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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Deft, kinky and resolute, Birgül Oğuz’s prose sails into her characters and tenderly splits them open.  In “Revol” are displayed the inner worlds of working people, at marginal, insecure jobs in Istanbul, or any Aegean, Mediterranean city, and their wobbly, brilliant heroism. Oğuz’s prose is tactile; consciousness and experience are conveyed in language of the skin. A moment of love in bed before shifts cutting out the guts of fish, “a drop of bloody water” falling from a finger like the chiming of the hour, the honking of a ferry, the grim grind of misogyny and breakthrough of subversion. The terrifying scale of political demonstration and excoriating minutiae of everyday injustice, man-woman, capitalism-nature and… inscrutability.        

“Revol” is from Birgül Oğuz’s novel-in-stories Hah, among winners of the 2014 European Prize for Literature. It is being translated into fourteen languages; the English was done by a group of nine working together at the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature: Alexander Dawe, Mark Wyers, Alev Ersan, Arzu Akbatur, Abigail Bowman, Feyza Howell, Amy Spangler, Kate Ferguson, and Kenneth Dakan.

— Victoria Rowe Holbrook, author of The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance, faculty member of the Architecture department of Istanbul Bilgi University, and translator of numerous Turkish works

1.

My lover’s eyes are as clear as a summer night. In the curls of his hair I see caves of light brown. To nestle into them is to be rejoined with my own hollow. Each and every time I’m damp, tired, and tearful. On the nape of my lover’s neck I will gasp for air like a winged fish. How soft you are, he says to me, how moist. His voice ripples in my ears like a blondish bed of reeds. I place my hand in the warmth of his palm and say goodnight. His hair becomes silken rain spilling down onto my back. His lashes grow long enough to envelop us both. Light flows down the street like water, like a flood.

For me, for him, the morning mist is like cotton. Together we walk down to the quay. A blue minibus takes him to Çömlekçi Çukuru. I pass by the tea houses and buses, looking at the cargo ships. The sound of winches dissolves into the water. The ropes slacken, get wet, and are drawn taut again. The morning is so beautiful, like a freshly inked word, and it touches me inside, every morning, my spirit gleams, my eyes burn, ah.

I walk on the shore road, unhurriedly, softly, solitary. I sleep off the remaining half of my slumber all the way to the door of the Fisherman’s Market. When I enter, I change the cottony mist of my tongue into a blue smock. My mind splits at that moment, and one side of me pulls away as the other spills forth. In the palm of my hand the cold knife grows.

The fish have already been placed on the blue-clad wooden counters. How odd, how could so many have died that early in the morning I say, as they gaze blankly into my face. In any case, mourning must be sheer foolishness, the mourning of water, a yeast that will never bloom. I say to myself: What a sentence! ha-ha, what a thing to say so early in the morning, ha! Is there no tea?

The warmth that my lover left in my hands turns to ice as soon as they touch the first fish of the day. I hold the fish by the gills and slice open its belly. With my knife I cut out the organs, which are the purple of aubergine, and scrape them into the bloody basin under the marble counter top. I never let the fish look me in the eye, because at that hour of the morning their gaze is fresh and moist, and their eyes see as if never touched by death. Looking them in the eye slices me open from throat to groin, dripping drop by drop into the bloody organ-filled basin below.

From time to time I, too, rise up in revolt and look up at the clock on the wall, and he looks at me, and as the dead are scaled and gutted, and as the scaled and gutted dead are wrapped up, Meathead, sitting at the register, always stares at me, at my thighs, at my pink wet hands, at my cleavage. The cash register opens with a ring and is shoved closed with a thud, and money dangles from his fat snotty hands as he says: Looking forward to serving you again. Jerk, ‘serve you again,’ slimy jerk, syllables dripping with saliva cling to the sycophant folds of his mouth. My heart churns, my stomach heaves, and a droplet of bloody water always falls from my pinkie finger, plop! into the bag of the dead. And I place the bloody bag into another bag which is as white as a panty pad and adorned with grinning blue dolphins, and I hand it to the customer: Bon appétit.

How time slips past—hours, seasons—between my fingers, cold and slippery, falling from the wet counter top with a plop and the basin fills, only to be emptied by the bucketful, carried off and emptied into the grate, down into nests of rats, piling up, piling up and slipping off their wet backs, churned to foam by the grinding of their teeth and clacking of their jaws, down into dark hollows and then deeper down into that pit where light congeals and thickens, and the darkness is terrifyingly blinding. How it flows; the greasy bulbs swing, plastic bags rustle. I fix my eyes on the wet counter top and think. I think about seeing eyes that know nothing of death. With my own eyes I see the eyes of the dead as they lie there glaring, their gaze fixed on the pit: their gaze is snared like a fish-hook on the soft belly of that hollow. They gaze not toward a distant destination but at the ruins of a time that toppled down long ago. They don’t blink. They have no will to blink. They have no courage. They have no time. There is no time for them, none.

At this point, the fish about to be emptied of their insides are piled up in the basin to my right. The cash register is shoved closed with a thud. Meathead eyes my cleavage wolfishly. I say that he too has eyes, for years he’s had eyes, he has them too. In the split of my mind a long sentence switches tracks, shuffling off the present tense and toppling down into a time that is frozen in place. My knife shrinks, withers and droops. A hand burns in my palm. Bloody water drips from my pinkie finger. I say: Bon appétit.

On the afternoon break, the world smells of damp towels and disinfectant. But the tea is misty and desolate. Unhurriedly, I console myself with two slices of bread and some feta cheese. I eat and think of my lover Memo’s warm, slow hands at the workshop in Çömlekçi Çukuru.

2.

