Archive for category: Creative Nonfiction

The ores of divine providence
are everywhere infused, and
everywhere to be found.
St. Augustine, De Doctrina Cristiana

The margins of the world surrounded me—at least in the physical sense—for hundreds of miles in every direction: a no-man’s land of semi-arid deserts; middles of nowhere; and solitary mountain ranges. I lived in this no-man’s land, in the small town of Elko, Nevada, and worked in its middles of nowhere during the last two years of high school and the first two of college. I spent summers searching for gold in the remote mountains and hills of Nevada, assisting geologists from Newmont Exploration Company. We hiked rocky hillsides covered with gnarled brush and pungent with the smell of juniper and sage. We scoured long-abandoned mining towns and uninhabited landscapes searching for hidden traces of ore. We crisscrossed rugged terrain far removed from towns and highways, accessible only by dirt road or no road at all. When the land became too steep or rugged for a four-wheel drive pick-up, we hiked in with pack mules. The mules hauled our gear: tents, sleeping bags, shovels, metal placer pans, canned and freeze-dried food, water jugs, and rifles. I scooped soil into small canvas bags, labeled them by location and soil type (gritty, loamy, clay-like), and loaded the bags onto the mules. The geologists carried compasses, maps, and binoculars with which to orient us in the vast open spaces. It was big country, country to get lost in, scorched in, or find oneself in.

~

Nevada, western Utah, and southern Idaho comprise a region known as the Great Basin, a semi- arid region in the western United States encompassing some 206,000 square miles, of which 190,000 are desert. The region is bounded by the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the west, the Wasatch Mountains of Utah on the east, the highlands of the Sonoran desert to the south, and the Columbian Plateau to the north. Its rivers and streams have no outlet to the ocean—they flow into one of many salten lakes, where the water stagnates, evaporates into the air, or sinks into the earth, leaving behind alkali flats hostile to life. The mountains and highlands once encircled a small ocean teeming with life. Fifteen thousand years ago, a breach in the land in southern Idaho caused the ocean to drain away through a massive flood with a volume three times the flow of the Amazon River at its mouth. The basin is now dry, silent, and empty, with shrub growth maturing slowly and with difficulty.

Geologists refer to the region as “Basin and Range” due to its intermittent series of mountain ranges running north-south, separated by wide valleys covered with sagebrush, cheatgrass, and Russian thistle (tumbleweed). Author and photographer Stephen Trimble calls the basin a “sagebrush ocean,” stretching boundlessly across the silent uninhabited spaces. The mountain ranges tower over this sagebrush ocean like enormous islands, just as they once rose
out of the watery ocean as real islands.

The region is geologically active. The movement of tectonic plates has stretched the earth’s crust throughout much of the basin, creating hot holes, warm ponds, geysers, steam rising through fissures in the earth, and volcanic seepage. The surface appears calm—serene even—but not far under its crust seething, turbulent energies seek to rise through its attenuated skin. Those intense energies have created a molten brew in which heavy metals such as gold and silver get separated out from other minerals.

Geologists at Newmont were certain gold lay hidden in the hills and mountains of northeastern Nevada, even though prospectors discovered and removed most of the principal veins of gold and silver ore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In those earlier times mining boom towns sprouted throughout Nevada. They had populations of between 500 and 10,000 people, and were home to opera houses, churches, hotels, newspapers, hardware stores,
grocers, schools and, of course, saloons and whorehouses. Once the ore gave out, the populations dwindled, turning the once-bustling towns into ghost towns. Only a few decaying buildings and mine tailings—the waste ore dug from the mountain side—remain.

Although miners extracted the principal veins of ore, plenty of gold remains hidden in microscopic flecks diffused over a broad area. Newmont hired my friend Warren Hardie and me to help look for it. And we found lots of it, without ever seeing it. Only special assaying can detect it and, until recently, no one knew how to extract it profitably.

Just west of Elko a vein of gold runs northwestward by southeastward through northern Nevada, dipping deep underground at places, rising near the surface in others. The gold is dispersed widely so it is not really accurate to call it a vein; rather, geologists refer to it as a “trend,” the “Carlin Trend” to be precise, named after the small town nearby. The trend does not run in a straight line; it twists and turns as it dives and rises. Around 1960 geologists from Newmont Exploration Company discovered where it rises near enough to the surface to extract, and one of the country’s most profitable gold mines—the Carlin Gold Mine— sprang to life.

During the summer after my freshman year of college Warren and I worked at Bootstrap, a site fifteen miles north of the Carlin gold mine, and the home to a small mining operation in the early twentieth century. Prospectors had followed and extracted a vein of gold that ran horizontally through a large hill that stood alone in a great, broad valley. The tunnel, carved through solid rock, remained. Newmont bought the mineral rights and began assessing its gold
content.

I did mostly grunt work and heavy lifting, but the pleasure of trekking the backcountry of Nevada made the hard work and scorching daytime heat worthwhile. We worked in shifts around the clock throughout most of the summer. I volunteered for the graveyard shift, from 8:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m., to avoid the scorching sun of day. At night the temperature in the high desert dipped to 50 degrees Fahrenheit—jacket-wearing temperature—contrasted to the mid 90s during the day. Bootstrap was about an hour and a half drive, each way, from Elko, so Newmont provided a
small trailer for us to live in during the week. The trailer had no air conditioning, though, so the night crew could not sleep in it during the heat of the day. Instead we slept on cots in the old mining tunnel, where it was cool, dark, and silent. A heavy wooden door at the opening sealed the tunnel enough to keep critters out. Only the howling of distant coyotes broke the silence. Sometimes the coyotes came close enough that we could hear their yap-yapping near the door. We were safe within the tunnel, but we kept loaded guns within reach, just in case. The interior of the tunnel presented us with both a temptation to explore and a fear of the unknown. The fear kept us near the opening; none of us ventured into the darkness.

I worked on a drill rig that bored deep into the earth. The rigs used 20-foot steel poles, about five inches in diameter, with a hollow center, to drill down. A steel drill bit was attached to the lower tip of the pole, a bit designed for scouring rock and turning it to dirt. As the drill bore into the ground, an air compressor forced air through the hollow tubes of the poles, blowing the loosened dirt up the shaft to the surface, where I collected it in a tub. I took samples of the soil at five-foot intervals, placed a portion of the dirt in a canvas bag, labeled the bag with a number and, on a separate note pad, noted the depth, color, and consistency of the soil. Once the pole drilled down 20 feet, we attached another to it and continued boring. Each drill rig carried thirty or forty of these poles, so we could drill down 500 to 600 feet if necessary. When the lead bit hit a very hard layer of rock, it wore down, forcing us to raise all the poles out of the ground, one at a time, and replace the steel bit with a diamond one (diamonds are the hardest mineral and can cut through almost anything). Normally we drilled down several hundred feet before moving onto another site fifty yards or so away.

Based on the assay results, geologists created a composite map of the mineral content underground. I marveled at human ingenuity, at the ability to investigate nature, to test, explore,and discover what is beyond the range of our five senses.

I worked with an assistant geologist named Fred Buechel, a gruff, overweight man in his mid-forties. Beuchel had worked for several mining companies before, but had not been promoted to any supervisory role. He was a crank, a heavy drinker, and socially inept. Most of the summer employees disliked his sarcasm and cynicism, but I liked the way he used geological terms as cuss word intensifiers, which I suspected he picked up from reading Mark Twain’s
accounts of Mississippi riverboat pilots. Given his profession, it suited him well. He called prominent land forms by anatomical names (tits, pricks, thumbs, elbows), and sexualized references to digging and drilling into the earth. His language had color. He was once married to a Russian woman he found through an advertisement in the back of some magazine. After receiving her citizenship papers, she divorced him. After that, he despised women. His sole contact with them now was an occasional visit to a whorehouse, which one could find in every town in Nevada. When he went to town for “business,” we knew which one.

~

Warren and I hunted rattlesnakes on occasion (one of the drill rig operators said we could sell their venom for cash because medical researchers used it to produce anti-snake venom). The snakes denned in the cavities of rock outcroppings about 10 miles north of Bootstrap. We took poles made of cut tree branches, about six feet long. The tips, sharpened with our pocket knives,formed a Y-shaped fork that looked like your index and middle finger when you spread them. On our initial hunt we came across the first rattler on the road to the outcropping. It crossed the road in front of us. We jumped out of the pickup and grabbed our poles. The snake, sensing danger, slithered up the embankment on the side of the road and coiled itself into a small cavity near the top. We poked at it with the tips of our poles, arms stretched—a good-sized rattler can bite through a pair of leather boots, so we kept our distance. The poking made it angry and its rattler buzzed frenetically, but it soon slithered off to escape the annoyance. As it crawled, Warren forked it right behind the head, the pointed tips stuck in the ground. With its head immobilized the snake couldn’t strike. The rest of its body writhed, trying to get free, but it couldn’t. Warren grabbed the squirming body with his left hand to hold it still. With his right hand he firmly grabbed the neck just behind the head as I held the Y-prong tight. I removed the pronged stick so he could lift the snake up. I placed a small glass jar up to the snake’s open mouth, its fangs on the inside of the jar and its lower mouth on the outside. The pressure against the fangs forced the snake to secrete its venom into the jar.

We milked five more snakes that day, then let them go. Their venom wouldn’t be replenished for some time, so they weren’t dangerous. Before driving back to Bootstrap, Warren suggested we take a rattler back for Buechel. I knew just what he had in mind. We caught, milked, and killed another snake and took it back to the tunnel. While Buechel was in town “on business” that evening we coiled the snake up inside his sleeping bag, then waited up for his return.

As he got into the bag, he recoiled in panic. “Holy crap! There’s a fucking snake in there!”

When he heard us snickering he cursed up some graphic geology words, which grew in number of syllables as he went.

“Goddamn sons of bitches! I’m going to fire your paleozoic asses! Fucking carboniferous potheads!”

In our spare hours, when we weren’t hunting snakes, we played cards and drank beer. Beuchel shot at wildlife, mostly lone coyotes and jack rabbits. His rugged temperament seemed just right for these places—places for men in dusty boots who broke rock with handpicks and penetrated the earth with drill rigs and bulldozers. Men who passed the tracks of cougar and deer, and kicked away the shed skin of snakes and bleached antlers, without wonder, seeking no
messages, wishing only for a gun. They extracted the gleaming substance of earth, stripped away its mystery, without reverence. I was comfortable among them.

I found solace in the vast, silent spaces, too.

~

The more time I spent in the wide-open country, the more I noticed an austere beauty that awakened an inner recess of my psyche that I had not known was there. Like a long, dark mining tunnel, forbidding but also mysterious, I felt lured to explore its depths. Something subtle drew me, though I barely recognized it at first. A sense of the land’s awesomeness, even sacredness, filtered gradually into my mind. I had no words to describe it at the time, and even if I had, my co-workers, especially Buechel, would have thought me “touched.” Treasure of a different kind, I slowly discovered, can be found in out-of- the-way and unexpected places, even in this seemingly desolate region.

While contemplating the vastness of the landscape, I began to detect something like a primordial power in nature—could I call it Spirit?—that seemed to permeate the countryside. And Spirit is a stealthy hunter. It does not gather in packs to surround you, like coyotes. It does not remain downwind lest you detect its presence. It rides the wind and filters through the grasses, suffusing the quiet, hollow places of the world.

During lunch hour—which for the night shift came around midnight—we shut down the drill rig for an hour. While the other workers took naps in the pick-up trucks, I took solitary walks over the hilltop. I lay on the ground gazing at the stars and listening to the night sounds. I carried a flashlight and a rifle, but on many nights I didn’t need the flashlight; moonlight illumined the way. The distant hills and valleys gleamed like quicksilver. Sometimes I thought I sensed a kind of in- and exhalation of the earth, something living, yet invisible. Is the earth alive? Breathing? Is that possible? It seemed such a mystery, like when you lean over to hear an infant’s soft breath, to detect whether it’s still breathing. When you realize it is—what wonder!

One morning, in the tunnel before we fell asleep, Buechel asked,
“Where the hell do you go during your lunch breaks? You got a coyote sweetheart out there or something?”

I laughed. “I just wander around. Have you ever really observed the country out there in the moonlight? You can see so far. And it’s so quiet. It’s eerie, but beautiful.”

“Beautiful! This desolate place? There’s nothing out there but dust, sagebrush, and coyotes.”

“Yeah, but not just those,” I protested. “There’s beauty, too.”

“Yeah, well what’s that stuff covering your boots and pant legs every day? And what are those thorns in your socks, beauty incarnate?”

I knew just what he meant. The land got so dry it turned powdery. With every step we made, the ground belched a miniature dust cloud that settled on our boots and pant legs. The little burrs from cheatgrass seeds clung to our cotton socks and irritated the skin. We had to stop occasionally to pluck them out.

“But seriously,” I said, “there’s something mind-boggling out there, something mysterious, you know?”

“Oh, Jesus!” he said. “All I see is a bunch of dirt and weeds. Mysterious! You get some
sleep so we can go out tomorrow and find more gold. Then you should go invest in Newmont
and be rich as hell. They’ve found a rich lode, for sure. That’s why they’ve brought in more
workers—to work the drill rigs around the clock.”

“We kind of are already, aren’t we?” I said before he finished speaking.

“Kind of what?” he asked.

“Rich. You know, with all that—I don’t know.” I paused to find the words. “With all that spiritual beauty out there.”

Beauty. Spirit. Nature. All kind of mingled and interwoven in ways that were inexplicable to me, as hidden as those flecks of gold, unless you knew how to look for them.“You’re full of it,” he said as he turned over on his cot. “The earth’s just a lump of inorganic stuff with an itty-bitty covering of organic stuff, that’s all.” I intuited otherwise, but did not have the language with which to express my emerging awareness.

~

I brought my mountain bike to work, and began riding in the evenings before my shift began—wandering aimlessly along dirt roads and cow paths. One weekend I didn’t return to Elko with the others.

“You’re staying here all weekend?” asked Warren. “Alone?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at me, puzzled. “What about Jan? Aren’t you seeing her this weekend?” Jan and I had dated since high school and usually went out together on weekends. “What’s she going to think?”

“If you see her, just tell her I’m working through the weekend.”

“Just tell her he’s a weirdo!” interrupted Buechel, “that he’s got a breccia brain—you take a handful of jagged little rocks and squeeze them together with cement-like mud, and you get a brain like his that doesn’t think too keen. If he wants to stay here and commune with dirt, let him.”

The next day I biked on a gravel road leading northward. After half an hour I reached the top of a rise where I caught sight of a vehicle about ten miles away, heading in my direction—not really the vehicle, but a cloud of dust billowing upward from a moving point on the road. The dust formed an elongated cloud held aloft by air currents before gradually spreading out and floating back to the ground. I did not want to eat that dust, so I left the road and biked over the untrodden countryside: across creases in the land, through tall sagebrush and Russian thistle that scratched my legs and ankles. I stopped at the edge of a narrow ravine and climbed down it, wondering if I could discern something of its history. Had it formed from the waters of ancient streams, or had the earth cracked and split like wood drying too fast? I rode from one rise to another, horizon to horizon, criss-crossing the valley in a general northward direction, just to see how far the unbounded space could go before I reached something human—a fence, a ranch house, an east-west road, anything. Such a boundless land. An inner void, filling slowly with something I didn’t know, opened as I gazed on the ever-receding horizon. A void at once frightening and comforting. I couldn’t explain it.

I came to a large rock outcropping surrounded by brush. One side of the outcropping had a large overhang about six feet up, creating a shady spot—a good place to crawl into and have lunch. I wriggled through the brush on all fours until I got under the ledge, and sat with my back against the rock. It was utterly quiet except for a breeze whispering through the brush. A few bird feathers and bones of small animals were scattered here and there. A hawk must use this place for lunch, too. Good choice. I wondered if any other human had sat here. Probably not. As I drank water from my canteen, I imagined this recessed nook as a kind of sacred space, and thought this: around the hollow, sacred spaces revolves the busy world that, uneasy with a presence unseen, refuses to know its own quiet center (or at least some inchoate thought that I later translated into those words). I sat still in the nook, listening. The wind whirled about, raw and pure; it filtered through the brush, gently, rhythmically. The place was lonely; severe; comfortable.

During my walks and bike rides I began collecting the sheddings and remains of animals: deer antlers, snake skins, golden eagle and hawk feathers, and dry animal bones bleached by the sun. I hung them from the timber just inside the doorway of the tunnel. I hung the jar of snake venom, too (we never bothered to find out where we could sell it). Buechel pretended to scorn my decorations, but I knew he liked them because on one occasion he brought me a badger skull to hang.

“Here’s something for your freak art show,” he said, and tossed me the skull. A few days later he brought a coyote tail he’d cut from one of his kills. I hung it with the rest.

One day Warren and I were assigned a double shift—all night and the next day. We gouged soil samples from the wall of a ten-foot deep trench dug out by a Caterpillar. After a few hours in the mid-July sun we needed a break. I sat in the last sliver of shade against one wall of the trench. A hard, pointed rock, barely above the surface and hidden by a layer of dirt, jammed into my tail bone. Unwilling to give up the only shady spot around, I began to dig it out. It was firmly lodged. Digging further, I discovered a horn-shaped object extruding from a large boulder below. It was of a different material than the rock, yet encrusted to it. Could it be the petrified horn of some ancient animal? It was too thick to be a deer or antelope antler; more like a bull’s horn. Yet if buried ten feet underground it must have been deposited there millennia ago,long before cattle came to this part of the world. Perhaps a buffalo horn? No, it had spiral-like wrinkles around it. It didn’t look like any horn I’d seen. I chipped off the extrusion from the rock with a hand pick and stuck it in my ruck sack. In the evening I showed it to Buechel.

“Do you have any idea what this is?” I asked.

He turned it over a couple of times, spat on it, then wiped off the wet dirt with his shirt tail. His facial hair showed several days of growth. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, then examined the object with a magnifying glass.

“Coral,” he said. “Coral rugosa to be exact.”

“Coral? Here? I thought coral grew on the ocean floor, in the tropics.”

“It does. Hundreds of millions of years ago, this place used to be under a tropical ocean.”

“Oh, come on. You’re pulling my leg.”

“No, I’m not,” he said. “The slow movement of tectonic plates shifted the continent way up here. That’s a piece of coral, all right, probably from the Devonian period.”

“When was that?”

“About 400 million years ago, give or take a few years.” Buechel was a crank, but he knew his geological history.

“So was this thing alive at the same time as the dinosaurs?”

“Earlier. About 150 million years earlier.” He paused a while. “If you go over to the Toquima Mountain Range, you’ll see plant fossils that are 600 million years old. And I’ll tell you something else. Someday the valleys in the Great Basin will be filled with ocean water again. This entire basin is stretching and expanding, just like the Atlantic basin did after North America separated from North Africa. Eventually the stretching will open a breach to the Pacific Ocean—maybe in southern California, maybe in northern California— but when it does, this will be ocean again and a big chunk of California will be an island. The Humboldt River and all the smaller streams will have an outlet to the ocean instead of emptying into alkali flats. That’s inevitable. Probably not before we get the gold out of this hill, though.” Beuchel, it seemed, knew something about the geological future, too. How could someone who knew the deep history of this land not see beauty in it?

I held the coral up to have a close look. “So this thing lived 400 million years ago?”

“Yeah. Maybe only 398 million.”

“Ah, so it’s not very old, then.”

“Nah. Not much older than your mama,” he said.

“Your mama, maybe,” I said as I tied a string around a wrinkle of the coral and hung it along with the coyote tail, deer antlers, and other items. I pondered my decorations.

“Could any of these animals hanging here have descended from this coral? You know,
maybe the coral evolved into an animal and one of these things is its descendent,” I said.

“Probably not, but you might be, with that fucking precambrian fossil brain of yours.”

~

It was the night of the full red moon of August. We had finished our work at Bootstrap several weeks earlier. We knew it was time to move on when the big yellow earth movers started arriving. Mining engineers, geologists, and surveyors wandered the hillside, surveying, calculating, pointing things out to one another on maps and drawings. Newmont would soon blast the hill with dynamite and shovel loads of earth into the giant trucks, which would haul the ore to the Carlin Gold mine for crushing and heap-leaching.

In a typical heap-leach operation, miners remove tons of ore from hillsides or open pits, crush it into dirt, and pile it onto clay or plastic liners. They then spray large quantities of cyanide solution over the ore. As the cyanide percolates through the layers of dirt, it draws microscopic flecks of gold and extracts up to ninety-seven percent of it from the rest of the ore. This “pregnant” solution concentrates at the bottom of a drainage system, where the miners distill and process it further. We completed our work without seeing a speck of gold. Buechel had predicted Newmont would find a rich lode; the increased activity and earth movers confirmed it.

Newmont sent Buechel and me to the Prospect Mountains in central Nevada, just south of Eureka—a nineteenth-century boom town now turned into a lethargic community of around 350 inhabitants. As we drove through town we noticed a handful of old-timers sitting on benches in front of decaying buildings.

“What do you think these old guys do all day long?” I asked.

“They probably reminisce about the old days and hope a new deposit of gold gets discovered so the town can spring back to life with saloons and whorehouses.”

Buechel and I explored the region surrounding Prospect Peak, the highest mountain in the range at 10,400 feet, and the site of significant mining operations in the 19th century. Extensive tailings fanned out from the mouth of several tunnels. Tons of dirt had been removed, so the tunnels went in deep, perhaps forming honey-combs inside the mountain. We planned to spend two weeks there.

I collected soil samples at 100 foot intervals while Buechel analyzed rock outcroppings and applied drops of chemicals to the dirt I dug up. He smelled and licked chips of rock he broke off with his hand pick, tasting for hints of certain minerals. We worked our way gradually over a nine square mile area, with frequent stops, side trips around ravines, and slow climbs up the mountainside. Because of Buechel’s weight, he had to take it slow. We pitched a tent alongside a spring, and in the evenings gathered firewood, and cooked our meals. We hunted cottontail or grouse for dinner.

The alpine terrain, well above the sagebrush zone, boasted rich grasses, berries, pinyon pine, wildflowers, and springs—good country for sheep-grazing. We chanced upon a flock almost daily. A Basque sheepherder made a point of visiting us regularly, glad for human contact. He spent nights alone in a metal-covered wagon stationed near the bottom of the canyon. He rode up the mountain on horseback each day to check on the flocks and share wine with us
from a leather bota. He spoke little English, so we conversed in pidgin and by gesture.

One morning Beuchel and I discovered two dead sheep lying in the brush. We walked over to have a closer look. As we approached we saw others. Three. Four. Five. Then many others, twenty-three in all. Dead sheep strewn everywhere.

“What the hell happened here?” I asked.

“Dunno,” said Buechel. “Maybe they ate some poisonous plants clustered in the area.”

Later that day, we met the sheepherder and pointed out the site to him. On the following day rangers from the Fish and Wildlife Service came to inspect the scene. They determined a lone mountain lion had killed them, not for food, but for sport. None of the sheep—not one—had been eaten.

Buechel and I did not sleep in the tent that night or out in the open, knowing a killer was
on the loose. We slept in one of the mining tunnels on the side of Prospect Peak. Its shabby
wooden door closed well enough. We kept our loaded rifles nearby.

~

The night witch set loose by the full moon forbade me sleep. I lay for a long time on the cot, pondering the great expanse of geological time and our minuscule span of life within it. Though just a microscopic fleck within its enormity, I felt a strange kindredness toward it. I wanted to walk about, but dared not because of the cougar. I decided to explore the tunnel instead. I put on my boots, grabbed a flashlight and rifle, and walked into the darkness.

I shone light on the walls and felt the layers of earth, one upon another. How old are these rocks? If an ancient coral fossil ten or twelve feet below the surface was 400 million years old, how old was this rock deep inside the mountain? A billion? It boggled the mind.

The tunnel went straight into the mountain for at least a hundred yards, then branched off in three directions. I took the branch on the right, the wider one. After another hundred feet or so,the tunnel descended steadily, deeper into the darkness. More branches. Then cross branches. Again I took the larger one, reasoning it would be the main branch. By following the larger tunnel consistently I should be able to find my way back. After a time, the air became tight. It grew warmer. Another branch veered to the left.

I began following a rise. The vein of ore must have trended horizontally, then twisted downward before gradually ascending. Walking became labored, breathing more difficult, though I was used to climbing hills. I stopped frequently to catch my breath. Altitude sickness? I felt a momentary disorientation. What if I got lost in this maze of passageways? Would Buechel think to look for me here? He was accustomed to my nighttime walks; he would assume
I had gone outside; would look for me in the morning, and wonder if the mountain lion had dragged me off to its lair.

What would happen if I died in here? Would they find me? If not, I imagined two endings. One was this: if Newmont found gold, they would tear down this mountain and my remains would end up in a heap-leach pile, dissolved by cyanide. The second was less dispiriting. The earth’s movement would close the tunnel and fuse my bones with Devonian or Ordovician rock. Some geologist would discover them ten million years from now and place them on exhibit as an example of a primitive hominoid form. Viewers would speculate on what thoughts I might have had, and what dreams and promises I never fulfilled. Would they be able to deduce from DNA that I had thoughts and dreams? Could scientists, by then, recreate my memories—such as bike rides toward a boundless horizon? Could they recreate the wonder and mystery of that?

I continued along the passageway. If I got lost I could shout for help from Buechel—if he could hear me, anyway. I imagined him banging on a placer pan repetitively, and I would follow the sound back. That image led to a curious question, given the circumstances. Would I even want to shout for help from Beuchel? Would death be any worse than the smirk on his face when I found my way back? I could hear his words, “Hey, Tonto, did you find some creature back there with an Archaean brain like yours?” Yet, I knew he would worry.

Soon I noticed a musty, acrid smell. And foul. Was it the odor of death? It grew stronger. Soon I entered a widened chamber, a small cavern of sorts. I shone light all around. There were bat droppings agglomerated on one side wall. They spread onto the floor, rank and hot, the outer layer still moist. Ghoulish stuff. I started to turn back, but then noticed there were no bats. They must be outside, hunting insects. There had to be an opening somewhere nearby. How else could they get out? I continued past the chamber. Soon a hint of outside air mingled with the musty, stale air of the tunnel. As the outside air became stronger I perceived a soft light up ahead. It came from an opening above, right where the tunnel came to an abrupt end.

A wooden ladder, old and decrepit, rose to the opening. Why did the miners use this opening? They couldn’t have hauled ore out through here. An escape route, probably. Two of the ladder’s rungs were missing, others were creaky. I pressed against it, shook it, pulled on the rungs within reach, stood on the bottom one. It was usable. I carefully ascended.

Outside, the full moon glowed fiery orange, not far above the eastern horizon. I walked to the top of Prospect Peak to get the best view, and peered over what seemed the edge of the world. To the north a few dim lights from Eureka shone in the distance. In all directions the sky extended limitlessly and the earth seemed to stretch out with it. The great valley below waited expectantly, like a womb, to be filled with glory. There was a mountain range thirty miles beyond, and another, ninety miles, stretching like millennia over the vast empty spaces. The moon’s light bathed the earth in a soft amber sheen like the lustre of the ocean just after sunset,or before sunrise. Yes, yes, Spirit hovers over these boundless spaces. Seeps in and fills them. The great valleys are like lungs through which it breathes in and out, rhythmically, glacially. The moonlight was gold, space was infinite, and Spirit rested patiently, everywhere. I knew this, though I was unschooled in things spiritual. Something broad and expansive filled me. And I intuited this, too: the long decades and distances between saints are too much. We no longer expect to hear, out of those silent spaces, a word that will bless.

Art by Matt Monk

The memory hits me like hunger: sudden pangs, gnawing edgewise. First it’s just a headline and the torn edge of a story. A nutrition professor. His gruesome murder. Fast food strewn all around the apartment. Junk food shoved down his throat. Food smeared on his body. The professor choking, asphyxiating, on junk food. Struggling to free himself of it, but drowning in it.

I’m visiting Gainesville, Florida, where I attended college thirty years earlier and where my mother now lives. On my way in, I drive by the Wendy’s that was on the outskirts of town in the early 1980s but is now just another bead on a string of fast food restaurants extending far beyond city limits. That’s when the smell of charred, grease-coated French fries fills my mouth and nose even though the car windows are closed, the scent-and-taste memory triggering not physical hunger but a more nebulous need to unwrap the Junk Food Professor story packed up in my unconscious.  

It was the start of fall semester, 1982, my sophomore year at the University of Florida. The Equal Rights amendment had just failed to be ratified, Ronald Reagan was eight months into his presidency, and Anita Bryant served orange juice flavored homophobia across Florida. At nineteen years old, I’d just moved into the honors dorm, and was about to struggle through organic chemistry, my major. I’d study the molecular structure of cholesterol and the process of hydrogenation that turned liquid oils into saturated fats along with partially saturated cis- and trans-fat by-products. On the personal front, I’d discover Pink Floyd and the Talking Heads as alternatives to Michael Jackson and Madonna, and I’d hear the first rumors about a new “gay cancer.” Later in the eighties, after I’d left, the “Gainesville Ripper” would rape and murder five female students matching my description—petite Caucasian brunettes—before being caught, and the University of Florida would be ranked a top party school by Playboy magazine. But in 1982, it was not rape, murder, drugs, or alcohol that posed the greatest threat to me. It was food.

~

1982 is as good a year as any to mark the time when food got truly scary, not only for me but for U.S. culture more generally. That year, the FDA published its first “red book” on the safety of color and other additives in food, signaling a new era in which food was now synthesized in an industrial chemical plant. “It was in the 1980s,” Michael Pollan has written, “that food began disappearing from the American supermarket,” to be replaced by processed edible “foodstuffs.” Known as “the decade of consumption,” the 1980s was the decade in which sugars in soft drinks were replaced by high fructose corn syrup and in which aspartame was first marketed, quickly colonizing diet soft drinks. Supermarket food was cheaper than ever, and junk food junkier, more processed, and sweeter and richer than anything nature on its own could provide. New packaging technologies and preservatives allowed fast, “one-hander” foods to migrate beyond supermarkets into drug stores, gas stations, and vending machines. The new microwaves could create instant meals around the clock. Convenience foods were suddenly everywhere. Foodstuffs became unnaturally ubiquitous and, as the ad went, “magically delicious.”

Food advertisements, too, proliferated, along with fad diets, Jazzercise franchises, and ever- skinnier models. The messages invaded. Have it your way. You deserve a break today. It’s finger lickin’ good.  Bet you can’t eat just one. Everything around me said “Eat!” Everything around me said “Don’t eat!”

~

My memory jolt about the Junk Food Professor’s murder recurs at a Gainesville Starbucks, where I’m rewarding my caffeine addiction amid students snacking before laptop screens. Coffee is my fast food now. Back when I was a student, there were no Starbucks cafes, no laptops or even computers. Instead, I dawdled in fast food restaurants, huddled over thick books while trying to make my salad last. Three decades later, dawdling over a venti dark roast, I take out my own iPhone and google. I quickly realize that I’ve misremembered the incident in significant ways.  

Howard Appledorf really was a professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Florida. That much I’d remembered correctly. The rest of the memory spent too long submerged in my unconscious, creating its own slant truths.

According to newspaper reports in the Gainesville Sun and elsewhere, Appledorf met at least one of his killers in June of 1982, when he attended a soft drink convention in San Francisco. Appledorf was known as an apologist for the fast food industry—hence his moniker “the Junk Food Professor”—and he allegedly received financial support for his work from the National Soft Drinks Association. More diplomatically, the Special Collections library of the University of Florida housing his papers says of him that, as “[a] national spokesman for the Institute of Food Technologists, he argued that ‘fast foods’ are of high nutritional value.” In professional papers as well as on national television talk shows, such as the John Davidson Show, Appledorf defended the nutritional value of franchise foods. He analyzed such meals as a fried chicken dinner and a burger-shake-and-fries, and found their nutritional value to be at least “adequate,” sometimes “pretty good.” He himself did not like the term “junk food”; he wrote in a 1980 paper entitled “Marketing Nutrition in Fast Food Operations” that fast foods suffer from “an image problem” and that it “is disturbing to see fast food referred to as ‘junk food,’ particularly in view of the wide variety of nutrients found in foods sold in fast food restaurants.”  That same paper condemns the “food activists” and “food purists” for their “politicalization of nutrition,” and implies that eating healthily is ultimately a matter of individual responsibility.

