For the past five years, Getty Images photographer Mario Tama, has been documenting Hurricane Katrina’s devastation and the recovery process of New Orleans and its people. Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent, is his newly released book published by Umbrage.

September 6, 2005—A resident walks past a burning house fire in the 7th ward, New Orleans. Fire companies are struggling to combat fires in the city with no water pressure and difficult communications.

At Length: What was it like for you, as a photographer, when you first arrived in New Orleans to cover Hurricane Katrina?

Mario Tama: It was apparent from the moment I stepped off the plane in New Orleans, two days before the storm, that the situation would be chaotic. I had reserved an SUV through a car rental agency, but as I arrived at the counter, the line was endless and there was only one poor soul manning the desk, the rest of the workers had fled. It was impossible to get a car from the regular agencies, but I was lucky enough to get the last vehicle available from a local agency, a Toyota Corrolla, not exactly the type of vehicle one hopes for to cover a hurricane. As I arrived into the city, many local residents were checking into hotels in the French Quarter, as they knew the Quarter was on high ground. Of course, the poorest residents could not afford a room in the Quarter and the buses that were supposed to be provided to evacuate them never arrived. I rode out the storm in the Holiday Inn in the Quarter and ended up on a rescue boat in the Lower Ninth Ward the following day. I recall at one point our boat became stuck on something, nearly tipping over. And as we looked down it turned out we were stuck on the top of someone’s roof. It was at that moment the immensity of the disaster became brutally apparent.

AL: At what point and why did you decide to compile your Katrina work into a book?

MT: Reportage photo editor Lauren Steel approached me about doing a book and of course I jumped at the chance. It had been in the back of my mind for a while, but I wasn’t really sure of the best way to approach it. I always felt the story was just too massive, too complex, to possibly be captured in a few images or in moments just following the storm. New Orleans has withstood 27 major floods over the past 290 years or so, so the real story was never just about Katrina, but about the resilience and spirit of the people who always manage to overcome and endure. We also wanted to give something back to the community, so I’m very proud that Getty Images will donate 100 percent of the royalties from this book to New Schools for New Orleans.

August 30, 2005—A woman is placed into an Army vehicle after being rescued from her home in high water in the Lower Ninth Ward during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans.

AL: You have had assignments in Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11—what was it about New Orleans that compelled you to continue documenting the city over the course of 5 years?

MT: I think I connected with the people of New Orleans on a deeper level than I ever had with my subjects before. I had fallen in love with the city years before Katrina, so I knew what an amazing place it was and I just felt that if the people were going to try to come back, I would try to come back with them. I think riding on boats with them in the Lower Ninth, walking through the floodwaters with them around the Superdome, waiting on overpasses with them to be rescued, all these experiences created an unbreakable foundation of solidarity. I’m not in any way, shape, or form a nationalist, but at the same time, there is something different, something more disturbing, about documenting people of your own country in such dire circumstances. I felt that if I were to truly be an American photojournalist, it was my duty to follow this story as thoroughly and sensitively as I could.

August 31, 2005—Two men paddle in high water after Hurricane Katrina devastated the area, New Orleans.

AL: Were there certain parts of the city that you focused on during your return visits?

MT: Yes, I focused of course on the Lower Ninth Ward, which is the first area of the city I photographed in the aftermath. I also focused on the B.W. Cooper housing projects, the projects were a very controversial subject following Katrina, and most were torn down. No one claimed that the projects were an ideal place to live, there was a terrible history of violence, drugs and crime in the projects. However, they were home to thousands of the poorest New Orleanians and a true incubator of New Orleans culture. Most of the people who lived there have now been priced out of the city. But I was able to photograph one section of B.W. Cooper that has remained open and I was indescribably drawn to the spirit of the people there. They truly embody resilience. Speaking of resilience, I also spent a lot of time in the FEMA Diamond trailer park in Port Sulphur, Louisiana. There were still people living in FEMA trailers down there four years after Katrina hit. The conditions were absolutely deplorable and shameful especially here in the richest country on Earth.

September 1, 2005—Stranded survivors wait in the Superdome, New Orleans.

AL: Being a staff photographer for Getty, how did you manage to spend so much time shooting in one location and on the same project?

MT: I was very fortunate that my Director of Photography, Pancho Bernasconi, understood the importance of this story. We had many discussions about how to cover it and we ended up coming up with ways to keep our coverage relevant. For instance, I would visit at times when New Orleans was in the news, like during elections, or at the beginning of hurricane season, or when presidential candidates came through town. Or we would cover other newsworthy moments like Easter and Thanksgiving in New Orleans. Even during my longer stints I would cover stories for the Getty wire in New Orleans which had very little to do with Katrina, such as immigrant rallies and oil production. There is enough going on in New Orleans that one doesn’t have to only photograph stories related to Katrina. Another big help was a great little bed and breakfast I found, the Crescent City Guest House, which charged me extremely reasonable rates, making coverage easy on the budget.

AL: It’s been five years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, how has the rebuilding of the city progressed;  have things changed during your trips there?

MT: I have heard the city compared to a stroke victim, in the sense that most areas seem to be functioning normally but certain areas are completely nonfunctional. If you visit the French Quarter or the Garden District there is basically zero evidence of Katrina. But if you go to certain parts of the Lower Ninth, homes remain destroyed and in fact a significant amount of the Lower Ninth Ward has now been overtaken by wild vegetation. It is coming along, slowly but surely.

May 28, 2008—Kailah Smith, 18 months, sleeps on a couch covered in mold caused by rain leaks in her parents’ FEMA trailer, just before the family moved out of the trailer to an apartment, Port Sulphur, Louisiana. Smith’s parents had to hospitalize her with bronchitis four times since they moved into the trailer and they said they were sure the trailer was to blame for her illnesses. Doctors fear tens of thousands of children were exposed to dangerous levels of the cancer-causing agent formaldehyde in the post-Katrina FEMA trailers and could have lifelong illnesses.

AL: During the time that you have spent in New Orleans, it must have been overwhelming witnessing the transition from the devastation to the recovery process, as well as the resulting good and bad aspects of human nature?

MT: This story has been an incredible roller coaster of emotions and experiences, but I’m thrilled to say almost every new visit seems to mark another milestone of progress and redemption. Of course some of the worst elements of humanity were manifested in the aftermath, but what truly sticks out in my mind is the strength of community, the bonds of family, the inherent decency of most humans, who bonded together, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and reclaimed their city. When you mention bad aspects of human nature, the thing that immediately pops to mind was the negligence and ineptitude of our government, which was deeply disturbing. Most people who went through Katrina will tell you they will never have faith in government again.

August 26, 2007—Boys participate in the Valley of the Silent Men Social Aid and Pleasure Club Second Line Parade, New Orleans.

AL: For a good time after the hurricane there was quite a media frenzy in and around New Orleans. Were there any major challenges that you faced as a photographer, coming from the outside?

MT: The challenges I faced were nothing compared to what the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast faced. I was very fortunate. I slept in my car for a couple nights following the storm before luckily finding a new hotel room, albeit without electricity or running water. I had a satellite phone to transmit pictures with, but it barely worked. I was eventually able to send images via a landline that somehow worked in a local bar. Driving through the flooded streets in a Toyota Corolla was not exactly optimal, and many times the only option was to wade through the floodwaters on foot, sometimes with cameras hoisted overhead. A police officer tried to commandeer all my gasoline at one point, that would have possibly put an end to my coverage. At one point the National Guard blocked myself and some other photographers from re-entering the city, but we were able to find another way in.

May 29, 2008—Isabella Lander and Arabella Christiansen climb on the 17th Street Canal levee, Metairie, Louisiana.

AL: A lot had been said about the inadequate government response during the Katrina crisis, how did people help each other out during that time?

MT: In the Lower Ninth Ward I saw citizens on boats, even canoes, rescuing their neighbors from rooftops and delivering food and water to those trapped inside their homes. Although most of the governmental response was mediocre, The U.S. Coast Guard and Louisiana Dept. of Wildlife and Fisheries both did an excellent job with rescues. Even in places as miserable as the Convention Center, I remember people still telling jokes and trying to smile, which is the New Orleans way, it is a communal method of getting through hardship.

August 24, 2007—Retired seamstress Rita Gillett, 63, sits in her damaged home in the Lower Ninth Ward where she lives with her husband Hazzert, New Orleans. The couple still lived without electricity or gas because they weren’t able to secure government assistance to pay for the repairs.

AL: Much of the recent press on the Gulf Cost has focused on the BP oil spill, how are the residents dealing with yet another tragedy?

MT: I think initially it was a big shock and of course people are angry and upset, but as time has passed I see once again the resilience shining through. Living down here is truly a way of life, and people will fight to keep their way of life with every bone in their body.

AL: You are currently in New Orleans on assignment right now. What’s the mood like during the 5th anniversary of Katrina?

MT: I think it’s difficult to guage an exact mood, a lot of people just want to look forward and forget about Katrina, understandably so. Others want to honor those who perished. And still others want to celebrate a little bit, like the dancers I photographed at a second line parade in the Lower Ninth. As they say down here, “In New Orleans, we put the ‘fun’ in funeral.”

November 26, 2009—Camilla Brewer attends the Thanksgiving Day horse races at the Fair Grounds Race Course, New Orleans. Each year people don their Thanksgiving finest and watch the races in an old New Orleans tradition.

AL: Do you feel that your relationship with the city and its people has changed since you started the project?

MT: Yes my relationship with the city has grown much deeper, I understand more about the history of the neighborhoods and the cultural significance of the various rituals that embody New Orleans. When I come down here now it usually takes about a day to de-New Yorkerize myself and get into the graceful unhurried rhythm that exemplifies New Orleans life. The two cities are different in so many ways, but one thing both cities absolutely share in common is amazing people. I feel so blessed to have been able to witness and document the spirit of so many incredible New Orleanians along with the resplendent intricacies of New Orleans life. It is truly one of those places where the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. So it has been a great education and I hope it continues for a long time.

June 6, 2007—B.W. Cooper housing project resident Leianne LaRoche holds niece Destiny Herbert, two, as they jump rope using a phone cable in front of their apartment, New Orleans.

AL: The Getty Images royalties from Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent are going to the New Schools for New Orleans. How did NSNO become involved with the project?

MT: The book has an emphasis on children, and so when a friend suggested I speak to Sarah Usdin, founder and CEO of NSNO, I jumped at the chance. We hit it off immediately and they just seemed like the perfect cause for this project. One of the silver linings of Katrina was that the school system was so devastated they were able to practically start over from scratch.

AL: What do you hope to achieve through the publication of this book?

MT: I hope people will never forget what happened here. It is a terrible mark on our nation’s history and the only way history won’t repeat itself is of course if we learn from the grave errors that occurred in 2005. But more importantly, I hope this book will serve as a reminder that New Orleans is a cultural cradle of our country, an extremely important and vital link to our nation’s history and to her future. The suggestion made in some circles that New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt was, to me, utterly preposterous and could only have been made by people who had never actually set foot in this glorious city. It is a city where history lives on in every corner and its citizens carry a vigorous and rarified strand of the very DNA of the American experience. I hope the book calls attention to that.

The book signing and launch for Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent will take place on Wednesday, September 8, 6–8pm at Umbrage Gallery, 111 Front Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Selected images from the book are on view at the gallery through September 15, 2010.
To see more work by New York-based photographer Mario Tama, visit his website. Tama is a staff photographer for Getty Images. All images © Mario Tama/Getty Images

Markus Popp - photo by Constantin Falk

To some extent, the history of popular music since the 1950s is the story of the way musicians and composers have broadened their musical palettes by exploiting the shortcomings of the technology used to amplify and reproduce music.  The amplification of the guitar resulted in the squall of distortion and feedback that are the hallmarks of rock, and the manipulation of vinyl records on a pair of turntables gave us the post-modern, beat-driven world of hip-hop.

Oval was one of the early pioneers of a similarly deliberate mishandling of technology: using computer software and the physical marking of compact disks (famously with felt tip pens) to create a style of music later dubbed “glitch.”  The cadences of the stuttering electronics were both alien and familiar, and are now so much a part of the sonic landscape (think Postal Service, Radiohead or Flying Lotus) as to seem obvious in retrospect.

But Berlin-based Markus Popp, a founding and now sole member of the group, seems almost allergic to labels or expectations.  After a string of impressive releases, Oval has been dormant throughout most of the new millenium.  Now, Popp has a new sound, using live takes and some traditional instrumentation to build upon the angular atmospherics of Oval’s earlier work.  And he’s making up for lost time, with some 85 tracks spread across an EP (“Oh,” out earlier this summer) and a double-album (“O,” out on September 13) – both on Thrill Jockey.

At Length recently corresponded with Popp about the new recordings, his new sonic outlook and his manifesto about his dislike of manifestos.

Oval – Ah! (Right click on the link to download a track from the new double-album.)

At Length: I believe the last record you worked on was 2003’s So, a collaboration with Eriko Toyoda, and your last record as Oval was Ovalcommers in 2001. Also, this summer you’ve released an EP and will shortly release a double LP of all new material.  Why did you take a break from recording, and what brought you back?  And why return with so much new material all at once?  Have you been working on this for a long time, or did it come as a torrent quite recently?

Markus Popp: The “Oh” EP and “O” album are the next chapter in an ongoing dialog with music. And while my early tracks from the mid-90s were engaged with music on a pretty basic and unsophisticated (yet effective) level, these new releases can confidently challenge music on its’ own turf – something I wanted to do for many years, but just did not quite feel ready for. Over the years, I increasingly felt I needed to be part of this conversation – ultimately, because music always has been a part of my life and I wanted to finally come up with a better payback scheme than just dissection or denial.