He sits slouched in the light seeping through the greasy window. Aluminium dust rains down onto his hair. With the sound of pounded rivets, drilled aluminium, filed plastic and the whizz and whir of a drill, his insides shudder. The bluesmocked man to his right hands him a circuit board, which he solders and hands to the blue-smocked man to his left. The smoke from the melting solder makes his eyes water. From time to time he looks up from the smoky water, a fish of curiosity with big clear eyes—how quiet and pensive people are, quiet, pensive, dusty, teary-eyed.

Used oil flames in the furnace, leaving the air dry as bone. In the heat of a dry wind their blue smocks shrivel like leaves. The dark dry withered men in smocks never come eye to eye. On occasion they toss glances back over their shoulders. But not at each other; they are looking at the possibility that, at one time, they could have been soldered together. They are looking at the ruins of a sentence that has long been out of currency. Then they become the same man: seen from the outside, a man who’s been dispossessed. Inside, as they hurl the ruins of the past at the present, there is a resuscitated ghost, a feast of unending mourning, a profusion of dust, soil, and seed.

Memo gets up from his chair and walks toward the window. Salman, the simit seller, is going down the street, and there are flocks of children, Bully Cafer, scrap collectors, and Pepe surrounded by clusters of dogs. A part of Memo’s mind is spinning like an empty tin can. In a hundred years, he says—the men wearing blue smocks look up and gaze at his back—Salman the simit seller will be dead. As will the children, scrap collectors, Bully Cafer, Pepe, and the dogs. We too will be dead, along with the bacteria of the yogurt we’ll soon be dipping our bread into and the mulberry tree at the corner of the street and the birds that perch in it. All the hearts that are beating now in the mud of Kurbağalı Creek, in the abysses of the Atlantic, in the crater lakes of Kilimanjaro, in the pistachio orchards of Nizip, in the hollows of the caves of the Yellow Sea and in the eggs laid in those hollows, in incubators, in the coffee houses in Ergani, in an orange grove in Serik, in school toilets, in the register office, in train stations and at the poles of the earth, and what a misery and miracle that they are beating now at the same moment, but uh! they will beat no more. The circuit of the beats and thumps that binds us all together will cease to be. This photograph will yellow in a nasty way.

The light that shines through the greasy window and specks of dust tracing lazy circles in the air freeze in place; the furnace falls silent, the sounds turn cold. That’s when the planet that Memo observes through the window begins to plummet like a piece of fruit falling from a branch, falling down, down, further and further down. Whoa, Memo says, look how it’s falling, hah, it’s not going forward.

He looks back over his shoulder at the men in blue smocks, at the pink paint being added to polyester, at the empty plastic receptacles, at the circuit boards being put into the receptacles, at the circuit boards being lined up on the massive metal tray, twenty-six by twenty-six. They didn’t even come to repossess what’s inside me, he says.

The 676 pink regulators look like jam-filled cookies when the polyester is poured over them. The polyester quivers. It quivers and then congeals. The transistor inside is fossilized like an ancient three-legged insect. Memo can measure the distance between himself and the transistor with a teaspoon. But its clock has stopped, he says, it has stopped, while mine keeps on going. The letters R, T, and L on his smock tremble. My lover can’t measure the distance between himself and the transistor.

3.

Hurry, Papa was saying, hurry.

The bellies of those filthy fascists were bursting with all the blood of the workers and peasants they’d swilled but day had broken and we knew the truth. I gobbled down a piece of bread slathered in jam. With a milk moustache, and joyful that we were going out, I strode into the street, head held high. My hand is a brown egg in Papa’s.

So many birds! May this be a good sign for the month of May. My mouth agape, I pointed at the sky, saying, Papa, look at the birds, Papa ha! and then I skipped forward with grave determination. Minute by minute the crowd swelled. The flag in front of us snapped in the wind, above all ours, a red uproar of cloth fluttering from the ground to the sky; such a flag! Papa was smiling, his eyes sparkling with pride, and he kept turning and winking at me; Look, he said, just look at this crowd of people, look. Even back then I knew that such a gathering of people was akin to victory. Tongues of flame, the churning of water, the howling whirl of wind, that’s what we were and that’s what we said, enough already! Closing my eyes, I was shouting as shrilly as I could: Raise your voice until libelation is ours, it’s your turn in this unstoppable struggle to be free, enough, enough, enough! Papa was all smiles, grinning as he placed his right hand over his heart; raise your left fist, not your right, he said. What a morning, ha! Libelation? Ha-ha! We still hadn’t arrived at the square; you couldn’t count us on your fingers, that’s how many of us there were, it was our day from the beginning, rat-a-tat tat.

Aha! Papa, look at the helly copter! I shouted, bumping into Uncle Metin’s belly, and Memo laughed, holding his belly, jerk that he is.

‘You jerk, what are you laughing at?’

‘How’s it going, little witch?’ Uncle Metin asked me.

Uncle Metin was holding Memo’s hand. Memo was wearing a red shirt and had hung a cardboard sign around his neck which read STOP CHYLD ABUSE. Idiot. Memo was lazy and fat, and when he ran down the hallway his belly shook. His palms were always sweaty, and he sat in the back of the class with Bully Mahmut, whose father was a doorman. Mahmut’s school uniform always smelt like eggs, cheap soap and mildew.

‘There’s never been such a crowd here,’ Uncle Metin said, lighting a cigarette. Papa nodded and said, ‘Isn’t that the truth.’ He also lit a cigarette. Both of them squinted, gazing with pleasure at the crowd.

I bent down and snarled at Memo, ‘That’s not how you write “child”.’ The smile fell from his face. Moron. When the teacher slapped him, Memo’s glasses would go flying. He’d bite his lip, trying not to cry. At lunch he always ate bread smeared with tomato paste. By the end of the day, his snot would get greener and slimier. Snotty jerk.

‘You’re snotty!’

‘No, you are!’

‘You are!’