While overt about his controversial, much-maligned support of fast food, Appledorf was in the closet about his sexuality, and seems to have led a double life. In an era just before AIDS outed gay men on a mass scale, forcing a visibility to gay identity undreamed of before, it was far more disgraceful to be homosexual than to be a scientist-shill for the fast food industry. But out-of-town conventions seemed to offer Appledorf opportunities to explore his other life. On his San Francisco trip, Appledorf , who was then 41 or 42 years old, met Paul Bown, 21, on Polk Street, and the two went to Appledorf’s room in the Hilton. There they split a $75 bottle of champagne, and, according to Chery McCall of People magazine, Appledorf “reportedly contracted for sexual services for two nights for $200. Later, he bought clothes for Bown and gave him another $200 before returning to Florida.”

But what happened in San Francisco followed Appledorf back to Florida. In the third week of August, Paul Bown, along with his friends and fellow prostitutes Paul Everson, 19, and Shane Kennedy, 15, showed up at Appledorf’s condo in Gainesville. During their stay with him, Paul Everson stole a check from Appledorf’s checkbook and forged it for $900. Appledorf first wanted to press charges, but when Everson contacted a local television reporter and claimed that Appledorf had molested him in exchange for the money, Appledorf dropped the charges under the condition that the three men leave town.

~

That may well have been the same week that, on campus across town, I entered a bathroom in the Reitz student union building. It was the week before classes started:  rush week. Just as I slipped into a stall some sorority girls entered the bathroom. One was talking to another about purging. I’d heard about this new illness called bulimia in magazines, but didn’t know anyone who did it. “Everybody does it,” the sorority sister said.  

I knew about anorexia, of course, and had already dabbled in it. In high school, during the Bo Derek era, I’d eaten only boiled chicken and vegetables to keep myself under 100 pounds. Over the summers I’d restrict my caloric intake to 800 a day. But such severe energy restriction was hard to keep up in college. While fraternities posted signs saying “No Fat Cows,” I was, according to my hallmates, “porking out.” I could now feel my thighs brush against each other as I walked. I tried a fellow chemistry major’s diet of freeze-dried coffee and nothing else, but couldn’t handle the jitters on top of the hunger. Special K ads asked, “Can you pinch an inch?” For the first time, I could.  

“You just stick your finger down your throat,” the sister said. “It’s hard at first, but it gets easier the more you do it.”

~

On September 2nd, Appledorf left for New York to lecture on nutritional trends at the Good Housekeeping Institute. That’s when the three itinerant young men returned to his home, broke in the back door, and camped out. They pawned some of his gold rings, threw food and clothes around, ate his food and drank his alcohol in front of the television. Before his expected return on Tuesday, September 7th, they bought three Subway sandwiches.

~

Perhaps that was the same morning when, eating my breakfast of Special K in the student cafeteria, I looked up from my newspaper to see a girl from last year’s freshman dorm joining me. I remembered her as a party girl. “I should be eating like you, she said, “instead of this egg muffin. I’m getting so fat. I can’t stand it. Look at how many inches I can pinch. I swear. I wish I could make myself vomit. That would solve everything. But I just can’t do it. I try. I stick my fingers all the way down my throat, but I don’t have any gag reflex left.”  She spoke with such infectious longing, as if bulimia would make her life complete. She assumed I would understand. I did. She sighed and added, “Sometimes when I drink I can make myself vomit. So when I’m drunk I get to eat anything I want.”  

That monologue has remained with me so clearly all these years that what I’ve recreated above has got to be an extremely close approximation, if not verbatim. But even more than the words, I remember the longing, and its flip side of despair.

~

On September 7th, Appledorf returned home. Upon entering, he saw the three men and the state of his house. An argument ensued. At one point Appledorf tried to leave but was blocked. That’s when Paul Everson struck the professor’s head with a frying pan. Appledorf sank to the floor.

At least two of the three men bound Appledorf’s hands, feet, and knees with his own ties and belts. They gagged him, and then put a sheet over his head and a bag over the sheet. Everson bounced on Appledorf’s chest until “the air went out of him.” Bown continued to strike Appledorf’s head with the frying pan until the handle fell off. When one of them put a cigarette out on the exposed skin of the professor’s stomach, there was no response. That was when they realized they’d killed him. An autopsy would determine that Appledorf suffocated. He was not killed with junk food, as I’d remembered.

In dispute is the level of involvement of the young Shane Kennedy. Some reports have him either in the bedroom or outside through much of this, sick to his stomach and vomiting.

~

One day early that semester, around the time of Appledorf’s murder, I passed through the student union, hungry as usual, and the smell of French fries, saturated in grease and lava-hot, overtook me. I bought a carton from the cafeteria and ate. One after another, until they were all gone. Then I went to the bathroom, the same one where I’d heard the sorority sisters talking, and leaned over the toilet. I didn’t even decide, I just did it. It was easy. I didn’t even need to use a finger. Just tightening my abdominal muscles did the trick. And then I was ethereally empty.

After that, food beckoned, always. Everything forbidden was now possible. Food appeared everywhere. It was no longer connected to its natural role of nourishment and became a drug. The cravings went wild. A nutrition professor might have been able to tell me that with each purge, the blood sugar level drops precipitously while electrolytes—which help regulate heartbeat and neurological function—get way out of balance. Such nutritional crashes can mimic a drug addition.

Eternally hypoglycemic, I’d sit in class thinking about my next meal. I was either stuffed or starving. I couldn’t get off the Ferris wheel. In lecture hall one day, light-headed with hunger and hypoglycemia. I felt my fingers tingle, then curl into claws. I didn’t know how I’d manage the lock on my bike when I couldn’t move my hands. Was I too faint to walk home? Could I make it back to the dorm? Or would I have to stop at the vending machine and get those crackers with the synthetic cheese or peanut butter. But at 300+ calories, along with the neurological panic and elevated heart rate such a caloric jolt would instigate, I’d have to start the cycle all over again.  

And again and again. When the Appledorf murder happened, I was the one choking on the food shoved down my throat.

~

  After they realized Appledorf was dead, the three men staged the crime scene to look like a ritualistic murder. They arranged four plates in the room, three with the remains of their Subway sandwiches and one empty of food but bearing a note saying, “HOWARD, I wish you could join us.” Inspired by the movie Times Square, they wrote “HOWARD, we love you sincerely. The slez sisters” on the wall, and, inspired by The Shining, added “murder” and “redrum” in red ink. Everson scrawled an insane, unsigned confession on a steno pad. Then they fled north in Appledorf’s Pontiac Firebird.

Appledorf’s three killers were caught fairly quickly, thanks in part to the cooperation of New York’s gay community, and prosecuted for their crimes.  

~

In retrospect, Appledorf’s story, despite its role in my memory, is more about the era of the closet just before AIDS. I see it now as an illustration of the harm that the closet can do, and, relatedly, an uncanny preview of the rapid movement of the AIDS virus from San Francisco to New York with many stops in between. Food in this drama was merely a decoy, which the killers used to both reveal and conceal their real pathologies. In the next decade, psychologists studying eating disorders would similarly say that these pathologies, too, aren’t really about food per se; food is the correlate at hand, in this culture of abundance and consumption, through which to ineffectually express/displace harder-to-articulate problems. Cultural critics would argue that eating disorders express not simply individual anxieties but societal conflicts. They are a kind of “compromise formation” through which young women negotiate their culture’s impossibly mixed messages about gender and consumption.  

At any rate, my memory of Appledorf’s murder fell for the murderers’ decoy that the story was about food, when it was really about things like the closet, class, power, and complicated systemic problems I didn’t know how to recognize, much less analyze. My memory metamorphosed the Junk Food Professor’s story into my own.

~

If my deceptive psyche projected my own crisis onto the Junk Food Murder story as it unfolded, and allowed my own unconscious needs to shape its narrative, then it performed a well-recognized displacement. Sometimes memory works like a dream. I would learn in a literature class that semester that, according to Freud anyway, the psyche reveals by concealing, offering truths through myth and metaphor, containing unacceptable desires in those bright, diverting wrappers. Like so many dreams, my false memory—or nightmare—may be truer than the true version, at least for me.  

~

I was lucky. I got chest pains, and rushed to the clinic fearing a heart attack. The pains turned out to be only a chest wall muscle spasm—probably developed from the strain of vomiting—but when the doctor saw my potassium level results she read me the riot act and scared me straight. I immediately gained ten pounds and settled into a more conventional self-disgust.

Still, I’ve been fighting dual impulses—fear of fat and longing for calorie-rich processed food—ever since. Even now, here in this Starbucks, a middle-aged woman, I sit with my coffee, longing for and loathing the turkey panini, whose warm, greasy smell overtakes the scent of charred coffee beans. I’m as consumed by this savory sandwich I’ll never eat as by my return-of-the-repressed memories.  

I say I’m lucky because I could have died from my disorder. Up to 30% of bulimarexics do. Another third recover. The final third linger on, bound and gagged by unnatural appetites. It’s not merely the extreme eating disorders (like bulimia and anorexia) that make up the death tolls of our junk food era, though, but also diseases resulting from what even Howard Appledorf called “the malnutrition of affluence”: the increased Type II diabetes incidence, the heart and circulatory conditions, the cancers correlated with dietary and body fat, and other diet-and-lifestyle-related illnesses. It’s these low-level but widespread food and consumption disorders that ultimately kill us culture-wide.

~

So maybe the story is one of Junk Food Killers after all. Ever since 1982 the junk food industry has taken our collective national metabolism captive to the point where we’re choking on overconsumption. As a culture, we now need tracts like Michael Pollan’s bestseller Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual to re-teach us how to eat in the most basic of ways. “Eat food. Not too much.  Mostly plants,” is his most famous, overall guideline, but he also offers sixty-four additional common-sense guidelines, such as “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.” Perhaps it was not 1984’s Big Brother but the food industry that loomed over us and invaded our most intimate spaces, inducing us to pinch our inches and discipline our bodies even as our collective food desires got more and more out of control. 1982, the year the Junk Food Professor was murdered, may well be the year we began to develop the national eating disorder we’ve been struggling with ever since.  

Art by Matt Monk

We took a walk this evening as we often do. My husband pushed my daughter in her stroller as I walked alongside. There are things I notice each time we pass them—the morning glories a block down that wind their cursive tendrils round the fence posts, the fat yellow cat who glowers after us from the makeshift throne of her lawn chair, the Cape Cod nearly hidden beneath the weeping of a funeral party of willows. In one yard a thicket of blackberries. In another a bed of cherry tomatoes. Standing sentry at the park the orange-leaved tree that warns us of the coming cold.

Yesterday on my kitchen radio I heard about a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo whose child was cut from her arms with a machete. I should say I saw one woman and child in my mind, but there were actually hundreds. Hundreds of women and children hacked to death by machetes. Other children in the vicinity were tossed down wells. I can’t remember why. Afterward I squeezed my daughter so hard and long against my chest that she began to cry. I didn’t think it should frighten her to be loved so.

When I was twelve, my friend’s father Chet was crushed to death by a semi while he raked tar on the side of the highway. I knew him from church services and church picnics, from volleyball games and sleepovers I shared with Emily, his 12-year-old daughter. His son Jordan and I had begun a secret romance a couple of months before Chet died—the sort where you slip each other notes, speak infrequently on the phone late at night, and glance at one another across the pews when you think no one’s looking. I suspect Chet knew of our longing; I imagine it amused him, brought him joy.  

Sometimes I take my daughter to the library, other times to the park. We sit on a blanket in the grass, and I blow bubbles. They mystify her. She stretches her whole body after them. When they pop, she studies the empty air with a furrowed brow as if to say, these things should not happen.

I attend a talk at the university. A man from the Democratic Republic of Congo describes how in his country rape is used as a weapon of war. After the militants break the women, he says, their husbands cannot forget their powerlessness. In this way, the people’s spirits wither and die. Then it is easy to sweep the broken families from the rich land like so many empty husks.

A woman in my hometown dresses her goose. It is plastic, white with a yellow beak, about three feet high. It stands at neck-stretched attention on the front porch next to a line of boxy yews. I pass the goose on the way to and from my parents’ house, and each time it sports a new look – always seasonally inspired. A Santa costume. A raincoat with matching bonnet.  A pinafore of hearts. A sundress. Striped Uncle Sam suspenders and a top hat. The dour black cloak of the sober pilgrim.  

Back when I was eight years old and the center of everything, I suspected that the world was designed for the express purpose of testing me. Everyone was in on it, even my mother. The stories that were too dreadful to be true – stories of kidnappings and murders and war – were actually untrue. My only responsibility was to react with appropriate horror and disbelief so that onlookers would admire my empathic spirit. Also, so that they would not know that I knew they were lying.

This morning I smooth down my daughter’s curls and find a lump, hard and inescapable, the size of a chickpea beneath her ear. I’ve noticed it before, but it was smaller and soft—the doctor told me not to worry unless it changed. So I call the office and request to speak to a nurse, who tells me it may well be nothing but suggests I bring her in to make certain. The appointment is in two days. Tonight I will forget to eat dinner. Somewhere out there a woman is dressing her goose.            

Most would have thought Chet rough at first glance – he was bearded, spoke in a gruff voice and wore a working man’s flannels. But with me he was as gentle as a baby. And he noticed things. He noticed when I had something to say even though as shy as I was, I wasn’t likely to say anything. He noticed when I didn’t feel well or when life was weighing heavy on my mind. It wasn’t that I ever made a fuss. I sat where I was told to sit and did what I was told to do, but Chet could tell. I know because of how he looked at me, his large brown eyes the eyes of a vigilant deer, and because of how he mixed humor with hope. Sometimes I accompanied the congregational hymns on piano, and after service in the church lawn he’d softly box my shoulder. “You keep playing piano like that, you won’t even make it to junior high. They’ll just pull up in a limo and whisk you straight off to New York City.” He looked and saw and understood all at once. He remembered how the world can deluge the young, how it can surge the shore and suck them under. So Chet built his own floating harbor, his stack of sandbags. I wanted to marry Jordan in part because I cared for Jordan but in part because then Chet would be my father, too.

In the DRC, combatants pitch a 15-year-old girl into a pit and rape her daily for three months. Her friend, also in the pit, dies 6 weeks in, about the time the 15-year-old girl realizes she is pregnant. She spends the next six weeks watching her friend rot. Inside her girl’s body, life anchors its obstinate root.

Chet died August 5th, 1993, at approximately 11:00 a.m. After his death I asked my mother for the precise time and wrote her answer in my diary, then looked up the word approximately and wrote that down as well: “Near or approaching a certain state, condition or goal.” It’s 11:00 and Chet is approaching the state of death, is oblivious to its swift pursuit as he scrapes the tar rocks over the asphalt seam just ahead of the roller with its hot black wheel and engine whine that drowns out those horrific seconds when the other men leap into ditches and shout one another’s names. It’s 11:00 and the sun shifts imperceptibly, the clocks align and a trucker spills hot coffee on his crotch or fiddles too long with the CB or simply succumbs to the hypnotic white line he’s traced since Atlanta, since midnight or Sunday or was it maybe even July he wonders and is still wondering in that warmly blissful near-sleep of eyes rolled back, lids lightly closed when a horn bleats, the ground beneath his wheels crunches and dips and a deafening wrench of metal jerks him awake.

At the university, the Congolese man says, “If we tell people what is happening to the women, they will stop listening. They cannot bring themselves to listen.”  

If my calculations are correct, the woman has been dressing her goose for nearly twenty years. It gawks on. The other day it boasted a black jumpsuit with golden studs. A large, glossy pompadour was fastened atop its small head.

August 5th, 1993. Soon after 11:00 our phone rings with a cheerful chirrup. My mother answers, hangs up, climbs the stairs, news of death in her throat. I blink for a minute, shake my head, walk past her, jog down the stairs, sprint out the side door past my father, who is locking the carcass of a turkey in the smoker, the scent of which will haunt me for the rest of my life but especially on that day as I run, as I ride my bike, as I climb the maple, as I try to read, play piano, watch TV – one thing after another after another until I find, at long last, that it’s approximately one o’clock in the afternoon, and I am approaching the state of grief, have exhausted all possible distractions when it rams me, annihilative as a semi, and I lie down on my bedroom floor and weep.    

Later that afternoon, we bring the family a platter of smoked turkey muffled in Saran wrap. Emily and I lie across her bed. That morning, she tells me, her father woke her up to kiss her goodbye – not a typical gesture. He knew, she says. He should have stayed home. Jordan sits in the living room and stares calmly at the wall. I say hi, and he sends me a puzzled smile. When his mother told him the news, he closed himself in the garage and beat the wall with his fists. He has washed them, but they still trickle blood. The bruises across his swollen knuckles are already beginning to purple.

Now twenty years later when I visit my parents, I drive past Chet’s cross where it stands nestled in the long grasses on the side of the highway. Several minutes later I pass the goose. I scan the roadside intently lest either of these objects slip past unnoticed. First, the white wooden cross with its sash of faded pink satin roses and his name, Chet Weller, nailed across its arms in black capitals. Second, the goose trussed up in its new ensemble – inscrutable, undying, attended. Why I must acknowledge them I don’t quite understand except that to be acknowledged is their purpose – to remind me that good people die randomly and young, yet there are other threads woven throughout the tapestry of life. For example, there is the comic, the slightly zany. There is the ubiquity of the ridiculous.

I scrutinize my daughter for signs of distress. Is she unusually tired? Is her appetite diminishing? Has she forgotten anything she once knew? Each of her actions is an occasion for observation, each storybook an exam. Beneath the high-pitched sing-song of my voice runs a current of urgency. Where’s the kitty? Can you point to the kitty? What does the kitty say?

Once when I was eleven years old and drifting off to sleep, I was struck by the certainty that my life would end that night. I was not sick or suicidal, just perfectly sure that I would not wake the next morning. I cried at the thought of my bereft mother and father, my brother and sister, my friends. I cried as I imagined my funeral. I cried that I would never again play piano or read a book. After tiptoeing into my parents’ room and trying without success to convince my mother of my imminent death, I returned to bed and cried myself to sleep. But then the unimaginable happened. I woke up the next day in perfect health, dressed, ate breakfast and caught the bus to school. At least, one version of myself did. In someone else’s universe, however – in someone’s universe who could bear the pain – I was convinced I had died. The school principal’s universe, perhaps, or the universe of a second cousin I had played with a handful of times. In this way, I thought, death would always be distant. Death would renew my appreciation for life, my gratitude for life, but it would not come close enough to crush me.  

I envy the woman who dresses the goose. The act betrays something that often escapes me. Frivolity, I think. Aimless enjoyment. Pleasure in the mundane.  

For a couple of years in my mid-twenties I worked with SXI (severely multiply impaired) kids from ages three to nine. One evening near the end of that era I found myself chasing a double dose of Vicodin with a six-pack of beer. A student I loved, Cece, a mere nine years old, had been slowly dying all year – since I had met her – though in truth they’d forecasted an early death from the day she was born. She had lost her ability to walk, then to stand, then to use her hands. Her seizures became longer and more frequent. She was fine-boned and thin with snappy brown eyes and freckles and a glossy black page-boy haircut. She was goofy and sweet. She loved to play little tricks on her classmates and ride therapy horses and visit her friends in other classrooms. Her coffin was small and white. I wore a skirt she would have loved. I never met her brother, who had died a few years earlier of the same disease. After the funeral, her parents wrote me a thank you letter. With it they enclosed a picture of Cece standing outside. Her eyes glow brightly, as if her head is full of sunlight. I cannot bear to look at the picture for very long. Her eyes shame me for reasons I can’t quite grasp. I was a little afraid of her; she was so delicate and so brave. She understood something crucial, something that she could not tell me, something that I do not, cannot know.

After the talk at the university, I approach the Congolese man and ask him what can be done to help. He directs me to a booth at the back of the room. I scrawl my signature on a petition for the U.S. government to suspend all non-humanitarian aid to Rwanda, whose government is arming and funding the rebels currently ravaging the DRC. I pick up a few fliers about activist groups and a fundraising hike.  

My daughter’s appointment is tomorrow. Today I sit her down so that I can chop vegetables for dinner, and she clings to my knees and screams. Eventually I give up and sit with her on the floor, build block towers that she, with the vehemence of a spiteful god, knocks over again and again and again.  

After Cece had left school to die, I visited her at her home. Her mother let me hold her like I used to do in class when she wasn’t feeling well. This time she felt smaller, emptier inside. Her skin had turned a pale grayish green, and her face had swelled, lips and cheeks and eyelids thick with fluid. She shook violently. But she seemed to remember me. She couldn’t use sign language anymore, but I think she remembered me. Her body still leaned against mine with its queer, familiar heft. When I handed her back to her mother and said my goodbyes, Cece fixed me with the same intent stare, urgent now, desperate to communicate something her failing body could not.    

Sometimes the goose is an opportunity to roll my eyes and wonder. Has the goose’s growing wardrobe demanded an entire closet? Does the woman organize the outfits according to season? Color? Holiday? And does she sew them herself, or does she order from a store? Could there be entire catalogues of goose costumes? Could there be a human being whose job it is to dream up new outfits for plastic poultry? To account for their short legs, their long necks, their substantial middle girth? To use these unique measurements to an advantage?       

Weeks later, I find the Congo fliers in the back of my car. They’re wet and the ink has smeared. I slip them into the recycling discreetly, as though I am being watched.  

I bought the six-pack on the way home from Cece’s. The bottles had barely begun to sweat when I popped the first cap and poured the dark bitter beer toward the two white pills already leaching comfort at the back of my throat. I stood in the middle of the kitchen, shoes on my feet, purse strap over my shoulder, sweater smelling faintly of her home, her soap, her souring skin. I tilted my head back and drank and drank.  

Though I’ve thrown out the fliers, the lecture continues to haunt me, so I find the Congo Activists of Michigan online. I register for their hike, sign up for their updates. I send out impassioned e-mails, raise three hundred dollars, walk five miles. I collect my friends’ used cell phones and computer parts and donate them to an organization that helps youth in the DRC set up social networking cells. I attend Congo Week at the university student center where I help catch people as they are passing and ask them to sign a letter to the Secretary of State. Send a postcard for peace in the Congo? Some say yes. Most say no, thank you, or they tell me that they are in a hurry. One girl pauses reluctantly. She is weary but willing. “What exactly do I have to do?” she asks.  

Two or three have heard of the crisis. They thank us for our work. The rest we give yellow half-slips of paper with a short summary of the conflict and a link to a documentary. When I leave the student center, I find one of the yellow sheets. The wind has blown it against the post of a bridge. It sticks there for a moment before slipping off and floating down into the dry bed of what used to be a stream.

Doctor Marla tweaks my daughter’s tiny nose before tiptoeing her fingers back beneath my daughter’s ear. I swallow hard, study the floor, think how this might be the moment I will recount years later, the moment when everything changed.  

Since 1994 the deaths from the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo are estimated at a little over six million. Such numbers are difficult to comprehend. Think Holocaust.  Think Rwandan genocide times seven. Think two Chicagos, think two Arkansas. Or if that doesn’t work, think a driveway of stones, think a field of wheat with its waves of ripe, golden heads. Or think of Chet and his children. Think of the woman who dresses the goose, of Cece, of my daughter. And then think of yourself and how precious you are. Think of your lover and your parents and your siblings and your children and the women you have loved and hated, and the men, and your teachers, and your coworkers, and all the men and women you have seen standing behind cash registers, and all of the people you have passed in cars, and everyone you have passed on the sidewalk; think of the children who have made you smile, and the children who have made you laugh, and the children who have cried when you were flying in a plane or shopping for groceries or just trying to read a book in a coffee shop, and the children who ride their bikes up and down the sidewalk in front of your home, and the children who you see riding up and down other sidewalks, and the children you have seen at the beach in summer running into the sea, and the children you have seen in the winter sledding down hills. I stress the children because mortality studies on the DRC conflicts report that three million who have died have been children, young children, children not even strong enough to lug minerals out of mines or to shoulder guns – children under the age of five. One Chicago of dead children under the age of five.    

I have seen the goose woman once or twice puttering about her yard. She looks as I expected her to look – short and solidly built with a stiff, gray hairdo. I have seen her watering her peonies in the mid-morning, sweeping leaves into tidy rows in the afternoon, but I have not seen her dressing her goose. I think perhaps it is part of her daily routine. She wakes, say, at seven o’clock. Dabs morning cream under her eyes, fishes her partials out of the water glass. Then she remembers the goose, and her heart quickens a little, reminds her of when her children would wake from naps and cry to her from across the house. Their voices were always so sudden and ardent that wherever she sat immersed in laundry or paperwork she would gasp a little and run to the nursery and stand a moment at the door with her hand on the handle, basking in that voice that called for only her. No, the goose is not the same, but as ludicrous as it is she still feels like she is taking care of someone – not the goose but maybe Mr. Henry, the neighbor five houses down, who always passes by dutifully at 8:30, behind his golden retriever. Or maybe her widowed Aunt Edith who visits when her rheumatism permits. Or maybe even someone she has not met, a young girl, a woman who drives past and cranes her neck for a brief glimpse of the goose’s new ensemble. A woman who thinks often on sad things. A woman for whom the goose, though she may not know it, is a relief.

Cece’s gaze still haunts me. I fear she was saying, “This never should have happened.” Or maybe, “Don’t forget me,” or, “Where is your anger?” or, “Don’t despair. When you die, I’ll find you, and we’ll talk.” Worst-case scenario: she was trying to tell me just how much she hurt, just how much she was afraid.  

Before I left my work with the handicapped children, I took pictures. Pictures of Julio dancing as he hummed the tune to “Twinkle Twinkle,” his right hand raised in its constant salute. Pictures of Janelle shooting me her trademark sideways smirk. Pictures of Harry carrying his lunch tray, a skill we had mastered over several months. Pictures of Micah lumbering to the office, the attendance sheet clenched in his determined grasp. Pictures of Meredith turning toward my voice with her sunniest smile.

“That’s a swollen lymph node,” Doctor Marla says. “We see them all the time, especially at this age. I hope they didn’t bring you in just for this.”

In the DRC, Dr. Denis Mukwege repairs women’s fistulas after rape or childhood pregnancy has torn their bodies apart. One evening, rebels invade his home. He ducks the gunfire, but his security guard is shot and killed. For the safety of his young family, he flees to Belgium. But he is haunted. Who will sew the women up now? Who will stitch their delicate organs back together? Certainly not me with my fundraising hikes, my postcards, my meager collection of outdated cell phones. Certainly not me, who scans articles from the safety of my home while my daughter naps on her soft mattress or patters from room to room, raising a toy in her fist like a dictator claiming a country. A few weeks later, Dr. Mukwege returns to his hospital in Bukavu. Further north, militants once more take the town of Goma. Refugees flee. One man, an article tells me, sprints from the city gripping a Thermos. He carries nothing else. In another article there is a picture of a father pushing his two children from town on a bicycle. Beneath their two thin frames, sacks bulge over the crossbars. The mother follows behind, bent forward under the bags on her back. She has hooked them over her head that she might use the strength of her neck, which bows forward so heavily she has no choice but to stare at the ground.

I showed a friend the pictures of the handicapped children, wanted to share their dear faces with someone I loved. I had only clicked through two or three shots when she stood up from the couch.  

“You hungry? I’m hungry,” she said, directing her gaze out the window.  

I tried another friend. The same thing happened – the silence, the shifting, the change of subject. Before meeting them, I would likely have done the same, would have been struck mute and sorrowful at the sight of their crooked faces, twisted limbs. I would have seen Julio’s thick eyebrows and missing fingers, Janelle’s wayward eyes, Harry’s milky stare, Micah’s giant helmet, Meredith’s wheelchair straps biting against her torso. I too would have been keenly aware of the tragedy and oblivious to the triumph it underscored – that life had carried on, despite its imperfections, and gifted the world these wonders, too.  

For a short time after the doctor’s news, relief dizzies me, makes me giddy. I whistle as I tug my daughter’s arms into her sweater. I skip out to the car as she bounces along on my hip. But the relief quickly fades. Yes, we have escaped death’s specter, but it will undoubtedly return. If this is some trifling exception, it is also a harbinger of the loss to come. One of us will bend over the other’s body after she has died, one of us will mourn and mourn and find little comfort.  

In the fall there are the orange and red warnings of cold. Chet’s and Cece’s bodies rot into velvet pillows under six feet of dirt. In the winter there are red berries capped with snow, cedar boughs that smoke green in the fire. Julio sings his favorite song. My daughter laughs whenever the cat walks into the room. In the spring there are days so suddenly warm and happy you feel like you are ten years old. A sixteen-year-old mother dreams of pits and screaming. In the summer I believe the green will never end; it is always a surprise when it does. A father pushes his whole life on a bicycle. A woman wakes up each morning and dresses a goose, smoothes a jogging suit over a white plastic back, slips on the matching headband thoughtfully outfitted with a nylon strap that promises to hold fast no matter the wind or the rain.   

Art by Matt Monk

Michelle Webster-Hein is an essayist and fiction writer from Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she finds herself moved by a multitude of common and not-so-common subjects. Her current projects include OUT OF ESAU, a novel set in a rural Michigan village, THE LOAD YOU CANNOT CARRY, a memoir of a global child psychiatrist, a children’s novel for my precocious daughter, and a series of meditations.

1.

After my death, no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least information about what has really filled my life, find the inscription in my innermost being which explains everything… once I take away the secret note which explains it. –Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), 1843

2.

Søren Kierkegaard and I ought to have been allowed to live in the same century.

In the best-known sketch of Kierkegaard, he is facing the viewer. His hair is wild and sweeps up away from his high, gentlemanly collar. He has a narrow face, high cheekbones, and an expression of placidness that borders on either boredom or sadness, depending on one’s mood when one looks at the image. His eyes are made of black ink, and the only thing that gives them the spark of life is white space—a lack of ink, an absence in the place where his eyes reflected the light. This is the spark of emptiness that locks with my gaze and watches me bemusedly.

White space is relief. It is balance. It breathes life and graciously gifts color and darkness with power. It provides room for the viewer to notate or revise. It is easy to forget that white space has its own shape and purpose. In crafting any kind of visual design, forgetting about white space is a mistake.

The white space in Kierkegaard’s eyes is easy to overlook. It takes time and close attention to notice it, appreciate it.

I never tire of this sketch.

3.

This same Søren Kierkegaard is the queerest bird of those we know: a brilliant head, but extremely vain and self satisfied. He always wants to be different from other people, and he himself always points out his own bizarre behavior. –Caspar Wilhelm Smith in a letter to his mother, 1841

4.

Søren Kierkegaard lived at the same time as Hans Christian Anderson. He was a philosopher whose trouser legs seemed to never be even. The Danish king kept trying to convince Kierkegaard to take a governmental position, but Kierkegaard got a particular sort of pleasure in turning him down. He would make fun of people to their faces and they’d never know it. As such, he was known for being egotistical and irritating. He was a Lutheran (I’m a Lutheran). He avoided the sun, even if it meant awkwardly cutting short a stroll with a friend, or moving from one side of the house to the other at various points throughout the day. He often wrote under pseudonyms, making his already complicated works more difficult to understand. It was never clear whether his works truly reflected his own thoughts or whether they were just mental exercises. Kierkegaard’s mantra: “Believe by virtue of the absurd.” That is, faith cannot be logically defended, or else it wouldn’t be faith.

He was engaged for a year to one Regine Olsen, with whom he then broke ties, and though society at large assumed he’d led her on, we can assume from his writings that he rather felt unfit for a life with her. He was too melancholy, too lost in his own worlds, destined for a life sustained by words and ideas, and not flesh and blood at all.

He has been called the Father of Existentialism.

5.