I always knew I would return with something – albeit not at all cost. Simply returning with just some new iteration of “electronic music” just wasn’t good enough. Basically, there was always a lot more “music” in Oval than might have been apparent all along, it was only a question of which form it would take in 2010. But then again, if you compare my 2010 material with my early albums, you realize that I just might have posted this “love letter to music” already a long time ago – and that it is only now, that its contents becomes more clear. To me, “O” is like a debut album, it is full of passion and enthusiasm.

How to start this dialogue with music? Easier said than done. Step 1: radical departure – do everything differently on all levels: technically, musically, organizationally. I wanted to PLAY stuff, take control – for example, by establishing riffs as the new main building block, replacing loops. This added much more immediacy and control (but also a lot of new decision-making and new responsibilities), while being loop-based had been by definition static and inflexible.

By recording my own improvisations, I was now the composer, not just the “music coordinator.” Once I had the tech aspect down, things went pretty quickly from there. The tracks are pretty much recorded live (of course in multi-track). Still, this says nothing about which direction to take from there – that took even longer. Having direct, real-time access to things does not mean that I was working any faster. All phrases have been triggered as you hear them, they are not montages. In the end, I decided to capture these riffs really quickly, like shooting Polaroids – if the recording went the wrong way, I had to do everything all over again.

AL: In the past, you’ve been careful to note that while you arrange the sounds on any particular piece of music you release as Oval, you don’t actually make the sounds that are heard.  Yet it seems that on your new work, there is something akin to more traditional musicianship or music-making going on, with “live” instruments recorded in the studio.  Are those samples?  Are you playing any instruments on this record?

MP: Hmm, careful with that “traditional musicianship” part. I have seen it fail before!

Sure, I had set my priorities differently. Instead of highlighting the “authorship” question, I went straight into the opposite direction: I wanted to be in charge of bringing out the “music” in “electronic music.” In practice, the production of O(h) was often all about ending up with the best possible take. You know, that one recording that is worth practicing an entire day for, the one that can convey a certain sophistication beyond all that technology involved. Joining the music game was also a pragmatic decision: to establish myself as a producer, widen the frame of reference and to ask for a fair chance to show what my music can do in the real world.

So, am I actually playing instruments on this new record? Yes and no. The more important question is: how to force music-making to catch up with the new challenges of this age of hyperrealism which is already seamlessly integrated into the aesthetic canon of other fields of media productivity, e.g. film.

A rain shower, an explosion, a flock of birds in the distance, human actors – *any* asset as part of a contemporary movie scene are perceived – provided the lighting and photography are flawless – as simply “being there”, whether these assets were ever part of the original shot or just added digitally in post. Who knows, to a certain degree, this new Oval sound might be nothing but a trompe l’oeil, an acoustic illusion – albeit a very convincing one – to a point, where you don’t insist on the seemingly specific qualities of the “original” any longer. So why still give way to the old impulse of investigating the perpetual “how did he do it? I thought people had already been over that with Systemisch in 1994.

Today, my goal is to create a “just listen” type of music that effortlessly just “is” (of course not in an esoteric sense of “beyond criticism”) and convincingly renders distinctions like “programmed vs. played” and “acoustic vs. electronic” obsolete.

AL: Similarly, you seem to be using more recognizable melodic structures here than in your previous work.  While many musicians and artists change their entire approach to their work over the course of their career, I find it striking that you did this while still using the Oval moniker, as that seemed to be so tied to a certain manifesto about the deficiencies in electronic music, or an almost philosophical problem with music itself.  Does Oval now stand for something other than what you once imagined?

MP: Oval stands for…Markus Popp and his perspective on music. And that perspective can of course evolve. I wanted to finally be able to tell the full story – from both, outside (“classic” Oval) and inside (new material) of the music container. And yet, I could still rely on certain continuities (in atmosphere, for example) which ultimately also made it onto the new records. The “manifesto” aspect is mainly provoked by interviews like this one and has to be evaluated separately from the actual musical result, which always could hold its own *as music*. Today, after having completed this latest work phase, I’d say that regardless of technique and the tools at my disposal, my music does retain this signature “Oval” atmosphere.

And yes, there was this (still unresolved) philosophical problem of the electronic musician: being perpetually torn between subjective creative expression and the mere execution of pre-implemented features. In the early days, I did not feel I belonged into any of these two camps and therefore took that “semi-authorship” route with Systemisch and all subsequent releases, putting the generative method center stage. But then again, even the vintage oval releases are remembered as music, not as the soundtrack to a manifesto.

Today, I seem to have gone straight down the authorship route, but let’s not forget, that this is an Oval record after all. A concept like “simply sitting down and playing some tunes” is not a route you can just opt to take – this is 2010. Even though it might be ultra-musical, O is not only an homage. And despite its’ accessible songwriter trappings, this record is a contemporary and pretty technical album – I just chose to give everything a very “playful” atmosphere. This is not only a revisionist “love letter to music”, this is a 2010 hi tech product.

AL: You seemed to have something of an educational aim when you began Oval, to point out the ways in which electronic music is constrained or enabled by the changing nature of the technology.   With so many artists using some of the glitchy sounds and textures or techniques that were your hallmark, how do you feel about the success of the Oval project in that regard?

MP: Well, “educational” might be a bit of a stretch here. But still, in the early days, it was all about not using the tricks of the trade, but to reveal the circumstances of those tricks. Of course the music could only convey this to a certain degree, but I felt obliged to give mention to what I at the time saw as the most relevant problems that were concealed by continuing to talk about music as if nothing had happened. But of course something had happened – software happened. At the time, giving mention to these “extra”-musical aspects seemed absolutely necessary to me. It simply had been no option for me to proceed with “(music) business as usual” while music productivity itself was facing these historical changes.

AL: In the time since you started Oval, popular music has increasingly highlighted the software and machines used in it’s creation.  I’m thinking specifically of the way Radiohead and many other bands incorporate glitches and software artifacts in their sound, and even the way pop and hip-hop artists like Kanye West have used Auto-Tune in ways that obviously distort the human voice instead of unobtrusively correct it.  Do you feel like these trends are in some way the result of what you did in the 90s, or at least inspired by the same things?

MP: It seems that the crucial aspect to “glitch” is not how to precisely date or define it, but from which angle you make it work for you. From my perspective, Oval in the 90s was not primarily about introducing disruptive elements into an otherwise unquestioned, fully intact musical narrative, but in fact it was about the exact opposite. Oval was all about creating intactness from the most disparate and unlikely building blocks – I guess I had subscribed to the somewhat naïve hope to prevent that at the advent of this “software era” everyone and everything would just proceed with (music) business as usual. By the way, I did not (and still don’t) believe in changing the agenda via “anti- music” – like noise, etc. – but always try to go for a more elegant solution that challenges people in an inviting way. With Systemisch, I was pretty busy proving that my tracks could be music after all, even capable of flirting with “pop” – while for others, Oval was probably on the forefront of “experimental electronic music” (ugh).

Sure, the entire early Oval mission did have a lot to do with disrupting certain traditional conceptions about the intactness of music. However, on a practical level, these early tracks were in fact totally linear, pleasant and very song-like. But granted, after the release of Systemisch, the “glitch” meme was undoubtedly out there, a steady part of the electronic music canon – and apparently, it spread into other many areas. But I guess such a dynamic has long been standard practice in arts, no? Plus, this dawn of self-awareness for digitality itself did happen in a lot of other fields of media as well.

What do I think of this? I remain pretty neutral here. First and foremost, I have always seen my role in introducing new distinctions into music to be suggesting the occasional shift in perspective and, if at all possible, trigger some discussions. And I guess I have ultimately succeeded at that – the glitch distinction/mechanic is out there, part of the electronic music arsenal / vocabulary – albeit for all the wrong reasons, at least from my perspective.

Disclaimer: I have never claimed to have been the first to have “invented glitch”. Looking back from today, I’ d say that Oval represented a certain alignment of musical instinct, pop sensibilities, some innovative details and lots of outspoken, nonconformist attitude – all apparently executed convincingly enough to render Oval this somewhat intangible phenomenon that kept people guessing…and to be “influential”.

AL: In the past, you’ve used high-end Mac Pros to create your music, and helped to create custom software consoles to illustrate some aspects of your work.  Have you continued to engage in high-tech experimentation, and keep up with the latest advances in computing? Have you revisited your software project to attempt to create something more sophisticated that takes advantage of greater computer power or advances in software?

MP: I feel this $500 PC could be the next felt pen applied to the CD surface. It is a piece of info from a release bio that already seems to be on the way to developing a life of its’ own. Even though O was in fact made with this old stock PC, it only serves as a placeholder to signify: “no secret-weapon-type tech was used in the making of this record”.

In fact, Oval always was a low key/low budget affair. If you would go ahead and date Oval tracks based on the hardware utilized in their making, you’d always have to add several years to the assumed creation date, because I never, even to this day, had (or cared about) the “latest technology.” For example, Systemisch ultimately ended up as this glorious mono recording because I simply could not afford a fancy stereo sampler at the time. Also, one of my ideas for these early records was that the music should always retain an atmosphere as if everything could have been created / performed on (multiple) old tape recorders. I guess it remains important to my music to this day that I always had to get creative with modest resources.

AL: Aside from the different methods and means you employ to make the music on the new records, how would you characterize the difference in the music itself?  How has your thinking about your music changed in the time since your last recorded output? What motivated this change of approach?

MP: The main guideline was to create pure music with an irresistible quality to it, something you could not really put your finger on, but that could move people. And despite the fact that pretty much everything else around me has undergone such crazy transitions since then, my perspective stayed the same through all these years. Ultimately, I wanted to end up with emotional, touching music – regardless of the building blocks or construction principles utilized in its’ making. I guess I am pretty good at identifying what I am *not* interested in, always ending up with this essentialist concept. Plus, I do know that I have a compulsive tendency to always go for the most unlikely building blocks. Systemisch was a linear album full of moody songscapes, everything was put together in a very straightforward manner, simply composed out of a few, albeit unlikely, building blocks.

In practical terms, this meant giving each track its’ most convincing musical form and to pack in as much emotion and atmosphere into the smallest possible space. That’s why a considerable portion of tracks on O ended up as these high-density miniatures (album CD2), while others were turned full-featured “songs” (tracks 2,4,6,8, etc on CD1). My primary concern was to give each track a chance to truly shine and achieve as much “associative power” and irresistible emotionality as possible. For example, the sheer “visual” potential of the “interludes” (O CD1, tracks 1,3,5,7,9,11, etc) could lock you into an intense staring contest for a pretty long time. In a sense, this music plays you.

Tracks based on these sorts of high-density phrases would in fact have lost a lot of their momentum by adding more variations – or adding any other type of sound for that matter. All tracks on side B of the Oh EP (same goes for CD2 of the O album) are pure, concise miniatures in order to get across the maximum emotion. Being liberated from having to think constantly about “what could be missing here,” I could instead concentrate on their distinct “faux future evergreen” atmosphere. Other design goals for these miniatures were “ringtone,” “evergreen,” and “music that you could swear you already know”.

All in all, O is all about turning Oval from a lean-forward to a lean-back experience without sacrificing any of the achievements (musical and programmatic) of the former Oval albums – and instead convincingly challenge music on its own turf without being just plain bad at writing songs.

THE NATURAL WORLD

There is no other
To explain where it came from is speculation like reading
water from a faucet. Beyond what we think
in our dreams or ideas it is still there
even the island of walruses

Inside a house he said
—the man from the rain forest—
inside that Bijoux, Rex, that Paramount, was a hill with steps.
He’d seen it.
And they go up, the whites, the egret people,
they go into the cinema balcony and stare out.
In the dark
ghosts appear on the walls.
Huge people of no substance doing terrible things.
It is death
dreaming on the walls he says.
Back home he will eat only songbirds and howlers
needing their voices to help him
say what happened.

Opening the index I see my list
Chordata
the worm that cries out from its ordered words,
from paper white from oxygen,
type black as onion fields near Sodus, New York,
from centuries of bedrock crumbled together with the old sea floor
things freshly pulled from the earth
and displayed
in neat rows at the roadside stand.

Madame Vidalia, dressed in slips, a seer from below.
Russets whose brown skins bake open.
They are protective
if we know their names:
Kingdom  Phylum  Class.

Opening Webster’s to estivation
I thought was a summer sleep, what lungfish do in the dry season,
land snail stuck to the house plaster,
I find it the arrangement of petals within a flower before it opens as well,
and maps of their little inner galaxies,
spiral backbones,
and other names in reverence,
words said softly to the dark:
involute. revolute. obvolute.
convolute. supervolute. induplicate.
conduplicate. plaited. imbricated. equitant.
valvate. circinate. twisted. alternative. vexilary.
cochlear. quincunx. contorted.
curvative. equitant.
Twenty.
By this time  none of my friends will be listening.

Imagine a page
orbiting the 320 possible faces of crystals,
ointment from anoint,
a scented oil pressed from a flower by a six-fingered hand
from the frieze of posies and ampersands.

Imagine in each train window
that heads are depicted so completely they cannot come loose,
like a traveling exhibition,
each face a moon floating like babies waiting to be born,
moving through the stark cities and ragged yards

We name durations
We do not name the shorter disasters:
tornado Alice, waterspout Belle,
don’t name lightnings
or the gust from the chimney dousing the lights.