We’d gone up onto the sidewalk, further away from the bustle. Uncle Metin and Papa were leaning against the wall smoking, and their puffs of smoke blew toward the groups of people. Unable to pull his eyes from the crowd, Uncle Metin said, ‘Probably fifty thousand people here.’ Papa said, ‘Fifty thousand? There must be more like a hundred and fifty thousand.’ Uncle Metin scoffed, and they made a bet for a bottle of rakı.

‘That includes meze.’

‘Bean paste and yogurt with dill.’

‘Dried eggplant in tomato sauce.’

‘And mackelel!’

‘Mackelel?’

‘Mackelel.’

Placards with photos of bedridden, emaciated revolutionaries were carried by. Lots of pillows and blankets. Iron bedsteads. Half-closed eyes. Fingers with knobby joints. Sideways victory signs. They couldn’t be seen in the pictures, but at the edge of those beds were tattered plastic slippers the colour of muddy snow. When the inmates put on those damp slippers and left the room, there was the stench of foul, shit-filled water. Hungry women and men shuffling through putrid water. When they walk, it sounds like the rustling of paper. This is our struggle, they say.

I also shouted: Unstoppable struggle! and made a sideways victory sign, lunging as if I were going to gouge out Memo’s eyes. He leapt back.

‘Put down your hand!’ Papa said.

‘Memo’s afraid of the hunger strike!’

‘I told you to stop doing that!’

‘I’m not afraid of the hunger stripe, you’re the one who’s afraid.’

‘Stop it now!’

‘Si-ssy Me-mooo!’

‘I told you to put down your hand.’

‘Son, it’s not called stripe.’

‘Memo, you’re a sissy!’

‘I’m not a sissy, you are!’

‘Am not!’

I put down my hand, balling it into a fist in my pocket. Helicopters full of filthy fascists buzzed overhead. Uncle Metin gazed after the photos of the faded men and women as they were carried away, and then he turned and whispered something into Papa’s ear. Papa’s fist unclenched and he held out his hand as if he were weighing something disgraceful, and then it dropped like a shot bird and his fingers twined around my own. Come on, he said, we still have a long way to go before we get there.

Uncle Metin’s moustache grew larger and larger, and his eyes and nose retreated inward. One night, Uncle Metin wept at our house, and that night his eyes and nose pulled inward as well. His belly was shaking, and the table shuddered as though an earthquake had struck. Memo was staring at the tomato paste on his plate and hunkered down in his chair. That’s what Memo would do when the teacher slapped him, and then he’d bite his lip. When he didn’t do his homework, he’d say, ‘Teacher, Mahmut tore it up.’ Dirty liar.

We were still so uh! far from the square. Ahead was our flag, we were sweating. Two helicopters full of filthy fascists swooped low, and just then we heard the crackle of a radio and someone in the crowd said, ‘Three dead!’ The bodies of three life-gone revolutionaries were taken away!

When they said that, Papa squeezed my hand hard and then there was a crack. Smoke the colour of egg yolks filled the air. Papa said, ‘There are some dirty agitators among us,’ and he squinted at the swarm of people. ‘Filthy murderers,’ Uncle Metin spat. Memo gulped, the sissy. At that moment, the ties holding the crowd together bang!
                                                                                        snapped ap aaart! Huurry!
                                                                                                                                                                                      Papa shouted and then bang bang bang! Papa tugged me by the hand as we ran for it clippity clop Uncle Metin pointed toward a street up ahead and then from behind we heard Memo cry out
                                                                                                                                                                                Pa-paa! Pa-paa!

Uncle Metin’s eyes bang! bulged and at that moment, I, as the crowd surged and swirled, I saw Memo clenched up rooted to the spot just over there oy! oy! a prickly pear in the desert oy! a frog with a placard, his throat puffing in and out

ribbit ribbit

where is heeeeee!

Metiiiiin! booooy! Papa shouted, but the stampeding crowd was pushing us further and further clippity clop down the street. Unclemetin oy! had already turned around and was wading through the crowd, splish splash, his belly bouncing as he waded against the rush of people and as he called out

Me-MOOO! Me-MOO!

                                                                                      some windows were broken punches were thrown and w’re gnna kll yu al sid a man wit a gun hs eys ful of bloodred htred n the crwd was wippt into sch a fury that thit tht wht a fury it was a raw yelow smoke flled th air swallwing Memo and Uncle Metin

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffhwp!

my eyes started wuhwuhweeepng yellow tears and Papa said
                                                                                                     DON’T be scared!

                                                                                                                               our flag up ahead we packed into that street pushng n shoving each othr everyone was shving everone else, we wre wuhweeeping yelow tears and we still had so far to go to reach the square and w’re going to kll yu al they wre sying 

(but everyone knew where they weren’t going to go. (Because everyone knew that the state was a chariot lowered on strings from high above, lurch by lurch.) Everyone had a soft belly thirsting to bleed (pressing their giant hands to their unravelled stitches, unravel ling wounds (meaning everyone had a soft belly thirsting to bleed)). Everyone had a strangled corpse they paraded around inside them (inside everyone, all of them), everyone had a corpse that marched up from their stomach to their gullet and from there to their mouth. People pinched their lips tight (these were sealed parentheses, they’d closed the circuit long ago). But still the dead had risen as far as the peoples’ mouths; now they were pushing their swollen, knobby fingers between the lips and then, as if sliding up a window (pushing and shoving between tongue teeth palate), opening those mouths. They were opening those mouths and sticking out their scarred, dented heads. As soon as their heads were out, they were propping their elbows on people’s molars (on the molars of the people), resting their chests on the mouths’ ledges (on the ledges of the mouths of the people), and waving to the other dead who’d stuck their heads out of other mouths, saying what’s up? isn’t this a beautiful morning, so, have you gotten used to being a corpse?)

Nothing was happening. But it was terrifying, this nothing. My head grew clouded with dust gas breaking glass and cries and he was squeezing my hand so hard Papaa Papaa!

