail camera: at the edge of the woods, bathed in lurid green light, was a group of children. Six of them, of various ages. None looked to be over ten, the smallest one a toddling baby. No one knew whose they were, or what they were doing on a stranger’s property in the middle of the night, or why they were just standing there. They stood for duration of three hours, according to the camera time lapse.

It wasn’t a natural thing, for children to be so still and quiet. There was something not right about them. Like creepy kids from a horror movie. Possessed kids, killer kids. Creepy little ghost prophets who knew no boundaries. A faded image from the back of an old VHS video sleeve.

After the photos went viral on social media, sightings of strange children began to spread until it was happening in small towns all over the country. Although the police increased their patrols, nothing was verified. That did not stop the townspeople from calling in reports of these strange children appearing in people’s yards, in vacant lots, under the lunar glow of utility lights in empty store parking lots.

Barron was sitting in the faculty lounge scrolling through his phone as he ate his lunch. There was another story in his news feed about the creepy kids that he clicked on, and as he was reading it, a female voice said from behind him,

“Maybe it’s some kind of viral marketing stunt. For a horror movie or something. What do you think?”

He startled and whipped his head around: it was one of the new teachers. Youngish looking, flax colored hair with a bit of washed-out pink at the ends. Eyes that were pink rimmed and rabbity. She always wore things that were oversized and black, lots of silver rings on her fingers. She had the look of one of those female techno artists who played the keyboard at festivals. Raspy voice over an industrial beat.

Barron worked tech support and rotated through the district. The teachers usually ignored him until they needed him to install an operating system or fix a laptop that a fifth grader used to smack their sibling in the head.

The teacher’s sudden question spooked him. He hadn’t been sleeping recently. His nerves felt raw an exposed as a frayed electrical cord.

But he took a draw off his coffee and tried to sound insouciant, bored: “Seems to me it’s a textbook example of social panic. It’s like a medieval village around here. When people stop getting hysterical, this will fade away. Just to get replaced by the next thing to come along.”

This must have come out harsher than he intended, because the woman gave him a look and muttered about forgetting something, and bolted. But that’s the way it was around there. He had been a temp worker in the school system going on years now. He was aware of the odd way people looked at him. At his curly blonde hair, still full but so thin you could see right through it. His worn Chuck Taylors, his pants with raggedy hems. He had a reputation for barbed sarcasm when he spoke at all. Mostly he didn’t.

She must be the new art teacher, he thought. It had been so long since he had talked to a woman that he didn’t quite remember how to. She snagged his brain for rest of the day. Trying to figure out why she asked him that. She had that look of an ex-punk. Not that it impressed him. He used to be punk, too.

*

Tick tick tick tick tick.

It had come back again. The thing that chased him through the murky corridors of his dreams. The thing that ticked. Like the crocodile with a clock in its belly that chased Captain Hook. Except it was different. Not a cozy analog tick. A slick, digital one, like the face of a bomb. And he could never quite see what the thing was. He knew it wasn’t human. It was more like a shadow, or a haze of static. A fragmented shimmering mirage of ones and zeros. He did not know what it would do if it caught him. He just knew he had to run. If it caught him, it would annihilate him.

The dreams had been bad since his fortieth birthday, but now it was getting worse. He wasn’t eating well. And sleep? Sleep was a fairy tale now, a story from childhood.

And he didn’t know how to feel better. Sometimes he would have the guys over, guys he had known from way back at Greenhill Country Day. They didn’t seem to notice that something was terribly wrong with him.

In school Barron had been that guy. Reckless. Not afraid of anything. They still retold the story about the time down in the islands, when he was fourteen and taken a jet ski fifteen miles offshore and ramped a very large boat wake at wide open throttle. Went ten feet in the air, knocked unconscious. Saved by the fishermen in the boat. Barron was always the most fucked up guy at any party, guaranteed!

But those guys had wives and kids now. And somehow, they saw the fact that Barron worked his shitty job and had a living room that contained one couch, one enormous TV, and an Xbox as evidence of his uncompromising nature. That’s punk rock, man, man! Fuck the world!