Once I ate at his house every day for five weeks. Merely providing nourishment for his hungry spirit was also a source of unending bother. Every day… coffee was brought in: two silver pots, two cream pitchers and a bag of sugar which was filled up every day. Then he opened a cupboard in which he had at least fifty sets of cups and saucers, but only one of each sort, and said: “Well, which cup and saucer do you want today?” It was of no consequence, but there was no way around it; I had to choose a set. When I said which I would take, he asked, “Why?” One always had to explain why, and then at long last we would be finished and get our cups. (He also had an astounding number of walking sticks.) Next he filled the cup with sugar over the rim and then poured coffee on it. It amused him to no end every day to see the sugar melt. –August Wolff in a letter to Hans Peter Barfod, relating remarks by Israel Levin, 1870

6.

Though he is considered its father (and so postmodernism’s grandfather), Kierkegaard never used the word “existentialism.” Perhaps he would even have disagreed with its 20^th century champions—Sartre, Camus. Existentialists see the world as chaotic and indifferent. One’s place in it, then, is an unanswerable question; the thinking, breathing, isolated individual is free to interpret the world as one pleases, and is also responsible and bound to that unique interpretation.

I have a coffee mug, a gift from my grandmother, which says “Lutheran Church Basement Coffee,” with a picture of a mug sprouting wings and covered with a halo. Below the picture, the words: “It’s heavenly.” On the other side of the mug it says, “Pray, and let God worry,” which is a quote from Martin Luther. Except a piece of the printing got chipped off, and now it says, “Pray, and let Cod worry.”

When I, a twenty-something-year-old, choose this mug to drink from, it is for no better reason than that I am feeling particularly “unique” and “isolated” at that moment.

Interpretations begin from the position of uniqueness and isolation.

7.

Kierkegaard’s nicknames:

The Fork. When Søren was a child, between being teased and cheating on tests, he was asked by his sister what he wanted most to be. His response: a fork. Why? Because, he said, then I could spear anything on the dining table.

Hunchback. He wasn’t actually a hunchback, but he had some unknown back ailment. And he slouched often, probably from spending too much time over his desk.

The Crazy Student. When he was at University, and chambermaids came into his room, he scared them just by the way he looked at them. He would sit stone-like and gaze at them with steam and intensity. He maintained that lewd thoughts should be avoided, but “daring expressions” were acceptable.

Choirboy. In school, he always wore the same, dark tweed clothing—oddly cut, short tails, always with shoes and woolen stockings.

Søren Sock. His father was suspected to have previously been a hosier.

The Other One. Regine was later heard to say, “Oh that [my husband, Schlegel] could ever forgive me for being such a little scoundrel that I became engaged to the other one.”

This, more than anything else, cuts me. To some, Søren is the Father of This and That, and to Regine, the only woman he loved, he was The Other One. Though he sent her a note years after her marriage that read, “You see, Regine, in eternity there is no marriage; there, both Schlegel and I will happily be together with you.” Kierkegaard never knew that towards the end, when she was frail and white-headed, she’d begin talking about her husband, about his goodness and their happy marriage. But she always, always ended with Kierkegaard. He was always the last name behind her teeth, in the back of her throat.

8.

To Søren:

Lately, I live in a basement that I rent from a single man with a child. His wife was diagnosed with stomach cancer when she was twenty-four years old and five months pregnant. The pregnancy had hidden all the signs, and they delivered her child early so that she could begin chemotherapy. It was too late, of course; she died the same year her son was born. Sometimes I wake up to the boy screaming in the night (he is one year old now), and I hear his father go to him and sing. His voice comes down to me through the floor. I am surrounded on five sides by earth, and little creatures with hair-thin legs crawl into my bed and along the walls. I listen to my landlord’s voice through the ceiling and imagine he is singing to me. But when his sisters come over with their husbands and new boyfriends, when his parents or in-laws visit, when they all gather around the table to eat, when I smell their candles and baking ham, I quietly slip out the door and into the night, unsure of where to go, but knowing I can’t stay there.

Søren, I know this has little to do with you. I know that our lives are wildly different, but I think in other ways they are the same. Søren, your egotistical rants don’t fool me for a second. Søren, I would have led you into the sun, and you would have let me. Søren, I believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and I believe in you, and I understand that this, too, is irrational. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be called faith.

Love, Me

9.

The shape of his body was striking, not really ugly, certainly not repulsive, but with something disharmonious, rather slight, and yet also weighty. He went about like a thought that had got distracted at the very moment at which it was formed… There was a sort of unreality about him. –Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, 1879

10.

It did not take long after Kierkegaard’s death to turn his biographies into an industry, especially because he left so much room for interpretation. It seems most of what we know of him has passed through the filter of others’ perceptions. Everything about him is a shadow of a shadow. A voice in a voice. This is no way to know a person, and yet it’s what we try to accomplish, and we do so without apology. These self-proclaimed biographers excuse themselves. As did Kierkegaard’s acquaintance, Israel Levin: “He never managed to understand himself… It was enough for him to form a conception: he ‘poetized himself’ into every kind of existence.”

11.

This is how I poetize him into existence.

I think of the slash through the “o” in his Danish name. I am at a bar with my friends, trying to explain Søren to them. And I tell them everything about him is enticing. The sketch of him is enticing. The slash through his “o” is enticing. I’d like to put a slash through his “o.” I want to peel apart his pockets of words, like pulling apart slices of an orange. I want to open him and watch his organs thanklessly perform. Blood, push. Lungs, grow. Heart, a machine—jerk, convulse.

12.

Existentialism sprang from the seeds of Kierkegaard’s conception of the “single individual.” The problem: if I align my life with external norms and codes, I lose my individuality, but if I fail to do this, my actions and thoughts are meaningless because they lack a way of being interpreted.

If the Abraham of the Bible had not been stopped by an angel, killing his son Isaac would have made him both individual and incomprehensible to philosophy. And God’s command to Abraham that he kill Isaac was a command given to an individual, not meant to extend to others. To us, this is a paradox. To Kierkegaard, this is the point.

The idea that the ‘quest for the individual’ overrides external moral codes is inherently dangerous, especially if one uses such reasoning to justify crimes. Despite this, the idea presents the question: am I only “meaningful” in relation to the external? Or can I have meaning apart from this?

13.

To create meaning, I create logical patterns of thought and construct arguments out of sine cosine tangent, or is it sign signifier? Language is my limping Siamese twin. Though I did not create it, I only know myself through this filter and can’t help but wonder if this is a real knowing, or a real self.

And Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard, you poor soul. Once he said, “Next to taking off all my clothes, owning nothing in the world, not the least thing, and then throwing myself in the water, I find most pleasure in speaking a foreign language, preferably a living one, in order to become estranged from myself.” The world is shaped differently, and one turns it over and over in unsteady hands, suddenly unsure whether it is the same world at all.

14.

In the words of others, I am a solid individual. I am “put together.” In control.

15.

For a time I thought I was in love with Gene Kelly, with his smiles and tapping feet. He danced with newspapers and his voice was frail, but he sang and sang and was the first to swing around a lamppost in the rain. Gene Kelly was suave. Gene Kelly was immortalized in movie after movie, never tired of the limelight.

I consider him a childish crush. I realize now, instead, how deeply I love Søren. I puzzle over Søren’s obscure, patchy journals and feel this strong urge to laugh at his witticisms, to duly, simultaneously weep and tell him that our love, like one’s belief in a divine being, is utterly absurd, and is therefore the truest form of belief.

16.

I want to chide Kierkegaard for never submitting himself to immortalization via the daguerreotype (photography in its earliest days).The only images that have survived were sketched by his brother. His brother confessed that the sketches were incomplete and only a weak reincarnation, a skeleton of an idea.

There in the annals of stuffy philosophers with squiggly beards and wrinkles, Søren is a breath of clean air. He is rows of swooping, slanted Danish words with generous margins—margins for comments and revision and the relief of white space on a page. By accident I imagine those History Channel documentaries where they get low-budget voice actors to read quotes from historical personas, as though in doing so they bring said personas to life, when really they create cartoonish characters. I picture a harsh voice spitting out Danish, pretending to bring passion into a quote like this: “I have just come back from a party where I was the life and soul. Witticisms flowed from my lips. Everyone laughed and admired me—but, I left, yes, that dash should be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit ——— and wanted to shoot myself.”

I then imagine a frail Gene Kelly voice saying that, for no other reason than that I have always liked the sound of that voice. This is how I poetize Kierkegaard into existence.

17.

Thank god history has known, probably, countless like me, like us. Søren, you’ll pardon the “us”?

18.

He seemed to be someone who could understand everything, all worry and sorrow, and who could utter words of counsel, but could not share in that sorrow. Of course this could well have been an illusion that would have disappeared if one followed him into his private little space, but who could have known this, and how much do we humans really trouble ourselves about one another before it is too late? As a rule, we are preoccupied with our own egos, and we accept the prevailing opinions. –Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, 1846

19.

Kierkegaard said of Regine, “She did not love my shapely nose, nor my fine eyes, nor my small feet, nor my good mind—she loved only me, and yet she didn’t understand me.” Kierkegaard said, “People understand me so little that they fail even to understand my complaints that they do not understand me.”

20.

White space.

21.

This is actually becoming a problem. I resurrect the man, and I am troubled. Because now I find myself wondering, after all, what his hands would feel like. What his eyes could do to you. Those who knew him talked a lot about the looks he could give.

What looks would he give me?

22.

I’m trying to be reasonable about this. Kierkegaard was a man, and after all, what do men do? They eat. They sleep. They shit. They masturbate. Kierkegaard died a virgin. I can only assume this, given his aborted engagement and theological ponderings. It is said that when a man loses his virginity, he becomes a real man. That after entering a woman, he is re-born and emerges from her, made full. I am reminded of what Goldschmidt said about Kierkegaard: that he was shaped like a wayward thought, half-formed, incomplete.

23.

I am sitting in Sarah and Ty’s apartment. They live on the top floor of the house where I live, but they are in Germany, and told me I could come upstairs and use their apartment while they are gone. They know I live in the basement, and they know the only furniture I have is a bed and a toilet, and that sometimes I sit on the closed toilet with my computer on my lap when I can’t afford a coffee—a coffee that is really buying me a hard chair to sit on, something people take for granted. So here I sit, surrounded by their married-life clutter. Unread mail. Half-empty jars of peanut butter. Dirty coffee cups. On the wall above the table is a large framed poster, a painting of a bar. The bartender is reaching under the counter to get something for the couple leaning against the bar. This man and woman are standing close enough so that it is clear they are together, but distant enough that we question their relationship. Close enough that their hands, resting casually on the bar, are touching. Distant enough that they are distracted by other things—he, by the bartender, she, by her nails. His eyes are shadowed by his hat. She is pink and orange and red—her hair, her dress, her skin.

The only other person at the bar is sitting with his back facing us. He is alone. Half of his body is in shadow.

24.

Imagined conversations with Kierkegaard:

Why, Lissa, what a lovely dress. You are a vision.

Thank you, Søren. I picked it especially for you.

Ah, darling, you shouldn’t have.

Actually, dearest Søren, I’ve been meaning to ask you what you meant when you wrote that “subjectivity is truth, and objectivity is repelled by it by virtue of the absurd.” It seems to me that given the plethora of subjective viewpoints, there would then be a plethora of truths, which denies that there is any one single truth.

My love, your questioning is to be applauded. I could attempt to go on a quest to prove, rationally, that the Christian god is The God. But that runs counter to the point of faith, just as an established church is counterproductive. There is no logical reason for faith. I cannot “convince” you to believe, even if I may want to.

And then he would compliment me on the asparagus and perhaps how my hair looked that day.I might offer to repair his trousers since they seemed uneven. And he might, as usual, gently refuse.

25.

Let’s talk about tragic: The tragic, Kierkegaard said in passing (to Israel Levin, who told it to August Wolff, who wrote it to Hans Peter Barfod), is not the act of pain, or blood, or violence. It implies permanence. He described evening in a cemetery and a girl crying to a grave. “Ludwig, Ludwig, are you asleep? I gave you everything. I gave you my honor. Give it back to me.” And then, Kierkegaard added, she throws herself onto the grave in desperation.

That’s his description. To me, this is tragic: a coffee shop, a cup of coffee, a computer. A girl is frantically running her fingers across the computer keys, imagining a dead philosopher’s eyelids, and his probably quite long eyelashes.

26.

I imagine and re-imagine people. I swallow their ticks and twitches until the day that I pull them out, like a party-trick—impersonations to impress all my friends. A particular turn of phrase, tone of voice, tensing of the jaw, squinting of the eyes. The intent is not to damage. It is an acknowledgement of the physical casing they have received for this time on the earth, and we are all at the mercy of our casings, after all. There is a bitter humor in it, if we allow ourselves to see it. We are all at the mercy of our real-time manifestations, and we are all at the mercy of what others perceive in us and the language they use to communicate such. It is profoundly terrifying to be earnest in the way we portray ourselves, to attempt confidence, or attempt to “own” who we are, because then we are made vulnerable.

Kierkegaard chose to hide and attempted to control himself in the hands of others by giving out, like seeds to ravenous birds, pieces of ideas about himself. In the end, he emerged victorious. A lot of good that did him. A lot of happiness that brought him.

27.

In the end it’s all a question of ear. The rules of grammar end with ear—the edicts of law end with ear—the figured bass ends with ear—the philosophical system ends with ear—which is why the next life is also represented as pure music, as a great harmony—if only my life’s dissonance may soon be resolved into that. –Søren Kierkegaard, in reference to Hegelian thought, 1836

28.

I say I am in love with him because it’s safe to say that I love him. Safe.

29.

People make broad assumptions about me or my identity. “I think you are a perceptive young woman,” or, “You are not willing to take things at face value, you question things, you are curious.” I don’t believe anything I tell myself. Only by hearing about myself through others’ mouths do I crawl my way into reality. Then I know what I am, and I am temporarily at rest. I end with ear.

30.

I imagine Kierkegaard’s tongue—a pale pink. Imagining his tongue resting in his mouth—warm, cozy, nestling behind his teeth—it’s easier to imagine him alive. We never see tongues in pictures. We see hardened teeth. We see things that people try to control, things that can shift with the time and the style—hair, the arrangement of the hands across the lap. But to imagine flesh and life, it’s easier to imagine the tongue, warm, wet and cloistered, hidden in the mouth.

31.

Dear Søren,

You end with ear, and I have no complaints.

I love you into reality; I grip you into existence. We “hit it off” and are “compatible.” In my mind, you’re sitting at the table across from me, grasping a pen firmly between your thumb and forefinger, and these muscles, along with your tongue, are the strongest muscles in your body. I explain that I actually picked the coffee mug about the Cod by accident—is that allowed? You allow it.

I think you’ll allow me a great many things. I think you won’t waste my time. I think you’ll make observations about the color of my earlobes, and I think you’ll look at me ravenously, like you are about to make fun of me, or like you are about to eat me—“fork” me, so to speak, true to your nickname. Yes. Like you are about to spear me.

_________________________

NOTES

Impressions of Kierkegaard in italics above were chiefly drawn from Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, collected, edited, and annotated by Bruce H. Kirmmse and translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen.

Passages in Kierkegaard’s own words were drawn from his journals as collected with commentary by D. Anthony Storm (sorenkierkegaard.org).

Kierkegaard’s discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac is found in Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric published under Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio.

Art by Matt Monk

Elizabeth Horneber’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, PRISM international, The Open Bar, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. She was a 2015-16 Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Winner. She teaches writing in Mankato, Minnesota.

Do Not’s (For Her)

Do not drink alcohol: this may hurt the baby. / Severe learning disabilities, physical abnormalities, and disorders of the central nervous system may result. / Do not drink caffeine (or maybe not too much; it is okay to sneak a sip, / here or there, if careful, she-of-the-morning-two-cups will argue). / Increased risk of miscarriage during the first trimester is associated with elevated caffeine intake. / Do not eat soft cheeses. Brie, Gorgonzola, Camembert, goat, feta, queso blanco will assuredly have Listeria. / (This, she finds toughest; no more / baked goat cheese dinners with him / to warm their wintered stomachs.) / Do not eat deli meat: again, Listeria. (She is vegetarian; this will be no problem.) / Do not eat fish / high in mercury: no swordfish or tilefish; no King mackerel to finish / roasting in the oven after a kiss / on the grill; no seven-spiced shark steaks or shark kabobs, / absolutely no shark fin soup when they eat high-priced Chinese. (Again, no problem.) / Do not eat uncooked fish or shellfish, / Which goes without much saying, he thinks, wondering what / the world must be coming to if that needs noting. / Do not drink unpasteurized milk or cider; Campylobacter, E. coli, Listeria, or Salmonella. / Do not eat salads / made in a store (Listeria, one more time). / Do not eat at salad bars, sayeth the March of Dimes, for fear of, / yes, Listeria. / Do not lick the spoon or tongue away / the chocolate batter from the beaters’ twisted metal / after making cookies or cake. Do not think / pregnancy is excuse to Eat for two; this is myth. / Do not panic; do not worry. Babies happen / every minute. Do not think / this list is complete, ma’am: / there will be more trouble soon enough.

Do Not’s (For Him)

Do not drink alcohol in front of her, / especially not beers, sun-kissed Hefeweizens or bitterly persistent pale ales. She will ask / for a sip, she will beg for a half-glass. / Say no and be strong: remember, this will hurt / only the least important person of this new three. / Do not drink caffeine. A long night’s sleep will never come / easily again; take advantage now. / Do not eat what might turn / her stomach; roasted salmon, a salami sandwich, too-heavily-garlicked spaghetti. / (At least brush your teeth before / trying to kiss her glowing, or faintly shimmering if it’s early on, self.) / Do not rub her belly and sing, I wish I had a watermelon, I wish / I had a watermelon. It is crass. / Do not force her onto a roller coaster. (Sudden stops can harm the baby.) Do not / suggest taking a sauna or dipping into a hot tub. (Raised core temperature is a no-no.) / Do not go for a long, romantic bike ride. (Her center / of gravity will have been wrecked.) Do not propose / a celebratory skydive. (This deserves no explanation.) / Basically, do not openly enjoy anything / she cannot do. Do not seem pleased / this list is shorter and more ridiculous. She will be carrying / the weight for as long as this marriage lasts, / for as long as this child is alive. And if she ever feels / terrible, broken-down, needing to unburden herself and says, / You did this to me, / do not, do not, do not say anything. Take the punishment / like a man.

Art by Matt Monk

Michael Levan has work in recent or forthcoming issues of Arts & Letters, Painted Bride Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Copper Nickel, and Ruminate. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Saint Francis and writes reviews for American Microreviews and Interviews.

My name is Isabella Tangherlini, I am twenty years old, and I used to be an internet troll. It sounds like something you’d hear at a group therapy session with a twelve-step program, or maybe an episode of Dr. Phil. Either way, it’s not a very good way to introduce a person, or an essay. The word “troll” conjures an image of a short, hairy imp with pointed teeth and a penchant for lurking beneath bridges. And this negative imagery is absolutely on point when it comes to the business of online trolling. Many have a simplistic view of Internet trolls—but trolls are more than simply anonymous bullies. Trolling is a bastardization of culture jamming, itself already a form of anti-consumerism with roots in anarchy and subversion. Trolling takes this anarchy to a different level, an extreme form of schadenfreude. Trolls basically weave through the online universe creating conflict and discord as they go. The terminology and culture are complicated and extensive, with many ins and outs and bizarre rules and caveats. The basic idea is simple: trolling exists for trolling’s sake. The vitriol, dissonance, and bedlam left in a troll’s wake is the point. Nothing is sacred, nothing is off-limits—everyone and anything can be trolled.

My career as an internet troll began in the library of my high school six years ago. I was a fourteen-year-old sophomore on lunch break with two friends: Michael, who owned a full-body camouflage suit and loved airsoft guns, and Robert, who once set my jeans on fire in Chemistry with a torch lighter. We were discussing our impending sophomore research paper and brainstorming potential research topics. After a while, Michael, bored, asked me, “Would you like to see some kittens?” Michael logged into his school account and brought up the web browser. “Here,” he said, motioning to the keyboard.

“I thought you were showing me kittens,” I said.

“I’m feeling a little lazy. Type in encyclopedia dramatica dot com slash kittens,” Michael said. I heard Robert snigger and cast a knowing glance over at Michael. Frowning, I followed Michael’s instructions and hit “enter.” I was greeted with an entire page of the most viscerally graphic images I’d ever seen. Stillborn children with horrifying birth defects. Rows and rows of mutilated genitals afflicted with venereal disease. A man who had attempted suicide via shotgun, and failed. Bizarre illustrations of fetish pornography. “What the hell, Michael?” I whispered, quickly closing the page.

“That’s kittens for you,” he replied, laughing.

This morbid experience might have turned a person off the internet forever. ButI was intrigued. Although the images were gruesome, I was more interested in the reactions to the pictures recorded in the comments area. No one seemed particularly perturbed by the images. If anything, the commenters were glad to think the pictures would disgust other viewers. This strange website with its flippant disregard of society’s taboos piqued my interest and I wanted to know more. I went home and returned to the website, and one of the links at the top of the page was simply titled, “4chan.” But what is 4chan?

4chan is, officially speaking, an image-based internet forum. You post a picture, people reply to it, and discussion happens. 4chan is organized into dozens of different boards that cater to different interests. Do you like cars? There’s a board for that. Video games? There are at least four boards dedicated to them. Grown men discussing which animated pony in a show for little girls is the most sexually appealing? Yes, there’s a board for that, too. 4chan is almost completely anonymous, and keeps no archive of the thousands of threads and pictures that are posted to it daily. Once the thread reaches its post limit it disappears forever. Maybe because of the anonymity, or the lack of archives, there’s an aura of mystery around the website.

The most famous board on 4chan, whereall the worst horror stories and tall tales come from, is /b/. /b/ is the “random” board of 4chan, where a user can start a thread about virtually anything. For whatever reason, /b/ attracts more trolls than any other board, which explains its harsh reputation. I was fascinated by /b/. On it, nothing was sacred. My heart pounded as I waded through images that felt secret, forbidden. I was privy to the very things society tells us to close our eyes to. What was hidden from almost everyone, was laid bare for me. I found dozens of threads featuring dead and mutilated children, terrible war crimes, and amateur snuff films. There were also discussions on why the Holocaust was almost certainly a hoax, and what seemed like a veritable ocean of white supremacist theories. And yet, despite the serious tones of the conversations, a muted tone of sarcasm ran throughout the whole place. Somehow, I understood that this was the ultimate “Just kidding!” Yes, the jokes were awful. The humor was off-color to the extreme. But these people were largely harmless. I didn’t believe the anons I came across on /b/ were genuinely bad people. I thought of /b/as a place where we could participate in the unfiltered, honest conversations that only took place in real life after a few drinks.

But some of us, an inner circle of people, had different intentions. Most people who trolled on /b/ were trolling the other boards as well, like /o/ (the automobile board) for example, and posting irrelevant content to anger the regular posters. Like, they liked cars, so we’d find really awful porn of dragons having sex with cars and post it in one of their threads talking about BMWs. Sure, it was nasty, and at the end of it all I had a collection of weird images saved on my laptop, but to this day I find that stuff  harmless.

The real trolling took place off-site.

Back in 2010, there was a series of truly epic flame wars taking place in the comments section of YouTube. If you’re at all familiar with the comments section of YouTube, you know it is the ninth circle of comment hell, dripping with personal, often vicious attacks. Flame wars were an everyday occurrence then, as they are now. But what set the flame wars of 2010 apart from today’s wars were the participants. On the internet, spread across many sites and forums, are a group of fetishists known as “Furries.” Furries are people who are attracted to anthropomorphized animals. Members of the community vary in terms of their level of outspokenness. But, like any fringe community, the loudest members are often the worst. And on YouTube, the loudest furries were beginning to grate on the nerves of /b/. To /b/, furries represented an extreme fringe community even they didn’t want to accept. While furries rallied for acceptance and normalization of their behavior, /b/ lashed out against them.  I took part in those 2010 flame wars between /b/ and the many furry-centric YouTube channels and users. Any prolific furry user whose channel we found out about, we attacked. Posting nasty comments, flagging their videos for no reason, making parody videos of their content—it was all-out war. The furries retaliated. They would post furry pornography on /b/, or make videos of themselves in their animal costumes ranting empty threats. In retrospect, I don’t think I fully know why /b/ chose to target the furry community. But I latched on to this dislike and made it my own, even though I’d never felt personally offended by furries. I wasn’t in any school clubs and had few friends. I felt a greater sense of companionship with the faceless, hateful, politically incorrect horde of /b/ than I ever did with any of my classmates. And the feeling that I could say or look at whatever I wanted online gave me a greater adrenaline rush than anything I could do as a high schooler with limited freedom.

The thing about being an internet troll, though, is that eventually who you are online and who you are offline start to blur together. And when you post on places like 4chan, those two personalities meld into something uniquely unpleasant. To be short, I was a really mean high school sophomore. I would openly bash my Jewish classmates. Despite being a member of the LGBT community myself, I freely used the word “faggot” in everyday speech. Once I was sitting with Robert in our chemistry class, and instead of taking notes we drew the popular memes of 4chan in the back of my notebook—Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at the Grammy Awards, Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and Advice Dog, the puppy who gave questionable counsel. I saw nothing wrong with what I was doing or who I had become. For me, everyone was in on the joke. It wasn’t my fault if they couldn’t detect the sarcasm in my voice, or tell that I wasn’t really anti-Semitic or racist or homophobic.  As far as I was concerned, the uninitiated were beneath my notice—4chan was like a secret club that only a few people could join, despite the millions of users worldwide who posted there.

I browsed and posted on 4chan daily until I was a freshman in college. And then….I stopped. I was a sophomore in college when I realized that trolling, this culture of nastiness, wasn’t who I wanted to be.  4channers call it “troll’s remorse”—the sudden moment of clarity when you realize that being mean to another human being for no adequately explored reason is kind of awful. And troll’s remorse hit me hard when I remembered the longest-suffering victim of 4chan’s efforts, Christian Weston Chandler. Christian—abbreviated on 4chan to Chris-chan or CWC—was a 24-year old, high-functioning autistic man who made videos on YouTube about his fan-made comics and figurine collections. He posted a video venting his rage at not winning a contest, which caught the attention of many viewers—including some 4channers. From that point on, Chris-chan was trolled mercilessly for nearly five years. He’s been hacked, had his personal information leaked, he’s been harassed, and mocked for being sent to jail and suffering the death of his father. Chris-chan’s life has been thoroughly tainted, if not completely ruined, by trolls. When I came across Chris-chan at the age of 15, it was via his entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica. The entry itself was expansive, with many links to chat logs and screenshots. It was all dedicated to Chris-chan and what had been done to troll him. I read the entire entry and its links. In a few hours’ worth of reading, I found out nearly everything about Chris-chan’s life—where he went to school, how many girls he’d dated, where he lived—even where to find his amateur sex tape. He was hilarious. He was pathetic. He was homophobic, unhygienic, and completely backwards. He deserved to be trolled, I thought. I was delighted when I read about the things that’d been done to him: the deception, the fake accounts pretending to be girls interested in him, the dozens of pizzas ordered to his house. At the time, it was hilarious. I’d show my friends his YouTube videos, where he’d be ranting and raving at the camera, laughing my head off while they looked on with mild interest.

“Isn’t he funny, in like a pathetic way?” I’d say, grinning widely.

“Isn’t he retarded or something? That’s kind of mean,” my friends would say. I’d just shake my head and roll my eyes, thinking, He’s just autistic.

Either way, I wanted in on it. I wanted to troll Christian Chandler myself. He was growing harder and harder to find as more and more people trolled him, and the only place I could reach him was through Sony’s PlayStation Network. I found his PSN ID through the Encyclopedia Dramatica entry and clicked the “Add Friend” button. I waited nearly a week for his response. When he accepted, I was ecstatic. “Is this really Christian Chandler?” I sent in a message to his account. “I am the one and only Christian Weston Chandler,” he replied. At that point, my options seemed infinite. What would I do? How would I troll him? Just go the usual route, and call him out for his various online misdeeds? Threaten to call his parents? Maybe try to phish the password for his account?

Honestly? None of these things happened. Once I’d typed out the perfect nasty message and sent it to him, he promptly deleted me and never replied. It was all very underwhelming. Mine was probably the umpteenth nasty message he’d received that day, and definitely not the worst message or the last. My fascination with CWC ended very quickly after that, and I didn’t give him—or my own delight in hurting him—much thought for the next four years.

I was taking a sociology course my sophomore year in college, and one of my friends was commenting on his autistic brother and the stigma he faced in society. I’d had many, many conversations about autism, and heard plenty of stories about autistic children and family members, but for some reason it all finally clicked in that classroom. Trolling Christian Chandler, reading about his whole life and laughing about it on Encyclopedia Dramatica, trying to add to his misery—it was awful. Suddenly I didn’t understand myself.  Everything that I’d found hilarious as a high school sophomore wasn’t funny anymore, four years later. Christian Chandler was an autistic man raised by uneducated parents in a low-income neighborhood in Virginia. He certainly hadn’t had the same advantages that I had. I grew up in one of the richest towns in Connecticut and had the luxury to sit in a sociology classroom in a private liberal arts college. Who was I to laugh at Christian? Who was anyone to laugh at Christian? Rich or poor, autistic or not—why did we laugh? And why for so long? Suddenly everyone seemed pathetic to me. The poor guy who’s been harassed and victimized for years and the people who have nothing better to do than type angry words on a keyboard all day. It suddenly seemed so obvious: It’s not fun to laugh at disabled people or tell furries to kill themselves.

It’s been more than five years since Christian was “discovered” by 4chan. I checked on his Facebook page a few months ago, and he still gets nasty comments on his statuses from trolls who won’t give up the game.

I like to think that I wouldn’t fall into the same pattern of behaviors I displayed all those years ago, and I haven’t. But can an internet troll be reformed? Am I really a retired 4channer? I still browse and post on the chans occasionally. My sense of humor remains sharp and off-color. Images of disaster and victims of violence still don’t faze me. Have I really managed to separate my online persona from my offline persona? Or have they simply consolidated neatly into a low-empathy, high-functioning human being?

Maybe this essay is what they’d call the “ultimate troll.” A literary confession on memes and 4chan. You’d never think that the same culture behind the hacking of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! account would have any place in the digital space of a literary journal, but apparently it does. Haven’t I just trolled you? Reformed, indeed.

Art by Matt Monk

Isabella Tangherlini holds a degree in Communication Studies from Manhattanville College.

There was always Montaigne. “Of Cannibals.” “Of Drunkenness.” “Upon Some Verses of Virgil.” The stranglehold of imperialism. Books. Thumbs. Dead fathers. He is the sixteenth-century headwaters of the essay, the textual meanderer, the French progenitor of Emerson, Shakespeare, and Descartes. Montaigne haunts us all, more momentousness here than torment. I dwell on his death as much as the death of my own father, a writer, like me.

A recent article dubbed Montaigne the “godfather of blogging.” His pioneering style seems to have anticipated, among other things, the anxieties now arresting nonfiction. Montaigne made the most of his century’s science and philosophy, freely copying from Horace, Virgil, and other ancients, and going un-fact checked. It was not the generation of thoughts but their recording that was his business.

I have trouble being so brazen. I am more like my father in this way, with whom I share a face, outward friendliness, crippling insecurity, and book-ardor. It was he who stacked novels on the mantel, made it seem less strange to squirm behind a desk, wanted me to write.

Near the end of my father’s life at a Dallas nursing home, where kind-lipped West African nurses cared for him like a newborn, he repeated confessions of wasted youth, his thirties spent carousing and womanizing, lost in a pinball mind. At fifty, he packed up and trucked our family to Lubbock, Texas, to start his own journalism business, to write about football.

But his work was never a success. My mom floated him on her teaching job. And then Dad grew a tumor that, when he was fifty-nine, swelled and crowded his brain, stole his ability to write.

Everyone wants what is lost. Sixteenth century Europe: Constantinople sacked. A re-appropriation of the classics. Montaigne fit in. His father, trying to fashion nobility, ensured his son’s first language was Latin. He was a pampered child of the classics, but his Jewish mom’s poor family was burned in Spain. He later entered parliament, believing government at odds with justice. “How many condemnations have I seen that are more criminal than the crime?” he wrote.

He was a man broken in his time and out of his time, sensitive but elitist. There was an unaccountable, contradictory storm in his personality. “Essays were designed to record the flux and flow of his daily existence,” writes his biographer Donald Frame.