Whatever happened, this is when it did, another shot sounded, things got ugly at the head of the street. The crowd clenched up like a cramping calf, exhaled, sucked in its stomach and puffed out its cheeks and oof 

thump! something went off in my ribcage, the eggshell of my hand crunched, my eyes rolled back into my stomach: It’s okay, Papa was saying still, it’s okayy just don’t be scared it’s okayy! And inside Papa’s mouth was a man watching me from the corner of his eye. He propped his elbows on Papa’s molars and stuck his head out of Papa’s gaping mouth when it opened to say it’s okay and stayed that way, a dark dry dire cute man, a man not afraid of anything any more, staring out at the street, staring without blinking at the dust gas breaking glass and cries. And Papa was saying don’t be scared!, it’s okayy don’t be scared it’s okayy honey it’s okayy don’t be scared it’s okayy just don’t be scared and he was looking at me from the corner of his eye, dark dry dire cute, like all the pain of the world had piled up in my face, like he didn’t have the will, the courage, the time, to blink.

4.

One time, Meathead followed me home. I pretended I didn’t notice, and he pretended he didn’t notice that I was pretending I didn’t notice. I turned right at the underwear store and then left at the local diner, he kept coming after me, jerk, even though I was taking my time, wondering how much longer he’d follow me. I went inside the herbalist, I looked at the dried plums and blueberries, I cracked open an almond, I stalled. Meathead was standing at the produce stall kitty-corner from the herbalist, hands in his pockets, one eye rolling toward me, the other gazing thoughtfully at the potatoes. I felt like laughing but didn’t. I told the herbalist 200 grams of cinnamon sticks, please hurry.

I left the herbalist in a rush, pretending to be fed up and busy. I stopped behind a white van near the meat shop and squinted over at the leeks. I looked and Meathead is scooting toward me, ‘heey,’ he says, ‘heey …’

‘Heey, what’s it to you?’

‘Uhh, uhhguhh …’ His mouth a bit crooked, taking a gulp here and there.

The grocer weighed my leeks and went to hand them over. I was just about to take them when the creep reached out and took my leeks. ‘Give me those,’ I spat, stepping toward him to grab the sack. ‘Hey,’ he said, wagging his finger back and forth, ‘how nice, she thought of her boss.’ And he didn’t give back my leeks.

There was a contention between this moron and me, its roots reaching back into God knows where. This situation was forcing the birth of, not a relationship, but a relation. To be honest, Meathead wasn’t even the last person I’d want a relation with. But this loom was plenty old, its knots had been tied long ago. Which of us was the deer and which was the hunter, who had herded me into this place of ours where so many deer have drunk, where’s the door I should leave from, how could I know where it is.

I went yech! when I first saw him. I’d stopped at the door of the store, pointing at the sign in the window. Meathead was sitting inside. He started checking me out, my thighs, my breasts, my knees. My stomach cramped and all of a sudden my heart leapt into my throat. And right there I clenched up like a stubborn stain. I should have listened to my stomach. I should have cleared out of there as soon as I felt my heart in my throat. But I clenched up. I still don’t know. Why did I walk into that store with my heart in my throat? I ask. It wasn’t like I needed money or anything. I wanted the blue smock, that’s all. A blue smock. That’s all.

Later on, every time I looked at his stupid face and pursed my lips with disgust, I shuddered with the thought of the law that held us together in the same place. Whenever he looked at me he got a look on his face like someone picking their nose, thinking they’re alone. His teeth were disgusting. The fuss of his tomato-pasty hands to and fro during the lunch break, the stupefied look that came over his face as he scratched his belly, the hairy pinkie finger he held in the air as he drank his tea, the spittle accent from who knows where, it was all disgusting. There was nothing strange about loathing him. Who wouldn’t loathe him? The problem was me loathing him. Me, as much as anyone. Because of this, every time I looked at him I saw the scissor marks in my own soul. This creaky soul that despised others with great pleasure, despised and groaned, growing larger as it groaned, no longer fitting in its membrane, its shell, this was my soul. I didn’t have a lick of patience for day-to-day language. But on the other hand, I was a day labourer to the hilt of my knife. And if I started not to loathe Meathead for even a second, we would wither the world.

‘Wanna sit down and get a tea over there, huh?’ Meathead was saying. They opened the back door of the white van and started to haul the cow and sheep heads out of it into the meat shop. I’d never seen cow and sheep heads uncooked before, not decapitated like this.

‘Let’s get a tea in that little corner, come on, nice n’ hot, huh?’

I’d seen them cooked plenty of times, inside ovens lit up with greasy bulbs to whet the appetites of those walking by, brown grease drips off their noses and they look just like smiling, eyeless goats.

‘Dontcha think there’s a spark between us, come on, let’s talk you and me, drink a tea, glug glug, nice n’ hot?’

Their eyes were moist and bright, just recently deadened, clearly in a terrible way, their bodies still trembling and clenching up, dangling on iron hooks from the ceiling of a slaughterhouse far away but there are no eyes there, the eyes are here, they’re looking around, what is this place where’s my body what is this place where’s my body.

‘At least let’s move to the side a little, baby, don’t wanna get in the way of these guys,’ said Meathead. I felt like laughing again, but I think I was slowly but surely losing my mind.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I won’t move an inch and I won’t drink tea with you and I’m not your baby and give me back my leeks.’

‘Why’s that?’ he asked, laughing as he asked, stomach jiggling as he laughed, leaning back a bit as his stomach jiggled, the sack swinging as he leant back.

‘Because,

I said and a deadened cow passed between us, resting its cheek on a bloody smock and crying

‘those leeks are mine,’

the bloody-smocked man came out of the meat shop swinging his arms, passed between us huffing and puffing, and got into the white van

‘Besides,

I said and a deadened ram passed between us, resting its forehead on the bloody smock and crying

‘are you my soulmate or something that I have to drink tea with you, give me back my leeks.’