He wasn’t depressed. And he had never thought of himself as anxious. He had always been smarter than the other kids in his grade and tended to get bored a lot, or so the kiddie shrink had explained to his parents. So, what was wrong with him? Why were things increasingly feeling not right? Why did he feel so afraid all the time? He didn’t know how to describe the feeling. Except it was like some terrible knowledge, some secret was about to be revealed, and when it was, he would lose his mind.

It couldn’t be the methadone; he’d been telling himself. He’d already been on it for years now. Going to the clinic like he always did. Walking up to the bulletproof glass, yelling his ID number through the metal grating. Dealing with cops, questions, cameras, until he at last got that plastic cup of ruby red nectar. It went down bitter. After he swallowed it he had to say something to the nurse to prove that he swallowed it. It was now a running joke that Barron always said the same thing:

This is bullshit.

Though the doctor had not brought it up, he knew he should taper off. He knew he would have to, eventually. If only something, someone would make him.

His deck overlooked a backyard with nothing in it. It stretched out to a rim of woods in the back. The good thing about the little house was that it was tucked away behind trees, no neighbors to hassle him. The only bad thing was that it was in his mother’s name.

And it was his mother that had strung the deck with “fairy lights,” decorated it with absurd Tiki decorations. A little grill that he rarely used sat in a corner, collecting a scrim of pollen dust.

He liked sitting out there at night, though. There was an X-box game he played a lot, where the main character was driving a car across a vast, desolate landscape. Shooting guns at monsters. Trying to stop an apocalypse. He would play it so long that afterword he had a feeling of seasickness. Everything lurched and he felt nauseous. Then he would sit on the deck, smoking, gazing in an unfocused way into the night, letting the tension drain from his eyes; the tension took the form of showering sparks and flares on the backsides of his lids. When they went away, he felt clearer, more able to concentrate. And then he would indulge in his obsession with palindromes.

Live not on evil. Too bad I hid a boot. Rise to vote, sir! Draw, O coward!

It was a real compulsion, reciting palindromes in his head. They sounded like nonsense. But they were full of hidden patterns. The bridge between sense and nonsense, order and….

The cliff. Madness. The point of no return. All the things he would not think about.

When he was a punk, he had accepted that the world was chaos, but he was not part of the world, so it didn’t matter. He just flipped everyone the bird and had a good time. But ever since he turned forty, it was dawning on him that maybe it wasn’t all just chaos. That there was actually a terrible, occult order to things. A force that he couldn’t know or understand, but it was there. He could glimpse it in palindromes. He could glimpse it while programming, running code, watching it compile, making it optimize, could make him feel thrumming elation, a flicker of joy, something so beautiful it made him soar.

Until the magnitude of it became too much. And the fear came back, like a hand closing tight around his throat.

One night he was sitting out there, smoking in his rattan chair. Drinking his third beer, listening to the swaying of tree branches in the night breeze. The yip of a coyote out there, somewhere. There was a song nagging in his head, a scrap of melody, a bit of lyric that went, take me back where dreams of you never made me feel blue. Acoustic guitar, guy kinda singing through his nose like they did back then, what was that damn song? And why was he thinking of it? He tried to grasp at the significance, the hidden meaning, but the beer buzz was making him foggy…

…when a sudden noise intruded into his awareness. A stirring, a furtive breaking of twigs. Somehow he knew it wasn’t an animal noise.

He became all at once alert. Scanning the yard, out where the grassy lawn met the woods. It was so dark out here with no streetlights, only the golden glow of the fairy lights around the porch, couldn’t see a goddamn thing beyond that, really…

But he heard breathing. Then whispering. From down there.

He was frozen now, hand gripped on the neck of the beer bottle. Something about his aroused state made him feel he could hyper focus, could see in the dark like an owl: there was a group of shadowy figures down there, at the edge of the woods. Small figures. Children. And now they were very, very still.

And Barron, too, was very, very still. Time seemed to slow down, bending like taffy, then stopped. Instead of feeling advantaged by being up above them, he felt more vulnerable, like a lone figure on a stage.

“Who’s there?” he asked the night, the question catching in his dry throat and breaking in the middle.