“I portray passing,” Montaigne explained.

While Dad labored as a sports journalist, he wrote nonfiction essays. They were endearing and candid in their way, monographs he had printed and bound at the copy center. I remember him leaving one there, saying, “Someone will want to read it.”

Growing up, I assumed he owned a playbook that told him how to write, but I see now that he was charming fate, waiting for a break. Maybe he was enabled by my supportive mother, and his sportsaholic friends to compile football narratives, and mostly ignore what was lurking in his consciousness, along with that tumor — the engulfing need to explain himself.

By most accounts, the greatest impact on Montaigne’s life was an ugly man named Etienne de la Boetie. To Montaigne, he and Boetie were “two halves of the same soul.” Boetie gave Montaigne his skepticism and his ideas about beauty. They carried on “the most remarkable of friendships.”

Boetie died four years after their meeting. On his deathbed, he sent his wife away, and passed his final moments with Montaigne, murmuring his name over and over and over, his loss giving Montaigne a reason to create art.

When my father died, I felt only a quiet numbness. I had eleven years to prepare for his death, but it still left me frozen. It took me three more years to learn what he’d taught me: that every letter counts, and so do the spaces between them.

The death of Montaigne feels more visceral than the death of other writers, the silence not of the loon but of the wilderness. He was aware of multidimensionality, the contradiction of existence, of laying bare his bifurcated humanity. “My history must be adapted to the moment,” he wrote.

Montaigne fretted constantly about kidney stones. They’d killed his father, and he searched Europe for a cure. In the end, he died from a severe case of tonsillitis at fifty-nine, the age at which my father stopped writing.

His is a lesson I’m trying to learn, that I cannot reduce Dad to a sentence, nor to a period after which my life begins.

With Boetie gone, Montaigne’s essays filled “a vigorous need to communicate,” his biographer Frame suggests. Montaigne wrote to talk to the dead.

His work to me is a force of nature, not a story, an is that emanates from his need to analyze himself. “I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself,” Montaigne wrote. And by that I believe he means Boetie too, the way I write to talk to my father, the person whose DNA and mind I am woven from. Like Montaigne, when I direct my gaze inside, I hope to find that mentor, father, friend who seems to have left his fingerprints. And until the last word falls, I’m looking for a way to recover that once entwined personality that left a space for me to fill.

Art by Matt Monk

Clinton Crockett Peters has been awarded literary prizes from Shenandoah, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Columbia Journal, and the Society for Professional Journalists. His writing has appeared in Orion, Southern Review, Hotel Amerika, The Rumpus, and many other venues. He lives in Carrollton, Texas.

AUGUST 19: NORTH CAROLINA

Elliot Mazer won’t work with me. The music producer has been in the business for decades, so he knows what language my funders want. But every time I bring up copyright he changes the subject back to himself and his past glories. In fairness, however, he does this with every other question I ask him as well.

I thank him for the interview and imagine the edited version. I’ll include some discussion about how he’s produced many of Neil Young’s seminal albums, but perhaps—because viewers might think him arrogant—I’ll leave out the part where he says the singer and guitarist wouldn’t be where he is today without Elliot’s expertise with a sound board. I’ll include discussion of his life now, here in Reidsville, North Carolina, just south of the Virginia border. How he’s converted the stately dining room of this grand old home into a state-of-the-art studio. And how he’s using that studio in his semi-retirement to produce albums for clients who find him online.

I’m okay with this interview being a disappointment, because I have another one to shoot, here in this home with his wife, Diana Reid Haig. Elliot and I leave the high-ceilinged front parlor and walk down the home’s front hallway, across the worn oak floors, past the antique brass gas-style wall lamps, below the dental plaster molding framing the pressed tin ceiling. Halfway down the hall he slips into his studio and I keep going. As I enter the kitchen a wooden floorboard creaks under my foot. Marisa, seated with Diana at a small round table, slams her sketch book shut. One of the pencils Colleen Doran gave her yesterday rolls off the table onto the parquet floor.

“Oh here, sweetie, let me get that for you.” Diana slips gracefully out of her chair and retrieves the pencil as she stands. She reaches down and presses straight the skirt of her blue sundress. Marisa takes the pencil from her.

“Thank Diana,” I say to Marisa.

“Oh, that’s not necessary. Your daughter is so charming and polite,” Diana says, as if boasting about a favorite granddaughter. She’s describing the Marisa I once knew, not the teenager I live with now. I decide to celebrate the fact that Marisa did not alienate our host during the hour I was interviewing Diana’s husband. “How did it go with Elliot?”

“Great,” I lie. “Are you still up for an interview?”

“Oh, why not,” she says with a smile.

When it was decided I would interview Elliot first, Diana immediately volunteered to “entertain” Marisa in the kitchen. Elliot clearly won’t be playing the same role during my interview with Diana. I recall how quiet Marisa was during my interview yesterday with Colleen, and how much she seemed to get out of being present for it. “Marisa, do you want to join us?”

Marisa looks down at her notebook, and then shakes her head no.

Diana places her hand gently on Marisa’s right shoulder. “I think she probably just wants to keep working in her sketch book. She’s a brilliant artist, Patrick. You should see the still life she just did. Show your father, Marisa.”

I step forward. Marisa would in the past show me some of her drawings, but the person she most wanted to share with was my mother. I don’t know who she shares her art with now, or even what art she is producing. I’ve had opportunities to peek at her work—like everything else she owns, she leaves her sketchbooks all over the house—but I’ve resisted. It isn’t the same if she doesn’t show me. I’m not sure this counts, with Diana insisting she do so. But I’ll take the opportunity nonetheless. I see on the page the fruit bowl centerpiece. Two bananas, a peach, and an orange emerge from the blue ceramic bowl. The fruit is depicted accurately, but there’s more to it than that. It’s as if Marisa has added some spark of life to the display. The banana in the foreground appears to be calling to me to choose it over its bowl mates.

“Marisa, that is quite good. Diana is right.”

“Oh, your daughter is so talented. She told me all about her love of drawing, and especially of photography. And she’s so thrilled you’re taking her to Savannah to tour the art school there. She’s lucky to have a father like you.”

Now my discomfort level matches that of my daughter. I nod to Diana to join me in the hall.

“Marisa,” Diana says as we leave the kitchen, “don’t forget that I’m sending you two on your way with blueberry muffins. I won’t take no for an answer.”

We return to the front parlor. I had seated Elliot in a wing-back chair, but I want to film Diana in a separate part of the room. She suggests the bench in front of the upright piano.

“You said this house dates back generations in your family,” I say as I set up the camera. “And I can’t help but notice that your last name is Reid, and the town’s name is Reidsville.”

Diana laughs. “Yes, I am local royalty, if you will. But my branch is the black sheep. My grandmother built this house at what was then outside of town. We’re still viewed as the splinter line.”

I nod knowingly, but don’t inform her I also grew up with black-sheep parents. We begin the interview. Diana discusses her early career as a songwriter in New York, Nashville and Los Angeles. She grew up surrounded by music, and it was in that professional world that she met Elliot. She turns and places her left hand on the keys behind her. “I remember when I was young, my piano teacher, at this very piano, told me that when I play, I’m putting my hands in the same position as that composer’s hands. That made the music come alive to me. It’s like a living link to the past, stepping into someone else’s shoes.”

“That’s not unlike the books you write.”

Diana has written a series of travel books that guide the reader along the same paths followed by famous people in their cities of origin. If you’ve ever been curious about where Napoleon or his wife Josephine passed the time in Paris, her books will take you there. I’ve been reading a fair amount of travel literature as I’ve prepared for this trip, and I didn’t come across any other works that are so original in concept.

“Yes, you’re right, although I’ve never really thought of it that way. I just am really obsessed with history. You know, that first book about Napoleon grew out of a personal obsession. I love Paris, and when I was there I’d seek those places out. Often they’re very hard to find, so I’d jot down directions to share with others. But believe it or not, I found the people I knew, in the music business, weren’t that eager to talk about Napoleon. I’d bring him up and I could see my friends kind of back away and say, ‘Oh there she goes again.’”

That’s my experience when I try to share with Washington lobbyists my passion for antique maps. With these books, Diana found a way to convey her passion to like-minded readers. A perforated ulcer laid her up in bed for close to a year, she tells me, so to keep busy she compiled her travel notes into a book. It didn’t take long for her to find a publisher, and she’s since written more books about Paris. Her new project is a book about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ lifelong love affair with New York City. The Kennedy family has given her access to some of the former First Lady’s personal records.

I tell her about meeting Michael Swanwick in Philadelphia, and how he turned a personal obsession about a poet into a published biography. Then I ask what her friends in the music business think of her books.

“It’s been very interesting to see how people perceive different forms of creativity, the songs I’ve written and my books. It’s a different reaction. It seems to me that people really admire it when you can make something up, like with my songs. But I love writing nonfiction. It’s my passion now. It’s what I think about when I wake up in the morning. You just need to find your own compass.”

I like that metaphor, and not just because I love the artistry found in an antique map’s compass rose. I picture Diana, an artist who reinvented herself late in life, gliding along the cobblestones of a tucked-away Parisian lane, sunlight glistening on her copper hair. I see her bursting with excitement, a skip in her step as she explores, then her stopping to pull out a notebook from her purse so she can jot down her latest discovery.

We discuss the mysteries of the creative process some more and then I wrap up, not distressed that we haven’t really discussed copyright law. I secure the camera in its bag. Diana remains on the piano bench, a mischievous gleam in her eye.

“I assume you’re writing a book about this trip, right?” she asks.

I feel as if she’s caught me stealing a banana from her bowl. I realize now that my subconscious has been toying with the idea since that first day in New England. My resistance stems from the fact that I can’t figure out how to write a book about my travels without putting me in it. I think of other road-trip authors like John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat Moon and Robert Pirsig. They invite you to join them in their journey. Steinbeck, an old crank longing for an America he feels is lost. Kerouac, living without fear of consequences. Heat Moon, learning and healing from those he meets along the way. And Pirsig, who slowly reveals his struggle with mental illness. That last one hits perhaps too close to home.

“You absolutely must write this story,” she says. “What you’re doing is so, well, different. I’d love to be Marisa, to ride along with you, even if only for a few days.”

We head back to the kitchen. Rain pelts the bay window over the sink, a barrage of liquid bullets. Marisa and I will have to brave a run across the street to the car. Diana offers us umbrellas, a gesture I immediately dismiss. I don’t mean to dismiss Southern hospitality, but we’d have no opportunity to return them.

Elliot remains in his studio, but Diana offers us a farewell. She thanks me for the interview before I can thank her. Then she gives Marisa a full-body embrace. I watch for my daughter to flinch, but she does not. Her arms go up, and her red sketch book wraps around our host. Then Marisa and I dash to the car. Once safely inside the vehicle, only moderately drenched, Marisa says, “Um, Dad,” and points out my driver’s side window.

Diana is rushing across the street, a bag in one hand and a red umbrella in the other. I lower the window.

“You forgot the muffins,” she says over the sound of the sheeting rain bombarding the umbrella’s nylon.

“You didn’t have to do this,” I say, but I take the muffins.

“I wouldn’t let you leave without them,” she says. “It’s the least I could do, after your gift of letting me talk about my creativity.”

Diana heads back to her family home, I close the window, and then turn to Marisa. She’s smiling and shaking her head.

“What the hell was she thinking?” Marisa says. “That is so nice, and so ridiculous.”

“You know,” I tell her, “I’ve stopped being surprised by things on this trip.”

~

We slice west through the rain toward Asheville, North Carolina. I’m taking Marisa tomorrow to the Biltmore Estate, a summer home for one of the Vanderbilts. It seemed like a good place to give Marisa a tourism experience and, perhaps, make up for having done so little with her during our family vacation on the Jersey Shore. To justify the drive, I booked an interview with an artist nearby.

Marisa and I chuckle over how sweet Diana is. She then tells me that Diana spent most of their time together in the kitchen encouraging Marisa to pursue her passion for art. That was unnecessary. Art is the only thing that motivates Marisa to apply herself. Then Marisa falls silent, and I see her eyes are focused on a highway sign. It tells us we have forty-seven miles to go before we reach Asheville. But it also says we are one hundred and sixty-three miles from Knoxville, Tennessee. Marisa emits a low growl, puts her ear buds back in, and then flips open her sketch book.

I didn’t realize that this highway could lead me to my parents’ home. I consider the possibility of pushing on to Knoxville for a surprise visit with my parents. Perhaps that is the way to mend this latest rift. I ended the last one, after all, by calling them with news of Marisa’s impending birth. Maybe this time having Marisa in tow would do the trick. Since we left their house in the middle of the night a year ago, Marisa has finished her first year of high school. She’s knocking at the door of womanhood. But my mother knows that without me visiting. That call fifteen years ago delivered news unknown to her.

I almost drove another route to Knoxville in January of this year. I was attending a conference hosted by one of my funders at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville. While seeking a quiet moment under a palm tree in the resort’s glass-enclosed garden conservatory, my mobile phone rang. It was my mother.

“Your father’s having a hard time breathing. I’m taking him to the hospital now.”

Somehow I had been expecting a call like this. And here I was, I thought, back in Tennessee for the first time since that August night five months earlier. “I’m in Nashville, Mom. I can rent a car and be there in two hours.”

“I doubt your father would want to see you, but hold on. I’ll call you from the hospital.” And she hung up.

I felt as if the marrow had been drained from my bones. I made my way to a hotel bar, a dark, low-ceilinged establishment that cocooned my fear. An hour later the phone rang again. I quickly put down my scotch and answered.

“He’s fine. False alarm.”

“I’m glad. I can still come.”

“I don’t know why we’d want you here.”

I took a sip of scotch. How often had I held this conversation in my mind? Hundreds, probably. Each time I tried a different approach. The only commonality was that each ended disastrously.

“Mom, I think we should talk.” I forged ahead. “The last time we found ourselves like this, Marisa’s birth brought us back together. Well, Marisa and Parker still need grandparents.”

“She’d have to apologize first.”

Already I was thrown off-script. “You mean Marisa? What would she be apologizing for?”

“For starters, she defriended me on Facebook.”

I placed the phone down on the bar, careful not to disconnect the call. I needed a moment to process my mother’s demand, and the reason for it. My motion caught the bartender’s eye, and he pointed at my near-empty glass. Ordering another round had not been my intent, but I nodded.

Two weeks after the kids and I returned from Knoxville last August, Laura took me to a psychologist she trusted. I wanted to better understand my mother, to learn how I could repair this latest rift or, at a minimum, discuss what had happened with my children. It didn’t take him long to assess my situation. He mapped out our relationship on a whiteboard. Various boxes represented me, Laura, Marisa, Parker, my mother, and my father.

“Your mother is a classic narcissist. This is how she views her world,” he said. He drew circles that placed all of the boxes in orbit around my mother. “She is basically frozen as a child, the center of everything and all drama magnified. Perhaps some trauma when she was young locked her into that mindset. It’s an appealing place to be, the center of attention and no responsibilities. You’ve empowered her mindset your whole life, and it sounds like your father began to do so when she let him back into her life all those years ago.” He then erased the circles and drew straight lines connecting various boxes. Only one line extended from my father’s box. It connected with my mother. Laura, Marisa, and Parker were all connected to me via dry-erase marker strokes. These two clusters–my parents and my nuclear family–were joined by a single line between my mother and me. I couldn’t reach my father separate from my mother. And she couldn’t reach my children separate from me.

“You’re the nexus, Patrick,” the psychologist said.

“I don’t want to be.”

“It’s not a matter of want. If your children are to have a relationship with your mother, it has to go through you.”

In that Opryland bar I took a sip of my new glass of scotch and thought of that whiteboard diagram. Before that night, my mother had a line connecting her with my daughter. It was social media. Marisa had erased that line, and I knew she had no interest in re-drawing it. I picked up the phone again, assuming the responsibility I was evading. “Mom, I hear what you’re saying. But I think Marisa would want something from you as well. Not an apology,” I said quickly, anticipating an objection to my mother to a word she associated with surrender and defeat, “but perhaps an explanation. You could explain to her you didn’t mean some of the things you said, some of the things she heard you say.”

“What? That I wanted to keep her safe from her crazy father, who could snap and hurt her in a heartbeat?”

There are a number of fathers who could have been in her mind at that moment other than me. My father, who never physically harmed me but had on several occasions committed significant damage to inanimate objects such as drywall and bathroom doors. My mother’s biological father who, like mine, left when she was young, but unlike mine did not return. Or her stepfather, of whom my mother spoke with an unsettling combination of love and disgust. I couldn’t know where my mother’s mind was at that moment–I never knew such things–but what was clear was that she had spent the last few months completely recasting in her memory the events of that night. She was the saint who had struggled valiantly to protect her grandchildren from a demonic father. I knew my father would have retained a memory of the evening’s actual events. But the only box he was connected to on the psychologist’s whiteboard was my mother. I could not expect him to support a more accurate version of events. He would do everything he could to keep from having that solitary line erased.

I did not drive to Knoxville that day at the Gaylord hotel. I stayed in that bar. I do not recall how many drinks I had, but it was not enough to fill, for even a moment, the places where my marrow had been drained.

We pass the highway sign directing us to Knoxville and I look over at my daughter. I’ve never told her about that January call with her grandmother. I consider acknowledging the sign, using it as a way to get her to talk to me about that night, and about the loss she has suffered the last year. She’s trapped in the car now, no way to walk away from my questions. But I’m feeling a connection with her that is rare and refreshing. I don’t want to ruin it by bullying her into confronting a pain she is actively avoiding.

As I reach the outskirts of Asheville I develop another plan to engage her. When I booked the interview with percussionist Paul Babelay, he told me he lived in a wooded area on a steep mountain slope, and the road that led up that mountain was extremely hard to spot. The GPS tells me I’m getting close. I hand Marisa printed directions provided by Paul. “Marisa, I need you to play navigator.”

Marisa removes her left ear bud and takes the paper. “There’s supposed to be a turn on the right,” I tell her, “but he says it will be hard to find.”

The road I’m on hugs a cutout of mountainside. On the GPS screen it appears as a solid patch of green, no black lines penetrating the block of color. Marisa leans forward, squinting.

“There it is!” Somehow her artist’s eye has perceived a thin break in the pines. I come nearly to a stop, then wonder if it was wise to lose the car’s momentum. The slope is steep and the road isn’t paved. I press the car forward. As we move under the tree canopy, the sound of pelting rain is replaced by pings of gravel kicking up against the car’s undercarriage. My distress is lessened when I see the smile on Marisa’s face, a rare sight in the last year.

“Marisa, that was fabulous. I never would have spotted that on my own.” My compliment has the added advantage of being sincere. As we climb, we pass one mailbox, then another. Thin strips of clearing extend left and right past each one. Then I see Paul’s house, tucked away in the pines. The main floor extends out off the mountain into space, with a basement level supporting the right half of the house. A wide porch extends the length of the home in front of us, then turns a sharp left to extend along the drop-off. We step out of the car.

“You just missed a bear. Tiger is still a bit freaked out.” A thin man about my age places a fat tabby down on the wood. The cat shakes slightly, it looks directly at Marisa and me, and then walks off, tail erect, the tip twitching slightly. We head inside, and I interview Paul in his living room in front of a massive stone fireplace while Marisa sketches. Her subject is Tiger, who stares at us through a glass door. Paul discusses his choice to pursue a musical career here in Asheville rather than Nashville. He and his wife have built a good life here for their children, and he is willing to take the work he can get so as not to disturb that life. I can relate. When I was a single father I turned down reporting jobs that would have had me covering Capitol Hill debates long into the evening because it would have caused havoc with my custody schedule.

Paul says his life choices have not prevented him from exploring his true passion. It’s called a vibraphone, which he says is similar to a xylophone but more compelling. I ask him to elaborate but fail to listen to the response. It’s as if my mind is being tugged out of my head, pulled west into a different orbit. I am in my mother’s office in Knoxville. I am in the Gaylord bar in Nashville. Boxes and lines swirl on a whiteboard. I look again at Marisa. Somehow Tiger has re-entered the house and is now on Marisa’s lap, forcing her to hold the sketchbook in the air above him. She doesn’t appear distressed by this inconvenience. What terrible act would Marisa have to perform that would lead me to cut her out of my life? What harm would she have to inflict to have me turn my back on her, a person I have dedicated my life to fostering? I come up blank.

Marisa has been unwilling to speak of that Knoxville night with me. But what have I really said to her? Have I shared with her the depth of the pain I feel at losing my parents? No. Because I haven’t fully admitted it’s there. I have been performing the family tradition of denying what is right in front of me. Sabra Field told me the art-committed life is a difficult one, and many choose the easier path. The easy road–in creativity and in family dynamics–is one with which I am all too familiar. I know without looking at the camera’s diagnostic display that I have enough footage. It’s time to leave. It’s time for Marisa and me to spend a little more time together, to search out dinner and the hotel in our respective roles of parent and child. I’m eager to do so.

AUGUST 20: NORTH CAROLINA AND SOUTH CAROLINA

I am content. Marisa is not. This library fills me with warmth and comfort despite its cavernous size. The Biltmore Estate tour guide tells me the 40-feet by 60-feet room holds 10,000 books written in eight languages. It is the largest privately owned library in the country. But what speaks to me is not the volume of books. It is the reverence in which the room holds them. The tour guide focuses on the ceiling painting, an Eighteenth Century mural by Giovanni Pelligrini that George Vanderbilt actually paid to relocate from a palace in Italy. But my eyes are not drawn to gods and cherubs dwelling in a cloud. Nor are they directed to the massive fireplace that runs the length of the two-tiered room, its black mantel blending in with the dark walnut bookcases running on both levels. No, my focus is on the multitude of books, leather-bound with gold-lined spines. Did Vanderbilt realize that by creating the grandest possible private library, the room itself could serve to humble him, showing him as just one man surrounded by the mental output of thousands? Whatever the answer, he is long gone, but the books remain.

Marisa fell into a funk once the tour began and the docent said no photographs were allowed indoors. As we’ve entered each room, I’ve watched as her hand flicked to her camera bag then slowly lowered, as if the bones in her arm had liquefied.

The docent tells us that Vanderbilt owned nearly 30,000 books in all, three times what we see here. I understand the challenge of being able to display all of the books you own, even the modest number I’ve accumulated. In fact, I came close to solving that problem once by intending to rid myself of most of them. It took nearly three years for my ex-wife and me to resolve our custody battle. I managed to secure three nights a week with Marisa and Parker. To approximate as closely as possible a family experience for them, I moved us from my bachelor apartment to a three-level, three-bedroom detached home in a quiet northern Virginia suburb. In what I now recognize as a bout of manic spending—always a risk for someone with my diagnosis–I furnished every room. But the legal cost of securing that custody schedule produced unanticipated debt. After a year I couldn’t afford to keep renting the house. I knew things needed to change when I found myself acting out a cliché, actually digging under couch cushions for loose change so I could buy bread and milk for my children. I did in fact produce enough change, and ignored the fury of the woman behind me in line at the supermarket as I slowly counted out what I owed.

The only way to begin the climb out of debt was to relocate to a small apartment. That meant nearly all of the furniture I acquired had to go, but I hoped to make a little cash by selling it at a yard sale. I gave the kids the apartment’s one bedroom, yet it was still too small for their two beds, so I sold them at a severe loss and bought a bunk bed. Marisa played the older child card and took the top bunk, but Parker seemed to like the cocoon-like environment formed underneath when Marisa’s sheet hung down over the side. I placed my bed in the living room in the space meant for a dinette set, something else I had sold. I purchased a collapsible card table and folding chairs that I would set up by my bed for meals. My first year in the apartment the custody agreement had the children with me for Thanksgiving. I gathered up a number of my coffee-table books of antique maps and placed them on the bed. Each held one of the sides– mashed potatoes, peas, candied yams, the fruit ambrosia my mother always made for that meal– and my nightstand held the turkey.

I found a use that day for books I ended up not selling. When I conducted the yard sale— a key element of what I called The Simplification, the initial caps visible in my mind even now– most of my books were on display, from suspense novels bought on impulse at airports to firstedition biographies acquired through extensive explorations of used bookstores. The books were of course cheaper and more portable than a 7-piece dinette set or a set of beds, and began moving quickly. As a customer brought to me for purchase a cherished biography of the English clockmaker who made possible the calculation of longitude at sea, I realized there are only so many sacrifices that are acceptable in life. About thirty minutes into the official time of the sale, I covered the books in sheets to ensure they were off-limits. They traveled with me to the small apartment, but were not displayed in two-story walnut bookcases. Instead I stacked them on any free section of floor. My display aesthetic may have been lacking, but my reverence for those books was no less than Vanderbilt’s was for his.

We are ushered out of the library to make room for the next tour group, and soon enough we are back outside, walking down the wide stone steps to the gravel drive in front of the mansion. I squint, adjusting to the sunlight after an hour spent in near-darkness. When my vision clears I see Marisa has already removed her camera. In front of us is a large expanse of green lawn. To the right lie acres of flowers and fountains we had darted past on our way to the mansion. Marisa looks at me, I nod, and she is off to the garden.

I catch up with her a few minutes later. She is shaded under a vine-covered trellis, standing precariously several feet up on the edge of a fountain. It appears she’s trying to capture a close-up of a cherub pouring water. She’s resting her left hand on the wet stone behind the cherub, and I imagine several scenarios that have in common a disastrous ending.

“What are you doing?” I call out.

“I’m trying to freeze a drop of water against the contours of the stone behind it,” Marisa says without looking. “It’s tricky with this camera, I’m stuck with the built-in lens, there aren’t a lot of settings and it seems to have been designed by chimps. But I’ve struggled with it enough to sometimes fool it into getting the exposure level I want with the focus range I need.”

I rush to her side while she takes a few more photographs. Then she permits me to support her by the arm as I guide her back to the ground. She turns instantly to her camera’s screen to examine her handiwork.

“Can I see?”

She pauses, then turns the camera display my direction. I see an image too real to be real, a glistening drop of water broadcasting a hint of rainbow from the morning sun. The photograph’s tranquility momentarily washes away the scorching August heat.

Marisa’s latest passion is photography, and for her fifteenth birthday she had asked for a something called a digital single-lens reflex camera, or DSLR. They turned out to be pretty expensive, nearly as pricey as the laptop I’m using to edit these films. I couldn’t pull the trigger on such an expensive gift. So after I said no she gathered up her cash and bought this camera used. It’s not a true DSLR, but apparently she’s spent the last few months trying to figure out how to get it to do what she wants anyway.

I like to think I have done my part to foster her creative development. But that has mostly been through encouragement. As Colleen Doran said two days ago, an artist needs the right tools. But Marisa’s will to create trumps her technical limitations. And perhaps it is will that is the most important thing. I no longer sleep in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment. I cut expenses and took on extra work, and clawed my way out of debt. My parents helped with that, in part by adhering to my request to honor my birthday and Christmas by making donations to college funds I had set up for Marisa and Parker to which I could no longer afford to contribute. I remain grateful for their assistance, even if the amount they provided has continued to balloon in my mother’s mind. Then, after I knew I would not be a financial burden on a partner, I remarried. Two years ago Laura and I purchased a three-level, three-bedroom home in a quiet northern Virginia suburb. We bought Marisa a new bed, but Parker insisted upon keeping the bunk bed. He still sleeps on the bottom, and keeps a sheet on the unused upper bunk, which I sometimes find hanging down, cocooning him. It’s good that Marisa experienced that life arc, seeing her father fight his way out of a personal setback. I suspect she has focused a fair amount in the past year on what genetic inheritance she may have received from her grandmother, both artistic and mental. I don’t know what questions she asks herself about genetic hand-me-downs from her father. She overheard my mother that night. She knows I have struggled with bipolar disorder. She knows I impregnated a girl as a teenager, and paid for it to be aborted. But she has also seen something in both her father–and her grandparents–that should hearten her. Resiliency. Or perhaps stubbornness. My mother has always demonstrated an unwavering determination to overcome obstacles through sheer force of will. I have never ceased to admire that about her. Perhaps unwavering fortitude is part of Marisa’s genetic destiny.

~

As we leave the Biltmore estate a road sign informs us that turning right leads to Charleston, South Carolina. A left brings us to Knoxville, Tennessee. I glance at Marisa, who smiles in agreement as I make the right turn. As the driver, I control the car speakers, so I fire up my portable music player as I start down the interstate. After a minute of not hearing any music I glance down at the player and see the screen is frozen. I fiddle with it, turning it on and off with my right hand while my left holds the steering wheel. Such multitasking is reckless, I know, but I am compelled to bring this device back to life. It is unthinkable that I am facing three weeks of lengthy drives with no recorded music to distract me. I filled this player specifically for this trip, hundreds of hours of rock, blues, and gospel to provide energy and classical to wind me down. My record-label and music-publisher members would be pleased to know that all of the music was acquired legally. But now that is all gone.

Thoughts race. Bile rises in my throat. I hear my doctor’s voice reminding me of the importance of staying calm in the face of the unexpected. I do not feel calm. I want to take this thin metal contraption with its brand name frozen on the front screen and hurl it out the car window. I want to whip the car into a violent U-turn and thread through the oncoming traffic so I can smash the unfaithful plastic player under two tons of unforgiving steel. Instead I glance at Marisa. Lost in her own music, she has not detected my growing rage. Nor do I wish her to. I focus on the road ahead, counting the white highway dashes whizzing by on the left the way I used to count letters when I would pyramid as a child. The repeated flicks of paint dance across my mind in a rhythmic staccato. My heartbeat synchronizes with the beat, then my breathing joins in harmony.

When my father knew he was on the verge of a manic outburst, he often fled to his car. My mother and I would wait, sometimes for hours. When he returned, he was back to his calm, medicated self, and we would all pretend that life was normal. I am approaching an approximation of normalcy now, at least well enough that I can fake it with my daughter. I point to the music player on her lap, then speak loudly.

“Do you want to play that through the car speakers?” She pulls out her left ear bud, I repeat the question, and she smiles.

“Really? You don’t mind?”

“I’d like to hear what you’re listening to.”

For the next three hours she flicks through her music library, informing me of when she discovered this song or that artist while explaining how her musical tastes have developed. I tell her what I like about what she’s playing, as well as what I dislike. I’m surprised at how much of it I enjoy. There’s a darkness to a lot of her music, minor chords and lyrics dripping with pathos. It is a stark contrast to the music popular when I was a teenager, bouncy pop tunes by Boy George and Cyndi Lauper. But then again I didn’t listen to those artists. Some of the music from my childhood is on that dead music player, including moody works by Pink Floyd. And, from what Marisa tells me, her music isn’t what is popular now.

“Oh, you’ve got to hear this song,” she says, repeatedly pressing a button. “It’s a giveaway tune that was already on the player.”

An acoustic guitar opens to a wholesome male voice.

“The world… is made of energy. And the world… is electricity. And the world… is made of energy. And there’s a light inside of you, and there’s a light inside of me.”

The dark complexities that have filled the passenger cabin are washed away by this sunshiny folk tune. I wince, and begin to seriously question my daughter’s musical taste. Then I hear it, rising above the music. Marisa is actively suppressing laughter. I glance at her and see those blue eyes squinting as a smile extends upwards from the edges of her mouth, the same expression she had a year ago as we watched that dancer on my mother’s television.

“What a lovely song,” I say. “I can see why you like it so much, Marisa. It’s so moving. So insightful. And so true!”

Marisa’s laugh finally explodes.

Music was central to our time together when she was young. When I first moved out of her mother’s house I bought her a pink cassette player. She would fall asleep to Disney soundtracks. Of course, kids that age can listen to the same music over and over again, at least as much as I listened to Dark Side of the Moon as a teenager. The tapes weren’t just her bedtime accompaniment. They’d play in the car when I drove her to school, or at the table when I fed her dinner. Those tunes burrowed into my brain without invitation, and sometimes I would snap. Unlike my father’s pre-lithium explosions, I instead embraced a more creative response. I would make up lyrics and sing them loudly over the Disney talent.

I find myself doing that now: “And the world… is made of angry bees. And the world… is made of nasty fleas. And the world… is full of underpants trees. And there are leafy shorts on you and there are leafy shorts on me.”