‘Look at youu,’ said Meathead, and his mouth twitched. ‘A sharp little tongue, but I love me a sharp tongue, I wanna love that sharp tongue of yours.’ And shik! he was clicking his tongue, shaking his eyes to and fro shik dada shik dada shik shik.

It felt like the inner wall of my stomach had burst with rabid foam.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘are you giving back my leeks or not?’

‘And what if I don’t?’ he said with a click of his tongue, the little shit.

‘What’s going to happen if you don’t?’

‘Uh huhh … what’ll happen?’

‘You’re asking what will happen if you don’t, is that right?’

‘Uh huhh … what’s gonna happen?’

‘What am I gonna do?’

‘What are you gonna do?’

‘Take one guess what I’m gonna do.’

‘What are you gonna do then?’

‘Oh, I’ll do something …’

‘That’s great baby but what, what’s gonna happen?’

‘Something, something’s gonna happen.’

Meathead was laughing and shik! clicking his tongue, shaking his eyes shik dada shik shik dada shik.

Now I was pumped up and pissed off. Meathead’s teeth were wet and growing larger. The door of the white van was shrinking, shrank as small as an anchovy’s mouth. The market’s lights blurred together. Fruit, vegetables, and the white van all dissolved pssst bit by bit in that tangled light. I could have killed him off. In a flash, in the blink of an eye. I could have killed him off, everyone knows. But me, I’d wanted the blue smock. That’s all. A blue smock. Hah!

‘Eey, what is it, let’s see?’

‘Shake it baby …’

‘What?’

‘Shake it baby. Shake.’

‘Uh, shake what?’

I raised my arms out to the sides, clicking my fingers shik dada shik dada, and gave a shake of my hips, left right snap.

‘Now click your fingers like this! Watch! Oh oh! Snap ’em!’

‘What the hell are you doing …’

‘Pull up that smock and rock my world! Oh oh! It hurts, it hurts!’

‘Would you shut up.’

‘Pat-a-cake pat-a-cake baker’s man, shake me a cake as fast as you can, snap it and shake it and mark it with a B …’

‘Cut it the hell out.’

‘Pull up that smock! Grab it! Grab it, man! Enough! Gimme whatcha got!’

‘Here, take the leeks.’

‘Snap baby shake and snap!’

‘Take your leeks, you psycho.’

‘Swiing! Theem! Hiips!’

‘Take your damn leeks!’

I took them and screamed shithead! in his face. Without flinching, I jabbed my finger into his heart. It was empty, it really was, but that’s not quite all of it.

5.

I can’t even call it a room, but inside a fire’s burning. I just want to hug my knees to my chest and shrivel up in a corner, but no, I say, not like that. And who put that fire there.

A cool air hits my face when I come out into the hallway, but it’s humid. The walls are mossy, streaked, wet. They quiver when touched, like meat. Who the hell would make a wall like this.

I feel like rising up into the open air. I look, a window’s ajar. Forget the door, I say, the window’s best. Then when I’m in front of the window I realize the door is better. But it’s too late. They had set the table long ago. Potato stew, rice and pickles. Come on, Papa says, hurry it up.

I don’t want potato stew. I don’t want rice. I don’t want pickles. Papa hands me the salt. No, I say, not that either. I feel depressed. The table sways.

Ah, I say, Unclemetin’s here. He’s crying so hard, weeping and weeping. Memo’s tossing nuts at my plate. Don’t cry, Papa says to Unclemetin, you have to forgive yourself. Your papa is a little traitor, I say to Memo.

And then I bang on the table tak takka tak with the handle of my spoon. Everyone goes quiet. That’s enough, I say, let’s cheer up a bit, come on, hands in the air! We all start together singing ka-kalinnnka maya! Papa’s clapping his hands, Unclemetin hits his fork on his glass. Memo sways his head back and forth. But they can’t keep the beat at all. No, I say, not like that. No. Not like that.

The door opens, two sweaty men in ski masks come inside. Black shafts dangle from their waists. Is it the Sivas crew? Yes we’re the Sivas crew, they say, come on, hands in the air! Together we all start dancing Logs Burn on the Banks heavy eyes awake / double wicks, one wound / can the heart endure.

Suddenly my insides twist up really bad, I’m not going to dance, I say, shrugging my shoulders. You’ll dance, they say. No no, I say, you don’t get it, I’m not going to dance. You’ll dance, they say. Come on Memo let’s go, I say. Come on, my Memo, my love. We aren’t going to dance, in fact. But that’s not quite all of it.

Then you’ll go to sleep, they say in unison. Then they grab their black shafts.

Memoo! I say, don’t go to sleep! Hurry, let’s get out of here, it’s nuts.

Papaa! Don’t go to sleep. This place is nuts! Nutsss!

But you’re the salt of the earth, don’t forget, says Papa, there is yet another revolution. He squeezes something really—really really—heavy into my hand. Then he skips off down the hallway. What the hell! Who would’ve thought, a papa skipping and running down a hallway?

I say Papaa Papaa! It’s nuts here!

It’s okay honey don’t be scared! It’s okayy! It’s okayy!

Papaa! Papaa! It’s so heavy Papaa!

It isn’t, honey, it isn’t! It’s empty, just empty!

It isn’t Papa it isn’t!

It isn’t!

It isn’t! 

6.

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Memo, ‘tell the water, not me.’

His voice rippled in my ears like a blondish bed of reeds. A misty, glacial-blue light was dripping in from the window.

‘It’s five o’clock,’ said Memo.

Under the blanket it was dark and warm. I nestled up to Memo. Yeah, I said, I won’t tell you. I won’t tell the water either. I’ll start over again, once more, from the very beginning. I’ll start again from the beginning.