There was no answer, but there was more whispering, and quiet laughter. Then, one of them, who looked like a baby who had just learned to walk, sallied forth on bowed little legs, panting excitedly. It let out a squeal that sounded like EEEEEEEEECH, and then it toppled over with a grunt, as though it couldn’t balance its oversized head on its little body.

Something about that squeal resonated in Barron’s very spine. Neural alarms were going off all through his body now, driving him to his feet. He let the beer bottle drop, spewing foam everywhere. He rushed back into the house, hurling the sliding door shut. Locked it, then sagged against the wall, breathing hard, wondering if this was how a heart attack could start.

*

“Sorry, I really didn’t want to bother you. But it’s the first time I’ve tried to hook up to the projector, and I just couldn’t get it, and I need it for class tomorrow, so you know….”

“Yeah. No problem. Everyone has trouble with these.”

It was her again. The art teacher, whose name was Sarah. The one he had thought he had scared off the other day. But here she was, and she was looking at him in this certain way. Piercing, avid. Almost brazen, in spite of the nervous, skittering way she spoke. It made him feel pinned in stasis like a moth in a case. It helped if he didn’t make eye contact.

All he had to do was plug in the HDMI and VGA cords. “Here we go. Okay. You can go ahead and turn on your computer now.”

She tapped a few buttons and the machine hummed to life. “Okay, I’ll just pull up what I was going to show, I guess?”

“Sure, sure.” He was exhausted from a sleepless night last night. The room felt like it was spinning. The creepy kids in his yard. It couldn’t have been real. And the way she had brought it up the other day…It didn’t sit right with him. What did she know? She must know, or why would she look at him like that?

“So anyway, I set these up as a slide show, where I show one to the kids and say a little bit about each painting, yadda yadda yadda…” As she prattled on, leaning over the keyboard, nose ring glinting in the screen’s glow, it occurred to him that maybe she wasn’t as young as he first thought. Sometimes he confused young with small.

The projector screen was suddenly flooded with amoeba shapes. Bright, exuberant and playful looking.

“Cute,” said Barron bemusedly, one eyelid starting to twitch.

“You like it? It’s Yayoi Kasuma. Let me just…there.” She clicked, and the image changed. This time it was a field of polka dots. But so many polka dots, multitudes. By some trick of the eyes they seemed to swarm and pulse in a way that was alarming. It made him feel scared and sick.

“Well, it’s different, I guess.” He was beginning to feel his pulse speed up. She was looking at him again. Like this was some kind of test. Who was she, and what did she want with him?

“Her paintings are about obsession.” She was moving her hands, gesturing excitedly. There were black leather bracelets on each wrist. “Her obsession with dots. She said, the earth is a dot. The moon is a dot. The sun is a dot. She is a dot. Dots to infinity.”

He stood there, feeling weak as though shot with a poison dart. She clicked to the next slide. This one had the design of a net. A very dense, very flat net. Where each stroke was tight, distinct, and had nothing to do with any other line.

“It’s… a lot. It’s making me feel kind of ill,” he said, and then added a laugh, so she wouldn’t see how afraid he was. Once again, things seemed to be coming together in a terrible sense. Whatever he was afraid of knowing, this person was going to show it to him. She may as well have been wearing an executioner’s hood. She wasn’t an art teacher. She was an agent of doom.

“That’s kind of the idea, though. Because the lines are full of energy. See? There’s a lot of passion in these lines. A lot of fear.” She paused to give him another long look. Unblinking, lips slightly parted as though in anticipation.

She wanted him to tell her. He would never tell her.

Before she could say another word, he said in a breathless rush, “Sorry, I’ve got another ticket. Got a lot on my dance card today. Just email me if you need anything else.”

“Did you maybe, want to…I just thought that sometime we could—“

He didn’t hear the end of her sentence, he was sprinting out the door so fast.

Spring had come when he wasn’t paying attention. The back yard would soon need mowing. There were purple crocuses sprouting. Birdsong at daybreak.