In Nebraska
another tornado tries to screw something heavenly to the fields
whose rows come together in the theoretical distance.
We hear the wind next door
get caught trying to slip unnoticed through the wind chime.
A reminder
the world insistently presses against us
not like frotteurs on subways or a bus in Rome
but like azaleas the window, the water propping the house up so we’ll notice,
tight as peptides.

We cannot pick blackberries anymore
on the path to The National Seashore
because they spray for mosquitoes even where no one is living.
So many so afraid of nature they send trucks to end it.
If they looked back they might see their own long reluctant shadows
as if dragging their deaths behind.

EARTH SCIENCE

A silence
as when leaving a city the uniting quiet spreads
like the transformational influence of the art of some underdogs.
On a ledge overlooking Arkansas
delicacy is not lost in distance anymore than quartz or olivine
in the crystallization of magma
though you may grow woozy near the edge.
The inadequate is us.
Genetics is like the flurry of Daggers and Prominents
in the halogen death-moons at the Texaco gas plaza in Eureka Springs
calculating quietly without us.

None of this requires a creature self-aware.
No catastrophists. No creationists. No arrogant nations whose rockets protect them.
No one unfolding the Alps on paper
while wooden structures change quietly to stone.
A couple drawn unwittingly together because of their underbites.
Myths are how one participates
assured the impossible is ours.

The unconvinced
want footnotes  a throw rug on the ocean floor   new windows for deflecting firearms.
Departures from normal are magnetic anomalies.
Finding tireless islands like the cookies from last March still unopened on the table.
Christmas cards from the year before that. We are accruing a schematic.
The continents are slipping but the older is not farther off
only covered up on the coffee table by National Geographics.
Clastics. Synclines.
Fortunes faded and brittle.
Footprints turned to stone.

SOLVING FOR X

Aristotle and his cranky commentators,
Darwin’s critics in a dark room like bees dazed by endless clover,
the buffalo down to a few,
the subtracted intimidating sound of wings of passenger pigeons,
a thundering softness, darkening at noon the plains of Kansas,
now a long lost wind in a unique contrivance, uniquely human:
extinction from abundance.

To Hell
with the Argument by Design. Something has gone wrong
down on the planet whose atmosphere swirls like a soapy fever.
The sick animal, earthly in fatigues,
is armed and reloading.
A structured leading edge manages lift from a partial vacuum
and laminar flow.
It contains the strong hollow bone of a bat
or gun barrel.
Some parakeets are thriving in Palm Harbor, some pets flushed,
others let off at the end of the road in another neighborhood.
This is close as we come to solving for X,
a diminishing equation.

To the unknown
and presumptions about them
the propositions are like a concerto in three movements:
Arrow of Time,
which may turn backwards into its flight path
after skewering the target;
Illusion of Equilibrium,
recognized when after dinner overlooking the sunset, we have to ask who is purring
and what color does arsenic turn in the atmosphere anyway;
and More the Merrier,
which we never believed, in which exuberance and poignancy fall on the same note,
prolonged, prayerful, unheard.

CONSERVATION OF ELEGY

We use dead center for bullseye
We like reckless since it sounds like no wrecks
but is dying just the same
Like blasting both our fathers to powder
the process and language denying
what we always said about bodies: keep them care for them
as themselves  as ideas
like concentric circles that are guides
ribs in a long dark tunnel.

We like to say pass on  pass over
like to say outtage like the lights
but we clutter our sky with star hiss and animals
so thickly they cannot

In the backyard earth
the generality we know best about the planet
compost reduces by half
refuse returning to earth in one season
encouraging
the gas-lit grass  each blade a perfect stranger
dagger-flames green as envy
all numbers lucky lotto another chance
We are after more
than the usual understanding
more brainstem more sweethearts
lasting life

LOSING TRACK

They are libraries.
Even the little doily maker is a book itself,
from the book of spiders, a speck that looking at plain air
sees a place in it where silk geometry could fit,
shapes too fine to focus a shadow,
and knows how its snowflake deforms and wobbles
more than 2=XY on the graphing calculator,
how to stay calm
while the threads go limp between the two waving stalks of goldenrod,
and recognize wind that peels bark,
flakes the micro chips of the tempera Last Supper in the damp refectory,
that borrows a book of its own when a dopey looper tingles its feet.

I lose track. The magazine details flutter on my knees
awaiting a check-up
A blurred figure is swimming in a lighted pool,
then Nigeria drifts past, something in neon, the gas that shivers all night
in its glass letters without fatigue,
the toothed stars that settle in just above the trees in a time-lapse,
a low breath.
And what is whispered splits like a milkweed
and drifts.

I cannot open like the book of wallpaper samples
but learn from those who can
make the crocodiles see-through, show the baby in the kangaroo,
make rats out of shadows,
find a scorpion drifting in the clouds, bones in my clothing on a chair.
And from whom we overlap:
Freud in my father’s lifetime, Einstein in mine
a few blocks away on Mercer in Princeton.
Then Hitler for us both, confusions of the inner ear,
a sick swirling.

SYNCHRONICITY

Writing in the dark to the myth between the metaphors,
to the hawks afraid to cross water,
commensals, herbivores, to whom it cannot possibly matter.

In childhood, the long wingless inconvenience,
I breathed faster to hasten my growth,
anxious to put on my own clothes in a home of my own
with safe objects, starch into sugar,
rattles of hand bones and a thousand books.

I wanted to say what it tastes like, everlasting nouns
and parkland in a single room.
I read silently how the skull meant vanity
the year I had measles
and at the moment of burning the skin is sterilized.

In the pages that followed, the animals influenced stars
and coincidence. Our canary
voided an egg while flying from the cabinet to a chair
the moment a robin broke the window
with its neck, my rabbit screamed from a dog, and Jupiter
boomed the horizon.

Among the products of reason is infection in the abstract,
geometric quiescence, in boats going out
to dampen water with their nets, candles weeping
for the sadness of combustible fats.
The reason for this is everything at once, acausal,
as the sun’s gold coin
melted before me, or a mirror refusing us.

At the bottom of the cage we had shredded newspaper,
so in the nest the babies were raised
in a swaddling of car wrecks, marriage,
pictures of MacArthur and his famous speech,
the first words pleading to the candle shedding its light
not to spread fire, to poignancy, and the unanimous
sea-starved Minnesota.

IF’S WIDESPREAD

Fossil gasses,
boneless aromas released from long-softening tree ferns,
pass through the fence unchanged, and the mailman,
a fortuitous confluence of the apparent and supposed
delivers every afternoon in a rusting Camero.
With them, we have arisen without the faintest recollection,
made possible by the cooling process,
crystals on a string deduced from evaporation and sugar water.
This lessens nothing, nor lasts.
Seeing October’s night sky, Frances says time for the Fair;
crisp and cool and stars become rides as she watches.
Under us,
the earth accelerates to just faster than we can remember,
as single pictures link in continuous syrup
at certain speeds, or on a mission in the next drifting room,
we forget our purpose and continuity is lost.

What appeared to be a miracle of leaves fallen all on their edges
on the bank of the Sweetwater-Juniper
rose in a cloud of lemon alfalfas as we brushed past
in grinning canoes, rafts of pleasure in the presence of the vast,
expressed minutely.
Nothing is everywhere at once, but  local things mingle
and drift as if the present were not speaking of the past, gravity was not
weaker than your knees after the Twister or Tilt-A-Whirl;
if’s were not widespread.
If it sometime grows frozen, if it broils in the future,
if merely the bees were extracted,
none of this would be here,
and lightning
would erase the answering machine.

INSIGNIFICANCE IS EASY

By hemispherical traits he meant
of the Americas,
not things causing you to swell up like walking in tight shoes,
plumping from anchovies,
or wandering in circles with a broken wing,
not seeing the sculptured sallow moth on the side of the gas pump
as I did today,  picking it out of the thousands of details,
in themselves all underestimates and way too severe as abstractions,
like fingers in the Finger Lakes.
This is unusual.
Nothing plain and monumental.
Not forbidding like a fortress against the light
as the mission churches of Acoma, but an intimate sculptural splendor
for which you must tighten your time scale or miss,
change your depth of field or be blurred,
have its dignity unnoticed like a Deputy Assistant
Undersecretary of Interior Blind Corners,
one of the chairmen of the final minutes till midnight,
a pheromone recognition system
tuned to three parts per quadrillion, unseen until it moves,
proving nothing arrives pre-formed
but as evidence of a vast history of adaptation.
And the conditions pass through us,
an imagination ghost-filled, a vest button lost in the gorge of the Colorado.
Who invented the rectangle is long lost,
or the  man in the photograph standing on the back of a bi-plane,
but insignificant is easy
as the long pointed arches of the Gothic are wishbones.

Allan Peterson is the author of two books, All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize) and Anonymous Or (2001 Defined Providence Press Prize). His third book, As Much As, is forthcoming from Salmon Press, Ireland. In addition, he has five chapbooks. The most recent, Omnivore, won the 2009 chapbook prize from Bateau Press. Other recognitions include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The State of Florida. The selection published here is the complete first section of an unpublished manuscript, None Other. More information available at: www.allanpeterson.net

Amistad

After the tunnel of no return
After the roiling Atlantic, the black Atlantic, black and mucilaginous
After skin to skin in the hold and the picked handcuff locks
After the mutiny
After the fight to the death on the ship
After picked handcuff locks and the jump overboard
After the sight of no land and the zigzag course
After the Babel which settles like silt into silence
and silence and silence, and the whack
of lashes and waves on the side of the boat
After the half cup of rice, the half cup of sea-water
the dry swallow and silence
After the sight of no land
After two daughters sold to pay off a father’s debt
After Cinque himself a settled debt

After, white gulf between stanzas

the space at the end

the last quatrain



The Blue Whale

swam alongside the vessel for hours.
I saw her breach. The spray when she sounded
soaked me (the lookout) on deck. I was joyous.
There her oily, rainbowed, lingering wake,
ambergris print on the water’s sheer skin,
she skimmed and we skimmed and we sped
straight on toward home, on the glorious wind.

Then something told her, Turn (whales travel
in pods and will beach themselves rather than split)—
toward her pod?—and the way she turned was not
our way. I begged and prayed an begged for her
companionship, the guide-light of her print,
North Star (I did imagine) of her spout.
But she had elsewhere to go. I watched
the blue whale’s silver spout. It disappeared.



Absence

In the absence of women on board,
when the ship reached the point where no landmass
was visible in any direction
and the funk had begun to accrue—
human funk, spirit funk, soul funk—who
commenced the moaning? Who first hummed that deep
sound from empty bowels, roiling stomachs,
from back of the frantically thumping heart?
In the absence of women, of mothers,
who found the note that would soon be called “blue,”
the first blue note from one bowel, one throat,
joined by dark others in gnarled harmony.
Before the head-rag, the cast-iron skillet,
new blue awaited on the other shore,
invisible, as  yet unhummed. Who knew
what note to hit or how? In the middle
of the ocean, in the absence of women,
there I no deeper deep, no bluer blue.



boy haiku

the motherless child
rests his hand on a dead man’s
forehead ‘til it cools.



Poro Society

Without leopard skin, leather,
antelope horns, wart-hog tusks,
crocodile jaws, raffia muffs,

without the sacred bush,
the primordial grove,
our ancient initiations,

we will find a way
to teach the young man
on board with us.

We contend
with the forces of evil
in the universe.

Aggressive magic
addresses the need for control
in an imperfect world.



Approach

With shore in sight, the wind dies and we slow.
Up from the water bobs a sleek black head
with enormous dark eyes that question us:

who and what are you? Why? Then another
and another and another of those
faces, ’til our boat is all surrounded.

The dark creatures are seen to be
seals, New England gray seals, we later learn.
They stare. We stare. Not all are blackest black:

Some piebald, some the dull gray of the guns
our captors used to steal and corral us,
some the brown-black of our brothers, mothers,

and two milky blue-eyed albino pups.
Albino: the congenital absence
of normal pigmentation. Something gone

amiss. Anomaly, aberration.



Connecticut

They squint from shore
at scarlet-shirted blackamoors.

The battered boat sails in.
White sky, black sea, black skin,

a low black schooner,
armed black men on deck

in shawls, pantaloons,
a Cuban planter’s hat—

parched, starved,
dressed in what they found

in the dry goods barrels,
the Africans squint

at trees not their trees,
at shore not their shore.



Other Cargo

Saddles and bridles,
bolts of ribbon,
calico, muslin, silk,
beans, bread, books,
gloves, raisins, cologne,
olives, mirrors, vermicelli,
parasols, rice, black bombazine.



Education

In 1839, to enter University,
the Yale men already knew Cicero,

Dalzel’s Graeca Minora, then learned more Latin prosody,
Stiles on astronomy, Dana’s mineralogy.

Each year they named a Class Bully
who would butt heads with sailors in town.

‘‘The first foreign heathen ever seen,’’
Obookiah, arrived from Hawaii in ’09.

The most powerful telescope in America
was a recent gift to the school

and through it, they were first to see
the blazing return of Halley’s comet.

Ebeneezer Peter Mason
and Hamilton Lanphere Smith

spent all their free time at the instrument
observing the stars, their systems,

their movement and science and magic,
pondering the logic of mysteries that twinkle.