I was letting myself slip into another dream, like a paper boat into water, and woke again to my own voice:

‘I can’t do it Memo, I’ll sink Memo, it’s so heavy Memo.’

‘You’ll do it,’ said Memo, ‘fear no more, forget, a handful of dust for you.’

It’s not just a handful of dust for me, Memo. Sissy Memo.

‘You’re the sissy.’

‘You are.’

‘You are.’

---

Reprinted with permission of the author.

 

From the moment in Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Crossroads, when Perry, the intellectual 15-year-old son of the First Reformed Church’s Minister, Russell Hildebrandt, walks into Reverend Haefle’s Holiday Open House, dips his cup into a cauldron of “Christmas gløgg for grownups,” and moves to the center of the room to pose questions to two clergymen about how to achieve goodness, I was hooked! Perry was known to deliberate on the essence of goodness and the immutability of the soul, for heaven sakes! So, rather than stopping for a chat with Mrs. Haefle, about the ingredients in the Swedish meatballs, I made a bee line for the center of the room where the action was set to occur. This kid’s questions interested me: “Can goodness ever be its own reward, or does it always serve personal interests?” And “if we can never escape our own selfishness, is such an act truly virtuous?” I was fascinated with what comes of being a minister’s son–resolutions to be a better person, friend, brother––even if self-interest does sneak in to compromise the purity of one’s altruism (and even if Perry did offer to stand in for his delayed parents at the party as a favor to his sister, hoping to buy her secrecy on his smoking and dealing pot). But then, it’s not unusual for sound philosophical thinking to be born of experience, is it?

Unfortunately, neither Reverend Walsh nor Rabbi Meyer abandoned dogma long enough to address Perry’s questions as he might have hoped. The preacher advises emulating Christ’s life to live virtuously, saying “Christ gives us a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions.” The Rabbi claims that God’s laws are guideposts for a pious journey. Neither answer addresses the reflective investigation with which Perry struggles. Their answers depend on a faith Perry doesn’t have, a comfort with obedience rather than reason for defining virtue, and the belief that goodness and God are synonymous. Their responses also don’t match Perry’s ability to think outside of the doctrine box, despite his return dips into the gløgg. I find myself flashing back to the joke about a Preacher, a Rabbi, and a Priest walking into a bar to answer a question about getting into heaven and wondered why the priest was cast as Edward Gorey’s “Doubtful Guest” here. But years of Catholic education suggest that Perry wouldn’t have been satisfied by the priest’s answers either.

I attribute my own desire to enter Perry’s conversation with the clergymen to an interest in ethics developed during graduate studies in moral philosophy and literature. That interest led to a career in education and a focus on literature dealing with justice––social and otherwise. Questions such as “Upon what do we base best determinations of virtue and why?” have always intrigued me: God’s laws? Platonic and Aristotelian effects of actions (inner harmony and a flourishing life)? Kant’s Categorical Imperative? Mom? The Golden Rule? A Social Contract? The “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” utilitarianism or “the lesser-of-two-evils guide to ethics” offered by a high school student of mine in 1993? What intrigues me more is the basis upon which the word best is understood. But, the impact of indoctrination is powerful and persistent, and I am not without understanding for its victims, having been one; and, I venture to say, most likely neither is Franzen. His story feels more like an invitation to wrestle with which roads, the combinations of roads, and/or which, if any, philosophical approaches above lead to a moral life, how suited one answer is for everyone, and how important religion is to the process?

The novel, Volume I of a planned trilogy called A Key to All the Mythologies (referencing Reverend Casaubon in Middlemarch by George Eliot) is made up of the individual and collective stories of the Hildebrandt family–Russ and Marion, in their 50s; Clem, 19; Becky, 17, Perry, 15; and Judson, 8– that cover the years between the 1940s and the 1970s. The church looms large in their lives and in their collective consciousness, though individuals feel free to modify beliefs and practices, including church attendance. Clem, and initially Becky, choose to not attend church at all but each tries to live a good and moral life, the ideals of which, for Franzen, seem to include “loving others as one loves oneself, and so forth,” if words assigned to Perry, are indicators. Sometimes they arrive at “crossroads,” struggling when desires for power, pleasure, concern for self/others, or religious principles, collide. Sometimes they get stuck at these “crossroads. In each case, the stories are provocative and insightful, often hilarious, and occasionally heartbreaking. 

At the time of the Haefle party, Reverend Russ and Marion are out on the streets of the Chicago suburb, New Prospect, at metaphorical “crossroads” that cause them to be late for the party: Russ is in a snowstorm after making Christmas deliveries to an inner-city Black sister church with the perky blond object of his current desire, Frances Cottrell. Marion, now frenetically smoking and starving her way to 110 pounds, is with a therapist, questioning her role in Russ’s wandering eye, and looking for reasons why she submerged her authentic self in her marriage. Becky has been set free by Perry to attend a concert where she is falling in love with Tanner Evans, discovering marijuana, attempting to rediscover God to land Tanner, and praying that (please God) she will come out of the high of her first experience with weed with her mind intact. Clem, the eldest, is just home from college for Christmas. Fresh from the decision to drop out of school, break up with his girlfriend, Sharon, and sign up for duty in Vietnam, he is struggling mightily at multiple “crossroads.” He has the “Is it love or Sharon’s sexual irresistibility that caused me to avoid all academic work this semester? blues,” some concerns about her compatibility with his family, and issues relating to his extremely close relationship with his sister, Becky. Lastly, his guilt for leaving poorer, blacker American kids to die in Vietnam is weighing on him as it is sure to result in a break with Russ, whose opposition to the war is legendary and unalterable. Judson, as yet unaffected by moral quandaries, is downstairs viewing Miracle on 34^th Street with the Haefle children. And, Perry, aware that he has little faith that he will know whether he is really “being good or pursuing a sinful advantage” becomes more concerned with each dip into the cauldron, that it is he who is in the wrong. “You’re all saved but apparently I’m damned!” he sobbed loudly at the end of his conversation. And, Marion, arriving at the party just in time to hear Perry’s outburst and Doris Haefle’s news that he is intoxicated and should be taken home, whispers into Perry’s ear, “You picked the wrong woman’s house to get drunk in,” as they left to walk home in the snow. Marion doesn’t suffer fools or prigs easily. And Perry is her dearest child. 