Now she’s bent over, gripping her side. Apparently she didn’t mind that the word “underpants” has too many syllables to perfectly parallel the song’s meter. Then she pulls out her phone and begins to text. I had her, for a moment, but now she’s fallen into her virtual world, a place without fathers. Yet, after some frantic typing, she resurfaces.

“I just got a text from Brian.”

All I know about Brian is what little intel Parker has provided me. Brian is one of Marisa’s classmates. From what I gather she is fond of him, but he is like many boys in his early teen years, not fully focused yet on girls. I am very pleased with this and hope he stays that way for some time. But she has never spoken his name around me.

“Brian,” Marisa says, “wrote that any dad who imagines underpants trees has to be the coolest dad there is.”

I fix my eyes on the road so Marisa can’t see how close I am to tears. “Text Brian that he is an excellent judge of character.”

Before I know it I see a sign reading CHARLESTON 18 MILES. But my focus is on the sky above, which has turned black as night even though we’re still a couple of hours away from sunset. We’re scheduled in an hour to interview John Smoak, a jack-of-all-trades photographer. He wants to be filmed outside his home on a small island in Charleston Harbor. I question the wisdom of that desire when a clap of thunder rips over the car. Traffic slows. Moments later we are under assault.

“Is that… hail?”

Marisa’s right. It’s August, in the South, and yet, somehow, frozen rain is pelting our car. I hand Marisa my phone. “Could you find John Smoak’s number and give him a call? We’re probably going to be late, and we’ll have to film him indoors.”

Marisa takes the phone, flips through my directory, and calls. I don’t know where the shy girl is who sat quietly on Colleen Doran’s rug two days ago. I only hear her side of the conversation, but they talk as if they’re old friends.

“Dad, he says he’d like to do the interview tomorrow morning, say around nine. It’s supposed to be clear then, and we could still shoot outside.”

I run the math in my head. Tomorrow is all about Savannah. We’re meeting Meghan Woodcock, an instructor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, in the early afternoon. But the drive from Charleston isn’t that long. “Okay, Marisa, tell John that’s fine.”

The exit ramp drops us onto the edge of old Charleston. I find myself driving through flooded streets. The water level rises on either side of the car.

“Oh my God,” Marisa says. “Can we get to the hotel?”

We’re only three blocks away, but it’s a reasonable question. This rental is a basic sedan with no ground clearance to speak of. And it’s a hybrid. I know little about these kinds of cars, but it’s generally not good to get batteries wet. I refuse to fail, however. This day has been perfect, and I’m not letting a literal freak of nature–frozen rain on a hot summer day–destroy it. We press forward, deeper into the water. Marisa squeals, I believe more in delight than fear. Waves erupt from both sides of the car like a crystalline angel’s wings. And then we’re clear, the road rising just enough to allow us to emerge.

The motel parking lot is a lake. At least three dozen parked cars soak in water, the tires very nearly submerged. I locate the highest ground, far from the building, and park. I offer Marisa an umbrella but she declines. Instead she leaps from the safety of the car and runs straight into the lake, kicking the water with her sandal-covered feet. “Come on, Dad!”

She’ll be drenched. She must know that. Now Marisa runs in circles near the entrance of the motel. I watch her, experiencing the secondary buzz of her joy, soaking it in the way I do the creativity-driven enthusiasm of my interview subjects. I’m still holding the umbrella. I’m still safe and sound in the car. And then I’m not. I leave the umbrella behind. Rain soaks my shirt as I run to join her. My pace slows as the water level reaches my calf, then my knees. Then I reach her. In one smooth motion she guides her arm down to the water and then up again, splashing toward my face. I smile and return the favor. An older woman with well-coiffed hair glares at us through the lobby window. Let her judge.

Art by Matt Monk

Patrick Ross holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and has been published in numerous literary journals. He has taught creative writing for The Loft Literary Center and The Writer’s Center. In 2012 he won the Sidney W. Vernick Prize in Nonfiction from fwriction: review, and in 2014 his acclaimed literary travel memoir COMMITTED: A MEMOIR OF THE ARTIST’S ROAD was published by Black Rose Writing. He is currently writing an urban fantasy novel that would be the first of a trilogy. 

A little bell is called tintinnabulum; a small shrill bell, squilla; a big one in the shape of a wide-brimmed hat, petasius; codon for a hand bell; nola for a bell that swings on the necks of dogs and the feet of birds and the houses of horses; nolula and dupla for a bell in a clock; campana for a large brass bell; signum for a bell in a tower; lebetes for a bell that’s really a cauldron.

At dawn, I imagine waking to the bellow of a bell outside my window. Its toll knocks my eyes open, spreads me evenly with vibration, hums in my finger and toe tips until the next toll knocks me open again. I crawl out the window and into the tower, pulling my body up into the body of the bell. There’s dew on the cold metal, on my hands, on the bare scoop of skin between my shoulder blades. I curl like a comma in the bell, duck my head in the small of its crown and wait for the next hour to arrive.

There is no belfry in my neighborhood, no tower’s strike at break of day or bellman marking hours upon the street at night. Even with the windows cracked open or an ear to the ground, time does not call us here but is kept by us. We wind the dials and push the buttons until the numbers match the corner of our computer screens and the bottom of our TVs. We try and fail to stay in sync with time, losing seconds by worn batteries and wasted eyes, in rounding and estimation. We end up deviating tocks and ticks, minutes apart. Between us, by this loss of seconds, some break in correspondence, too.

This is why I’ve been thinking of bells. I’m tired of the winding and the pushing, tired of deciding when to go where to do what for how long. I want to rise and fall out of duty, according to custom or by decree like a rooster or a monk. I want to synchronize, to move by swell and hum through the day with you and you and you.  

 —

Clock is related to the Latin word, cloca, meaning bell. The clock, the bell, and their meanings still share the same word in several languages, the same shell. Theirs is an ancient coupling. Plato had a clock with a striking bell to signal the beginning of his lectures at break of day, and the Egyptian inventor, Ctesibius, made water clocks with pebbles that resonated against gongs and bell jars that, when submerged beneath the water, clamored and rang. Not long after man first held the hours and watched their minutes pass, he pushed and prodded time to speak, made the bell its voice.

My desire for bells has everything to do with my desire to be ceaseless: to move forward as time does, to go with purpose from one second to the next in some greater agreement.

A couple hundred years ago, on any given day, the bell said to the child: wake up, pray, breakfast’s ready, school’s started, lunch is served, school’s out, it’s dinnertime, past curfew, time for bed. It told the man: wake up, pray, breakfast’s ready, the newspaper’s here, the train is coming, the factory’s opening, it’s lunch time, work’s out, dinner’s served, put the fire out, go to bed. And to the woman: wake up, pray, it’s breakfast time, there’s the muffin man, school’s started, there’s the postman, it’s lunchtime, there’s the ragman, school’s out, the train’s arrived, it’s past curfew, gather the children, it’s dinnertime, put the fire out, go to bed. A bell was made for telling. And it’s a relief to be told.

 —

Satis N. Coleman, a music teacher and scholar, writes that our earliest ancestors must’ve worshipped bells as the voice of God and invested them with “sacred character.” We have no way of knowing how exactly the bell first came to be or where, but there’s evidence from China that bells have existed for at least forty-seven centuries. Scholars believe the discovery of the earliest forms of the bell happened far earlier, by cavemen and women, and during that insoluble time beyond proof. They imagine that some happy accident, like a knocked stick on a stone or log or piece of metal was responsible for that first rich, sonorous sound.

I imagine the discovery was made by restless, not bumbling, hands; the hands of some earthly adventurer, some explorer of matter and lover of form; hands that would rather traverse a stone than a continent and preferred the shape and weight of a thing to the surrounding expanse; hands that settled upon the kind of catch or find they could carry; callused and curious hands that struck the thing to see its matter resist, bend, or break open; trembling hands that held, in the substance of the bell, an instrument and sound that did all three.

—

According to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the bell’s sound owes its godliness to its complexity and its complexity to its varying frequencies. These frequencies may or may not be harmonious with one another, but it’s the sound of the upper partials that gives the bell’s timber the “vibrant attack” that arrests us. Whether we are the ringer or receiver and no matter how many times we’ve heard a bell before, its note enters and covers us without warning; we’ve no choice but to submit to the second and the sound.

Certain pitches, tones and harmonies have always satisfied us the way food or sex does. Not by aiding our survival or reproduction, but because we long to be spoken to. Some days, the earth must have spoken to our ancestors often, in the howling cave bear and cracking lighting, in the echo of the screeching bat, in the river rushing. Other days, the earth’s air would have been quiet and its creatures still. It must have been a day like that when these men and women, bodies aching, asked the hollow wood to speak, felt the answer humming in their limbs, accepted this primal reward.

The gush of pleasure, the sighing relief, the looming quiet, and the humble desire for more. If the sound satisfied them, it must have been the sound repeated that brought them comfort. For when they struck the substance of the bell once more, its tone was there like the night and more beautiful. And unlike lightning or thunder, the substance of the bell was theirs for the taking. While its tone appeared unearthly, the bell’s singularity relied upon a mortal refrain.

 —

If I had bells to myself, I would harbor them: slip them in the shoeboxes beneath my bed and put them in the drawer of my nightstand with all my unmentionables.

I would put some in the creases of the couch and on the top shelf of the linen closet, tuck one behind the oatmeal and behind each of the salad dressing bottles and between the spaces of my toes.

I’d stow them in best hiding places in my childhood home: under the hats of the dolls in the china cabinet and on the ledges of the laundry chute and ceiling fan panels and under the rocks in the crawlspace, and I’d hide enough that I could forget about some.

I’d keep the dearest ones close: in the palm of my hand and under my tongue. Between my breast and my ribs, behind my eyes, stacked between the vertebras in my back.

I’d show my nephews how I could pull them out from behind my ear, left and right, and from my sleeves.

I’d put the littlest ones in the tops of my pens.

And my dog would swallow a bell.

And never mind the shape. Never mind the consequences.

My dog would swallow a bell, and everyone would know she was on her way.

—

In the earliest records, bells were worn. Moses wrote of “bells of gold” that dangled on the robes of high priests. When the congregation heard them, they knew the priest had reached the sanctuary. Another record tells of bells attached to the clothing of ancient Hebrew women, virgins, and boys. Persian royals wore bells. Bells were fastened to the necks of horses and donkeys and decorated the hats of fools.

Ancient Greek Warriors held bells in their shields, and mystics and babies held them in their hands. In the Life of Brutus, Plutarch wrote that when Xanthus was attacked, its people dove into the river in their attempt to escape and were caught with bells. Their enemy’s nets were lined with them, and every capture was an announcement. Medieval falconers tied bells to the legs of birds that, if lost, might then be found again. Bells announced that the train had arrived, that an heir was born, that a war had begun. For centuries, curfew bells extinguished light and fire in every home in England.

In some parts of Europe, bells were placed at the bedside of a woman giving birth. These bells were an aid to delivery: the woman’s girdle set atop the bell and struck three times to transfer its power to the girdle and then to the woman through vibration. The bell also asked the neighbors to pray for the woman in pain. Other prayers were placed onto bells by the touch of a hand and traveled outward with the sound.

Men and women returned to the body of the bell when their own figures failed them. Legend had it that if a bell was placed on the head of a mad person and she drank a potion, she’d be well again. The bell appeared indomitable, with its hulking, shining body and its clamoring, far-reaching voice. At the bed of the sick, men and women lifted the bell, steadied the hammer, pressed its smooth, round mouth atop the patient’s head and held both as the potion went down.

—

A few years ago, I was making my way down the aisle of a church in Texas when I noticed a slight woman in motion near the exit. She was reaching up and pulling down on a thick, white rope. Over and over, her body was stretching toward the ceiling, grabbing the rope and tugging down to her knees, which were bent and inches from the ground. She was smiling and I was smiling. She looked every bit a woman designated to supplicate in prayer. By the might of her tugs, all of Austin heard.

The total movement of the bell is called its duty. And this duty is of the ringer. The body that moves before the body of the bell. Each pull of the rope like a link and an opening.

I listened for the sweet assault, strained my ears and craned my neck and held my breath. All I could hear through the thick stucco walls, though, were the people in front and behind me, intent on one another. No one, I suspect not even the slight woman, could hear the bell ringing from the inside. The walls were built to keep outside sounds out and inside sounds in. They weren’t made for the sounds between.

—

To cast a bell takes careful preparation. First, the founder builds the core, a foundation of bricks coated in clay and grease, and sets it on a spindle to dry. Next, the founder makes the false bell with plastic wax and places it on top of the core. He or she greases the false bell to keep the next layer from sticking then smoothes some fine clay over the grease to fill in any holes. After that, the founder spreads a coarser, thicker layer of clay and smoothes it until the cope forms.

When the core, the false bell, and the cope are dry, the founder sets a fire beneath the bricks and bakes the mold until it hardens. While baking, the grease falls away with the steam and leaves two thin contours of air between the core: one between the false bell and the core and the other between the false bell and the cope. In these tight spaces, the founder loosens and lifts the false bell out from between the core and cope, leaving a fat empty curve. He or she takes the bell metal, a mixture of copper and tin, and pours it through a hole at the top of the mold to fill the bell-shaped hollow.

If the core or cope is wet or the wrong temperature, if there is too much tin or the bell-metal is not hot enough, if the gases cannot escape, if the clapper is too heavy or the ringer too clumsy or boisterous, the bell can crack. Once a young girl was swept off the ground by the weight of the bell and the force of the rope she was swinging. The girl, who was not a skillful ringer, fell on the floor of the bell-chamber and died. The cracked bell, though, was likely recast—broken into pieces and set on fire. Poured into the shape of a bell again.

In the end, better to be the bell—the instrument, the tool, the vessel—than climb one or keep one or ring one.

Years ago, I went to a doctor with a bad case of nerves. When I sat down, he asked me to close my eyes, to think of a liquid and warm it up. I saw gold and melted it in a kettle in a cave in my mind. Then, he filled me up, toes first, with the molten stream. The liquid pooled in my toes, rose to my calves and up my thighs. It moved bit by bit to my abdomen and chest, spilled into my arms and into the tips of my fingers, surged in my throat and lips. By the time it reached my cheeks, I was replete: solid and sailing, backward and forward, backward and backward again.

Art by Matt Monk

Rebecca Bald is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher in Chicago.  She has a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, a MAT in Language Arts from National-Louis University, and a MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University.  She is the 2014 recipient of the Clare Rosen and Samuel Edes First Runner-up Prize for Emerging Artists.

Nearly every day, seventy-seven-year-old Yoshida Katsuji drives across the city from his modest home to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.  Always early, Yoshida moves through the museum corridors and office hallways with ease, greeting each staff member with an energetic “Good morning!” and a slight bow of his head.  As the museum lobby and sidewalks outside become packed with students lining up for tours and presentations, Yoshida stands at the information desk talking and laughing with the staff person there.  Once his group arrives, he enters the lecture hall just off the main entrance, stands before a hundred or more visiting school children, and tells them his story.

“I look out at them,” Yoshida tells me, “and the little girls look at me like this.”  He raises his eyebrows and mimics an expression of shock and horror.  “Instantly, they begin to cry— because I’m so incredibly handsome.”  Yoshida laughs—a huge upper body laugh—and waits, eyes wide, for my reaction.

I hold his gaze.  A large black patch covers the right side of his head, secured by a black elastic band that runs underneath his chin, up the other side of his face, and across the top of his nearly bald head.  Scar tissue covers his face and neck, and his left ear is shriveled.  When he smiles, his mouth is crooked, revealing severely misshapen teeth.  Behind large framed glasses, Yoshida’s eyes are uneven, one higher than the other.

“I’ve gotten used to it,” he says, as if to reassure me.  “I tell the audience, ‘I am as good looking as Kimutaku’—a famous actor.  When I spoke in Chicago, I was DiCaprio.  In Japan, I am Kimutaku.  I tell them this to make them laugh.”

Yoshida leans back and laughs again.  Then he sighs and covers his mouth and nose with the palm of his hand to wipe tiny beads of excess saliva from his lips and face.

˜

In a small conference room tucked away inside the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall, I interview Yoshida for the first time.  In my research for a book about the Nagasaki survivors, I had read his brief testimony of the days and weeks after the bomb, and had asked my contact at the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace to set up this meeting.  Yoshida is wearing black slacks, black suspenders, and a beige dress shirt with thin blue stripes and a narrow Nehru collar.  He leans in, ready for my questions.

“Is it all right to begin by looking at this map?” I ask in Japanese, turning the map around so he can read it.

Yoshida quickly scans the map, finds the atomic bomb’s hypocenter, and points to a neighborhood on the other side of the mountains.  “This is where my house was,” he replies in Japanese,   “Uma-machi No. 65.”

Yoshida studies the map further and indicates an area just north of the hypocenter.  “My school was here.”

“That’s so close,” I say.  Few survived at that proximity.

“Yes,” Yoshida says, “it was very close.”

˜

In 1945, Yoshida was a thirteen-year-old student in the shipbuilding course at the Nagasaki Vocational School.  But classes had been cancelled for more than a year, so Yoshida, one year too young for mandated student labor in military factories, dug air raid shelters, joined bucket brigades to extinguish fires caused by Allied bombing, and made bamboo spears for use against the Allies in the anticipated land invasion of Japan.

“When you were a child,” I ask, “what did you think about the war?”

“Us?” Yoshida says, speaking with immense energy and intention.  “We thought Japan would win for sure.  We had to endure until we won.  That’s how it was.”

Yoshida

“Did you want to fight in the war?”

“Everyone did.  We longed to.  We wanted to become soldiers and fight; we were educated that way starting in elementary school.  We were brainwashed, so we didn’t think it was possible for us to lose.”

Yoshida’s words are hurried, upbeat.  “A portrait of the Emperor hung at our school.  He was considered a descendent of God.  We bowed to the portrait when we passed it to pay our respects.

“But during the war, the situation in Japan was bad, you know?  Gradually, we were being defeated.  Everything was rationed.  The amount of food we were allowed each month got smaller and smaller.  We got two go (just under a cup) of uncooked rice per month.  One loaf of bread.  That’s how it was.”  Yoshida looks at me intently.  “My stomach was empty.”

˜

By August 1945, Allied forces had firebombed and incinerated sixty-six Japanese cities.  Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed, and the country’s infrastructure had crumbled.  Nagasaki, however, was on the short list for the atomic bomb, so the United States had not implemented full-scale bombing on the city.  Instead, Nagasaki had experienced limited targeted attacks on docks, shipyards, factories, and the central railway station.  U.S. surveillance planes flew over Nagasaki every morning and evening, prompting air raid alarms across the city that interrupted work, school, and agricultural routines.  The city was on constant alert.

At about ten o’clock on the morning of August 9—three days after the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb used in wartime over the city of Hiroshima—another round of air raid sirens wailed in Nagasaki.  Adults and children throughout the city scurried to the tunnel-shaped air raid shelters built in factories, hospitals, schools, and into the sides of hills all around.

Yoshida points on the map to the shelter where he hid that morning.  “When the air raid alarm sounded, my friends—”

“There were six of you?”

“Yes, six friends, plus me—seven total—we went to the air raid shelter near our school for protection.  But teachers and employees had priority, so we didn’t go in.  Instead, we escaped to an air raid shelter in the woods to hide from the enemy.

“We crouched there until the ‘all clear’ sounded.  This meant that the enemy planes were gone, and we had to leave the shelter and get back to school.  If the ‘all clear’ siren hadn’t sounded, we would have stayed in the woods, and we wouldn’t have been so close.”

Just before 11:00 a.m., the people of Nagasaki emerged from hiding.  The sun was hot, and the high-pitched, rhythmic song of cicadas vibrated across the city.  Crowds filled the streets.  At an altitude of thirty thousand feet, Bock’s Car, the B-29 carrying the second atomic bomb, arrived undetected.

“It was summer—right?”  Yoshida says, speaking so fast I can hardly understand him.  “We wanted some water.   So when we came down from the mountain, we stopped at a roadside well shared by two farmhouses.”

Six miles above, Captain Kermit Beahan, Bock’s Car’s bombardier, activated the tone signal that opened the bomb bay doors and indicated thirty seconds until release. Five seconds later, he noticed a hole in the clouds and made a visual identification of Nagasaki. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he yelled. Within seconds, the instrument plane accompanying Bock’s Car discharged three parachutes, each attached to scientific equipment that would measure heat, blast, and radiation effects. Then Beahan released the bomb.

On the side of the road, Yoshida was lowering the bucket into the well when he looked up to his right and saw two parachutes about a half a mile away, falling between a crack in the clouds.

“Rakka-san, they were called back then,” he says.  Descending umbrellas.

“What did you think when you saw them?”

“I just thought that they were regular parachutes, that maybe some soldiers were coming down.”

“Did you say anything?”

Yoshida shrugs.  “Just, ‘Hey, look! Something’s falling!’  We all looked up, using our hands to block the sun.  The parachutes floated down—saaatto—quietly, with no sound.”

Then Yoshida noticed a large dark object falling through the clouds.

“There was just a split second, then…BAN!” he says, his voice loud and fevered as he recalls the thunderous detonation of the five-ton plutonium bomb.  Yoshida jumps up from his chair and moves to the white board behind me.  At high speed, he scribbles the mountains around the city, marks where he was standing when he saw the bomb, and draws an “x” for the hypocenter—the point five hundred meters above the ground where the bomb exploded.  “My body was hurled into the air,” he says, drawing a line from one spot to another, “and blasted across a field, a road, and an irrigation channel.  I landed here, in a rice paddy.”

One millionth of a second after the bomb exploded above the city, the burst point reached an estimated three to four million degrees Fahrenheit.  All the materials that made up the bomb vaporized into an ionized gas, releasing electromagnetic waves that, when absorbed by the air, ignited a fireball approximately fifty-two feet wide, with an internal temperature of over 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  In one second, the fireball grew to about 750 feet in diameter.  The demolition force of the blast blew people off their feet, crushed them beneath houses and collapsed buildings, destroyed steel structures, roofs, and walls, and moved an iron bridge twenty-eight inches downstream.  Near the hypocenter, the heat instantly carbonized human and animal bodies and vaporized their internal fluids.  Within three seconds of the explosion, infrared rays from the heat of the blast caused severe and fatal flash burns on the exposed faces, arms, and legs of tens of thousands of people.  Unprecedented levels of radiation penetrated deeply into the bodies of people and animals, initiating cellular mutations that would lead to death, disease, and life-changing medical conditions.

As the mushroom cloud billowed three miles overhead and darkened the city, Yoshida lay in a muddy rice field more than 130 feet from the well where he had seen the bomb.  His entire body was burned.

˜

Yoshida moves back to his chair but does not sit.  “We should go to the museum,” he says, “I’ll show you the photos of me there.”  I follow him through the long corridors of the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall, into hidden hallways that connect it to the Atomic Bomb Museum, and downstairs to the below-ground entrance to the exhibits.  The museum staff wave Yoshida through, and we bypass the turnstiles that visitors use to enter.

The first room is a small passageway with oversized black-and-white photographs of Nagasaki from the 1940s.  Set into trees and foliage, wooden homes are clustered in small neighborhoods across the city.  Staircases ascend into the hills, leading to shops and tile-roofed houses huddled close together.  Streetcars wind through the city on tracks, their wires connected to cables strung between electrical poles along the side of the road.  Women wear kimonos, and men wear Western clothes – suits, shirts, slacks, and sometimes hats.  Workers transport their goods with hand- and horse-pulled carts.  In one celebratory photo, thousands of people are standing on the docks of a shipyard next to a battleship, waving their fathers, sons, brothers, and uncles off to war.  In another, students at bayonet practice stand in lines on the dirt field of their school.

The next room is cavernous and nearly dark.  All around are actual and recreated ruins of the city:  cracked archways and crumbling sacred statues from the Urakami Cathedral, melted metal beams from bridges, and fractured cement staircases from schools and factories.  Video screens alternate black-and-white photos of factories reduced to mangled steel skeletons, vast stretches of debris and dust where the city once was, scorched bodies, and people wandering dazed through the rubble.

We move into the main exhibit room, past a timeline of the Manhattan Project and the development and delivery of the bombs, and weave through a crowd of junior high school students toward a wall of photographs relating to survivors’ injuries.  Behind us to our left stands a life-size model of the Nagasaki atomic bomb, ten feet eight inches high and five feet in diameter with an orange-red band around its middle like a belt.

Yoshida points to the glass case in front of us.  “The top photo is before my surgery,” he says.  “The bottom one is after.”

I stare at the top photo trying to understand what I am seeing.  Except for the outline of his head and neck and his thick black hair on top, it is hard to tell that this photograph is actually a side view of Yoshida’s face.  The entire right side of his head—from behind his ear to the middle of his nose, and from the top of his head past his right eye, cheek, and down to his neck—is a mass of charred, blistered, crusted skin.  His right ear is a swollen glob of melted flesh.

We stand together in silence.

“The left side of my face healed on its own,” Yoshida says, “but on the right side, the burns were more severe.  Even though my skin grew back, the flesh beneath it didn’t.  I was in the hospital for fifteen months.”

Yoshida

“How many surgeries did you have?”

“Three.  Two of them failed.  They took skin from my left thigh and grafted it onto my face, but infections grew beneath the skin and pus would pour out.  When the infections healed, the skin scabbed over, as hard as a cast.  That was really, intensely painful.  After the third surgery, I gradually healed.”

“What about your right ear?”

Yoshida touches the black patch covering the right side of his head.  “After a while,” he says, “the swollen part rotted and fell off.  So there’s no ear here.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No.  Just a hole, alone.”

The bottom photograph shows Yoshida’s face a year later, after his final surgery in late 1946.  It is difficult to see much of a difference, except that both the blackness and the swelling are somewhat reduced.  By then, Yoshida was nearly fifteen.  His eyes are frozen in terror.

˜

“Let’s go upstairs,” he says, turning to leave.  I dash after him, barely keeping up, past artifacts of the bombing:  melted coins and glass; scorched rice in a schoolgirl’s melted metal lunch box; and a military helmet found near the hypocenter, with part of the soldier’s skull still attached on the inner surface.  We enter the last exhibit room, filled with paintings and poems created by survivors.  To the right, three small television screens are mounted on the wall in front of cushioned benches where visitors can sit and watch videotaped testimonies of individual hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”).

“My video is number 21,” Yoshida tells me as we race by.

“Number 21?” I say. “I’ll come back when it’s not crowded.”

“Yes,” he replies.  “I hope you will.”

We ascend the spiral walkway to the museum lobby.  In the span of three minutes, Yoshida seamlessly interrupts his conversation with me numerous times to bow slightly and say ohayou gozaimasu—good morning—to every visitor who passes.

“When did you start speaking in front of others?”  I ask.

“It was about twenty-two years ago,” he says.   That’s 1987, I calculate, forty-two years after the bomb.  “Many survivors spoke a lot, but I didn’t until then.  I was shy to be in front of women.  Everyone looks at me like this—” Yoshida grimaces.  “I didn’t like it.”

“But you don’t feel that way now?”

“No, no.  I don’t.  Right now, my schedule is very busy.  High school students, junior high students, elementary school students.  When I speak to elementary school students, I have to use language they can understand.  It’s hard.

“This is what I say to children,” he continues.  “‘Have you ever looked up “heiwa”— “peace”—in the dictionary?’  They never have.  They’ve never looked it up because we don’t need to know what peace is during peacetime.  ‘Let’s look it up together,’ I say to them.”

We continue up the walkway.  “Our greatest enemy is carelessness,” he says.  “We need to pay attention to peace.”

In 2005, Yoshida traveled to Chicago to speak at several universities and at the Chicago Peace Museum.  “Audiences were generally receptive,” he says, “and they always asked about Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.  I told them that I think it was wrong that Japan started the war, and I apologized for that.”

“Telling your story over and over again,” I ask, “it’s not overwhelming?”

“No, I’ve gotten used to it.  In the past, whenever I went to speak somewhere, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s too much.’  Now, I think that we should prevent war at all costs, so I should tell my story.  Being shy is not a good reason to not speak for peace.”

We enter the lobby of the museum.  On every wall hangs artwork, most made of colorful origami cranes representing peace, from school children across Japan and the world.  Dozens of other pieces lean against the walls, overlapping one another.  A group of students in uniforms waits for Yoshida in the lobby.

“An hour isn’t long enough to tell my story,” he says.

“No, it isn’t,” I reply.  “I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

We bow to one another and I thank him.  Then he turns to greet his group and lead them down the hall to the assembly room.

˜

The next day, I meet Yoshida at the information desk and follow him as he zips through the hallways toward the elevator.  Suddenly he veers right to the staircase.  “The stairs are better for you!” he says, ascending them at fast speed and laughing as I hurry to keep up.  We head into the second-floor conference room with a large window overlooking the city.  As I try to catch my breath, Yoshida holds out his hand.  “This is for you,” he says, giving me an individually wrapped lemon cake, “in case you didn’t have time for lunch.”

We settle into chairs across from one another, and Yoshida quickly returns to his memories immediately following the atomic explosion.  “I’d been hurled back into a rice paddy, right?  At some point when I regained consciousness, I could feel the coldness of the water, so I stood up.  My body was covered in mud.  I didn’t feel any pain.”

“You were in shock?”

“Yes.  My entire face was burned.”  Yoshida’s voice is animated. “The skin on my arms had peeled off and was hanging down, and blood—I had no skin, so blood was pouring out of my flesh.”

He points to his ribcage and looks at me.  “I broke two ribs, and they’re still bent, even now.  The doctor said the bones had healed in that bent position, as they’d been broken.  Now, mostly, it doesn’t hurt, but when I play baseball, I can’t swing the bat further than this.”  Yoshida mimes a baseball swing that stops short because he can’t turn his body at the waist.

“After the bomb,” he continues, showing me his hands, palms upward, “my hands were tight, like this.”   Yoshida curls his fingers into fists.  “The doctor told me to put sand in a bucket and hold it with my fingers so that my fingers would eventually open.  The bucket was pulling my fingers down.  I couldn’t hold it for five minutes because it hurt, like my hand would break.  It took thirteen years before I could do this.”  He spreads his fingers open.  “In winter, it’s still really painful because the tissue underneath my skin always seems to split open.”

All six of Yoshida’s friends survived the initial explosion.  They found each other and lay wounded in the grass next to a small river, hoping to be rescued.  Field workers and others began staggering down from the hills, injured and dazed.  “Tons of people,” Yoshida says.  “People whose skin was falling off and hanging in strips from their bodies.  Some had body parts that had been blown away.  Some were almost completely naked and so badly burned I couldn’t tell if they were men or women.”

“People were moaning and crying,” he says, his voice higher—younger, it seems, as if he is still there.   “I saw one person whose eyeballs were hanging out.  And people who were burned black all over, like us.  Everyone begged for water.”

Yoshida leans forward, his eyes holding my focus.  “Some mothers came down from the mountains and were crying, and we started crying, too, even louder.  We joined them and headed toward the city, past dead bodies, some burned to ashes.  As we got closer to the hypocenter, the whole city was on fire.  Our skin was peeling off, and our flesh was swollen.  Leeches from the rice paddy had attached to me, and at some point, we turned around and went back to the embankment to wash ourselves off.  We placed uncharred leaves all over our bodies to cover the areas without skin.  Then we crouched down in an area where the ground was depressed.  ‘Hang in there, okay?’ we said, trying to encourage each other. ‘Gotta keep going…do our best…’

“By late afternoon,” he continues without pausing, “the leaves that we’d put over our open wounds began to dry out and crumble from the heat of the sun.  When they fell off, the sun was beating down on our exposed flesh.”  Later that day when the sun fell behind the mountains, the boys felt visceral relief.  “At that point,” Yoshida says, “we thought we were saved.”

Yoshida’s story races from his mouth.  “My face was so swollen that I couldn’t open my eyes.  I couldn’t see anything, but whenever anyone passed, I called out to ask if my neighborhood near Suwa Shrine was damaged.  I heard their voices reply to me, ‘The whole city is destroyed!’