Some forty years before, Banneker’s
eclipse-predicting charts and almanacs

had gone to Thomas Jefferson
to prove ‘‘that nature has given our brethren

talents equal to other colors of men.’’
Benjamin Banneker, born free,

whose people came from Guinea,
who taught himself at twenty-two (the same age

as the graduates) to carve entirely from wood
a watch which kept exquisite time,

accurate to the blade-sharp second.



The Yale Men

One by one the Yale men come
to teach their tongue to these
caged Africans so they might tell

in court what happened on the ship
and then, like Phillis Wheatley,
find the Yale men’s God

and take Him for their own.



Teacher
(Josiah Willard Gibbs)

I learn to count in Mende one to ten,
then hasten to the New York docks to see
if one of these black seamen is their kind.

I run to one and then another, count.
Most look at me as though I am quite mad.
I’ve learned to count in Mende one to ten!

I shout, exhausted as the long day ends
and still no hope to know the captive’s tale.
Is any of these black seamen their kind?

I’d asked an old Congo sailor to come
to the jail, but his tongue was the wrong one,
I learned. To count in Mende one to ten

begin eta, fili, kian-wa, naeni.
I spy a robust fellow loading crates.
Is this the black seaman who is their kind?

He stares at me as though I am in need,
but tilts his head and opens up his ear
and counts to me in Mende one to ten,
this one at last, this black seaman, their kind.



Translator
(James Covey)

I was stolen from Mendeland as a child
then rescued by the British ship Buzzard
and brought to Freetown, Sierra Leone.

I love ships and the sea, joined this crew
of my own accord, set sail as a teen,
now re-supplying in New York Harbor.

When the white professor first came to me
babbling sounds, I thought he needed help
until weta, my mother’s six, hooked my ear

and I knew what he was saying, and I knew
what he wanted in an instant, for we had heard
wild tales of black pirates off New London,

the captives, the low black schooner like
so many ships, an infinity of ships fatted
with Africans, men, women, children

as I was. Now it is my turn to rescue.
I have not spoken Mende in some years,
yet every night I dream it, or silence.

To New Haven, to the jail. To my people.
Who am I now? This them, not them. We burst
with joy to speak and settle to the tale:

We killed the cook, who said he would cook us.
They rubbed gunpowder and vinegar in our wounds.
We were taken away in broad daylight.

And in a loud voice loud as a thousand waves
I sing my father’s song. It shakes the jail.
I sing from my entire black body.



Physiognomy

Monday, September 16, 1839
Another of the captured Africans named Bulwa (or Woolwah) died on Saturday night. This is the third who has died in this city, and the thirteenth since their leaving Havana. One more remains sick in this city, the others having been removed to Hartford on Saturday, to await their trial on Tuesday the 17th. Several are still affected with the white flux, the disease which has proved fatal to so many of them.
The Daily Herald, New Haven

Kimbo, 5 feet 6 inches, with mustaches and long beard,
in middle life, calls himself Manding. Very intelligent,

he counts thus: 1. eta, 2. fili, 3. kian-wa, 4. naeni,
5. loelu, 6. weta, 7. wafura, 8. wayapa,
9. ta-u, 10. pu.

Shuma, 5 feet 6 inches, spoke
over the corpse of Tha
after Reverend Mister Bacon’s prayer.

Konoma, 5 feet 4 inches, with incisor teeth
pressed outward and filed, with large lips
and projecting mouth, tattooed on the forehead,

calls himself Congo (Congo
of Ashmun’s map of Liberia,
or Kanga, or Vater).

They are represented by travelers as handsome.
They are supposed to be more ancient of the soil than Timaris.
Their language, according to Port Chad, is distinct from any other.

Biah, 5 feet 4-1/2 inches with remarkably pleasant countenance,
with hands whitened by scars from gunpowder,
calls himself Duminah (Timmari),

counts also in Timari.
He counts in Bullom thus.
He counts in Manding like Kwong.

With face broad in the middle
With sly and mirthful countenance (rather old)
With full Negro features
With hair shorn in rows from behind
With permanent flexion of two fingers on right hand
A mere boy, calls himself Manding
With depression of skull from a forehead wound
Tattooed on breast
With narrow and high head
With large head and high cheekbones
Marked on face by the smallpox
Stout and fleshy

Teme, 4 feet 3 inches, a young girl,
calls herself Congo but when further interrogated
says her parents were Congo, she a Manding.

Observe that in this examination
no one when asked for his name
gave any other than an African name.

No one when asked
to count counted in any
language other than African.

There was no appearance in any of them,
so far as I could judge,
of having been from Africa more than two or three months.



Constitutional

Mary Barber’s children beg their mother
to take them into town each day to see
the Africans on the New Haven Green
let out of their cells for movement and air.

A New York shilling apiece to the jailer
who tucks away coins in a full suede purse.
The children push through skirts, past waistcoats,
to see the Africans turn somersets.

In the open air, in the bright sunlight,
the Africans chatter, and sound to
the children like blackbirds or cawing gulls.
The Africans spring. The Africans do not smile.



Mende Vocabulary

they
my father
our father
your father
my mother
our mother
my book
his house
one ship
two men
all men
good man
bad man
white man
black man

I eat
he eats
we eat
they sleep
I see God
did I say it right?
we sleep
I make
he makes
they have eaten

this book is mine
that book is his
this book is ours
I am your friend
here
now
that
there
then



The Girls

Margru, Teme, Kere,
the three little girls onboard.
In Connecticut
they stay with Pendleton
the jailer and his wife.
Some say they are slaves
in that house. The lawyer
comes to remove them,
but they cling to their hosts,
run screaming through the snow
instead of go. Cinque comes
and speaks in their language
with much agitation.
Do you fear Pendleton? No.
Do you fear the lawyer? No.
Do you fear Cinque? No.
Who or what do you fear?
The men, they say, the men.
The girls will become Christians.
They will move to Farmington
with the Mende mission
and return to Sierra Leone.
One will return to America
to attend college at Oberlin.
They will be called Sarah,
Maria, and Charlotte.



Kere’s Song

My brother would gather the salt crust.
My grandmother would boil it gray to white.

My mother boated in the near salt river,
grabbed fat fish from the water with bare hands.

Women paint their faces with white clay and dance
to bring girls into our society, our

secrets, our womanhood, our community.
The clay-whitened faces of my mothers

are what I see in my dreams, and hear
drum-songs that drown girls’ cries after

they have been cut to be made women.
If someone does evil, hags ride them

all night and pummel them to exhaustion.
Hags slip off their skins and leave them

in the corner during such rambles.
At my grandmother’s grave, cooked chicken, red rice,

and water to sustain her on her journey.
I was learning the secrets of Sande

when they brought me here, before my dance,
before my drum, before my Sande song.



Judge Judson

These negroes are bozals
(those recently from Africa)
not ladinos

(those long on the island)
and were imported
in violation of the law.

The question remains:
What disposition shall be made
of these negroes?

Bloody may be their hands
yet they shall
embrace their kindred.

Cinqueze and Grabeau
shall not sigh for Africa
in vain

and once remanded
they shall no longer
be here.



In Cursive
Westville, February 9, 1841

Miss Chamberlain and others,

I will write you a few lines
because I love you very much
and I want you to pray to the great God to make us free
and give us new souls and pray for African people.

He sent his beloved son into the world
to save sinners who were lost. He sent
the Bible into the world to save us
from going down to Hell, to make us turn from sin.

I heard Mr. Booth say you give five dollars
to Mr. Townsend for African people. I thank you
and hope the great God will help you and bless you
and hear you and take you up to Heaven when you die.

I want you to pray to the great God make us free.
We want to go home and see our friends in African Country.
I want the great God love me very much and forgive all my sins.
All Mendi people thank you for your kindness.

Hope to meet you in heaven. Your friend, Kale



God

There is one God in Farmington, Connecticut,
another in Mendeland.

None listen.
None laugh, but none have listened.

We will sail home carrying Bibles
and wearing calico.

The journey this time
is seven weeks.

If we find our mothers,
children, fathers, brothers,

sisters, aunties, uncles,
cousins, friends,

if we find them,
we will read to them

(we read this book)
the God stories in our Bibles.

That is the price for the ticket home
to Mendeland

for us the decimated three years hence.



Waiting for Cinque to Speak

Having tried,

having tried, having failed,

having raised rice
that shimmered green, green,
having planted and threshed.

Having been a man, having sired children,
having raised my rice, having amassed a bit of debt,
having done nothing remarkable.

Years later it would be said
the Africans were snatched into slavery, then,
that we were sold by our own into slavery, then,
that those of our own who sold us
never imagined chattel slavery,
the other side of the Atlantic.

Having amassed debt, I was taken to settle that debt.
(Not enough rice in the shimmering green.)
Better me than my daughter or son. (I was strong.)
And on the ship I met my day
as a man must meet his day.
Out of the Babel of Wolof and Kissee
we were made of the same flour and water, it happened.
On the ship, I met my day.



The Amistad Trail

The Amistad Trail bus
leaves from the commuter parking lot,
exit 37 off Highway 84.
There is interest in this tale.

See where the girls lived while waiting
for the boat to sail home, see Cinque’s room,
the Farmington church where they learned
to pray to Jesus, Foone’s grave.

Good things: eventual justice, John Quincy Adams,
black fighting back, white helping black.
Bad things: the fact of it, price of the ticket,
the footnote, the twist, and the rest—

Done took my blues
Done took my blues and

—the good and the bad of it.
Preach it: learn. Teach it: weep.

Done took my blues.
Done took my blues and gone.
The verse will not resolve.
The blues that do not end.



Cinque Redux

I will be called bad motherfucker.
I will be venerated.
I will be misremembered.
I will be Seng-Pieh, Cinqueze, Joseph,
and end up CINQUE.

I will be remembered
as upstart, rebel, rabble-rouser, leader.
My name will be taken by black men
who wish to be thought RIGHTEOUS.
My portrait will be called ‘‘The Black Prince.’’
Violent acts will be committed in my name.
My face will appear on Sierra Leonean currency.

I will not proudly sail the ship home
but will go home, where I will not sell slaves,
then will choose to sail off
to a new place: Jamaica, West Indies.
In America, they called us ‘‘Amistads.’’
The cook we killed, Celestino, was mulatto.
Many things are true at once.

Yes I drew my hand across my throat
in the courtroom, at that cur Ruiz
to hex his thieving, killing self.
Yes I scuffled here and there instead of immolate.
Yes I flaunted my gleam and spring.
No I did not smile.
No I never forgot the secret teachings
of my fathers. No I never forgot

who died on board, who died on land,
who did what to whom, who will die
in the future, which I see
unfurling like the strangest dream.



The Last Quatrain

and where now

and what now

the black white space









Amistad appears in Elizabeth Alexander’s American Sublime (Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Alexander) and is reprinted here with the generous permission of Graywolf Press and the author.

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher born in New York City and raised in Washington, D.C. Alexander has degrees from Yale University and Boston University and completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Most recently, she composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. The poem has recently been published as a small book from Graywolf Press. In addition, she has published five books of poems: The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), American Sublime (2005), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year,” and her first young adult collection (co-authored with Marilyn Nelson), Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color (2008 Connecticut Book Award). Her two collections of essays are The Black Interior (2004) and Power and Possibility (2007), and her play, “Diva Studies,” was produced at the Yale School of Drama.

Professor Alexander is the first recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.” She is the 2007 winner of the first Jackson Prize for Poetry, awarded by Poets & Writers, Inc. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks, a Guggenheim fellowship as well as the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at University of Chicago. She is currently chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale University.

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you. Fucking American army piece of shit,” Sa’ad al-Azawi chanted behind the wheel of his BMW. He couldn’t recognize his own city, he couldn’t navigate it. He just wanted to hop across the July 14 Bridge to the manicured center of the city’s power, Baghdad’s palm-lined answer to the Washington Mall, soon to be home to the occupation headquarters. A tank blocked an on-ramp. We had to circle west along the Tigris River and then back east again to get to the Rashid Hotel.

Baghdad’s map had become malleable, old routes across town melting away like mercury and reforming in odd places. Americans had closed some roads and bridges with checkpoints. They had cut others with bombs. Buildings were missing in action. Pits of rubble had replaced homes, like an entire block that included a Saddam safe house behind a Mansour restaurant. A bunker buster had buried a three-story house in a pit 20 feet deep.

Along the approach to Baghdad, every hundred yards or less, a killed car askew beside the road — either a rotting driver, shot to death, or a charred car frame from a direct hit on the car by some kind of bomb. (Rocket? RPG? Mortar? So early in the war, I certainly couldn’t tell.) Bullet casings at every intersection, detours around each part of the highway bombed into a moonscape. A bloated dead donkey blocked the bridge across the Tigris in downtown Baghdad. You could date the bodies in the cars and sometimes on the sidewalks by their shape and smell. Within days of death the skin turned black. As they decomposed they bloated to twice their normal size. And they smelled stronger than anything I’ve smelled before, like that rush up the back of your nose from your stomach just before you vomit, and then blooming into something worse.

That’s what you could see up close. Wide-angle: the bombed buildings, the ubiquitous black smoke. (Why? Who knew. Things just seem to burn during wars, often random things like a junkyard full of old tires, or a warehouse, or the papers in a government building.) The entire city of Baghdad, it felt, had been tipped over on its side and shaken. Now its people were washed over the sidewalks, driven but directionless. City streets that a month before were full of traffic, lined with produce stands, pharmacies and jewelry stores, had been transformed into an alien landscape, often impassable, barely recognizable, like those microscopic images of human skin that show tiny predators foraging in our pores, the only reminder of place and scale a pylon that’s actually the base of an eyelash. The warped physical environment catalyzed the psychological change that began gestating for Iraqis during the months of drum-beating and posturing leading to Shock and Awe: a sense of possibility and change yoked to fear. The destruction of the country and its institutions left an uneasy vacuum for the mind as well as the body.