We learn that Marion had imbibed a bit as a teen herself, but not before we get to know her as a conservative mother of four and sometimes a force to contend with when seen through the eyes of her 17-year-old daughter, Becky. We also see her through Russ’s eyes, as a middle-aged wife who has let herself go, resulting in his lack of interest in her. She pales by comparison to the younger, thinner, though duller object of Russ’s desire, the First (though-not) Reformed, parishioner. She also pales in comparison with a younger, more desirable version of herself that captivated Russ and initially stole his virginity. Most of what we learn about her life experiences are revealed through talks with her therapist, affectionally called “The Dumpling,” in what struck me as the funniest chapter, possibly due to a history (that I share) with smoking, fad diets and Catholicism. It is the section, however, with some of the saddest reveals in the entire novel.

With Marion, Franzen succeeds in the creation of a well-rounded (in every way) character who has been to the “crossroads” and back, and with the possible arrival at another on the horizon in response to her threatened marriage. She’d been out of balance and stuck at a “crossroad” at least once with a breakdown in her early 20s, in response to a pile-up of unresolved psychic traumas resulting from the suicide of her beloved, though dismissive, father; her mother’s abandonment of her; a torrid, yet dead-end relationship with a married man; a subsequent abortion; and an eventual run-in with a sexual pervert whom she paid with her body for money to cover the cost of the abortion. She is drawn as the novel’s truly authentic and multi-faceted character–a mélange of opposing traits: self-determined and guilty, simple and complicated, capable and self-deprecating, independent and dependent–and “neither amazed nor disturbed by the apparent contradictions thereof.” She believes to have been saved by Russ’s love and her marriage to him, and a Catholicism strong on devotion though flexible on dogma. In exchange for this luck, she spent 25 years of marriage “keeping her mouth shut,” focusing more on others than on herself, and withholding from Russ all information about the breakdown, the affair, the abortion, and the pervert. She also invented a former marriage to explain her obvious sexual experience when starting with Russ, only to be shunned later by Russ’s Mennonite parents as a non-suitable wife. She is about to lie again –about tracking down the illicit lover –whom she has located after 25 years, to reconnect with her passionate self. Perry is a boy after his mother’s heart and emotional fragility and is understood and protected by her. Following their departure from the Haefle party, she shares her history with mental illness and institutionalization with him, as she is worried about his instability and wants to help him avoid the psychological problems to which he is susceptible through inheritance. Sadly, the confession increases Perry’s worry about himself.

As interesting as their individual and combined stories are–and they are interesting–the novel’s brilliance lies in its strategic organization of the storytelling. Especially with characters Marion and Russ, Franzen has assembled a patchwork of bits and pieces of their personal and family histories and woven them within and without the story’s sequential timeline. Through flashbacks, forwards, and retellings, he prompts a reinterpretation of events with facts that alter perception at strategic times to prompt us to rethink simplistic understandings of complex situations and characters. In doing this, he brings us into the action by inviting us to experience the twists and turns of moral deliberation in which he and the characters are involved. For example, in a section on Russ, Franzen flashes back to an incident involving the Crossroads teens calling Russ out for his treatment of Youth Minister, Rick Ambrose. Clem outwardly supports his father, though humiliated by what everyone, teens and readers alike, believe (and I, without question) –-that Russ, jealous of Ambrose’s popularity and “hip” quotient, pulled rank to boost his own advantage with the kids. The group’s call for Russ’ departure causes him to resign from Crossroads Youth Group work. For more than 100 pages, readers live with a lingering disappointment with and judgment of Russ that sustain negative opinions of him. Eventually in a flash-forward, while still in the story’s past, we learn facts that force us to revise our ideas on Russ and our attitudes toward Ambrose, who, it seems, withheld facts for his own self-interest. This turn welcomed us to join in Franzen’s meditation on the nature of goodness and wrestle along with him, aware that “doing the right thing” is complicated, as are the characters. We also see how judgments reify self-perceptions and perceptions of others, especially when they go unchallenged for long periods of time. The experience reminded me to postpone easy judgments of others in my own life, and to “deny myself the pleasures that harm others.” (The Golden Rule??)

The jury is still out on Franzen’s “definitive tenets for living the good life.” And, while he engages us in a more investigative approach, defined by openness rather than orthodoxy, he does present characters developing inside and outside formative and more dogmatic influences to guard against simplicity: Marion’s successful (even if watered-down) version of Catholicism, saved her life after a breakdown; Russ’s grandfather’s rejection of the family’s Mennonite sect to accommodate his new love is accepted by Russ and repeated for his own happiness, though he is true to the sect in its anti-war position. At the same time, a prayer-focused Russ tolerates a 60’s Kumbaya-esque guitar strumming Christianity that finds God in relationships and sees as much comfort in sensitivity-training sessions as in prayer vigils––because it brings in the kids. And, more remarkably, his paradigm shift, made as a young man on his first trip to the Navajo tribe, opened a new way for him to see the world, based on love for Keith Durochie and the beauty and spirituality of the Navajo people. He would stick with Christianity––he liked its standard practice everywhere–– even though Durochie jokes that Arbuckle’s coffee also is the same everywhere. But Russ would always carry the pleasure of the sweet Navajo coffee he came to love on the mesa and would assure its availability and that of Durochie and the tribe, through many return trips with the youth group, to the camps. Lastly, he would also carry with him, always, the mantra learned from Durochie and his grandfather, that “There are many ways to skin a cat”

So perhaps this cat mantra is a key to at least some mythologies? It also may be an important metaphor for interpreting Franzen’s preferences on the beliefs, attributes, and habits that lead to goodness, understanding how complicated life and people can be, and how difficult it is for some. Do we accept, then, that we are able to live a good life while trying to determine how, and what the good life is under complicated circumstances? If so, and again, What part God and what part Kant? What part Mom and what part Golden Rule? What part self and what part others? Or, are answers determined by a mix of these considerations? And, what about forgiveness?