“I lost consciousness that night.  One of my friends, Tabuchi, who could still see out of one eye, left to try to make it over the mountain to our neighborhood.   He arrived home the next morning, and his mother went to my house to tell my parents where I was.  Because of that, I was saved.

“My mother and father and two neighbors walked seven kilometers, all the way from Uma-machi.  The streets were still burning, you know?  Their feet got so hot, they couldn’t bear it.  Many houses were crushed and the water pipes had burst, so water trickled out.  They ran to the water and got their feet wet and then kept walking.  That’s what I heard.

“My parents were ira-ira—desperate—to find me, and walked through the ruins of my school where a member of a relief team had taken me.  They called out my name, ‘Katsuji!  Katsuji!’  But everyone looked the same, right?  And everyone answered to everyone else’s call.

“‘We won’t be able to find him,’ my mother said to my father.

“‘If that’s the case,’ my father said, ‘then we need to lean in close to their ears and say his name in a small voice.’  I don’t know how many dozens of people they did that with, but when they came to me, they suddenly knew it was me.”

“Did they carry you home in their arms?”

“They placed me in an uba-guruma—a baby carriage—and pushed me through the smoldering ruins and across the mountains to our home.”

“When did you regain consciousness?”

“Not until mid-December.  Four months.  My mother laid out a futon and put newspapers on top, and then a kind of wax paper to protect the bedding from the pus oozing out of my wounds.  She lay me down on top of that and hung mosquito netting.  My mother was especially cautious about flies, but they landed on her and she carried them through the mosquito netting to me.  They laid eggs all over me.  She tried removing them with chopsticks, but the eggs were too small, so she heated the scissors and scraped my flesh—even though it was rotting.  By doing that, she removed a lot of eggs and later maggots that had hatched in my wounds.”

“What about the friends you were with that day?”

“The first one died on August 21^st.  Then one by one they died in the weeks following the bomb. I’m the only one left.  As for my other classmates, we stopped having class reunions for my vocational school because everyone in my class had died.

“It’s because of my mother that I am alive,” he says.  “She never slept, and any food she had she gave to me.  My face was so badly burned that I couldn’t open my mouth, so my mother used a stick to feed me.  ‘Kuu, kuu,’ she said softly, to encourage me to eat.”

˜

In December 1945, still unconscious, Yoshida was transported to the Omura Naval Hospital north of Nagasaki and received medical treatment for the first time.  After three skin graft surgeries, he was discharged from the hospital in January 1947.  Yoshida, then fifteen, walked alone into the Omura train station, and when he entered the waiting area, the room fell silent.  Yoshida’s still blackened face drew everyone’s gaze.

“I bowed my head and cried,” he says.  “After the train left the station, I thought I would have some peace, but at each stop people got on and off, and everyone stared.  So I kept my face down and cried all the way to Nagasaki.

“I’m okay now, but then I was completely messed up.  Such a handsome fellow that I was,” Yoshida jokes.  “I was totally disfigured.  I couldn’t show my face.  After I got home, I never left my house.”

“How long did you stay inside?”

“For two or three years. There was a barbershop within fifty meters of my house, but I wouldn’t even go that far.  At some point, my mother asked the barber to come to our house on his day off to cut my hair, but instead, he said I could come to the shop in the morning before it opened.  In the middle of my haircut, it came time to open the shop.  I looked up into the mirror in front of me and saw a customer looking at me.  Our eyes met in the mirror.

“Immediately the customer looked away,” Yoshida continues.  “He looked at me again. Human nature is amazing—once you’ve seen something, even if you turn away, you want to see that thing again.  At that moment, I became very sad and began to cry.

“Later, my mother came to me and asked, ‘Have you ever thought about getting help so your face would be less difficult to look at?  Why don’t we contact the doctor in Omura and ask him what to do?’  She did that, and I got cream to apply to my face.  I’ve applied lotion to my skin every day since then.  Even today,” Yoshida teases and laughs, “knowing I was going to see you, I applied lotion on my skin!”

˜

By 1949, four years after the bomb, Yoshida had finally recovered enough to begin working at a grocery wholesaler.  Eventually he married.  “I was pretty lucky,” he says, speaking about his wife.

“Was she a hibakusha, too?”  I ask.

“No, my wife wasn’t injured in the bomb.  She died ten years ago, from cancer.”

h

“Did you discuss your experience with her?”

“We didn’t talk about it much.  But ten years after we were married—we’d had two children in ten years—my wife told me how she’d felt at first.  ‘We were sleeping together back then,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t look at your face because it was so black.’”  Yoshida clasps his hands.  “I had a wife who couldn’t look at me.”

“What about your children?”

“For years, when my sons were little, I instructed them:  ‘When someone asks what happened to me, don’t hide the facts of my experience.  Right away, tell them that your father was injured in the atomic bomb.’  I told them this over and over.  But three times my young sons brought friends over to the house, and when the children looked at me, they said, ‘Your father has a black face!’ But my sons didn’t say anything.

“Then one day, we were at sports day at my son Tomoji’s school.  During the lunch break, everyone from the same class sat together in a circle on the ground—on woven grass mats.  Parents and children together.  Some of the children looked at me like they were shocked.  They were still children, so they said what they were thinking without hesitation.  One of the children said, ‘Tomo-chan!  Your father has an awful face, huh!’

“‘Oh my God!’ I thought, ‘It would have been better if I hadn’t come!’  But this time my son spoke up for me immediately.

“‘My daddy was hurt by the atomic bomb,’ Tomoji said.  That saved me.  I felt grateful to my son.

“Now I go to my grandchildren’s school and anywhere I can.  The children of Kyushu’s elementary schools treat me like Kimutaku.  I sign my name ‘Grandpa Yoshida,’” he says and laughs.  “Then I write in parentheses, ‘Grandpa Kimutaku.’”

˜

The following morning, as I leave the museum library, all the school groups have already entered the exhibit hall, so the lobby is quiet.  Outside the main entrance, Yoshida is standing on the sidewalk talking with the ice cream cart vendor, an older woman, slightly bent over, wearing a long white apron and white kerchief on her head.

“Good morning,” I say, bowing to both of them.

“Good morning!” he says, his voice strong and vibrant.  “My group is late.”

“Ah,” I say, nodding, remembering that Yoshida himself is always early.

“Would you like some ice cream?” he says, smiling broadly.  “It’s very delicious!  I’ll treat you!”

“No, thank you,” I answer, laughing.  Yoshida laughs, too, and then turns back to continue talking with the woman as I head down the hill.  Behind me, I hear voices of students chattering as they approach the museum from the other side.  I glance back to see Yoshida greeting the head teacher.  He races ahead of the students and holds the museum door open, urging them inside until the last student has entered.  Yoshida follows quickly behind, on his way to the lecture hall where he will face more children’s stares, ease their fear with jokes about his dashing good looks, and tell his story once again.

Art by Matt Monk

Susan Southard is an American non-fiction writer. She won the 2016 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, for her book NAGASAKI: LIFE AFTER NUCLEAR WAR.

 “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

James Baldwin, “Faulkner and Desegregation”

In July 1957, after having lived nine years in Paris to escape an intolerable American racial climate, James Baldwin returned to the United States.  He had just written “Faulkner and Desegregation” in the winter of 1956 while still in Paris, and his biographer James Campbell believes that this essay marked a turning point in his commitment to civil rights and put him on a path of activism.  Back in New York, according to Campbell, Baldwin spent the summer brooding, visiting family and friends, and plotting how, with little money and no car, he could travel South to participate in the growing movement.  Both Baldwin’s mother and stepfather were Southerners, and Baldwin, a Harlem native who had never travelled south of Washington, D.C., frequently referred to himself as a Southerner.  Over the next six years he took multiple trips South:  in 1957 (a journey which produced “A Hard Kind of Courage,” and “A Letter from the South:  Nobody Knows My Name”), May 1960 (“Why They Can’t Wait,” “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King”), and 1963.  The period between 1957 and 1963 was a tense time in American history when many southern states resisted the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregation in the public schools.  Author Randall Kenan sees that Baldwin’s “eyewitness experience” of the South, at this moment of huge cultural change, “deepened, enriched, and focused” his writing voice.  Writing about the South as an anthropologist would, or as a foreigner or journalist, Baldwin holds the mirror up to southern whites, who perceive themselves as good and honorable people, in order to expose as dishonest their self-professed innocence and denial of racial injustice.  “In all his southern trips,” writes Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming, “his novelist’s instincts . . . gravitated to the white minds behind the racism he observed.”  With an unflinching eye he gives numerous descriptions of white people in his southern essays:  the white principal in “A Hard Kind of Courage,” the white Southerners who speak of love and heroism between white and black in old South at the end of “Nobody Knows My Name,” the white lady greeting her black chauffeur, as well as the white student believing in the effectiveness of the police to protect in Tallahassee in “They Can’t Turn Back.”  Two experiences which complicate his role as interviewer or observer of white Southerners may also provide him with a unique power:  his family history in the South, and his sense of anguished ethics regarding his commitment as a writer.  Where should he place his priorities—in his fiction or his activism?

I.

En route South for the first time in September 1957, Baldwin stopped in Charlotte, North Carolina, where four black schoolchildren were seeking to integrate the public school system.  “A Hard Kind of Courage,” the first essay to be published as a direct result of this trip, came out in Harper’s Magazine in 1958.  It was later renamed “A Fly in the Buttermilk” for the collection Nobody Knows My Name (1961) although I think its original title is more revealing of the  unassuming role Baldwin takes in order to probe the courage demanded from all sides in the small drama unfolding in Charlotte.  In some ways this essay is unremarkable in comparison to some of his other essays, like “Nobody Knows My Name” or “Notes of a Native Son,” because Baldwin remains so restrained (with some slips of sly sarcasm), but this very restraint displays how even in his prose writing Baldwin retains the sensibility of a novelist who listens quietly, straining to understand the inner lives of his characters.  What he refrains from saying to his interviewees is as important as what he does say.  The essay is divided into two parts:  in the first part he interviews G., a fifteen-year old black student and his mother; in the second part he interviews the white principal of G’s school.  In conversation with both parties, Baldwin extends the same attentiveness and presence of mind and lets his interviewees speak for themselves in their own voices without too much explicit judgment.  However, by juxtaposing the two contrasting points of view, of the black family and the white principal, Baldwin exposes the so-called innocence and graciousness of the white principal as morally corrupt:  an evasion of G’s humanity.

Baldwin first interviews G. and his mother, examples of those King would soon call (in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”) the “real heroes” of the civil rights movement, with the hopes of learning on the ground level about their inner lives and feelings.  Baldwin is impressed by the quiet dignity of G. and concludes that he remains so silent in part to “rescue” his mother from the pain of knowing about her son’s harassment at school.  When Baldwin asks about what motivated her to send her son to a previously all-white school, she replies:  “Well, it’s not because I’m so anxious to have him around white people,” the mother laughs.  “I really don’t know how I’d feel if I was to carry a white baby around who was calling me Grandma.”  This little joke elicits the first laugh from her son, and the mother, feeling Baldwin’s unspoken solidarity, shares her frustrations about the whole situation.

Baldwin then turns to the white principal of the same school, someone who sees himself as a good person with Christian values, and his sense of solidarity shifts.  “He was a thin, young man of about my age,” Baldwin writes, “bewildered and in trouble.”  Baldwin often uses “bewildered” or “baffled,” words he charges with sarcasm, to describe the demeanor of white Southerners still reeling in the face of desegregation. Baldwin does have evidence that the principal is a “good” man, “very gentle and honorable”:  on several occasions he has escorted G. through the halls as a kind of bodyguard, and he probably was the reason why a white student who tripped G. and knocked him down later offered an apology.

Baldwin pursues the journalistic equivalent of King’s non-violent protest, or non-violent witness, in order to create tension and provoke a crisis in the principal’s conscience.  When Baldwin asks why G. is the only black student at the school (in effect, the “fly in the buttermilk”), the principal responds, “I don’t think it’s right for colored children to come to white schools just because they’re white.”  Baldwin in turn says, “Well. . .  even if you don’t like it. . . ,” The principal interrupts Baldwin before he can finish his sentence and begins to talk, in a defensive tone, about the idea of integration.  Baldwin reports:

And then he explained to me, with difficulty, that it [integration] was simply contrary to everything he’d ever seen or believed. He’d never dreamed of a mingling of the races; had never lived that way himself and didn’t suppose that he ever would; in the same way, he added, perhaps a trifle defensively, that he only associated with a certain stratum of white people.  But, “I’ve never seen a colored person toward whom I had any hatred or ill-will.”

Baldwin’s strategy is to get the principal to verbalize his views out loud, baldly, in front of a witness.  “His eyes searched mine as he said this and I knew that he was wondering if I believed him.”  Baldwin does not comfort or judge the man, and he refrains from using some of his signature sarcasm.  He refrains, too, from mentioning the little inside joke about the white grandbaby shared with G. and his mother.  “There seemed no point in making this man any more a victim of his heritage than he so gallantly was already.” Baldwin’s choice of adverb here sharpens the edge of an already ironic statement; one does not immediately think of a perpetrator of benign racism as the victim.  This statement functions as a kind of inside joke with the reader.

In Baldwin’s eyes, the principal is, like Faulkner in his public views on desegregation, “guilty of great emotional and intellectual dishonesty.”  To break through his denial, Baldwin applies some psychological pressure by playing on the principal’s desire to see himself as a “good” man:

“Still,” I said at last, after a rather painful pause, “I should think that the trouble in this situation is that it’s very hard for you to face a child and treat him unjustly because of something for which he is no more responsible than–than you are.”

The eyes came to life then, or a veil fell, and I found myself staring at a man in anguish.

Here Baldwin, who had theorized about the white Southerner in his essay on Faulkner, is face to face with a real man in anguish.  At the start of the interview the principal fails to face the reality of the situation:  he used the phrase “excellent” to describe the race relations in his city; he called the white students’ blocking G.’s entrance to school an act of kidding; and he even omitted the fact that white children in his own school taunted him with the phrase “nigger lover.”  By the end of the interview, his eyes are full of pain.  To precipitate this change, Baldwin twice accents the pronoun “you.”  Normally one turns to the second person pronoun to accuse the other party, but Baldwin uses “you” to sympathize with the principal.  He understands on a very human level that the principal hopes to retain the respect of the white students, parents, and teachers with whom he has a long relationship even as he does the right thing by G., protecting him against harassment regardless of his personal feelings about integration.  By recognizing this genuinely difficult leadership position, Baldwin acknowledges the principal’s humanity. In return, Baldwin calls on the principal to be accountable and acknowledge publicly the humanity of the black child.  As a leader inside the white community, the principal–more than any black leader–has the power to change the hearts and minds of the white students and parents at his school.

Baldwin’s emphasis on “you” suggests to the principal that the “Negro problem” is, in fact, his own problem, a white problem—a problem of accountability.  (He pursues this theme with increasingly angry clarity in many of his later essays, including “The White Man’s Guilt.”)  Baldwin manages, through the pressure of his measured conversation that climaxes with this gentle moral punch, to bring about a breaking up in this man’s euphemistic point of view.

Confronted with his own contradictions, the white principal, like G. and his family, must draw on a “hard kind of courage” as he begins to examine, however tentatively, his own values and attitudes.  He has experienced what Flannery O’Connor readers would recognize as a moment of grace.

II.

“No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia.  It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion.  In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not.  I observe the traditions of the society I feed on–it’s only fair.  Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia.  I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.”

Flannery O’Connor to Maryat Lee, April 25, 1959

“About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing, prophesying, pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind.  Very ignorant but never silent.  Baldwin can tell us about what it feels to be a Negro in Harlam [sic] but he tries to tell us everything else too.”

Flannery O’Connor to Maryat Lee, May 21, 1964

In a letter written to her friend Maryat Lee in April of 1959, Flannery O’Connor refuses to meet James Baldwin in Georgia.  “Might as well expect a mule to fly as for me to see James Baldwin in Georgia.”  In the same breath, she adds, “I have read one of his stories, and it was a good one.”  However unwilling O’Connor is to break with tradition and see Baldwin in person, as a writer she admires Baldwin’s fiction, probably the story “Sonny’s Blues.”

Five years later, in May of 1964, O’Connor changes her tune about Baldwin the writer.  In another letter to Lee, a Kentucky native who then lived in Greenwich Village and had directed street theater with black youth in Harlem, O’Connor says she can’t stand a certain type of Negro, the “pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent.”  Her language is shocking to read today:  in letters to Lee–who poignantly understood the southern code of manners O’Connor was living under but chose to rebel against the code rather than respect it as O’Connor did in her daily life– O’Connor regularly and gleefully assumes the persona of a southern redneck racist.  In the 1964 letter, for instance, she probably intentionally misspells the word “Harlem” to indicate such a person’s level of education.  Yet, O’Connor may be reacting to Baldwin’s changing priorities as a writer, his shift away from writing fiction to essays, a shift she would criticize as a concession to the times and a sacrifice to one’s art.

Between 1957 and 1963, Baldwin traveled extensively (including four trips South), gave countless interviews and speeches, and met with politicians, including then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, over civil rights.  In 1963 The Fire Next Time was published, and articles about him appeared in Life, Times, and Mademoiselle.  According to his biographer James Campbell, to understand Baldwin before 1957, you read his letters; after 1963, his interviews.  Somewhere between 1957 and 1963, Campbell states in a tone of reproof, James Baldwin the private person became Jimmy Baldwin the civil rights celebrity.  In his own eyes, Baldwin saw the civil rights activism as central to his role as witness; even though he always thought of himself first as a novelist, in practice his choice of genre took a back seat to that moral imperative.

O’Connor would probably have disapproved of Baldwin’s decision to write essays on “topical” issues of the day.  Consider the case of Eudora Welty’s “Where is the Voice Coming From?” a story based closely on the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers which appeared in The New Yorker in June 1963 just days after the event.  About the story, O’Connor comments on September 1, 1963 to her friend Betty Hester, another Southerner:  “The more you think about it the less satisfactory it gets.  What I hate most is its being in the The New Yorker and all the stupid Yankee liberals smacking their lips over typical life in the dear old dirty Southland.  The topical is poison.  I got away with it in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ but only because I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business is concerned.”

Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie, dedicated to Medgar Evers and based in equal parts on his assassination and the murder of Emmett Till, opened in New York in April 1964 just weeks before O’Connor wrote her letter to Lee about Baldwin’s “pontificating.”  Reviews of the play appeared in New York papers, which O’Connor may have read or heard about from Lee, a playwright who had met Baldwin several times.

O’Connor may thus have perceived Baldwin as an “outside agitator” interfering with uniquely southern affairs, and in this respect, she shows herself to be a member of her own generation, a white Southerner, like the principal Baldwin interviews, who perhaps believes in integration in theory but does not actively seek to change the status quo.

However, even though she crassly expresses dislike of Baldwin in her letter of 1964, around this same time O’Connor herself shows evidence of a crack in her own point of view that is not unlike the changes Baldwin is undergoing.

As writers Baldwin and O’Connor are witnesses to what essentially “good” people say and do in a morally corrupt system, and they each take their role as witness to be an ethical imperative.  Confronted with the gracious manners of white Southerners, O’Connor the fiction writer is as unflinching as Baldwin the essayist in what she records.

Maryat Lee, who first met O’Connor in 1956, sees O’Connor’s late story “Revelation,” written in 1963 (in what turned out to be the final year of her life), to be evidence of a “crack” in her point of view regarding the civil rights movement: “The story is dear to me because it reveals I think the crack that finally developed in her own point of view which even three or four years ago she never expected would happen.”  The main character, the middle-aged Ruby Turpin, who thinks of herself as a good woman with Christian values, is a version of the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953).  In fact, “Revelation” can be seen as a sequel to “A Good Man.”  In it O’Connor explores what might have happened to the grandmother–how her perspective might have widened–had she, after having been granted a moment of grace, been allowed to live.

In “Revelation,” O’Connor clearly models Mary Grace, the Wellesley College student who returns home to Georgia over the holidays, after Maryat Lee, also a Wellesley graduate.  (Lee later studied at Union Theological Seminary, where she wrote her master’s thesis under Paul Tillich.)  “You can have half interest in Mary Grace,” O’Connor writes to Lee in the same 1964 letter as she disparages Baldwin.  In an understated way, O’Connor thus acknowledges the influence of Lee, the very person who calls her out on issues of race and civil rights, for inspiring a story where a key character talks back to power.  Lee delighted in violating the southern code of manners on her trips South–she changed her name from Mary Attaway to distance herself from her upper-class upbringing–as does Mary Grace, the “ugly girl,” who resorts to violence in her role as listener, radical interventionist, and witness.

The object of her scrutiny is Ruby Turpin, a middle-class pig farmer with the aspirations of a lady, who is filled with racist and classist clichés, which Mary Grace silently perceives as vacuous and morally corrupt.  In a crucial scene, when her mother tries to pull her daughter into the conversation, Mary Grace explodes, throwing a book at Mrs. Turpin.  She growls out a menacing curse:  “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”

If “Revelation” were modeled after “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the story would end here.  But the story continues, and it is in the second half of the story that we see the “crack” in O’Connor’s point of view.  Ruby Turpin, emotionally shocked and physically bruised by the book Mary Grace throws at her, cannot let go of the verbal insult, which she ponders over as if it were a message from God.  She returns home to the safety of her husband and farm, and alone, goes out to feed the pigs.  There, in the privacy of a pigpen, she confronts God in a fit of fury: “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too? . . . . Why me?”  She cannot wrap her mind around the fact that Mary Grace singled her out.  Ruby suffers a crisis of faith as we hear her rail against God:

“You could have made me trash.  Or a nigger.  If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?  . . . . I could quit working and take it easy and be filthy. . . . Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer.  Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face.  I could be nasty.

Or you could have made me a nigger.  It’s too late for me to be a nigger, . . . but I could act like one.  Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic.  Roll on the ground.”

In a similar position as Baldwin vis-à-vis the white principal, O’Connor as writer/witness holds the mirror up to the gracious southern lady and keeps it there; she turns the tape recorder on and lets her epithets fly.  It is not a pretty scene.  Finally we hear the raw, racist, and uncensored stereotypes spew from Ruby’s tongue.  Her dislike for black people is trumped by her disdain for “white trash.”

Curiously that blasphemous crisis of faith cracks open to a moment of calm:  Ruby Turpin is finally wrested from her self-preoccupation and begins to worry about her husband Claud, whose truck she sees disappearing on the horizon:  Will he be safe?  Will a bigger truck smash into his?  Then her concern for her husband opens up to the larger world.  By story’s end, in a scene that Brad Gooch, author of the biography Flannery, calls the fictional equivalent of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Ruby Turpin sees a vision of “a vast horde of souls” marching up to heaven:  “whole companies of white-trash,” “bands of black niggers,” “battalions of freaks and lunatics.” These are precisely the characters that pop up in all of O’Connor’s stories–those without power, the poor, the non-white–and often such a character, a freak, plays a key role in bringing about a revelation. Ruby Turpin joins this parade of freaks.  She and Claud are bringing up the rear of the parade, after all the poor “white trash” and “niggers.”  The rigid categories about race and class to which she held fast at the beginning of the story are turned on their head.

As with the white principal, however, the crack in Ruby’s perspective may only be slight. The principal gives a strained laugh at the very end of Baldwin’s interview that suggests a reversion to his former self.  “I’m a religious man, . . .  and I believe the Creator will always help us find a way to solve our problems.”  He falls back on religious clichés, and the veil returns.  In her vision when Ruby Turpin sees the respectable white people bringing up the rear, she refers to them, as reported by the narrator, as “a tribe of people . . .  who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right” (654).  Ruby Turpin, always a witty woman, still sees herself and her kind of people as being exceptionally blessed by God.

“I read one of his stories, and it was a good one.”  By the time O’Connor wrote this letter in April 1959, only two of Baldwin’s stories had been published, “Come out of the Wilderness” (published in Mademoiselle in 1958) and “Sonny’s Blues.”  I suspect O’Connor is referring to “Sonny’s Blues,” which came out in the summer of 1957 in Partisan Review, a journal she would have read.  O’Connor would have admired Baldwin’s use of flashbacks, his keen ear for dialogue, and especially, his attention to the details of place.  Although we have no record of O’Connor’s views on Baldwin’s work as a whole, she probably would have admired his stories and novels set in Harlem where the mystery and manners of Baldwin’s childhood–the language, music, and rituals of the streets and the Pentecostal church–are vivid and sharp:  Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), as well as many of the stories in Going to Meet the Man, including “Sonny’s Blues” (1958) and “Previous Condition” (1948).  After reading Go Tell It on the Mountain in the summer of 1959, Maryat Lee wrote to O’Connor, “You two have more in common that [sic] I had any idea.”

Both Baldwin and O’Connor were admirers of Henry James.  O’Connor quotes James often in her essays in Mystery and Manners, and Baldwin, called the “Henry James of Harlem” by Irish writer Colm Tóibín, left behind an unfinished essay on James and manners.  Yet, they seem to take away different lessons from the importance James placed on manners.  Baldwin and O’Connor were keen observers of the politics and rituals of manners in everyday social encounters, but O’Connor believed that paying close attention to manners was incompatible with writing about the topical, including the directly political; Baldwin, on the other hand, who could not separate the personal from the political, was, according to Leeming, fascinated by analyzing what Henry James called Americans’ innocence and sincerity, and critiqued the “innocence” he encountered among white Southerners.  In many of his essays (“Stranger in the Village,” “Nobody Knows My Name,” “A Fly in the Buttermilk”), through his technique of juxtaposing the two perspectives, white and black, on a given topic, Baldwin exposes white sincerity for what it is­–an evasion of the Negro’s humanity, as well as a denial of the role of power in American and world history.

O’Connor connected morality to a writer’s staying true to his craft.  Of Henry James she writes, “the morality of a piece of fiction depended on the amount of ‘felt life’ that was in it.”

In her essays on writing, O’Connor reveals how it is always through the concrete details of the local that a writer arrives at universal truths, which for her are also spiritual truths; a writer who cuts himself off from the people and place where he grew up–the fabric of his home community– is in danger. O’Connor stressed the importance of writing from inside a community, that is, being grounded in the language and manners of a specific place.  She mistrusts when a writer slips into abstractions, and she seems to associate the “topical” with a move away from the concrete and specific to the abstract and general.  In “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” she writes:

What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth.  The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is.  What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.

By saying that Baldwin “pontificates,” O’Connor may be referring to the kind of statements in his essays where Baldwin extrapolates from specific examples and goes on, in the preaching style with which he is familiar from being the youth minister in the Pentecostal church, to give general, somewhat oracular, statements about the history of racism in the United States. From O’Connor’s perspective Baldwin betrayed the limits of fiction by turning to prose essays in an attempt to mold reality.  In the process he loses his humbleness “in the face of what-is.”

For Baldwin, however, the topical seems absolutely to be connected to the specific language and manners of his childhood.  In “Down at the Cross,” for example, when he writes about his memory of being frisked by the police, the details of the incident are vivid and real; he is not merely slipping into abstract statements about police brutality.  Even his “pontificating” passages are expressed in the roaring language of the black ministers he knew intimately from his early days.  Whereas O’Connor may read about topical issues connected to racism in the newspapers from an abstract and emotional remove, Baldwin knows them firsthand, as part of the social fabric of his home community.  For Baldwin the topical is personal, and the personal is political; he cannot separate the topical from the politics of manners unfolding in the streets of Harlem.

In response to O’Connor’s saying that writing on the topical is “poison,” Baldwin might have shot back that O’Connor, with her cultural capital as a white Southerner from a certain class, has the luxury to avoid the topical, and he often uses the word “poison” in his essays to indicate the degree to which black families have no such luxury.  Near the end of “Notes of a Native Son,” reflecting on the elders attending his father’s funeral, Baldwin writes:  “It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced:  how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child–by what means?–a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.”  Baldwin concludes this passage by suggesting, “Perhaps poison should be fought with poison.”

III.

In “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr., expresses his  “grave disappointment” with white moderates, especially white ministers in the South.  King believes that they, as spiritual leaders inside the white community, have the moral authority to change the hearts and minds of the members of their congregation and are thus vital allies to the civil rights struggle.

My father, Richard Adams Harris, Jr., as pastor of Westhampton Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, from 1957 to 1968, was one of those moderates.  He felt challenged by King’s call to commitment and doubted if he was taking his commitment far enough.  In June of 1964 he gave a sermon entitled “This Is My Father’s World” in which he asked the question, “How can we be redemptive agents in the current racial crisis?”  He offered five guidelines to his congregation.  In guideline number one, he recommended that his congregation “keep things in perspective” by giving a “thoughtful evaluation” of both sides. On the side of the Negro, he recommended reading John Griffin’s then recently published book Black Like Me, as well as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”  On the side of the status quo, he suggested reading Carleton Putnam’s Race and Reason (Putnam is a bestselling segregationist author), or any editorial in the Richmond Times Dispatch. “Neither side,” wrote my father, “has a monopoly on right as neither side has a monopoly on wrong.”  King was endlessly frustrated by the middle of the road approach–as was Baldwin in his essay on Faulkner–which he saw as a way to evade taking a moral stand.  My father was “reasonable”:  by recommending reading seriously a segregationist article and weighing its merits against King’s letter, my father did not squarely take a moral stand.

He inched toward taking one, however, and in those days that already demanded a lot of courage.  He urged his congregation to feel, in King’s words, “the stinging darts of segregation” and put themselves, for example, in the place of a Negro parent.  “‘How,’ one such parent recently asked me, ‘do I tell my 6 year-old son that there are certain places he cannot go because his skin happens to be black?’”  As another example he reported that some members of the church who volunteered across town at the Negro Vacation Bible School had noticed that during picture-coloring time, “many of the black children positively insist on leaving faces white.  Is this not a tragic symptom that even their young minds have come to realize their own black skin represents a stigma?”

He spoke of his soul searching:  “Lately I have felt an increasing indictment on my own life:  what am I doing personally to redeem the situation that we are all so concerned about? I am convinced that I am doing far less than my Christian commitment calls me to do.”  He confessed that he knew a lot of Christians who, by joining the demonstrations, were more dedicated than he was, and he had yet to join one.  By publicly sharing his doubts, my father was working through something for himself regarding his responsibility. At the same time, he was making an appeal to the segregationists in his congregation.  They, too, had the power, and the duty, to examine themselves.

On October 6, 1968, my father delivered his last sermon.  One month earlier he had handed in a brief resignation letter.  The deacons, as well as the members of the congregation, were shocked that their beloved pastor would leave.  In his statement he said simply that he had doubts about his calling.  From as early as 1962–the year Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time, the year Faulkner died, the year of my birth–he had wrestled privately with the meaning of his vocation:  was he worthy to be called a pastor when he had so many doubts about his faith?

Many years later, when I was in my forties, my father confessed to me that at an early age he had compared himself to the Cosby boys, Bev and Gordon, with whom he had grown up on Boonsboro Road in Lynchburg, Virginia.  They had been the ones who had encouraged him to go into the ministry in the first place.  They had each founded their own church (Gordon the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D. C. and Bev, the Church of the Covenant in Lynchburg) based on the principles of radical Christianity.  Each church was comprised of a small band of disciples who would dedicate their lives to social service and justice, as King outlines in his letter when he talks about the early Christians.  Bev and Gordon were visionaries who clearly had a calling­ and chose a prophetic stance in their respective communities, and my father did not see himself as a visionary.  He did not feel himself worthy to be a minister.  He confessed to me in the same conversation that he had suffered debilitating depression off and on throughout his life.  He fell into a depression just ahead of his decision to leave the pastorate.

The pressures on my father to lead the members of his congregation during this tumultuous time put a subtle strain on my parents’ marriage.  In 1961, shortly after Nigeria gained its independence from England, my father’s church had sponsored a Nigerian couple to come study in Richmond for a year.  They were welcome at Westhampton as guests.  Within a year the couple fell in love with Richmond and wanted to stay, and they expressed a desire to join the church.  My father’s congregation split over whether or not blacks should be allowed to become members.  It was in the midst of this controversy that my father gave his sermon  “This Is my Father’s World.”  By expressing his own doubts and soul-searching my father was trying to ease into the hearts and minds of segregationists in the congregation, among them his friends.  My mother wanted him to be fiercer and take a clear and moral stand, but faced with a divided congregation, he was a reluctant leader.