It wasn’t immediately clear to me, but it was clear to Sa’ad al-Azawi — and, it turns out, to millions of his compatriots — that all this destruction would require each and every Iraqi to concoct a new identity to fit the new taxonomy of power. Iraqis had a very intense personal relationship with the state, and had long needed to define their political, sectarian and religious selves in relation to a capricious and seemingly all-powerful leader, who might kill them if they unwittingly projected a whiff of sedition. Saddam and his security services had made the rules clear for decades.

Now new powers would rewrite the rules, and men like Sa’ad al-Azawi didn’t know who those powers would be. In that environment, it was no wonder that Sa’ad al-Azawi felt suspended, adrift, fluid: Not just free to reinvent himself, but required to do so. Most of Iraq, in a state of confusion, embarked on a similar self-reinvention project at the same time. The road map had literally changed overnight. The political hierarchy had vanished. Many of the old psychological reference points had melted away with the Ba’athists; the old habits remained, but their raison d’etre, and their enforcers, were gone.

2.

Sa’ad al-Azawi was handsome, skinny, dark, with a long, vertical, equine face. He had the twitching mannerisms of a nervous man, always fidgeting with his keys, moving his hands, pacing with small steps, looking away, around, and back at you. He smoked not for pleasure but out of compulsion, wincing with distaste as he took a drag. His hair was cropped close but the gray patches showed anyhow. His eyes were dark, dark brown, but I remember them as somehow black, brooding, and impregnable. He talked at a fast clip, imperfect but confident English.

He had fished us out of the crowd at the Palestine Hotel on April 10, 2003, two days after Saddam’s government fled. The hotel lot on Baghdad’s east bank was teeming with foreign journalists, hundreds of new arrivals from Kuwait and Jordan who like me were looking for a place to stay and a way to begin reporting. Iraqis who spoke English or owned cars had likewise flocked to the Palestine to offer their services at amazing inflated rates. $200 anyone to drive around in a jalopy with a sullen man who hardly speaks?

The U.S. military had put down some barbed wire, some APCs and tanks were parked around the neighborhood, and the hotel entrances were so packed with people it took a quarter of an hour to get from the street to the lobby. I was traveling with Essdras Suarez, a photographer from The Boston Globe, and Rebecca, a Lebanese we had seduced away from a guest relations job at the Kuwait Hilton in order to translate for us. She knew next to nothing about Iraq, but she was smart and game, she spoke the language, and she knew from sectarian war, having grown up during some of Lebanon’s worst fratricidal excesses. We were equipped to work on a basic level.

Someone in the crowd overheard me saying I was from The Boston Globe and shouted: “Bostonglobe! Bostonglobe! You are Bostonglobe! A man is looking for you.” For me? No one knew I was in Baghdad except my editor. Instantly I was suspicious, on the alert for a scam.

My wariness was misplaced. It turned out that Sa’ad al-Azawi had been asking all day whether any Boston Globe correspondent had yet appeared in Baghdad; he had promised the last correspondent in Iraq that he would resume work for the paper as soon as any of its reporters returned. The random man led me to Sa’ad al-Azawi, who embraced me tightly, like we had a long history. I hugged him back, susceptible to the smallest gesture of familiarity and affection.

Under the circumstances, the enthusiasm and warmth felt entirely normal. We’d all spent the last three weeks in shell-shock — some, like Sa’ad al-Azawi, because of Operation Shock and Awe in Baghdad, others, like me, from the cacophony of smart bombs and artillery exploding in southern Iraq. We were rattled from the constant sounds of gunfire, artillery, and bombing, and we were all distressed from constantly witnessing death. People tended to turn more readily to one another for comfort, hugging strangers or sharing odd, brief moments of communion.

Elizabeth Neuffer, the Globe’s UN correspondent and a veteran of Iraq coverage since the first Gulf War, had enthusiastically introduced Sa’ad in an email as “the wonderful Sa’ad al-Azawi, our loyal Baghdad driver … our eyes and ears in Baghdad.” Some of our reporters had tried calling him during the war to hear first-hand about the toll on Baghdad, but after one or two brief conversations it proved impossible to get through. By the time I got to Baghdad after several weeks camped on the roadsides of southern Iraq and a harrowing drive through the frontlines to the capital, I had completely forgotten about Sa’ad al-Azawi. My memory of The Boston Globe’s institutional connections to Iraq had momentarily shorted.

When he found me, he immediately asked about Elizabeth and briefly brought me up to date. None of his family had died or been injured, he said. He had evacuated them to a Sunni village outside of Baghdad, and had stayed in the capital as long as he could to make sure his house wasn’t looted. By the third week he couldn’t take the bombing anymore and joined his family in Sunni-dominated, bucolic Diyala Province. Roughly an hour’s drive from Baghdad, it was a popular locale for Ba’athists and other well-to-do Baghdadis to build weekend getaway homes in the date groves. The day Saddam fled, Sa’ad returned to Baghdad, expecting (so he said) to hear from The Boston Globe that he was needed for work. He had money and a generator belonging to Elizabeth, and was eager to start.

We piled into his black BMW and got a quick tour of the city, whose war-scrambled layout was harder than ever to decipher. On the east (or left) bank of the Tigris –called Rusafa in Arabic — we saw the commercial downtown and our future home, the mixed-sect upper-middle class neighborhood of Karada. (Later it would become the last semi-safe area outside the Green Zone.) We saw churches, mosques and Husaynia, small prayer halls for the Shi’ites; electronics shops, DVD stores, fancy restaurants, multi-story hotels, all shuttered for the duration of the war, now removing the boards from their windows.

3.

It was Friday. On Inner Karada Street, Baghdad’s middle-class mall, men on the sidewalks stared angrily through the windows of Sa’ad’s BMW. The people who lived and shopped in Karada were more likely to worship money than some obstreperous cleric. The churches got some traffic, but the mosques seemed equally neglected by Sunnis and Shi’ites. Karada was an idyllic neighborhood, its secular residents bound by pragmatism; American war planners had intentionally spared it as much damage as possible, considering it a friendly area and an important quarter for post-war Baghdad. Still, some bombs had struck the neighborhood, leaving a twisted truck chassis here or a crater in the middle of a lane there.

At the time, Baghdad was a patchwork of neighborhoods usually dominated by one sect or another, but with lots of intermixing. Karada was exceptional even then for its blurred boundaries. Historically home to some noble Shi’ite merchant families, Karada had attracted secular, middle-class Iraqis from all sects because of its vibrant commerce, proximity to Baghdad University, and waterfront streets. Its denizens were not for the most part stalwarts of the regime; they were more likely to have earned or inherited their wealth than to have profited from one of the Ba’athist state’s highly remunerative sinecures. The neighborhood was poised to be the unofficial capital of a new Baghdad, embodying all its ideals — harmony among sects, zeal for commerce, religion observed quietly in the background.

It was flanked on one side by the river, which oozed brown rather than flowed, and on the other by the smokestacks of the Baghdad South power plant and the plume of the Dora refinery, where they just burnt the natural gas byproducts of the refinery process. (Why save it or sell it when oil was basically free?) On that second day of “liberation,” Karada’s denizens wanted to keep out the predators who were stripping bare every home, office and government building, burning anything they couldn’t carry away. Karada’s merchants would brook no such anarchy; at every intersection, shopkeepers had erected checkpoints.

Saddam in his grandiloquence had dubbed the destined-to-be-glorious 2003 war against America the “Marakat al Hawasim,” the Decisive Battle. Iraqis quickly adopted the word to describe the “decisive ones” — the looters, thieves, and opportunists, the poor and the greedy who stole Iraq blind during and immediately after the fighting. The hawasim were everywhere, stripping molding from public buildings, loading air conditioners from the university onto donkey carts under the indifferent eyes of U.S. soldiers, trashing the national museum. High-class hawasim emptied banks and munitions dumps. Malevolent political hawasim burned incriminating Ba’ath Party records. Americans counted themselves among the hawasim, availing themselves of cars from Iraqi government depots and palaces, sometimes handing over vehicles with a nod to embedded journalists or random Western civilians.

Not in Karada, though; this was a neighborhood of businessmen, and they had no intention of waiting for a government or soldiers to come to their protection. The U.S. military might not shoot looters on sight, but Iraqi businessmen would be thrilled to.

“I want people to know that not all Iraqis are lawless and violent,” Fahed al Jabouri declared to me. He was bald, with a pot belly and a tucked-in shirt, and seemed upper-middle class. He held his AK-47 with familiarity but not with a fighter’s swagger. He was the chief of a vigilante band on a busy corner of Inner Karada Street. The merchants’ placid faces belied the violence they were prepared to dispense at a moment’s notice. Some held chunks of concrete, others clubs or twisted lengths of rebar.

This wasn’t raging street justice though: these men were imposing law and order with the blessing of the community, in the form of a crowd of festive onlookers and a local cleric, in effect supervising the checkpoint. “We want the American Army to know these people are not fighting them. They are establishing security in their own neighborhood,” the cleric, Imam Faris Jaber al-Halo, told me.

“When the hawasim finished with the government buildings and the schools, they started to come into our homes,” Jabouri said. “We will protect ourselves.”

Just then, the men at the checkpoint stopped an Iraqi driving a bus. His family sat in the front seats. The bus overflowed with government furniture: sofas, desks, cabinets, and the like.

“Excuse me,” Jabouri said. “We have business.”

The merchants pulled the man from the bus and threw him to the ground. Jabouri joined them in a circle, kicking him the man as his wife and children watched.

The beating over, Jabouri returned to our conversation without skipping a beat. “We don’t need the Americans to protect us,” Jabouri said. “We’ll protect ourselves.”

4.

Further into that first Friday afternoon drive, we crossed the Tigris into Karkh, the west or right bank of the river, and approached the seat of government: Saddam’s palace, his triumphal arch, the one decorated with Iranian skulls, to commemorate the disastrous Qadisiya, the 8-year bloody draw of a war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s. We were in the future Green Zone. The architecture in this serene, wealthy residential area around the government buildings was ugly and Ba’athist — two-story villas with tightly clipped hedges, tinted windows, and ornate porticos over the windows and doors, curlicues drawn in cement. Lots of pink marble and gray granite accented the facades. These were the villas that in short order would house Iraqi official who wanted to be near but not in the Green Zone .

We kept getting lost trying to find our way around American checkpoints. The unsmiling troops were jumpy; already many of them had weathered attacks by suicide car bombers.

Just the night before, on our drive north from Basra to Baghdad, we’d camped overnight with a platoon from the 3rd Infantry Division at an overpass just outside the city. We were terrified to drive downtown in the dark. The soldiers were still on a combat high from days of gun battles, and they were camping in a patch of silt littered with the bodies of the men they’d shot the day before. At night Iraqi fighters were still firing at the platoon. It stank, it was scary, the men were on edge. Just after dark, a white car drove up the highway. Its driver didn’t hear, or ignored, the warning shots fired by the night guard, and didn’t (couldn’t?) see the tiny sign on the road, in English, ordering drivers to stop for a coalition checkpoint. The frightened soldiers fired a heavy machine gun, the red tracers drawing neon lines through the night. They looked fake, like Star Wars special effects, except for the insistent pounding noise, which echoed in my stomach the way bass does at a club. The car suddenly careered, its wheels screeching on the pavement, and came to rest a few meters beyond the checkpoint’s far side. The reality of the thudding bullets and skidding car jolted me out of an unreal trance, slamming into my gut with the force of a foot. In the morning we saw the driver’s corpse slumped over his wheel — a civilian, it turned out, with no weapons or explosives in his car. “Too bad,” a soldier said. “He should have stopped.”

The image of that dead driver still vividly in my mind, I ordered Sa’ad al-Azawi to slow down and approach the U.S. checkpoints with care: hazard lights flashing, 5 miles per hour, both hands visible on the wheel. But Sa’ad couldn’t believe that the same “fucking American army” that had bombed his city was now controlling its streets and telling him, an Iraqi, what to do. He approached checkpoints at full speed and only slammed on the brakes at the last minute, when the frightened soldiers raised their guns. Then he’d shout, “Jaish Amriki ya hara!” It was one of the first phrases I learned in Arabic, and it roughly translates as, “American Army, you are shit.”

“They won’t shoot us, don’t worry,” he assured me.

“They absolutely will fucking shoot us,” I shouted back. “You can’t do that, or you’ll get us killed.”

My protests were futile; Sa’ad could not control his rage. He was not alone. Everywhere a national temper problem was in evidence. At intersections, traffic would gnarl to a halt as anarchic drivers swarmed into oncoming lanes and sidewalks in search of shortcuts. Men brandished guns and screamed out of their car windows. It took hours to make even the shortest trip through the city center. At the newly erected checkpoints Iraqis recoiled at the invasive searches, outraged that an American with a gun might — for no apparent reason — decide an office worker wasn’t allowed to cross a checkpoint to the downtown building where he worked. Looters from lower-class neighborhoods roamed wealthy inner districts balancing menacing lengths of pipe over their shoulders. Those with property to protect wore pistols ostentatiously tucked into their jeans. Sa’ad was a bit player in this angry national drama.