He inspected the place at the edge of the woods where they had been. The ground was damp from rain earlier in the week. And he could swear he saw children’s footprints. Very faint ones. Maybe? The more he stared at the ground, the more confused he felt. He didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t anymore. Without realizing it he had been holding his breath, holding it so long that now he saw sparkles.

He would quit the methadone, he decided a propos of nothing, staring down into the mud, not knowing what was real anymore. He would quit, effective immediately.

Son, where are you? Why haven’t you called me back? his mother pleaded in an aggrieved voice on his voicemail. We used to be so close! I worry about you. Anyway, Madrid, or no? You have to give me an answer this week!

His mother wanted him to go to Spain with her. He told her he was working and she had brushed it off, saying that the school took him for granted, He didn’t know why she didn’t go with a girlfriend. Her persistence rankled him.

But then again, even just the idea of escaping this place for a while acted on him like a balm. He could stop resisting, let his mother be in charge. Imagining it made him feel safely cocooned. Like the Vicodin he used to take after he crashed one of his father’s delivery trucks and fucked up his back. His father. Thought he was god, just for owning a beer distribution company. He had pulled strings to keep Barron from going to jail. Breathalyzer tests under wraps. Practically cut him off after that, though. Never even gave him credit for getting those IT jobs all by himself…

He deleted his mother’s message. She could find someone else. He couldn’t be all she had. Maybe if he were married, if he had his own kids, like his brother did, she would let him go for once.

He did not call her back. He did take some days off of work, though. To detox from the methadone.

The first day that he skipped the clinic, his eyes watered, his nose ran, and he felt jumpy as hell. All he wanted to do was look up stories about the mysterious children. He read op-eds. (Can we blame the epidemic of broken families? Or are we overdue for self-inspection: They are all of our children, and we are all at fault.)

He read message boards of other people who were tormented by the children. They’ve been here for weeks now. I can feel them, I know they judge and mock me. I’m a prisoner in my own head. I don’t know what’s real or what’s not any more. Anybody out there who’s seen what I’ve seen, know that it’s real. It’s a living hell. They’ll tell you it’s not real. No one will help you. Only we know how it feels. You are not alone!

He started making Excel spreadsheets to study the data, trying to find patterns of where it happened, when it happened, how old the people who made the reports were. He made tables of cells, columns, and rows. Intersecting letters and numbers. Cells of percentages, dates, times, durations. He couldn’t sleep, so he wrote formulas, combined and separated the numbers. Did the pivot tables. Soon his eyes trembled in their sockets and he was starting to sweat.

After hours of work, he had to admit that there was nothing there. It was all for nothing. And that’s when the nausea began to hit him.

It was manageable at first. He wrapped in a wool blanket. He gave up working the numbers and drifted into looking at fan art and memes made of the phenomena known as #CREEPYKIDS. There were comics drawn of the creepy kids running amok through a shopping center, eating people. An altered photo of a toddler, grinning, with large, jagged adult teeth, captioned THEY ARE GETTING SMARTER. The children standing impassively watching the scene of a horrific car crash. The children in silhouette against a wall of flame and smoke that said THEY WILL BURN IT ALL DOWN.

Worst of all was the original night vision photo, animated so that they the kids had weirdly glowing eyes and limbs that were being grotesquely stretched out, further and further, until they snapped off. This gave Barron a sick feeling.

It reminded him of being a teenager, in the early days of the Internet. He was only alone, online, when there was suddenly too much freedom. When he always had to brace himself for the next scary image. Anything could jump out and shock him, scare him, if he stumbled on the wrong site. It made him feel numb, but aroused and excited. He hated it, but he loved it, and couldn’t stop…

He was vomiting now. Feeling slightly delirious. He was afraid, so afraid, but he had to do something, because he knew the children were there, and they were starting a fire. He could smell the smoke. He could hear them chanting things in his mind, silly things, something that sounded like tail of the comet, tail of the bear. The baby had worked itself into a frenzy, bobbing up and down on its stunted legs and shrieking. Crazy shit, and it was all out there, but also inside of him, so he couldn’t get away. He pressed his hands over his ears.