Forgiveness. This seems to be where Marion comes in. Like Radio Raheem, who sports love/hate brass rings, Marion is aware of how “inextricably connected good and evil are.” And this awareness, based on her complexity, enlarges her capacity for self-knowledge, and heightens her understanding of and empathy for others–making forgiveness easier. The “Crossroads” at which she arrives through a family crisis, reveals that what hadn’t seemed important could be the most important thing, and possibly “the right thing.” And forgiveness another key.

Godspeed, Marion! And . . . whatever comes to pass, may you accept “The Dumpling’s” challenge to put as much emphasis on yourself in the future as you deserve, whether inspired by the “Love thy neighbor as thyself commandment, or a feminist perspective, which could possibly be more acceptable to you in Volume II of the trilogy, when, in the late 1970s and beyond, the Women’s Movement will clearly be a much stronger cultural force!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________________________________________________________

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

 

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

Photo credits:

Now

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

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

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

We don’t have time for that, N says. 

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

It’s a baby. 

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

Come look at this, N says.

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

I thought we agreed not to have kids.

Where’d it come from?

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

Aw, look at it. Can we keep it?

Is it house broken? 

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

Where do we report a found baby?

N shrugs. They drink coffee. 

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

Make it convincing. Take this baby.

We don’t have a baby registered.

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

This baby isn’t registered.

J finishes drinking coffee, gets up. 

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

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

Don’t do that. It’s not ours.

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

J goes into the bedroom.

You can’t be thinking about keeping it. 

N follows J into the bedroom. 

Really. We can’t keep it.

The baby is still crying. J is getting dressed.

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

Just creamer. 

Try giving it that. 

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

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

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

We’ll figure it all out tonight.

Right.

Try not to make problems.

Right.

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

*

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

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

I’m already listed.

The minor official grows more uncomfortable.

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

Of course.

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

Yes, N says, That’s our dog.

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

*

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

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

Right, N says. Thanks.

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

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

Right, N says. Thanks.

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

The officer laughs. N laughs.

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

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

*

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

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

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

You can’t pull any strings?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you think they found it?

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

The baby cries. 

*

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

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

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

I need a fucking cigarette.

They climb out of the car. The baby cries.

Christ, J says, and lights a cigarette.

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

Let’s check out this river.

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

Its ear is sticking out.

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

Fuck, J says, and lights another cigarette. 

They share the cigarette. 

Water’s fucking cold.

Fuck.

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

Stay this time! J shouts.

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

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

*

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

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

Fuck, N says. 

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

Fuck, N says again, and opens another beer.

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

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

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

J doesn’t know what to say to that.

Shit.

Yeah.

We have to leave, don’t we?

Yeah.

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

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

We can, N says.  

*

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

You’re sure H is working tonight?

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

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

Shit.

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

What’s up?

The cat hisses and scratches J’s leg.

Shit, J says, and jumps. 

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

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

Sleeping?

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

Hang on.

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

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

Can you climb up here on your own?

You can’t just open the door?

It reads thumbprints.

Can’t H open it?

Um. 

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

Yeah, stand by the door.

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

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

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

Give me a hand with the arm?

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

What are you looking for? 

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

They followed me in.

Do we have a knife?

Why?

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

No.

Would you rather carry a cadaver?

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

Think this will work? 

N holds up a steak knife.

You’re crazy.

Yes.

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

What if someone comes?

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

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

We can go.

That’s it?

That’s all I did last time.

It didn’t work that well last time.

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

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

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

Fuck, J says.

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

*

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

How long do you think we have? 

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

At least today. Probably tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

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

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

Not yet. You?

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

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

Ready?

Wait.

J opens the whiskey bottle, drinks. N drinks.

Ready?

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

What do we do with them now?

I don’t know.

They drink whiskey and look at the registration chips. 

We could break them.

We could leave them here.

Frame them and hang them on the wall.

Throw them in the river with the dog.

Don’t disrespect the dog.

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

Fucking baby.

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

*

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

What? N says. 

The baby drools on N’s face.

You’re disgusting.

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

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

My arm hurts.

I know. My head hurts.

I know. 

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

Do you want to drive?

J pulls out a pack of cigarettes. 

Light? 

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

Thank god.

N lights a cigarette. 

Where’s the baby going?

Under the car. 

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

 

Before

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

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

Fuck.

Want to get out of here?

Fuck yes.

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

*

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

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

Are they still here?

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t actually know how to backstroke.

J laughs and sits on N.

No horseplay.

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

*

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

*

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

Almost there, N says.

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

When’s your lease up?

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

J sits on the couch and watches. 

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t seem like your style.

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

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

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

We should totally get a dog!

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

I always lie about my registration number, N says. 

*

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

Don’t fall.

Will you catch me if I do?

You’d knock me over if I tried.

Would you at least cushion my fall?

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

Do you think you have a concussion?

I think I have a fucking headache.

How many fingers am I holding up? 

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

*

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

Second thoughts?

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

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

How much trouble is not much trouble?

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

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

You didn’t. And we’re already here.

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

They’re fucking adorable, J says.

They’re beyond fucking adorable, N says.

*

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

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

How long do you think it took to die? 

J takes back the bottle, takes a sip.

Six days.

You’re just making that up.

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

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

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

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

I heard that, too.

Suicide, probably.

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

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