Oct. 6, 1968, the day my father left the pastorate, was my parents’ seventeenth wedding anniversary.  Within three years they would be divorced.  I was nine, my sister fourteen, my brother sixteen.  We spent the next forty years asking ourselves the question:  what happened?

After months of procrastination, Baldwin was finally able to complete “Down at the Cross,” which became the centerpiece of The Fire Next Time, in 1962, after traveling to Africa for the first time.  He visited Senegal, Guinea, and Sierra Leone–three nations recently liberated from colonial rule.  In his essay Baldwin charts his disillusionment as a youth minister with the elder black ministers of his own church in Harlem.  He is horrified to witness their acts of stealing from the collection plate, especially when members of the congregation are so impoverished.  “Being in the pulpit was like being in the theater; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked.  I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives.”  More disturbing still are their hypocritical values.  He cannot reconcile their preaching to love everybody when at the same time they counsel Baldwin never to give up his seat for a white woman since white men never do the same for a black woman.  By the end of “Down at the Cross,” he considers these memories of his elders from his Harlem childhood against the legacy of colonialism in the newly freed African nations, and he sees a similar brand of arrogance and moral corruption amongst the white Christian missionaries who hope to save the “infidels.” “The spreading of the Gospel, regardless of the motives or integrity or the heroism of the missionaries, was an absolutely indispensable justification for the planting of the flag.”  Baldwin undergoes a crisis of faith as he examines his own ethics as a leader in the church and concludes he must leave.  By the end of “Down at the Cross,” drawing on the moral authority of his own example to challenge the reader, Baldwin exclaims:

“It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being . . . must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church.  If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

In terms of language and style, Baldwin scholar Lynn Orilla Scott believes The Fire Next Time is “the literary equivalent of the strategy of ‘non-violent direct action’ that Martin Luther King was using in Birmingham to end racial segregation.”  As an example she shows that Baldwin’s long list of tribulations suffered by black people under segregation in The Fire Next Time echoes the long list of King’s in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”

When my father shared his doubts from the pulpit, Baldwin would recognize a man in anguish trying to grapple with his heritage.  I don’t think Baldwin would call my father, as he does at first the principal, a “victim,” however, because my father risked safety, in some ways, to wrestle publicly with the breaking up of the world as he had always known it.  (By driving the Nigerian couple to church every Sunday, so did my mother, in a different way, but that is another story to tell.)  The pressures my father experienced as a pastor in the early sixties were not unlike those of the young Baldwin as a writer in the late fifties while still living in Paris. Baldwin confessed how guilty he felt seated at a café, listening to Algerian friends lament the discrimination they encountered in the streets of Paris when back in the States black children entering formally all white schools were taunted by mobs.  He always felt a special responsibility toward black children.  In The Fire Next Time he recalls his days as a youth minister in Harlem delivering sermons in front of the radiant faces of the children.  He felt like he was committing a crime by telling the children to believe in the gentle Jesus rather than shouting at their parents, in his words, “to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize . . . a rent strike.”

“Lately I have felt an increasing indictment on my own life.”  My father’s words could have been Baldwin’s own.  Their willingness to examine their life and to face history with an unflinching eye links them together as men of faith (and one-time pastors) who do not want to succumb to being “victims” of their heritage.

I included my father’s sermon as part of a college course I teach on the literature of the civil rights era in which we read authors not often considered together, O’Connor and Baldwin included.  S., an African-American student with whom I had grown especially close–I had been her professor for two semesters–read out loud a passage of the sermon as part of a group discussion.  S. believed that my father was really addressing the fathers in the audience:

“We can kill off the monster of prejudice, too, if we honestly seek to change the climate of the day in which we live.  There is no better place to begin than with our own children.  Make sure the prejudices with which we are infected are not transmitted to them, crippling their lives.”

Almost in the same breath as finishing the last line, S. realized something in a flash–you could see it on her face:  “Oh, when he’s talking about ‘our children,’ he really means you.”  I felt a shot of pain through my heart, as if the students could see through my role as professor to my heritage as a child.  As if they, too, could hear echo my grandmother’s refrain each time she picked me up from the bus station in downtown Lynchburg, which everyone knew was a black neighborhood:  “Take care to keep your purse tucked under your arm.”

Who was I to lead a discussion on race?  I had spent some time over the summer scouting out this sermon, and the decision to use it in class seemed promising at the time.  But that morning before teaching it for the first time, I felt ill, and now in the presence of S.’s radiant face and the open faces of the other students, both black and white, I felt vulnerable and exposed.  This is how my father felt, how O’Connor felt, how Baldwin felt.  As writers and teachers we tapped into that terrifying place, those feelings of vulnerability and exposure.

We were witness to the dark weight of history.

Art by Matt Monk

Carole K. Harris received a B.A. in French Literature from Duke University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She has taught French, Comparative Literature, and English Composition at a variety of other institutions, including Yale University, Bennington College, Rutgers University, the University of California at Irvine, and Hofstra University.

I wasn’t crazy about the height. There we were, one paleontologist who might have been a mountain goat, his two assistants, and me, scrabbling up a mountainside of tilted and crumbling rock strata—or what my companions called “bedding planes.” Loose gravel and rock dislodged by our feet bounced all the way to the glint of streambed in the canyon’s crease below. I tried not to look down as I followed the others in diagonal ascent, and I thanked my new boots and their grippy soles.

Straight out, the view was enough to stop me in my tracks—past the steep gray mountainsides to the green, softening-toward-yellow alpine slopes beyond, and then the farther rocky mountains, all fiery yellows and reds under a high overcast. I could so clearly see something I’d just learned—the geological difference between where I was and where I had been that morning, two parts of Denali National Park. When I’d left the park road to hike up Tattler Creek, I’d walked back through time. The colorful Polychrome Mountains are volcanic, from magma-spewing events 40 to 50 million years ago. But the gray rock of the Cantwell Formation in which I now stood was considerably older, formed during the Late Cretaceous period some 70 million years ago from river and lake sediments deposited in a basin. That basin, later, was lifted by tectonic pressures, tilted, and eroded.

“Rock!” Another hunk of mountain bounced past me.

The mountain goat in our lead, Tony Fiorillo, had zeroed in on a particular ledge and was poking his way along it, examining its underturned face. A paleontologist from Dallas’s Museum of Nature and Science, Fiorillo has worked in Alaska for many years and specializes in high-latitude dinosaur ecosystems. On this trip, he and his two assistants had gotten chased out of their planned study area elsewhere in the park by an aggressive grizzly and so had returned to Tattler Creek to further document what was becoming a major location of dinosaur fossils.

“The candy store,” Fiorillo called it. This area—one of several along the Cantwell Formation in the northeast part of the park—“is the paleontological equivalent of a candy store,” he’d told me when I—a writer visiting the park through its artist-in-residence program—joined him along the creek. Fiorillo was the proverbial kid in the candy store, as excited about every rock on every ledge as any four-year-old let loose among jars and packages of sweets. Now, he was kneeling and squinting and feeling, studying what was embossed in ancient mud. It looked, he called to us, like the track of a “baby” theropod, but—more exciting—a track next to it might belong to a pterosaur. After consultation with the other two—Thomas Adams, a doctoral student who does 3-D laser scanning of dinosaur footprints, and Sarah Venator, a National Parks Service technician—Fiorillo set to work mixing compounds to make a resin cast of the two tracks together.

I sheltered in a protected area below them, still focused on not looking down.

~

The oft-told story has entered the realm of legend: In 2005 a geology professor, Paul McCarthy from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was teaching students field mapping (that is, how to observe, analyze, and record geologic features in the field) in Denali Park. At an outcrop of the Cantwell Formation, he stopped to explain that that kind of Cretaceous sedimentary rock commonly preserves dinosaur tracks and that they should keep an eye out. At that time, dinosaur footprints had been discovered on Alaska’s North Slope and in Aniakchak National Monument on the Alaska Peninsula, far to the south, but nowhere in interior Alaska. McCarthy had no sooner finished his sentence than two of the students pointed to a spot not far from his gesturing hand and asked, “Like this one?”

That grizzly-sized track, of a three-toed dinosaur known as a theropod, was later removed from its exposed location along a stream and displayed at the Murie Science and Learning Center near the park’s entrance. At the university, Susi Tomsich, one of the two alert students, is now a Ph.D candidate and co-author of a number of scientific papers related to understanding the environment of the Cantwell Formation when dinosaurs roamed. The geology department prominently features on its webpage a photo of that first dinosaur track with the promotional words “discovered by students.”

The unambiguous track looks like a giant bird foot.

~

Theropods. I’d never even heard of them before my trip to Denali and was trying not to confuse them with pteropods, or “winged feet,” tiny swimming marine snails I’d been learning about in another context. (Theropod translates to “beast foot” in the Greek.) Now I’d seen several of their tracks in place and had even learned to distinguish them from other tracks we’d been examining.

Back down in the main valley, before we’d headed up a side canyon, the energetic Fiorillo—a slim, well-tanned man in faded blue jeans stained on the knees from kneeling among blueberries—showed me my first dinosaur footprint. Amongst jumbles of other rocks and boulders that had fallen, washed, or been ice-shoved into the valley and were surrounded by the last blooms of dwarf fireweed, one was shaped into three large, smooth, unnatural-looking lobes.

“They’re all through here,” Fiorillo enthused. “Once we knew what to look for—it just doesn’t stop.”

I rested my hand on a sun-warmed rock toe. This was no ordinary fossil, no mere leaf or shell print in rock; a dinosaur had walked here. To hold that rock was not quite like grabbing a dinosaur by the toe, but the sensation was ticklishly related. I was not in a museum or a roped-off tourist attraction, and I was not looking at a photograph; here was the solid, physical manifestation of a very large near-mythic animal that had once—so very long ago—not only lived, but lived here.

I expect I knew less about dinosaurs (“terrible lizards”—I knew that much) than the average seven-year-old, but Fiorillo, patient teacher that he was, paused his trek to give me a short course in Alaska Dino Basics.

The rock we were looking at was the three-toed track, about a foot long, of a hadrosaur (“bulky lizard”), a duck-billed, sometimes horned, plant-eating dinosaur that grazed in large herds and has been called “the cow of the Cretaceous.” The adult animals (depending on the species) could range from ten to forty feet long. They had powerful hind legs, smaller front legs, and thick tails. They generally walked on all fours.

Some seventy million years ago, towards the end of the Cretaceous period but before the cataclysm (generally agreed by scientists to have been a giant asteroid hit near today’s Yucatan Peninsula) that resulted in the extinction of all dinosaurs as well as much other life on our planet, one of those hadrosaurs living in this northern place had stepped in mud or other soft sediments and left a hind footprint behind. That imprint had later filled with sand or other material harder than the mud, and when the mud eroded away, the cast of the print—the rock we were looking at—was left. “The fossil is the infill,” Fiorillo explained.

The rock casts were examples, Fiorillo, said, of “trace fossils”—fossilized evidence of animal behavior. “These can help tell us how the animals lived—the tracks as a data set to complement bones found elsewhere. When they’re found with other fossils—like horsetails or tree cones—that tells us more about what kind of environment the dinosaurs lived in.”

And what was especially valuable, he said, was that those dinosaurs lived right here—or very close to here—in what is now interior Alaska. While older Alaska rocks originated elsewhere and moved in on blocks pushed by colliding continental plates, the Cantwell Formation rocks formed in place, after mountains eroded into a basin and their sediments accumulated in layers. The mountains we were now in were only pushed up later, elevating and twisting what had been a braided river and lake topography. “These dinosaurs were Alaskan,” Fiorillo said. “They weren’t hijacked tectonically. We have an opportunity to study an ancient polar ecosystem in a warm climate.” That climate, at a “greenhouse” time in Earth’s history, was temperate, perhaps like that of the present-day Pacific Northwest. Winters would have been marked by cold but not frigid temperatures and by snow—as well as by the low light and darkness typical of northern latitudes.

The dinosaur tracks get the most attention from the public, but the larger value lay in studying the full ecosystem preserved in the Cantwell Formation. Other trace fossils found among the dinosaur prints include plants (from ferns and horsetails to the cones of Metasequoia trees), birds (tracks and the marks of beaks probing into mud), fish, burrowing invertebrates (worms and crayfish), even the impressions of scaly dinosaur skin. The numerous fossil bird tracks in Denali, along with being the first of the Cretaceous period found in Alaska and the most northern known to date, present a record of diversity—one of the most diverse fossil bird records yet discovered in the world. Fiorillo and his colleagues have classified one bird track, belonging to a creature larger than a great blue heron, as a new species: Magnoavipes (“big bird track”) denaliensis. The crayfish burrows are interesting because the nearest living crayfish today are found a thousand miles farther south. What it all means is that Alaska’s polar region during the late Cretaceous period supported significant biodiversity. “It’s all here,” Fiorillo said, referring to the biodiversity. “It is just phenomenal.”

~

We headed up a side canyon and all stopped at another track, a bulbous protrusion on a larger slab of mudstone. This was one Fiorillo hadn’t recorded before, and he took a GPS reading, photographs, and then a full page of descriptive notes. Just in this valley, he told me, he’d so far documented about a hundred tracks—many more elsewhere in the park and probably thousands of trace fossils of all kinds.

Venator drew Fiorillo’s attention to another track.

“Tell me what you see,” he said to her, “and then I’ll tell you what I see.”

“Toe, toe,” Venator pointed. “And this part’s broken off.”

“I was trying to see a hadrosaur,” Fiorillo said. “I’ll buy that. This”—he pointed to another mark—“I don’t know about.”

They talked some more, decided they had a single track of a hadrosaur but not a good enough one to document.

Higher, Adams was waiting with a theropod track next to a tree cone fossil. I was beginning to develop my own dinosaur eye, and could easily pick out the three long toes—narrower than those of the hadrosaurs we’d examined below.

Fiorillo had recorded the track and cone on a previous trip, but he took more photos and then we all sat on a ledge and ate our sandwiches.

The theropod, I learned, was a meat-eater, a predator of the hadrosaurs. At least the Denali theropods are thought to have been. Just as “hadrosaur” refers to a large group of plant-eating dinosaurs, “theropod” refers to a large group, or sub-order, distinguished by its bipedal walk on strong legs, bird-like clawed feet, small arms with grasping claws, and big tail for countering its weighty head and neck. Theropods are thought to have been fast and agile and to have had good eyesight. They ranged from chicken-size to huge—and included the famed Tyrannosaurus rex. Their fossils have been found all over the world.

In Denali, judging from their track sizes, adult theropods were commonly about nine feet long and stood three feet at the hip. From the trace fossils found so far, it’s not possible to narrow them into more specific taxa. On Alaska’s North Slope, where bones have been recovered, four species of theropods have been identified—all of them known from other parts of North America.

Linkages between theropods and modern birds have long been studied, and one theropod branch is considered ancestral to birds. At a minimum, many characteristics associated with birds were present in theropods before birds evolved; these included— besides the three-toed foot—hollow bones, a backward-pointing pelvis, and a wishbone in the wrist that allowed a sideways flex and quick snatching motion—a motion almost identical to the flight stroke of modern birds. Some theropods wore feathers.

~

The day was getting late. We’d inspected numerous tracks as well as the fossils of plants and crayfish burrows and had reached high and higher ledges. I left Fiorillo and his crew perched on the mountainside, applying pink resin to bumps on ancient rock, and headed back down the canyon.

But before I left, Fiorillo told me a little about why the possible pterosaur (“winged lizard”) track was so exciting. The year before, he and a colleague had documented a “hand” print from a pterosaur, establishing for the first time that those dinosaur relatives, the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight, had been present in Cretaceous Alaska. Pterosaurs not only flew, but were the largest flying animals ever to have lived; Fiorillo estimated the Denali one to have had a wingspan of 25 feet. Pterosaurs had digital appendages at their elbow-bends where the wing folds, and rested on both hands and feet when on land—an attribute that, along with air sacs in their wing membranes, might have helped (by providing a launching mechanism) such a large animal fly. If in fact Fiorillo had now found a pterosaur footprint, that evidence would help build a bigger picture of the animal’s presence in the northern ecosystem. Its presence next to a “baby” theropod track was a bonus.

The day before, the team had made molds of a theropod track and then a “baby” hadrosaur foot and hand together. Multiple fossils in the same piece of stone tell a better story than a single fossil alone; a line of tracks from a single animal can tell about its stride, and other combinations tell what lived together or might have been eaten. All through the Cantwell Formation, groups of hadrosaur tracks had been found together, cementing the knowledge that they lived in herds and—based on the many sizes together—that young received extended care by adults.

For all the trace fossils thus examined, Fiorillo and his colleagues had found just one small, non-descript bone in the Cantwell Formation. This is in contrast to the other Alaska area where Fiorillo has done extensive work—the North Slope, where dinosaur bones have been aplenty. Fiorillo expects they’re there in Denali to be found. He told me, “My thoughts on why no masses of bones have been found is that we’ve still only looked at a small percentage of the exposed rock in the park. One animal can leave many tracks in its lifetime, so the odds favor discovery of many tracks first.” Compared to the softer rock farther north, the hard rock in the Cantwell Formation makes tracks easy to see.

The rock quality explained why the area we were in was so fossiliferous. Fossiliferous: my favorite new word.

When I reached the main fork, near where Fiorillo had shown me the day’s first dinosaur track, I detoured to a site he’d told me about, known as “the dance floor.”

I had no trouble finding it on my own. Just beside the path a large rock wall angled out, and the lower surface of it was a rumpled mess. Or that’s what I would have thought before my very recent education. I might have thought it looked like something volcanic, an uneven surface formed by the flow of liquid rock. Now, I knew better. I could see what Fiorillo had described as “like one of those Arthur Murray dance illustrations, with the footprints showing you how to foxtrot.” I could make out a few clear, three-toed tracks, and then it looked to me like there’d just been a lot of big clumsy feet all squishing around on the same soft ground, one footprint obliterating another. I imagined the edge of a waterhole, and a herd of hadrosaurs gathered to drink, or a bank along a stream and the herd thundering past, chased by theropods. After the herd passed, or after many animals took turns coming to drink or to cross a waterway, something—a flood? a landslide?— had covered over the surface, filled and sealed it. Mountains had lifted, mountains had eroded.  Seventy million years, give or take a few million, passed.

Other people had come to see the dance floor. Their boots had worn a track along the base of the wall; their boots had scattered the larger rock shards and ground the smaller into a smooth surface.

I walked up and down that track, studying the wall. I looked closely at one embossment. It looked like a pile of, well, nasty turds, like something a bear that had been eating vegetation might have left behind. It stood out from the other rock to which it was attached, its own abundant and neat assemblage. I was pretty sure it was what the paleontologists call a coprolite—fossilized feces.

~

I took my time returning to the road, in a dinosaur daze of thought and emotion. A silver-colored marmot waddling beside the stream stared at me near-sightedly and wrinkled its nose. Dall sheep like snow patches hung on a far mountain. Juncos and warblers darted through the willows. On a knoll covered with blueberries, I stopped to pick some, stepping around berry-studded bear poop. I passed two burdened backpackers headed to the high country.

Tourists come to Denali primarily to see “the mountain” and the living megafauna—the “big five” bears, wolves, sheep, caribou, and moose. Now, it seemed to me, the park had a new and important role—not just to care for and showcase today’s magnificent wild environment but to preserve and teach us about the past. Dinosaurs are popular, especially with children, because they’re large, fierce (in myth if not fact), and extinct. That is, you get to be thrilled by them without being in any actual danger.

Dinosaurs can’t threaten us, but extinction surely can. As the world warms—and as the Arctic warms disproportionately—we would do well to think about what a warmer Arctic might look like. Fiorillo had said this: “For those concerned about a warming Arctic, the fossils here provide us clues about what that Arctic might look like.” I was one of those concerned. The fossil finds might give us those climate clues, but a warming climate was not going to give us that ancient ecosystem. Nor was it going to favor the current ecosystem, in all its complexity, its finely tuned evolutionary rightness. How will things change in a warmer Alaska? What adaptation mechanisms might help with survival? What migrations might occur? What species might disappear first, or continue longer, or flourish? Less cold, same darkness—who will be the winners and the losers? How will shifts in today’s ecological balance work their way through the whole system?

What can we humans do, now that we understand what our heavy tread has done not just to the Earth’s surface and its other living inhabitants but to the systems that support life as we know it, the Earth’s atmosphere, the ocean’s chemistry?

We might ask and attempt to answer those questions.

Alternatively, we can take the long view—the really long view.

It’s been 65 million years since the dinosaurs and much else—more than 50 percent of all animal species living at that time—went missing. The Earth continued; life recovered. It’s just that dinosaurs didn’t evolve again; mammals filled in the emptied niche. And here we are, now, just one more charismatic species, occupying the Earth for our moment in time. After us: other life, algal or floral, skeletal or spongy, with feet or fins or slinky twists, with large brains or small or none at all. The enduring Earth will bury in its seas and lift into new mountains the footprints—literal and otherwise—of Homo sapiens, our “wise man.”

Art by Matt Monk

Nancy Lord, who makes her home in Homer, Alaska, is passionate about place, history, and the natural environment.  From her many years of commercial salmon fishing and, later, work as a naturalist and historian on adventure cruise ships, she’s explored in both fiction and nonfiction the myths and realities of life in the north.  Among her published books are three collections of short stories and five works of literary nonfiction, including the memoir FISHCAMP, the cautionary BELUGA DAYS, and the front-lines story of climate change, EARLY WARMING.  In 2016 she edited the anthology MADE OF SALMON: ALASKA STORIES FROM THE SALMON PROJECT. Her novel, pH, was published in 2017 by WestWinds Press/Graphic Arts/Alaska Northwest Books.
Nancy was honored as Alaska’s Writer Laureate from 2008-2010.

When I was four years old, my father lost his job. We were living in Trenton, New Jersey at the time, where he had lived most of his life. With no college education, he had worked his way up to the position of controller at a Transamerica-owned manufacturing company called Delavalve. The company restructured itself and dismissed him. My parents decided to use his sudden unemployment as an opportunity to take a vacation, to drive whatever Buick convertible we had at the time from New Jersey to California. My parents loved the sun and the beach more than they loved anything except vodka martinis. They promised to take me to Disneyland. We stopped at Las Vegas on the way.

We stayed at the Sands, where my mother had opened, decades before, as a singing, dancing comedian for Frank Sinatra. I got to swim in the kidney shaped pool, and then we ate a giant slab of prime rib each for a dollar. My mother and I went up to the room to bed, and my father stayed downstairs to gamble. I woke up to my mother standing over my bed and sun streaming into the hotel room window. I was four and a half years old. “Pam,” she said, “go downstairs and get your father out of the casino.”

I found him sitting at an empty blackjack table, looking a hundred and ten. I took his hand and led him through the hazy cigarette air, up the elevator and down the long hall with the zig-zag carpet to our room. He had, of course, lost everything. The money we were meant to live on until he found another job, the money for the trip to California, the money for the hotel bill. Even the car.

My mother’s old boss at the Desert Inn loaned us enough to get the car back, to pay the hotel bill, to take me to Disneyland. A few weeks later my father started a new job in Pennsylvania, and we moved there, though when my mother ran away from Spiceland, Indiana at age thirteen to Manhattan, because she had won the bet with her Aunt Ermie, who raised her, that she could get straight C’s, and as a result had, for the first time in her life, fifty whole dollars, she’d vowed she would never live west of the New Jersey border again.

~

About five years ago, I was asked to be one of four writers to participate in an evening called “Unveiled” at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison. Our assignment was to write something new that had never been tried or tested, and read it aloud to an audience of roughly a thousand. I not only accepted; I took the assignment so literally, I didn’t start writing until I was on the plane to Wisconsin. I wrote for the entire plane ride, and all evening in my hotel room. I stayed up all night and wrote, and I wrote all day the day of the reading. When I started to panic that I would not have something ready in time for the reading, I told myself what I tell my students when they get stuck: write down all of the things out in the world that have arrested your attention lately, that have glimmered at you in some resonant way. Set them next to each other. See what happens.

By late afternoon I had twelve tiny scenes. I have always, for some reason, thought in twelves. I don’t believe this has anything to do with the apostles. One scene was called Georgetown, Great Exuma. Another was called Ozona, Texas. Another was called Juneau, Alaska. Two hours before I was to read, I looked back at my instructions to make sure I had done everything the assignment asked of me. The only caveat, it said, was that the piece had to mention Wisconsin. I knew nothing about Wisconsin, so I left my hotel room and sat on a street corner downtown and waited for something to happen. In less than thirty minutes, something did, and I went back to my room and wrote it down. When I added Madison, Wisconsin to the original twelve, I had to take out Mexican Hat, Utah, but that was okay with me.

“Jesus, Pam,” Richard Bausch said, after the reading, “Write a hundred of them, and that’s your next book.” I thought, “No, not a hundred, but possibly a hundred and forty-four.”

~

When I went on tour with my first book, a collection of short stories called Cowboys Are My Weakness, I was asked, more than any other question, how much of this really happened to you? “A lot of it,” was my honest answer, night after night, but the audience grew dissatisfied with that answer and seemed, more than anything, to want something quantifiable, so I began saying, also honestly, about 82 percent.

Eight years later, when I published my first “nonfiction” book, and went on tour with it, I would often be introduced in some version of the following manner: “In the past we have gotten 82 percent Pam, and now we are going to get 100 percent,” and I would approach the microphone and feel the need to say, “Well, no, still coming in right about 82.”

~

Between Davis and Dixon, California, in the heart of the Central Valley, just off I-80, right under the historic sign where the cow jumps over the moon, is the Guinness Book of World Records’ Largest Corn Maze. If you get off the highway and drive to it, you find out that technically speaking, it was the Guinness Book of World Records’ Largest Corn Maze in 2007, and not in 2010. But, you figure they figure, once a winner, always a winner.

In the corn maze, as in life, there are rules. No running. No smoking. No strollers. No drugs. No inappropriate language. (The corn has ears too!) No tampering with the signs and the maze markers. If you misbehave you will be asked to leave, though in a corn maze, you understand, that is not always so straightforward. Surprisingly, dogs are allowed in the corn maze, and there is nothing in the rules prohibiting handguns. Sex in the corn maze is also apparently okay, as long as you use appropriate language.

The computer-generated grid that the corn maze sits upon runs from A through QQ and 1 through 52. It contains 2,193 squares. When you enter, they hand you a map. To complete the maze successfully, you will make approximately 189 right turns and 156 left turns, though there are a few places when more than one option will get you out, so your individual numbers may vary.

One ear of corn has approximately 800 kernels in sixteen rows. A pound of corn contains 1,300 kernels. One bushel averages 90,000 kernels. In America we sell more corn than any other crop. The corn in this maze is as high as an elephant’s eye, if we are talking the world’s largest elephant, in heels.

I have a painting in my kitchen by my friend Mark Penner-Howell of a giant ear of corn with the word Hallelujah written in red letters running vertically up the ear and lots of little ghostly gas pumps in the background. When my boyfriend Greg eats corn on the cob his lips swell up so much we call him Angelina Jolie.

~

The reason I have been afraid, until very recently, to make any kind of general, theoretical, or philosophical statements about women, writers, westerners, environmentalists, academics, western women, western women writers, outdoorswomen who grew up in New Jersey and eventually became academics, women who dreamed of running white water rivers and falling in love with poets and cowboys (though not cowboy poets), women who got on I-80 West on the other side of the George Washington Bridge one day and just kept driving … is that I have never felt comfortable speaking for anyone except myself. Maybe I had been socialized not to make declarative statements. Maybe I thought you had to be fifty before you knew anything about the world. Maybe I was afraid of misrepresenting someone I thought I understood but didn’t. Maybe I was afraid of acting hypocritically. Maybe I have always believed it is more honest, more direct, and ultimately more powerful, to tell a story, one concrete and particular detail at a time.

So I did. I put my boat into the river, some things happened, and I took it back out on the other side. In time though, I began to suspect that linear narrative was not doing a very good job representing life as I experienced it, but I still tried to stretch the things I originally conceived of as Slinkies into straight lines. I don’t mean to suggest that I was unique in this. There are so many of us out there, trying to turn Spyrograph flowers into rocket ships. In time I began to gain confidence in my Spyrograph flowers and Slinkies. Eventually, I began to speculate about where they came from. Just for starters, I never met any of my grandparents. Also, every single one of my relatives (except a second cousin in Alaska who is oddly afraid of me and his illegitimate son who likes me, but lives in Prague) is dead. Also, when both of your parents are alcoholics, one thing never leads to another. There is no such thing as how it really happened. When both of your parents are alcoholics, the only way to get to a narrative that is un-shattered would be to run the tape backwards, like a car accident in reverse where the windshield that is in a million pieces magically mends itself. This is not necessarily the bad news. A mind that moves associatively (as my mind does and probably your mind too) like a firefly in a grassy yard on a late June evening, has more fun (and other things too, of course, like static, like trouble) than a mind that moves logically or even chronologically. Just the other day for instance, someone said the word tennis, and I saw in my mind’s eye a lady in a pig suit with wings.

~

Not too long after grad school, I was hired by a magazine to write an article about why women over forty take adventure vacations. I was barely thirty and had no idea why, but I needed the money so I called some power women I knew who had climbed Kilimanjaro or whatever and asked them. They gave flat and predictable answers like, “for the challenge,” so I made up some smart, funny women who said surprising and subversive things about why they took adventure vacations, and wrote the article up.

When the fact checker called me, I said, “You’re a what?” like an asshole fresh out of graduate school, “you actually believe in things called facts?”

The fact checker, whose name was Bethany, asked for the phone numbers of the six women I wrote about. I gave her the numbers of the three that actually existed.

“What about Katherine and Louise and Samantha?” she said.

“Well, Bethany,” I said, “I made them up.”

There was five seconds of silence, then she said, “Well, I guess we don’t have to call them then, do we?”

~

In 2010 in Las Vegas, in a gondola, in the canal that runs from Barney’s New York to Kenneth Cole (upstairs in the mall they call the Palazzo), a very young man is proposing to a very young woman. He is on one knee, and the acne faced gondolier in his straw hat and red kerchief steadies the wobbling boat. The shoppers pause a minute to look over the railing and watch. The girl is either genuinely surprised or good at pretending. She whispers yes, and then shouts it for the small crowd. The twenty-five of us gathered clap and cheer, and the boy stands up and pumps both fists, the same exact gesture he uses, one imagines, when he hears that his fantasy football quarterback has gone 18 for 24 with four TD’s and no interceptions. The gondolier turns the boat around with his single long paddle, and pushes them back toward Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Every day in Vegas is upside down day. Walking along the canal, young men in wife beaters say sentences into their cell phones that, if they were not in Las Vegas, they would never say. “I’ll meet you in an hour in St. Mark’s Square,” or, “I applied for a job with the KGB,” or, “Let’s meet up in time to see the volcano erupt.” People pay money—a lot of it—to see Donny and Marie Osmond. On the poster for the Garth Brooks show in the Wynn Encore theater, there is a picture of Garth in his big black hat and a one word review from the Los Angeles Times: Genius.

We are staying at the Golden Nugget, downtown, a hotel where, if you want to, you can go down a water slide, which is really more like a water straw, through a 200,000-gallon shark tank. At the guest relations desk there is a very pretty girl with quarter-inch thick make up and long blonde hair that has been dyed so many times it is leaning toward burnt sienna, and the kind of ultra thick, ultra blunt square false eyelashes that only transvestites wear, and the whole ensemble makes her look like somebody cross-dressed as herself.

Every time we leave the hotel, the junkies are sitting on the steps of the church across the street shooting up under their toenails. The lady in front of the sign that says Hotel-Wedding-Cuban buffet looks right through the driver’s side window into my eyes and says, “Put a muffler on it you fucking bitch,” right before she sits down in the middle of the street and tries to scratch her own scalp off.

~

When it was decided (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction, what was not taken into account was that for some of us truth can never be an absolute, that there can (at best) be only less true and more true and sometimes those two collapse inside each other like a Turducken. Given the failure of memory. Given the failure of language to mean. Given metaphor. Given metonymy. Given the ever-shifting junction of code and context. Given the twenty-five people who saw the same car accident. Given our denial. Given our longings.