He drove fast, taking curves recklessly, screaming at the Americans. He smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. And on the third day we were together, he suddenly started to pray. He came from a Sunni tribe, but he told me he was a Shi’ite, and he started praying as Shi’ites do, kneeling and pressing his head to the ground on a small round cake of hardened earth from Karbala. The most devout press so hard they create a permanent black bruise in the center of their forehead. In a day, Sa’ad bore the bruise of newfound devotion.

Out of old habit, Sa’ad al-Azawi wanted to please the Iraqis in power. In Shi’ite east Baghdad, he prayed like a Shi’ite. In Sunni west Baghdad, he talked with bluster about his powerful Sunni tribe. In Christian neighborhoods in the city center — the Christian minority was mostly Ba’athist and supported the regime — he reminisced about his old job at the Ministry of Information. Without a regime hierarchy, and with armored Americans asserting themselves at street corners everywhere, Sa’ad’s reflexes were confused, flexing and grasping at random as if a mad doctor was striking all his joints with a little rubber hammer. Surely Sa’ad knew he was a Sunni, but he didn’t know how that would play now that Saddam’s Sunni regime was in hiding. Until he knew who was going to take charge, aside from the Americans, he was going to hedge his bets, appealing to anyone and everyone he could. He could start by expanding his sectarian credentials, developing Sunni, Shia and mixed identities. He would also blend his political record depending on the audience, hinting at his affection for the Ba’ath when speaking to some members of the old Iraqi elite, or bellowing his rage at the regime’s atrocities when speaking to its victims.

He took us to meet his wife, a slight, pale and sweet woman who covered her hair. His wife was as placid as Sa’ad was nervous, sitting with her back straight but her facial features relaxed into a smile. She didn’t speak much English, and Sa’ad seemed uninterested in including her in a conversation. Their newborn baby, only a couple of months old, slept peacefully in her arms during our visit. Sa’ad said the bombing had upended his child, making him weep inconsolably at night. I believed it. I felt like weeping all the time.

5.

Within a week of my arrival, Globe colleagues joined me at the Hamra Hotel: Elizabeth Neuffer, the seasoned correspondent who was going to take control of our Iraq coverage, and Anne Barnard, another metro reporter from Boston. Anne and I made common cause as newcomers to war reporting. Anne was delighted and fascinated to find herself in Iraq just as it was opening to the world after decades of repressive dictatorship; it reminded her of the years she had spent in Moscow in the early 1990s, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She dived into the story with a great thirst to meet Iraqis and find nascent institutions as they were first getting off the ground.

Neuffer, who had reported extensively in Iraq since the first U.S.-Iraq war in 1991, got two shocks upon arriving. The first was the overt emergence of raging politics. Before, there had been nothing but Saddam; Neuffer had futilely sought to learn about the political tastes of the population. Before the U.S. invasion, officials in Washington had told her they were looking for “an Iraqi Hamid Karzai,” that is, an authority figure friendly to the Americans who still had the credibility to ascend to the leadership. The experts looked hard and deep among the ranks of known exiled politicians, but failed to canvass the clergy, the Ba’ath Party, and the exiles who still lived in the Middle East, quietly raising money in Tehran, Damascus, Beirut and Amman. All these operatives opened offices and revealed themselves in the span of a few short weeks in April 2003. No longer terrorized by Saddam’s intelligence services, suddenly everyone had a political opinion. Political parties hung banners on recruitment offices across Baghdad, and the secular populace was flocking to the mosques, openly trumpeting their allegiance as Shi’ites or Sunnis.

Her second shock came from Sa’ad al-Azawi, the man she completely trusted as a guide and a friend. Saddam’s Ministry of Information had tightly choreographed the movements of foreign journalists, but Sa’ad had been willing to bend the rules. He’d taken Elizabeth to meet Iraqis in their homes, without permission from the official minders. He’d expressed his own discontent with life in Ba’athist Iraq, signaling that he wasn’t a true believer in Saddam’s rule. Before the war he had stockpiled supplies for the Globe at Elizabeth’s request, including the generator. He had been generous with his time and taken risks to help Elizabeth do her job.

Now, after this latest war, Elizabeth couldn’t recognize Sa’ad’s brusque rage, his blossoming greed, and his newfound faith. As soon as she arrived, Sa’ad asked her for thousands of dollars as a reward for not decamping to the competition when the foreign press corps descended on Baghdad. He demanded that she hire only his relatives, and pay them through him. When Elizabeth balked, Sa’ad sulked. He told Anne he was a Shi’ite — another surprise for Elizabeth, who knew him as Sunni. He never used to pray during the years she had known him.

He was a man at a moment of transition, undergoing a process in tandem with most of his neighbors and fellow countrymen. And at that moment, people are hard to recognize, like a bolus of molten glass just before it’s blown into a shape. Sa’ad was Sunni, he was Shi’ite, but more than anything else he was Iraqi: a survivor, mutable, adaptive, sensitive to changes in the breeze.

He might have adopted religion, but he didn’t let that get in the way of other new things he wanted to try. We were busy, but he insisted every day that we stop for lunch at the most expensive restaurants. At those which served alcohol he drank cold beer with lunch — an indulgence that not only seemed obscene in a city reeling from war and steeped in death, but a luxury of time I couldn’t afford when, already exhausted, we were working 16-hour days filing news stories, features and photo packages in a constant stream.

On Thursday, April 17 — eight or nine days after the heaviest fighting in central Baghdad — we sped down to the ancient ruins of Babylon to see whether the antiquities were guarded. Sa’ad drove like a demon on the highway, 100 miles per hour over roads rutted by tank treads and explosives. I begged him to slow down, ordered him to slow down. “Your driving will get us killed!” I screamed. I really thought it would. Sa’ad al-Azawi refused to slow down; he chose to make it an issue of pride.

Past the city of Hilla, on the plains beside the Euphrates River, we came to the site of one of the ancient world’s great wonders, the hanging gardens of Babylon, perhaps the birthplace of writing. Now a barren parking lot and a concrete arch welcomed visitors to a spot unlikely to hold anything of beauty or wonder.

We found the museum sacked, archaeological records and slides strewn across a parking lot, and no one monitoring the site. A looter’s heaven. A few old tourist guides loitered around, offering their services. We climbed atop the famous lion sculpture, posing for photographs. A Blackhawk helicopter flew low over the temple walls reconstructed by Saddam Hussein. Babylon symbolized Iraq’s awesome cultural heritage, the birthplace of agriculture and writing, the fertile land between two rivers that spawned civilization. Saddam understood Babylon’s magnetic pull for Iraqis, similar to that of the Parthenon for Greeks. Bricks inscribed with Saddam’s name accented the reconstructed walls of the ancient city, an attempt to link Saddam’s secular Arab Ba’athist Republic to the most hallowed pre-Islamic history of Arabia. It depressed me to see such a symbol of Iraqi history and culture trashed and abandoned — almost more poignant than the looting of the Archaeological Museum in Baghdad.

If to me Babylon bereft was a despondent sign of America’s failure to treat its new occupied zone with honor, for Sa’ad al-Azawi the state of disorder in this ancient place was positively humiliating. He ceased his usual angry patter and gazed with generalized hatred at his surroundings, and at us. On the way home he drove with abandon, propelling the car with such focused speed that it felt barely connected to the road by gravity. All three terrified passengers, Essdras, Rebecca and I, rode in silence, mindful of the simmering rage in our driver’s eyes. I vowed never to enter the man’s car again.

Like so many common-sense decisions made in a war zone, it wasn’t a vow I could keep. In a time of flux, nearly everyone overrules their better judgment to fulfill some immediate need — a travel visa, a safe house on the road, an important interview, a hot meal, news of a missing relative.

6.

Upon our return to Baghdad, we heard a crowd had gathered at the Ministry of Information, or rather, its ruins. It was in Karkh, right up the boulevard from the Assassin’s Gate. In front of the ministry was a park, a grassy, palm-lined square in a government quarter delineated by wide avenues, stiff statues, and grassy lawns watered by sprinklers. Everything was dissonant, though. This was the building where Sa’ad had come to get his highly-paid work driving foreign journalists during Saddam’s rule, where creepy intelligence officials browbeat reporters, revoking visas at will, determining on a whim what could and could not be said about Saddam’s Iraq.

Red Crescent workers were exhuming bodies from the park. A major battle had been fought here during the first week of April, it was said in the crowd; American infantry soldiers versus Saddam’s Fedayeen, the passionate young militiamen, many of them foreign volunteers paid $600 in cash for their fervor, choosing near-certain death in a last stand against the foreign invader. Most of them had sent their signing bonuses home before joining the fight. In Basra, I had fished the receipt for the cash payment from the breast pocket of a dead Syrian Fedayeen fighter.

In the park, the Iraqi fighters had built an old-fashioned World War I-style earthworks. Meter-deep ditches and meter-high berms meandered through a park only the size of two city blocks. It looked like a mini-golf version of trench warfare. At the end of the fight, someone had thrown the bodies of the Iraqi fighters into the trench and bulldozed over them. Now the Red Crescent had dug away the earth and was carrying the rotting bodies away one by one for proper burial. The stench was so great the Red Crescent was passing out surgical masks to the onlookers. Some of the fighters looked as if they had been buried where they had died in action — fallen face forward, a machine gun or grenade launcher still clutched in hand. All the dead were young men, wearing the headbands of the Fedayeen. Craters of rocket-propelled grenades and bullets were stacked beside them in the trench.

An outraged man wanted to talk to me, the foreign reporter. “Do you see what the Americans have done here? They have slaughtered innocent civilians! Look: men, women, children, no fighters here. Is this liberation?”

In three weeks of war I’d already seen plenty of carnage, including countless dead civilians. Here, though, was clearly a battleground, where combatants had met and perished. These specific facts were immaterial to the man in his immaculate rage: voice raised but controlled, anger expressed in singsong crescendo, hair and mustache neatly combed, shirt tucked in, no excess sweat or emotion. He was making a speech about a greater truth, the details of objective reality be damned. If he had spoken directly, he might have said: “I don’t want the Americans here and I loathe all this death and destruction. I hate whoever visited it upon us, even if I hated Saddam as well.” But he wasn’t interested in betraying emotion openly. Nor, it turns out, was he interested in the actual people who had died on this square, and whose bodies were being dragged out of the pit beside us. He wanted to deliver a message to me, in a guise soon to become familiar to me: a cloak of righteousness, denial of reality, and literal lies, all in service of expressing an emotion that heralded an undeniable truth. The Americans had killed countless civilians and now they were occupying the country. That was the source of his outrage. So what if right here, in this particular place, Americans had killed Fedayeen soldiers in combat?

Then, so early in my time in Iraq, I couldn’t understand why was this man was describing a false reality in order to make a genuine point. A hundred meters away on the same street was a burnt car with a dead family inside. Why make his argument by identifying gun-toting Fedayeen boys as women and children? But my mistake was that I was still thinking too literally, not realizing that the war had created a new, liquid realm, which empowered everyone to name things anew. This state of mind was the key to the sectarian opening; anger and emotion pave the way to an alternate reality, in which literal truth doesn’t count, and then the sluice opens, ready to accept the torrential washing waves of the sect.

“Don’t these men look like fighters to you?” I asked. “What are these guns doing here, these trenches?”

“No, these are women and children,” he said, then shrugged and walked away from me. He wouldn’t give me his name.

There outside of the Ministry of Information, the still-recognizable cityscape played host to a mini-drama of war, or post-war, or pre-the-next-war. The boulevard was clear, and the row of riverfront villas across from the Ministry was fully intact, though pockmarked from shrapnel. One man had found a stray camel in the city streets and had brought it home. The beast stood in the front yard, watching the pandemonium in the park. “Why the camel?” I asked. The lady of the house explained: Her husband had gone a bit crazy during the bombing, seeing too many people die and powerless to help them. When he found the camel in the street, he brought it home, even though, she said, they barely had enough food and money to take care of themselves. For the man, it was no question: He had to help the camel, because he could. He didn’t talk to us, or to his family; he just stood in the yard, looking impassively at them, at the camel, at the crowd outside his gate.

Sa’ad al-Azawi disappeared. We found him an hour later. He said he’d been looking for us the whole time, which was hard to believe because the area we were in was so small. He wouldn’t say where he’d gone, or why he was so angry.

7.

As April 2003 wore on, Sa’ad would do his duty by the Globe, but increasingly, he would do it gracelessly. Neuffer was wary of Sa’ad’s new ego, but with the country now so unfamiliar, she relied on him to help her set up a full-strength bureau. His temper unsettled her enough that she started looking for an office manager, someone to serve as a counterweight to Sa’ad. But for the time being, she still trusted him, and acceded reluctantly to his will, hiring the drivers and extra translators he presented. He brought on board a coterie of relatives whose old jobs had suddenly vanished. I ventured into the city with a succession of drivers disgusted that they had been reduced to working for $50 a day chauffering foreigners: One was a doctor, another had a wedding photography studio, and a third styled himself a fighter pilot. A coquettish young student of English joined the bureau as a translator, although she was reluctant to work too closely with men. The nepotism was a classic case of war zone expediency: not necessarily smart, but the path of least resistance.

Sa’ad had already denounced my Lebanese translator to me, not coincidentally just after Rebecca had called to our attention that Sa’ad was taking a cut of the salaries we were paying his relatives.

“I don’t like Rebecca,” he declared. “You should not work with her. She is no good.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I cannot tell you, but you must trust me,” Sa’ad replied, with a conspiratorial look. “You must not work with her.”

“Why?” I insisted. “Can you give me any reason?”

Of course he had none, but he wouldn’t back down. “You don’t trust me?”