Something was happening to him. The lines were being blurred between his interior and exterior. He was terrified of disappearing into his own visions. He felt the way he did when Sarah showed him the field of dots. Everything was swarming and churning. The world was too big. There were too many dots. Too many points of reference to know anything for certain anymore. His own mind was devouring him. The only thing that kept him from going under completely was focusing on a mental image of her, the way her eyes pierced and pinned him down to reality. She was a pale cipher, a flame that burned through his bad dreams. Her shapeless black, her absurd chunky boots. She wasn’t there to harm him. She was trying to save him. Maybe, just maybe, things could be different from now on.

But for right now, he needed all the help he could get. Because the monster was here. The thing that had chased him through his dreams was here.

The last time he had been this helpless, he had been lying in a hospital bed after crashing the delivery truck while driving shitfaced. He had awakened to his father standing over him, self-made man in work boots, faded jeans, and a Burberry scarf. Head cocked towards the door, a remote smile on his face. In the low Southern drawl that he used when he was being “real,” he intoned,

There’s nothing uglier than an adult infant. A mama’s boy gone to rot. You’re a colossal fuck up, my boy. You’d better wake up before something wakes you up.

The memory shocked him. Had he willfully repressed it, stuffed it down the memory hole? He saw himself now as his father might see him, a pale sick man wrapped in a blanket, peaking out the blinds, afraid of the world. First he felt ashamed. Then he felt…something else. A spark, and then a flickering. It was anger.

Though he staggered a bit, as though he were moving across the deck of a lurching ship in a raging storm, he got up, walked through the kitchen, and exited the side door, out where the trash bins were kept; the cold spring air was bracing, but made him tremble. It must have been three AM. The loneliest time, where it seemed like he was the only person on the planet.

He could hear them, out there, talking their nonsense and riddles.

The moon cast a bluish light. His feet were bare, and the earth felt cold and damp. The sense of vagueness and unreality was draining away from him as the adrenalin flooded his veins. He could see their shapes, standing there at the edge of the woods.

They could sense he was coming. He knew because they went quiet. The sense of suspended stillness like an intake of breath.

Then noises started coming from the baby, who was snorting and gasping, blowing wet raspberries.

The sounds were repulsive, but somehow spurred him on to yell, “Who are you kids? What do you want from me?” He kept walking, straight over to where they were.

But at the sound of his voice, they fled into the woods. Quick as a school of guppies, a swarm of hummingbirds.

“I’m not afraid of you! Here I am! Here I am!”

But they were already gone. Absorbed silently back into the landscape from which they had emerged. And he was standing by himself in his own backyard, in the middle of the night, in sweatpants and a robe, screaming into the dark; He closed his eyes because it felt all at once that he might fall over. He leaned forward, bracing himself against his own thighs, and drew ragged breaths. Alone.

Except he wasn’t alone. The baby couldn’t run as the others had. They had left him behind. Now the thing was overstimulated and confused, running away from the woods. It shrieked and huffed, its bowed legs pumping as it ran in circles, until it tripped and face planted onto the ground.

Barron slowly, warily, walked towards it. He squatted down to look closer.

It was trying to stand up again, but it seemed unbalanced. Its head was so round, as wide as its shoulders. Its body was so stunted and rubbery. Its eyes rolled up to look at him. Eyes so deep set and shadowed, like the eyeholes in a skull. Was it a baby or an old man?

“What are you?” he asked. He was no longer angry but stuck somewhere between revulsion and pity. When something was real and in front of you, everything felt a lot more complicated.

Its hands were rubbery starfish. Its mouth wet and gaping with drool. The baby sneezed, panted a bit, and gurgled a string of nonsense syllables. Or was it speaking a language of some kind? Maybe it was the palindrome he had always been searching for.

“Who are you?” Barron whispered hoarsely.

But then the baby was gone, as though it had never been there at all.

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

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

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

“Erase them,” he ordered.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I told you to.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.

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

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

2.

(Phil Collins, “One More Night)

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

Soft rock is “The 80s.”

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

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

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

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

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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

(Bon Iver, “Beth/Rest”)

(Weezer, “Africa”)

(Mike Masse and Jeff Hall, “Africa”)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7.

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