Who cares really if she hung herself or slit her wrists when what really matters is that James Frey is secretly afraid that he’s the one who killed her. Dear Random House Refund Department: If they were moved, then they got their twenty-four dollars’ worth.

~

Back in the nineties, a magazine sent me to the Ardèche region of France. They wanted me, among other things, to kayak the Ardèche river canyon, one of the five river canyons the French call the Grand Canyon of France. But they sent me in late October, the days were short and getting shorter, all the kayak rental places were boarded up tight for the year, and it was 36 degrees with freezing rain. So I hiked the canyon of the Ardèche, thinking it would be an acceptable substitute.

When I turned in the article the editor said, “We really wanted you to kayak the Ardèche.”

“I know,” I said, “but it was too cold, all the rental places…”

“No,” she said, “we really wanted you to kayak the Ardèche…”

“Ah…” I said.

“And while you’re at it,” she said, “could you make it rain a little less?”

I found her request neither difficult nor surprising. The river had, at that time of year, hardly a riffle on it, and would have been a pretty, if chilly, float. To spice things up, I added a water fight with three Italian kayakers. There was some good-natured flirting across the language barrier. It didn’t rain that day at all.

Some years later, the editor of an anthology asked my permission to reprint that essay. He said, “I really liked your story, especially the part about the three Italian kayakers.”

“Funny,” I said, “I made that part up.”

Maybe I should have anticipated the depth of his outrage, but I did not. This was pre-James Frey, of course, and who would have ever anticipated that? The editor called back a few days later and said he had removed the kayak trip from the essay. He had added a scene in which I carry my kayak down to the river’s edge, and a fog bank rolls in, and I decide not to go.

“I don’t want to be an asshole,” I said, which of course wasn’t true either. “But if I can’t make up three Italian kayakers, I don’t think you can make up fog in my essay.”

It is hard, all these decades after The Things They Carried, to stand here and say the scene with the three Italian kayakers is the truest thing in the entire essay (though, of course it is) even though it never really happened. Nor would I turn an entirely deaf ear to the complaints of those who actually use travel magazines to plan trips. And I’m not even going to mention journalistic coverage of war crimes, genocide, sex offenders, presidents who lie about weapons of mass destruction… certainly I do believe that sometimes it is necessary for us all to pretend together that language can really mean.

But if you think about it, the fact that I did not really have a flirty exchange with three Italian kayakers doesn’t make it any less likely that you might. I might even go so far as to argue that you would be more likely to have such an exchange because of my (non-existent) kayakers, first because they charmed you into going to the Ardèche to begin with, and second, because if you happened to be floating along on a rainless day in your kayak and a sexy, curly-haired guy glided by and splashed water on you, you would now be much more likely to splash him back.

~

Due north of Newfoundland, there is a small rocky island in the Labrador Straits called Quirpon (pronounced Kar-poon). The island is roughly ten miles long and three miles across, and on the seaward tip there is a lighthouse and a lighthouse keeper’s house—both painted a bright red and white—and no other buildings to speak of. Inside the house, two tough and sweet women named Madonna and Doris fry cod, dry clothes, fix mugs of hot chocolate, and hand out maps to soggy hikers who’ve come to stay the night.

Marked on the map along with the fox den and the osprey nest is an old townsite called L’Anse au Pigeon, and underneath the name in parentheses it says, “site of mass murder.”  When I ask Doris about it, she tells me she isn’t much of a storyteller, but when I press she takes a deep breath to get into what I recognize as the Newfoundlanders’ storytelling mode, a half performance/half trance state that suggests stories are serious matters, whether they are about mass murders or not.

“And now,” she says, “I will tell you the story of the mass murders on Quirpon Island.” She brings her hands into her lap and folds them as if she’s getting ready to pray. “A long long time ago,” she says, “not in this time, but in the time before this time, there was a settlement—several fishing families, living together on Quirpon Island. And one day the government saw fit to send them a schoolteacher. Now this schoolteacher mind you, he was a handsome fellow, young and smart, and one of the fishermen’s wives fell head over heels in love with him. And the husband was terrible jealous, terrible, terrible, so he decided to trick the schoolteacher into drinking a little bit of the stuff–what is it? I don’t know what the stuff is called….”

“Arsenic?”

“No, it’s the stuff they use in the lanterns.”

“Kerosene?”

“Like kerosene, but different from kerosene.”

“White gas?”

“Like white gas, but different from white gas….anyway, he gave it to him a little, a little, a little at a time, and finally the poor handsome schoolteacher died.”

Doris nods her head as a kind of punctuation, unfolds her hands and stands. “And that is the story of the mass murder on Quirpon Island.”

“But Doris,” I say, “why call the death of one schoolteacher a mass murder?”

Doris sighs heavily. She sits back down and brings her hands back into her lap. “A long long time ago,” she begins, “not in this time, but in the time before this time, the fisherman who had given the schoolteacher the poison to drink became more and more afraid that the men in the town were getting ready to confront him. There wasn’t law back then like we have in these times, so he probably would have gotten away with it, but his guilt made him believe his friends were not his friends. So deep deep into one dark night he soaked one of the fishing boats with the liquid that goes into the lanterns…”

“The same liquid,” I say, “that he gave the schoolteacher to drink?”

“The very same!”

“The white gas?”

“Like white gas,” Doris says, “but different from white gas.”

“Didn’t they smell it?”

“This is the liquid that has no smell. Anyway, all the men in the town went fishing the next morning and one of ‘em struck a match to light his cigarette and the whole lot of them burned up or drowned or died of hypothermia. You can’t last long in that iceberg water,” she says, nodding her head towards the window. “And that is the story of the mass murder on Quirpon Island.”

~

I was driving over Slumgullion Pass listening to Ashes of American Flags at volume 50. There were three feet of new snow on the ground, and I watched a herd of two hundred elk gallop through it. I had spent hours the night before on baby naming websites trying to find something I could search and replace for Pam in my forthcoming novel of 144 chapters. The book is more or less autobiographical. I have, of course, taken massive liberties with the truth.

In past books I have used Millie, Lucy, and Rae. For the sake of sentence rhythm, I was leaning towards something with one syllable, but it would also be convenient to the book if the replacement name meant something as embarrassing as what the name “Pamela” means: which is all honey. I had considered Melinda, which on some sites means honey and could be shortened to Mel. I had considered Samantha which means listener, and could be shortened to Sam.  But in the car with the elk in the pasture and the snow on the road and Jeff Tweedy in my ears I was all of a sudden very angry at whoever it was who put all that pressure on Oprah Winfrey. This book was in danger of missing the whole point of itself if my name were not Pam in it. If my name were not Pam in it, who was the organizing consciousness behind these 144 tiny miraculous coincident unrelated things?

~

About ten years ago, I was looking for an epigraph for a book of my travel essays. I arranged a lot of my Asian travel in those days with an excellent San Francisco outfit called Geographic Expeditions, a company famous for their catalogs, which are full of heart-stopping photos and quotes from writers like Goethe, Shakespeare, Chatwin, and Plato. That year’s catalog contained a quote from Seamus O’Banion: Eventually I realized that wanting to go where I hadn’t been might be as fruitful as going there, but for the repose of my soul I had to do both. I found it wise and pleasingly self-effacing, and I shamelessly stole it for my epigraph, without taking time to find the original source.

A season later, I was invited to a cocktail party at the offices of Geographic Expeditions, and since my new book contained essays about trips they had arranged for me, I brought them a copy. “And look,” I said, “I thieved my epigraph straight from your catalog,” and showed them the O’Banion quote.

When they could contain their laughter long enough to explain it, they said, “There’s no such person as Seamus O’Banion. We made him up, one late night several catalogues ago, and now we bring him back whenever we need him to say something profound.”

~

When I told my friend Shannon how rattled I got in Vegas, she twisted up her mouth and said, “Well, it seems to me that Vegas is the distillation of American-style capitalism, where what is desired is a facsimile of old world decadence (Venice) exchangeable only by complete ignorance of its actual cost (the wasteland at its margins). And that the lower-middle class who go there with their obese children are the real fools, because it’s their money that keeps everyone else either rich or poor.”

For the first time in my life I truly understood the difference between a writer and a cultural critic. A cultural critic goes to Vegas and lets it serve as proof of everything she’s been trying to say about the world. A writer goes to Vegas, and it makes her want to kill herself.

~

It is possible that I will be advised to change the character Pam’s name to Melinda. It is also possible, though less so, that I will be advised to change the names I have changed back to the actual names, or that I will be advised, the first time I introduce a character called Rick to say “the man I’ll call Rick.” It is possible I will be advised to do that with all the characters’ names I have changed, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty. In the instances where I have combined two or more real live people into one character, and thrown a little something in there to make them blend—a little storyteller’s petit verdot—or even made a character up all together, this method becomes problematic.

The Rick I’ve put on the page bears only a modest resemblance to the man I love and live with—less and less with every draft. But the point I am trying to make here is that the two wouldn’t resemble each other much more than they currently do if I called him by his real name and tried with all my might to make the two characters match. Nor would the Pam on the page resemble me any more or less than she currently does (which is only so much) if I am made to call her Melinda. Except in as much as her name would be Melinda, and my name would still be Pam.

~

I understand that it is in bad taste to love Venice, the real version. The city exists, now, more or less for the tourists, who number an astounding seven million a year. None of the employees can afford to live there, and the whole city shuts down by ten thirty each night because the waiters have to run for the last boat/train/bus for the city of Mestre, where there are apartments they can actually afford. Eighty percent of the palazzo windows are dark at night because they are all owned by counts or bankers or corporations, and now, because of the wave action of speedboats, the wood pilings that have stood strong under the town for more than a thousand years are finally rotting, and the whole city is sinking, slowly but surely into the Adriatic Sea.

And still, leaving the rent-a-car at the San Marco carpark, and slipping onto a Vaporetto at 8:00 pm on a foggy January night, leaving the dock and watching the first Palazzos come into view, some of them still adorned with Christmas lights, puttering past a Gondola, its Gondolier ram-rod straight in his slim black coat, passing under the Bridge of Sighs, with the dark water lapping softly against the bow, it is hard not to feel like you have entered the world’s single remaining magical kingdom.

And when you tell the Sicilian owner at Beccafico, “We have only one night here, so just make us whatever you think is best,” and he brings a whole fish cooked in wine and capers and olives and so fresh it is like the definition of the words fresh fish in your mouth, and afterwards, your sweetheart buys you for your birthday a small piece of venetian glass, various shades of umber, in the shape of a life preserver to wear around your neck, and you drift off to sleep in a room that has had fancy people sleeping in it since at least the 1400s, you think, if the worst thing they ever say about you is that you have an underdeveloped sense of irony that might be quite all right.

~

Did I mention that when James Frey was an undergraduate, I was his creative writing teacher?

~

In San Francisco, at Alonzo King’s Scheherazade there was one dancer who was head and shoulders above the others. I mean that literally—he was a giant—and figuratively–every time he leapt onto the stage all of our hearts leapt up too.

It was a difficult problem, I imagined, for the choreographer to solve, to have one dancer in a troupe who was so outstanding, so lithe and fluid, so perfectly free inside his own body, that he made all the other dancers, who I am sure were very fine dancers, look clunky, boorish, and uncontrovertibly white (even the black ones). And yet, having seen that dancer perform, wasn’t it Alonzo King’s duty to let us see him, even if he couldn’t be on stage the entire time, even if every time he left the stage, we all died a little bit inside?

~

I did not actually believe, for example, until I saw the signs with my own eyes, that several places in Vegas offer drive-through windows for weddings.

~

It has been five years since my trip to Madison, Wisconsin, and I have 144 chapters. 132 of them are titled with a place name, divided into groups of twelve by twelve single stories that take place no place—on an airplane, 39,000 feet above the ground. I had to make a decision as to whether the airplane stories would count as twelve of the 144, or over and above the 144, but that turned out to be easy. If I stuck to 132 non-airplane stories, I needed just twelve airplane stories to serve as both dividers and bookends. If I wrote 144 non-airplane stories, I would have needed thirteen, which would have ruined everything.

In the final stages of editing, I sent an email to my editor saying, “Is it wrong of me to want to call myself Pam in this book? Should I just change my name to Melinda and be done with it?”

She wrote back saying, “No, I like Pam. I think we want people to think it is both you and not you,” and I sat in front of the computer and nearly wept with gratitude.

Six months before my father lost his job and we drove to Las Vegas, he threw me across the room and broke my femur. I think it’s possible he meant to kill me, and I spent the rest of my childhood, the rest of his life, really, thinking he probably would. Speaking only for myself, now, I cannot see any way that my subsequent well-being depends on whether or not, or how much, you believe what I am telling you—that is to say—on the difference (if there is any) between 82 and 100 percent true. My well-being (when and if it exists) resides in the gaps language leaves between myself and the corn maze, myself and the Las Vegas junkies, myself and the elk chest-deep in snow. It is there, in that white space of language’s limitation that I am allowed to touch everything, and it is in those moments of touching everything, that I am some version of free.

When my agent read the first draft of my forthcoming book, she said in dismay, you haven’t taken us anywhere and yet you have taken us everywhere! I know what she was asking for was more resolution, which she was right to ask for and which I subsequently provided, but I still don’t know how to inflect her sentence in a way in which it doesn’t sound like praise.

One thing I am sure of, having spent the last five years inside a shattered narrative, is that time is a worthy opponent. It does not give up quietly. It does not give up kicking and screaming. It does not, in fact, give up at all. Time is like when you break a thermometer and all the mercury runs around the table trying like crazy to reconstitute itself. Or like the way PCB can start out in a glass transformer in Alabama and wind up on the island of Svalbard, inside a polar bear cub’s brain. A shattered narrative is still a narrative. We can’t escape it; it is what we are.

Art by Matt Monk

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, DEEP CREEK: FINDING HOPE IN THE HIGH COUNTRY, as well as two novels, CONTENTS MAY HAVE SHIFTED and SIGHT HOUND, two collections of short stories, COWBOYS ARE MY WEAKNESS and WALTZING THE CAT, and a collection of essays, A LITTLE MORE ABOUT ME, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century among other anthologies. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award and several teaching awards. She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

It is autumn and the leaves of October have begun to fall, but still Jennifer’s summer romance blossoms with a freshness that even the first cherry trees of April might envy. Her boyfriend David, who is trapped in his body like a mummy in its sarcophagus, calls her almost every day. The telephone rings and I jump to answer it because I am, even though moderately arthritic, swifter on my feet than she is. I hear his man’s voice gather its wind and attempt to phrase her name when I pick up. “Is Jshenny home?”

He works his tongue over the consonants as if he were scraping melted cheese from the roof of his mouth. Jennifer, at twenty-seven, is almost always home, and I fetch her while he waits.

“Jennifer! David’s on the phone!” I call as I take to the stairs, hoping my voice will penetrate her bedroom door and the music throbbing beyond it. As always, Celine Dion is crooning Jennifer’s favorite song, “My Heart Will Go On,” the love theme from Titanic, while Jennifer works the CD over the same phrase again and again, my heart will go ah, ah; and ah, ah; and ah, ah; and ah, ah; and on and on. Jennifer has been head over heels about the Titanic since the Leonardo DiCaprio/Kate Winslet movie was released, their ill-fated, but oh-so-romantic, love story igniting her desires. I detect a dip in the volume but not too much. She cranks the door’s handle hard, opens it and flaps her arms, wing-like, then step-thumps with her head held high past me and down the staircase, which takes considerable time, through the living room and into the kitchen.

She is pudgier than ever now, an enlivened dwarf on parade. Wearing enough necklaces to stock a display case, including one with a blue heart to honor the Heart of the Ocean thrown to sea in the Titanic movie, she whips them to a shoulder with a wave of her neck, picks up the receiver, smiles broadly, and places it to her ear.

David has been most patient, awaiting her presence on the phone, I’m sure, with a great deal of anticipation. I back out of the kitchen, allowing Jennifer a woman’s privacy for her conversation, but it doesn’t matter. Even if I go back upstairs or out on the lawn I can hear her shouting her high-pitched affection. “David, I love you! I love you, David!”

There is a pause, just long enough for David to say, “I love you” back. I know the duration and the speed of the three-stroke tempo these words command. Their conversation is always the same: limited to love and the memories of first meeting— limited by the constraints of their willing but impossible bodies.

“David, I met you at SCAMP,” Jennifer screeches, and I wonder what David is thinking on his end. What kind of woman he might otherwise romance if his legs could bear his weight, his lips produce a kiss, his arms effect an embrace. Though physically disabled in nearly every way, he is much brighter than Jennifer, and he knows he met her at SCAMP. I picture him receiving her comment as if he were truly astonished, for Jennifer’s sake. He seems infinitely patient; perhaps patience comes second nature to him, a necessity, bound as he is to a life without mobility.

Strapped for hours at a time in his wheelchair or in his hospital bed, David has little to occupy him besides his thoughts. I have my suspicions about his cunning: how he prods the attendant at his group home to dial the phone for him; how he urges her to hold the receiver to his ear, but to not eavesdrop; how he plots to find time and place with Jennifer.

Jennifer endures a long silence, holding the receiver close to her ear, straining to hear whatever might come next. David, perhaps distracted, has gone silent on his end. Apparently satisfied that the conversation has ended, she plops the receiver into its cradle and begins making her way back to her bedroom.

~

The day comes when he places a personal call to me. I hear him emit a tongue-manipulating, “Woul’ shou bring Jshenny over to shee me?”

I am seized not only by his effort but the longing in his voice, and I commit to honor his request. I hear myself say, “Sure, David, of course I will.” Some part of me wants Jennifer and David to share in the euphoria of romantic love. I remember how love energized my life when it came to me, and philosophically, I believe that they are equally entitled. But some part of me is terrified, too. Will I have to chaperone their marriage, dole out her birth control? Will I have to comfort her with words she can’t understand if love, or David, dies?

While few have given birth, it is known that women with Rubinstein/Taybi Syndrome have a high likelihood of passing this rare mental retardation onto their children—giving birth to miniatures of themselves who have beak noses, sloping eyes, jointless thumbs, and stymied IQs. And as if that weren’t frightening enough, I know that Jennifer’s peculiar little body could never carry a child, to say nothing of her inability to raise one.

I am a pro-active mother. All her life I have fought for her right to lead an independent, full, and rich life—to strive for her potential, the way the rest of us do. I’ve taken on school systems, pressured the medical establishment, transported her to her job. Now arriving at the pinnacle of that effort, I ask myself if she, I, dare make this move toward love, with all its implications.

I sent Jennifer to SCAMP, a summer day camp for the “physically and/or mentally challenged” as the administrators like to call it, for the first time when she was scarcely five years old—and then again every year for twenty-six years. In addition to the fun the camp provides its participants, it offers a bridge across the summer season, building upon whatever skills and education the SCAMPers might have mastered during the previous school year.

Jennifer’s earliest camping photographs, my favorites, show her sitting on a gymnasium floor learning to sing with her friends, their fingers, like a gathering of fairies, translating Row, Row, Row Your Boat or Sunshine On My Shoulders into the sign language of the deaf, while more recent pictures show Jennifer and David on the beach, embracing at water’s edge, frothing with desire as if they were Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr filming From SCAMP to Eternity.

Although I am afraid, I decide Jennifer is entitled to the human pleasures, and I drive her to David’s group home, in the next city over. I am aided and abetted by their Scamp counselors who help me find the way.

Sometimes on days like today it would be better if I were the proverbial fly on a wall—a slightly less obtrusive and annoying presence. But as it is I am antsy, situated on a cream-colored, cushy sofa, surrounded by way too many throw pillows, and I am amazed at Jennifer’s behavior, there, just across the room. I am struggling to control that amazement, keeping my voice in check, trying not to lurch and jump every time she makes a move—my maternal instinct to rein her in when she promises to get carried away.

Jennifer, her enthusiasm propelling her forward, is seated on the very front edge of an oversized footstool, and David is in his wheelchair before her. David was roused from a nap for this, Jennifer’s first visit with him outside of SCAMP. They have not seen each other in months. His attendant in this county-run group home where he lives, named Danetta, has gone to another room to fetch the carnations he has bought my daughter for Sweetest Day, although Jennifer is unaware that such a holiday even exists. The toothless Danetta, grinning and chatting affectionately, loves the idea of their love and, in cahoots with David, has planned a grand presentation for the flowers.

While she is out of the room, Jennifer clasps her hands together and shoves them between her knees, tilting her head coyly to one side and batting her eyes, as if she were a purring actress in a Rudolph Valentino film.

I can scarcely believe what I’m seeing and hearing. She appears to have absorbed every hokey gesture from every Big Screen romance she’s ever watched and made them her own. Jennifer preens, she fauns, she swoons. Her hands go before her breasts now, her voice suddenly Bette Davis-deep, airy and sensual, something more than a whisper. “I love you, David. I’ll be the best, brightest babe you ever knew.” She shakes her head gently for effect while David looks on, infatuated, bemused.

Because Danetta has not attached the foot rests to David’s chair, his legs hang awkwardly, suspended like those of an abandoned marionette when the strings are too tight. His right foot begins to shake up and down uncontrollably, like Thumper’s in the movie Bambi.

I know David is excited—just as besotted as Thumper—what I don’t want to know is how much? I engage my rational mind. His foot thrums the air because some obscure nerve lost in that tangled body has misfired. He is not, please, have mercy, sending Jennifer sexual messages that are beyond me.

Jennifer is so completely unabashed about her intentions. She reaches forward and clamps poor David’s twisted fingers in her hands. I cannot tell from my position if she is squeezing, as she is sometimes prone to do.

“Don’t hurt David,” I yell, finally overriding my restraint and going to sit beside her.

David’s head goes way back so that he looks at the ceiling. This response is part delight, part cerebral palsy asserting itself. He urges his face back down.

“Don’t worry, I will shay shomeshin if she doesh.” He directs his voice to me, but his eyes are on Jennifer.

At this, she releases his fingers (I notice the blood drain back into their tips) and she grabs the armrests on his wheelchair. With mind-boggling speed and agility—as if she had both practiced this maneuver and honed her strength on a rowing machine—she sweeps his chair, and him, between her legs. He is there in an instant, his knees brushing her inner thighs.

David is thrilled. I am mortified. At Jennifer’s audacity. At my unspoken concerns. I notice the taped corner of David’s paper diaper peek over his belt. The sight is both reassuring and heartbreaking to me, but Jennifer pays no attention. Her face is more alive than I have ever seen it. “David, I love you,” she gushes.

As if on cue, the carnations present themselves. David takes them from Danetta, gives them over with a strained reach, and Jennifer accepts them, but she is much more interested in a hug and kiss.

She rises and goes to embrace his shoulders. Stretched to full length, she stands at the same height as David when he is seated. The woman inside her knows what she wants; she plants a kiss on his cheek, presses herself against his chest, lingers there, and David attempts to wrap his all but useless arms around her.

Danetta and I utter sweet, stereophonic Aws—as if our voices were being piped in from two sides of the room.

When Jennifer’s hug becomes a little too eager, I peel her off David and insist that she sit back down, attempting, myself, to conjure up small talk. As a distraction, I help entertain their fantasy as David and Jennifer begin planning their first date. She wants to have dinner at the Red Lobster, while he would prefer a movie. My mind whirls. Yes, I would drive her to meet him if an attendant could get him to a rendezvous.

David, showing the stunning depth of not only his affection for, but his understanding of Jennifer, says he has been working on a picture of the Titanic for her but has not been able to render it perfectly because he can’t draw well. It will come eventually, he says. Jennifer goes wild at this news, hooting and clapping at the prospect that a portrait of her obsession will be given by the man of her dreams.

Suddenly she wants to see David’s bedroom. She asks boldly, “Can I see your room?” Jennifer rises once again and pivots David’s chair, begins nudging him down the hallway as Danetta and I follow, two anxious cocker spaniels.

David’s room turns out to be a sparse affair, dominated by his bed and a hoist on one side, and an empty bed that awaits a new client on the other. Things are in a bit of a clutter. I can see how he must have pored through his open drawers recently, dropped his belongings, been forced to leave them on the floor. His sheets are in disarray. On his brown dresser there is a stereo system, his prized possession, and beside that, at somewhat of a distance, a silver urn that, Danetta informs me, contains the remains of his mother.

I am at once struck by what seems a macabre addition to an already uncomfortable environment, filled with compassion for David, and reminded of my own mortality. His mother has been dead just over a year. I envision the woman she must have been, long in the limbs and dark-haired like David, her face impossibly forlorn. I notice the way my own spirit wants to step in as her surrogate. I feel her giving me a nudge from the other side.

Danetta stands behind David and mouths with her gums and lips, “His father doesn’t want anything to do with him.” David breaks the silence, speaking of his mother’s death without betraying a single emotion, while Jennifer, at his side, makes a mental connection and announces, “Your mother is in heaven.”

“I hope sho,” David says.

~

In what seems like short order, we lose track of David. After several visits and months of phone calls, one day I simply notice that the phone has stopped ringing. There is a not-so-conspicuous change to the overall tenor of our noisy household.

Certain that they must miss one another I think about David and Jennifer’s love. I feel optimism pull at me, a quixotic notion that I can rectify this, that I can nudge along something akin to happiness for them, if I try. On a piece of computer paper, I write Find David as if he were a misplaced screwdriver. I leave the reminder on the kitchen countertop, where for weeks I shuffle it around lunch fixings or the dinner dishes, waiting for the day when I will have time to commence a search.

When I finally call, we learn he has been swallowed up by the community mental health system, moved to a different group home without warning.

“David doesn’t live here anymore,” Danetta says bluntly into the receiver. “He’s somewhere closer to you, supposedly.”

I sigh. David must be waiting out there in the world, full of hope. I think that he’s close in the same way that a moon on an elliptical path sometimes moves in on its planet, even as the forces of nature push it away.

I am ashamed to admit that I have eaten the chocolates Jennifer bought for him for Valentine’s Day. I rationalize that they would be stale by now, early June. I say to myself, “We can buy more”—but I’m not fooling anyone. Store shelves are stocked with July Fourth fireworks and beach toys. There’s not a red box heart for miles.

David would have been thrilled with that box heart, too. He, the quintessential romantic who said to me during a visit one Christmastime, as he handed over a bottle of perfume to Jennifer, “She told me over the phone she wantsh to kish me.” He caught my gaze with his own, blushed, and followed up with a copper ring for her finger—a hand-me-down, dime store band inherited from his cousin. “Can I ashk her to marry me now, or do you want me to wait?”

David’s question hovered in the air and then dropped into the hole I reserve for questions with impossible answers. I felt it hit bottom. “Maybe you should wait,” I said.

~

From his wheelchair, after I locate him through our community mental health channels, a full two years into their hit-and-miss relationship, David finally orchestrates the perfect first date with Jennifer. Some three months have passed since Danetta told me of his move, and he is now, indeed, living only a mile or two from our house.

David’s and Jennifer’s meeting is the kind of date Cinderella and Prince Charming might have had, had the clock not struck midnight just when things were going well for them. David calls on a weeknight and pronounces with an empowerment that I can’t help but admire, “I’ve made plansh for ush.”

I listen.

“I bought ush ticketsh to the prom. They were thirty dollarsh.”

I think about the magnitude of this expense in his government-funded life, and I hear myself agree to bring Jennifer to his special education school on the appointed night.

He wants to know what color dress she will wear, and I say pink, knowing all the while that Jennifer will show up in her good white slacks and a mauve blouse. It is impossible to fit her body into a dress, and I have long since given up trying, but how can I explain this? Why would I want to go into all the details at this very moment?

“Jennifer will be excited,” I tell him.

~

The night is, as David will soon observe, a perfect night for a prom. The weather is clear and tepid. The sun burns a marvelous tangerine in the evening sky, administering just the right dose of romance.

We arrive at the prom ahead of David and are greeted by a bevy of enthusiastic PTA mothers bent on making this a memory-worthy night for their children. Most of those in attendance are students of the school, young men and women in their early to mid-twenties, with all manner of complicated mental and physical disabilities. Jennifer seems to be the only outsider, but not for long. She is, as I like to call it, “fully gussied” for this affair. Accenting her silk blouse, she has on four bracelets, nine of her favorite beaded necklaces, in all colors—everything from wooden to glass to shiny metal—and four plastic rings pilfered from the dentist’s treasure box.

She quickly ingratiates herself with the PTA moms by announcing, “I’m waiting for my husband. He’s my best true love I ever met. I’ll be his lovely bride.”

Jennifer has fantasies that she is going to replicate her sister Holly’s marriage ceremony in the gazebo of our hometown’s scenic little park. Her comment is met with a series of smiles and hums, the mothers looking at me with understanding.

Jennifer squeals when she sees David’s van finally pull up. He exits it with help from an aide, dressed in his best clothes, twisted to dating perfection in his wheelchair, with a pink corsage pressed into his hands.

“Mom, it’s so romantic,” Jennifer gushes. She is feigning Valentino kitten again. “Here comes my best, true love.”

I slip the corsage, which David says he ordered only today, onto Jennifer’s wrist for him, and she surprises me when she says, “You can leave, Mom”—gripping the wheelchair’s handles and pushing it toward the action.

I am a confusion of emotions: proud of her and delighted to be sharing in her delight, afraid to leave her in a crowd of strangers, touched by her desire for adult independence even as I am aware that she’s still mostly a child. We compromise when I drift off to the far, distant end of the cafeteria, way beyond the dance floor, beyond even the disc jockey and the dining tables to a bench in no man’s land, where I set up watch, like an owl on a barn rafter.

The evening’s festivities begin with song, Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy—which strikes me as a somewhat ironic choice. From my spot as spy, I notice that Jennifer and David are totally involved already. They are oblivious to those around them: the stumpish girls who swim in their oversized evening gowns, the spastic break dancers, the ecstatic young Down Syndrome man who is on the receiving end of a bump and grind.

Jennifer and David hold hands. They hug and kiss. They pause and gaze into one another’s eyes. They arm polka, Jennifer moving David’s left arm up and down as if she were dancing with an old-fashioned water pump.

After an hour, the mothers dish up a chicken and rice dinner, but Jennifer and David scarcely seem to eat. I know from experience that excitement has claimed a victory over Jennifer’s otherwise insatiable appetite, but I’m not sure about David, who is something more than a paraplegic, something less than a quadriplegic. I amble over and, not wanting to embarrass him, ask him in a whisper if he needs help with his food, and he tells me that he does because he doesn’t want to spill on his good clothes. It would be different back at the group home, he acknowledges. There, he could wear all the food necessary to get some into his mouth. But on a date, especially this date … well, things are different.

I seat myself next to him and begin to fork rice into his mouth. Jennifer does not take this move well at all. “I want to do it,” she says, summoning a pushiness that is new to both of us. “Let me do it!”

Surprised, I hand the fork over and watch while she delicately spears a piece of chicken and moves it to David’s lips. He rolls his head back and opens his mouth to receive it, submitting to her completely.

She pushes the food at him tenderly, more tenderly than a mother bird might feed her tiniest, most favorite fledgling. Every muscle and nerve in her body is focused on his satisfaction, and I cannot help but realize that a woman I have never known now sits before me.

Art by Matt Monk

Carolyn Walker’s work has recently appeared in such publications as Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Her memoir, EVERY LEAST SPARROW, was released in 2017. The book details the story of her daughter Jennifer who was born with Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, a rare condition that affects mental and physical development. A MOTHER RUNS THROUGH IT—a collection of her creative nonfiction—was released in 2001. Her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry were published in the anthology AT THE EDGE OF MIRROR LAKE. Her journalism has appeared in HOUR Detroit Magazine; Detroit Monthly Magazine; Michigan, the Magazine of the Detroit News; the Detroit Free Press; the Flint Journal; the Oakland Press; the Observer & Eccentric newspapers; and The Clarkston News. Carolyn’s journalism has won awards from the Suburban Newspapers of America, the Michigan Press Association, the Better Newspapers Association, and the Association for Retarded Citizens. She teaches writing at the college and university level, has taught writing workshops in local school districts, and is a member of Detroit Working Writers and Creative Writers in the Schools.