Mostly he worked with Elizabeth, but occasionally we still had the privilege of his seething services. While cruising one neighborhood, he chatted with some teenage men and then excitedly hustled Essdras and me into an underground bomb shelter. It was filled with acrid smoke from a fresh looter’s fire. (Why the hell do hawasim set aflame the shoe boxes they leave behind? A mystery of human nature.) We got lost and briefly contemplated suffocating to death. After we found our way out, Sa’ad defended his judgment: “They told me there were weapons of mass destruction in there!” he explained. “It would have been great for your story.”

Sa’ad al-Azawi was no more or less greedy than the other Information Ministry alumni who had parlayed their tainted but familiar relationships with the foreign press corps into office manager posts, ripe with opportunities to hand out patronage jobs, collect kickbacks, and skim money off the war-bloated news budgets. Sure, he was theatrical, he liked cash, and he made too much of a production of every gesture of generosity that otherwise would have engendered affection. But he clearly cared about Elizabeth, and he worked hard, taking risks and initiative in a society that had notably punished creative and entrepreneurial behavior. In those confusing yet heady weeks, he lurked around the Hamra, trying to preside over what he hoped would be a lucrative business empire at the service of The Boston Globe. He didn’t want to be a driver, no, he wanted to follow the lead of his old Ministry peers.

While he was a bullshit artist of the first caliber, Sa’ad was also delightfully specific, tangible, real. His loyalty had been bought through a combination of concern, gifts, phone calls, help, money and trust; he was always offering it for sale to other prospective high bidders.

I went away to Karbala for a few days. When I returned, Elizabeth told me she had fought with Sa’ad when it came time to settle the bill for his first days of work after the war. Elizabeth had refused some of his more egregious terms, so Sa’ad went looking for alternate jobs to use as leverage. His old contacts at other newspapers were wise to the game, and put off by his manic demeanor, and refused to make him offers. Sa’ad was now driving like a teenage drag racer, and praying five times a day.

On the last Friday in April I said goodbye to Anne before dawn, and Essdras, Rebecca and I piled into our rented Pajero for the trip back to Kuwait City. Sa’ad al-Azawi, in his BMW, led us out of the urban labyrinth to the drawbridge on the Kut highway. He hugged me tightly. “You are my brother,” he murmured. A pack of cigarettes strategically dispensed to the American soldiers at the riverbank got us to the front of the line for the one-lane bridge across the Tigris. By afternoon we were at the Kuwaiti border, subjected to hours of nonsensical bureaucracy (“Are you bringing alcohol? How come you have no exit stamp from Kuwait?”). That night we dined in a ridiculous restaurant shaped like a schooner at the SAS Radisson. The next day, home.

I knew I would return to Iraq soon. The day after Anne returned, however, brought horrific news. There had been a car crash, a wreck somewhere north of Baghdad. The details were fuzzy at first. We frantically called other reporters at the Hamra, Globe reporters who had replaced us in Baghdad, and Rebecca, who had stayed on as Elizabeth’s office manager. Slowly the details came in. Elizabeth was gravely injured. She had been driving back from Tikrit with her translator Walid, a gentle Republican Guard veteran whose wife was pregnant with their first child. Sa’ad al-Azawi was driving.

According to Sa’ad’s account afterwards, Walid was napping in the passenger seat, and Elizabeth was deep asleep in the back. Sometime in the early hours of dawn, Sa’ad lost control of his BMW at the great yawning turn where the six-lane divided highway bypasses Samarra. The car skidded onto the side of the road. The guardrail smashed through the engine block and went straight through Walid and Elizabeth. Sa’ad somehow emerged unscathed. Elizabeth, we learned, had died immediately. Walid was less fortunate; he apparently walked in circles trying to speak before finally collapsing.

There were lots of gruesome logistical details. Her partner, my friend and editor Peter Canellos, was trying to figure out how to get her body back home, with help from friends in the U.S. military and journalists in Baghdad. Everyone was trying to piece together what happened: Was the accident somehow war-related? Had the military caused it? Another driver? Sa’ad al-Azawi’s recklessness? Was there shrapnel in the road? And then there was the raw grief — for Elizabeth herself, for Peter, and for the shattered sense of invincibility that had somehow survived the first two months of war.

The unreality of all the killing of the last month suddenly dissolved. In all that time, I hadn’t cried once; there was too much to process, too much to write, far too much pain to hold. With Neuffer’s death, it all cracked open. My sense of grief paralleled in a small but tangible way the loss that had left almost all Iraqis raw: a pain at once personal and public, an individual death that had somehow political dimensions, since it would not have occurred were it not for the circumstances of the war.

It became quickly clear from all accounts that Sa’ad al-Azawi was to blame for the crash. The Globe fired him. Meanwhile, Walid’s family was negotiating with the Azawi clan over the fassil — the traditional compensation paid by the guilty party in the event of a crime, injury, or death. Sa’ad, however, wanted no responsibility. He had taken to harassing the Globe staff at the Hamra every day, demanding cash to replace the totaled car.

One afternoon in my office in the Boston Federal Court basement, I picked up the phone and was stunned to hear Sa’ad al-Azawi’s voice on the other end of the line, tinny and distant, calling from a Thuraya satellite phone. I had heard about his abominable behavior after Elizabeth’s death, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

“Sa’ad,” I shouted into the phone. “How are you doing? I’m so sorry about what happened to Elizabeth and Walid.”

With no preamble and no words of sympathy, rote or sincere, he launched his attack. “The Boston Globe cannot punish me. You are my only friend in Boston, you must tell them. They are responsible. I must pay my brother for the car. Bostonglobe owes me money for the car. Six thousand dollars! Six thousand! Where am I supposed to get the money to pay my brother? The car is destroyed because of Bostonglobe, I am working for Boston when car is destroyed. I would not drive to north unless Bostonglobe asks me to.”

I was shocked. I couldn’t believe this man had lost touch so drastically with his humanity and his manners, no matter how impetuous and prone to rage he had seemed when I first met him. If he didn’t actually feel remorse or sadness for the two deaths he had caused, I imagined he would at least be able to feign the emotion. But no: The world was out to screw him, and he wasn’t going to let it happen. I silently weathered his barrage of angry words, at first too stunned to react.

“You tell Boston I will have the best lawyer in Iraq and I will sue them if they don’t give me the money immediately!” Sa’ad was saying. Something about the simultaneous venality and absurdity of the threat knocked me out of my stupor.

“Have you gone crazy?” I interrupted, my voice hoarse, shaky and faint, the way it gets when I’m on the verge of tears or a rage episode of my own. “Don’t you have anything to say about Elizabeth, about Walid? Are you sad? Are you sorry? What’s happened to you? Two people are dead and you want only to talk about money?” He said nothing, so I continued. “As for suing, just go ahead. Please. Sue in Iraqi court and see how much they’ll make you pay, since you’re the one at fault. And for your own good, stop threatening people at the Hamra. You’ll never work for another journalist again, and if you keep showing your face at the Hamra and threatening reporters, you could find yourself facing consequences you can’t imagine.”

Only then did he backtrack, apologizing vaguely, mumbling nonsense about his sadness and sense of loss, how sorry he was; the line dropped, and I was glad not to hear his voice anymore. I couldn’t blame him for the two deaths — well I could, a little, because he drove like a maniac, but he certainly didn’t intend to kill his passengers — but I held him responsible for his behavior afterward, which reeked of cowardice, self-interest, greed, and a kind of root selfishness that I could hardly understand.

The reporters still in Baghdad were frightened of Sa’ad al-Azawi’s erratic behavior. With old power structures gone and police non-existent, everyone possessed some vague, ominous power, some reserve of the old laws of tribal justice and power. Sa’ad might have been playing the Shi’ite card, but he also came from a tribe well versed in shows of force and violent confrontation. A one-time regime thug or spook could reinvent himself as a Western media translator; a Ba’athist could come back as a devout Shi’ite clerical aide; a Westernized secular man could reinvent himself as a criminal or a resistance fighter. In fact, many men and women could and did manage all these transformations at once. Sa’ad al-Azawi loitered outside the Hamra, demanding money, and the reporters staying there worried that in short order if they didn’t pay he would sic thugs on them, people who could cause harm. Ultimately, he backed down.

8.

I returned to Baghdad in August. On my second day back, Sa’ad learned I was there and waited for me at the back gate of the parking lot in the afternoon when I returned from reporting. He looked gaunt and pale, his face far skinnier than I remembered.

I trembled as soon as I saw him, with an irrational mix of rage and fear. I was afraid of what he might say, or ask me to do, or make me want to do to him. As soon as he spoke, I realized my animal instinct was misplaced. Sa’ad had a new tack: contrition. It was almost believable. The first thing he did was hug me, desperately. He felt bony in my arms, wasted away in the three months since I’d last seen him. “Look,” he said, taking out his wallet. He showed me an ID card of Elizabeth’s that he’d kept. “I think about Elizabeth every day. I have changed my name. I have taken away an ‘a.’ My name is now Sad, not Sa’ad. I’m sorry.”

In a land where militants grooved to Boyzone and had Hello Kitty in their clubhouses, his words were only as hokey as the next English-speaker’s, if he meant them. I had no reason yet to believe that he did. He looked so fragile though, his once-angry posture now deflated to a slouch, that I couldn’t summon my own anger.

“I’m sorry too,” I said. We stood close, holding each other’s forearms. “I hope you’re okay,” I added.

“You must forgive me,” Sa’ad said.

“It’s not for me to forgive,” I said. “I’m not the one you wronged. If it makes you feel any better, though, I forgive you for any harm you’ve caused me. But I can’t help you.”

“I need to work again,” Sa’ad pleaded. “I want my job back. Please. Or help me get a job with another newspaper.”

I was too immersed in the war, too raw, too damaged to credit Sa’ad al-Azawi for the limits of his agency. He was responsible for the deaths of Elizabeth and Walid, but he hadn’t murdered them. He had shirked his responsibility and for a time had gone mad, but now his paroxysm had passed and he was carrying the chronic form of his condition. In our final encounter, it was I who failed to take responsibility and acknowledge that we were bound, and owed each other things. I knew that he had frightened me, and frightened me still, that he had nakedly pursued money and authority, and that already once he had lost hold of himself in that first phase of Iraq’s structural failure. He had lost hold of himself so wholly that he had surrendered to the tunnel vision of impulse and insulted pride.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” I repeated. I meant that I was sorry about everything that had happened, starting with the destruction of Sa’ad’s world in the war and the way he had pissed on everybody around him and ending with the pointless, avoidable deaths of Elizabeth and Walid. I was sorry that I no longer wanted to know this man, who not long ago had been so connected to Elizabeth, and who had promised to accompany me on Iraq’s journey across the Styx to whatever was coming next. I was sorry that he had failed, even though he had been under cataclysmic pressure.

Symbols of both destruction and transformation littered Iraq like the red dust from the spring sandstorms. We were learning about the first phase of structural failure, like engineers testing the limits of the materials they had created, but our lab was a nation and our materials ourselves, a society, and a web of human institutions. We knew this grisly phase was but an introduction to the failures and reinventions to come, but that foreknowledge made few of us any wiser. For the time being we were still stupefied by our inquiry into wartime physics. How long does a dead body bake in the sun until it explodes? What shape does a family sedan take after it burns, melts, and cools with the family inside? How long do half-destroyed buildings remain standing? What’s the boiling point of a man’s identity? What happens to those traces of sect, tribe, and politics when the state that suppressed them by fiat burns away in a flash?

Sa’ad al-Azawi and I would navigate Iraq’s dissolution on parallel but unconnected paths. “Please don’t come to see me again,” I said, wan and tense from the effort to control the emotions that would take me years to understand. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” said Sa’ad, crying freely, but suddenly looking more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. He never contacted me again. Years later I heard he had left Iraq too. He’d taken Elizabeth’s nickname as his email address.

—

—

Thanassis Cambanis’ first book, A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel will be published by Free Press in September. He served as Baghdad and Middle East bureau chief for The Boston Globe, and writes about the Middle East and the Arab world for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Global Post and other publications. He teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York, where he lives with his wife and son.

Polo, 2008; oil on canvas, 22 x 27 in.

AL
I’m wondering if you would talk about some of the recurring objects in your recent work: the Brita water filter, the Kleenex box, the polo shirt. Why these objects?

RW
They’re in a blind spot. If you were asked to make an inventory of your possessions, you might simply forget you owned them. It’s no coincidence that they’re all bodily implements. There’s something fascinating about trying to represent the stratum of experience they evoke, the combination of familiarity and oblivion. It’s like trying to look at the back of your own head. Using them as the subjects for paintings puts the emphasis on how they’re painted, because there’s so little else to go on.

Brita, 2008; oil on canvas, 15 x 18 in.

With the Brita filters, there’s also an analogy to the role of the artist, who takes things in the world and distills them into a more refined state. I’m ambivalent about that.

The East, 2008; oil on canvas, 14 x 9 in.

AL
George Oppen has a line about his work in relation to clarity—”Not to reduce the thing to nothing—”—which your still life paintings trigger in me. I’m curious, too, about the role of branding as it operates in/on these objects and your selection of them; they have all slipped from their brand names, as their titles point out.

RW
I hadn’t thought in those terms about the titles: that there’s a substitution of a brand for a generic description of the object. There’s an interesting relationship to the trajectory of names within art: “a Jackson Pollock painting” becoming “a Pollock,” as if the object actually does take the place of the maker, who is then parceled out into his or her works.

In deciding how much or how little to describe in the paintings, I often drop the logos—Kleenex, Brita, Lacoste— because they’re redundant, so fused are brand and thing. But hopefully their branded-ness endures, so they don’t end up seeming too humble, or “honest,” Van Gogh’s boots, and so on.

Brita, 2008; watercolor on paper, 11 x 7.75 inches

AL
Would you say more about your ambivalence about the idea of an artist as someone who filters, selects, makes something “refined”? Is this an idea worn out, made trite by our culture?

RW
I thought of those ideas—filtering, ambivalence—specifically in terms of the way I work, which is repetitive and simplifying but not necessarily aimed at purifying or distilling. I do a lot of versions of the same thing, over and over, in drawings and watercolors and oils, until it approximates what I  want. So the paintings are more refined in some senses, but by the end they’ve also shed a lot of other qualities—in many ways, they describe their objects less adequately at the end than at the beginning, and much less adequately than a simple snapshot would. Ultimately, the painting has accumulated a lot of strange quirks, many of them unconscious.  And those minute adjustments are really the content of the painting, for me. They’re what I’ve added to the meaning of that object.

Untitled, 2009; watercolor on paper, 7 x 7.75 in.

AL
How you would talk about beauty in relation to your process? In beholding the thing do you already begin wanting to move into those “strange quirks” inherent in moving away (from drawing to watercolor to oil) from the object? The beauty in your work is immediate for me—as a viewer I’m wondering if it’s a goal, a destination, or something less articulate within the way you make art.

RW
I hope they’re beautiful. It’s hard to think about that head-on. There’s an unavoidable conflict between the way the subject of the painting can be beautiful and the way the painting itself can. They’re completely divergent.

It’s slightly easier to talk about preference, taste, desire, which are unavoidable issues in the paintings. With the shirts, I thought about the infinite variety of men’s striped polo shirts in the world, how small those variations are, how impossibly overdetermined my preference of one over another is by the complex mechanisms of consumer culture—and still, when I’m walking down the street, I’m always hoping to catch a glimpse of someone wearing the ultimate polo, the polo to end all polos.

Untitled, 2008; watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 in.

AL
Yes, I love how your polos redress (!) held notions of them as “prep,” signs of a certain class. By revisiting them I feel you wrest them away from a reified state assumptions about them put us in, turning them into canvas for play. Stripe, color, shirt-shadows, attention to fabric-as-field, do you feel close to Milton Avery in this? You’ve written about the “easy to miss” significance of his work…

RW
Avery’s work is easy to love, but he often gets relegated to the status of a transitional figure: Abstract Expressionism’s weird uncle. He didn’t want to iron the embarrassing, folksy, regional touches out of his work, the chickens and sunbathers and sailboats, so it seems like he didn’t quite make the leap into “pure” nonobjective painting, as his younger peers did. But I imagine that, for Avery, art was about playing at the outer limits of those pictorial conventions: seeing how far you could take a seascape without losing the connection between the image and its referent. That’s an entirely different idea about painting, not just a stage in the modern project. I’m similarly committed to thinking about painting in terms of pictures, even if sometimes the works are apparently abstract—it seems like a more promising way to proceed.

Clothes on the Floor, 2008; watercolor on paper, 6 x 11 in.

AL
What role does watercolor play in your process?

RW
I started making watercolors as a way to plan out oil paintings, and it quickly became an end in itself. There are some things I do in watercolor only, and others that originate in paintings and stay there. I don’t think of them as less or more finished or important than the larger paintings.

AL
Do you feel far afield from what’s happening in painting today? Does your writing about art help you contextualize what you’re doing within all that’s being done/has been done?

RW
It’s hard to find something that’s not happening in painting today: the field is huge and inclusive, there are plenty of great people doing anything and everything within it. I feel more detached from the discussion around painting than from the types of paintings being made. There’s a tendency when writing about painting to retreat into tentative, self-conscious formulations, like, “what would it mean to propose a concept of painting in which X is possible?” Operating at that level of remove is dizzying, and it now feels like a limitation, this endless deconstruction of the medium. There has to be something more pressing to talk about, in 2010, here on our troubled planet—even if it’s just the dull business of daily life.

So, writing: I hope, like a lot of people, to work my way out of a kind of static, depressed, internal analysis of painting, and find a way to talk about everything else painting does—without lapsing into an uncritical celebration of the medium.

AL
You must have hated my watercolor question, leading down the road to deconstruction! Though I wonder about what happens there for your work, still.

RW
Not at all. The watercolors are usually very small, and I often do five or six of the same image before it starts to go anywhere. At the same time, lots of unexpected things happen in them (the scale means that slight differences in mixing a color or handling the brush result in big variations), and that’s a useful feature. You can’t make two identical watercolors, no matter how hard you try. And once they’re done, they’re done; you can’t rework them, you have to start again. That’s the model for the paintings as well, which either work out or they don’t. I rarely go back into a painting and rework something, because they’re about being in a very focused place and doing something from start to finish with the same feeling.

Blue and White, 2009; watercolor on paper, 9.5 x 12 in.

AL
Do you often have an urge to rework/revise? Has error been useful, something agonizing, or something else?

RW
What is error, anyway, in the context of painting? I certainly believe in it, since I think some of things I make are successful and others aren’t. But that has little to do with fidelity, or being correct.

A while ago I made a bunch of paintings of dogs, in the manner of a fictitious pet portraitist, and I ended up thinking a lot about this issue. It’s very clear what success means when applied to a pet portrait. The animal in the painting is attractive, it resembles the subject, the fur is furry, the eyes sparkle. My attempts didn’t have those qualities. From that vantage point, they were unlovable. But within the broader field of painting qua contemporary art, a failed pet portrait can be a successful painting, and vice versa, and that’s the whole point. Those criteria are suspended. All criteria are suspended. That suspension is the purpose of continuing to paint.  But at the same time, I’m often bored by art that can’t fail.

Chloe, 2008; watercolor on paper, 9.75 x 7.75 in.

AL
Detachment sounds like a necessary vantage for both your painting and your writing about painting. Cultivating the space to find a vital language (or a place where language fails, falters) vs. picking up a ratty discourse. Dwelling in possibility… (Do you like Dickinson?)

RW
I hardly know Dickinson at all. I should. But on the subject of faltering language (or thought), I do think about Wallace Stevens’s formula that “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” The “almost” is essential: not that the work of art is entirely beyond analysis, but that it’s just slightly beyond. A very modest form of mysticism. And in terms of art and language, it comes down to trying to exhaust the work of art in thought or in description and encountering a remainder—which isn’t “beyond language” in any ontological way, but represents the furthest point of analysis at the moment.  Everything is explained eventually, but there are brief, wonderful periods of not knowing what’s going on.

AL
How do you feel about titling your paintings, as it relates to stepping out of making them, closer to their being viewed?

RW
I’m still deciding what these things should be called. It may take years… I think the titles should grate against the paintings slightly.

I’ve been working on a group of paintings that are all based on one sketch—a doodle, almost, that I made after waking up from a vivid dream. In the dream I was thumbing through a book of pictures of textiles, beautiful tapestries or weavings—a very postmodern dream, heavily mediated. When it came to titling these works, I felt like they should have people’s names, as if the titles indicated the makers of the nonexistent objects I was cribbing the paintings from. It’s easy on the internet to generate random names, and I selected a small group from a longer list and then tweaked them slightly. One was Walter Elevad, there was also Linda M. Sparks, Allan Hanway, Vera Lowering. Something about the rudimentary associations with the sounds of the words, below the level of reference or symbolism.

Walter Elevad, 2009; oil on canvas, 60 x 42 in.

AL
I was curious about Walter Elevad—I kept looking at this one wanting it to be Water Elevad, liking that it wasn’t that kind of precious title yet, still, zapping me with how many precious titles there are out there and the expectancy I have for them. I hope someone adopts “Walter Elevad” as a protagonist.

RW
It was originally Eleveld, and someone mistyped it for a show checklist. I decided this was an extension of the chance process that generated the name in the first place, so I went with it.

Mr. and Mrs., 2009; oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in.

AL
What are you reading right now? Anything in particular informing your work?

RW
Georges Perec’s writing was an influence. It worked on so many levels, from formal game playing, to sociological analysis to deep, wrenching stuff about pain and memory. He was able to keep everything in motion at once, and the humor of the work was in a necessary relationship to its broader goals. I had an edition of Things and A Man Asleep in one volume: an account of a young Parisian couple told through their relationship to material culture, and a description of drifting in and out of consciousness during insomnia. I admire the way he could look through both ends of the telescope.

AL
How do you think about the colors you use?

RW
Usually, it’s about getting the maximum effect from the simplest means. Doing the watercolors made me think a lot about transparency, which is a lot harder to control in oil painting. Sometimes the color is keyed to something particular in the subject of the paintings, at other times it comes out of something observed in the process. Each painting works differently—unfortunately. It would save a lot of time, otherwise.

Small Baja, 2009; watercolor on paper, 3.75 x 5.75 in.

*

Roger White has exhibited his work in New York, Los Angeles, and Marfa, Texas. He is represented by the Rachel Uffner Gallery. Along with Dushko Petrovich, he founded the art journal Paper Monument in 2007.

There had been a letter to my father, along the lines of Dear Friend Please. This one read Find my son, our middle child, he is good character and hard-working boy.

A needle in a haystack. What are the chances?

You’re sure to find it, if only you’ll burn the hay.



2

Speechless in his striped pants, sitting on the beach like a boy at Brighton, out of place and out of time.  The elements: sand, sea.  A funny kind of first date.  His left hand larger than his right, his silence very alluring at first, then boring.  I traced half circles in the sand with my foot, as the ballet teacher had instructed.  If nothing else, I would have the perfect turnout, toes that could hold the weight of a body. I wanted to ask him what it’s like “to flee”—



3

Even now, it’s not a history I know well that had forced a correlation between his body, the left hand stronger than the right, and the limits of a country that his grandfathers had fought for, and lost twice if they’d lost it once. When I think of it, what I imagine is the word defenestration, which gestures, in its compound Latinate way, to what I initially guessed must be the act of replacing a pane of glass in a broken window. But what would break the glass?

Several men in the room with the one who fell, and whether he was ‘helped,’ who could say? The body on the street below, after all, evidence only of the fact that a desperate man will leave what he loves.

Fly or flee, the given options—



4

What you don’t know can’t hurt you, so he didn’t tell anyone he was going for good when he boarded the plane for a fortnight away. On the way back, he packed a change of clothes in his carry-on, as one might do in case something spilled on the plane, or the luggage was lost on the homeward journey. A spare pair of shoes, too, to change into in the airport bathroom as the flight boarded. The effect was transformative: the StB officers traveling with the exposition team didn’t recognize the left-handed pitcher’s bare ankles when they peered under the stalls. Then he waited, I don’t know how long, before sliding the lock open and turning to the washroom mirror.

What did he see looking into the mirror at JFK, if not his same eyes looking back at him? Still, he had become, one might say, a stranger in a strange land. Yet this very statement is illustration of an impossibility: from his point of view, he was himself still, walking the new streets, whereas I saw a stranger in familiar territory. And so our eyebeams crossed, or, as Donne had it, we twisted and did thread / Our eyes upon one double string. Except that there was no ecstasy. Beads threaded from opposing ends will meet in the middle, but that’s not to say that they belong side by side.



5

Ask the boy who leaves his country wherefore and he won’t know it means why, that’s what country does to you and if you leave what they call you is, as everyone knows, not a nice word. Something wrong with you to have found something wrong with it—that sort of logic, not very logical, but then neither is the fact of love.

Love of the homeland, we know all about, its rolling hills and rolled haystacks remembered through the lens of loss, the dozen city bridges crossed in memory. But his was a homeland that loved—he belonged to it, was wanted. Condemned in absentia for his absence.

It was ridiculous to feel anything at all for him, but there were many strands in the unraveling ribbon; loving the boy, I tied it into my hair, tucking the stray ends away. Seemly the word I wanted used of me, not that he had much to say. Or there wasn’t much he could say with the words sold in the beginner’s word-kit. A few nouns, a few hot verbs stuck to the fridge. The articles, missing. We learned from him to do without, his strange English undoing ours.



6

What he saw, we never could tell—“gray-green,” or “a sort of a gray.” I tried to pair the socks in his drawer, arrange them by color, but I was distracted by the photograph that he’d slipped in beneath, black and white, dogeared. The negative a world away. What was gone, he remembered: the scene a snowfield, or, like the film that catches in the projector, the indelible past alight. It showed the children with three instruments, violin flute harmonica. Stacked by height like the musicians in Bremen. An allegory, but of what. The edges of the photograph scalloped. The past a field buried in snow.



7

Filmmakers of the Eastern Bloc talk about color—about its lack—when they want to get at the era. Not that it was in fact colorless: I myself counted the red stars on the Lenin Museum. But strip the primary colors away and you approximate in visual form what it was to be behind the curtain or wall. As viewers, we register only that something is off, the way in the dream when the car is held up and the shots fired, you realize even within the dream that the scene hasn’t ended as expected: you aren’t dead, nor are you awake. Either way that you explain the uncanny fact, it remains, though you remain safe in the script, a prop more than a person, a dreamer merely.

So it was only afterwards, listening to the NPR interview with the director, that you realize that the colors red and blue are nowhere in the film. It is in one sense a bloodless world, missing the colors blood takes, except when blood mars the scene. Her death destroyed you, though the filmgoers in the lobby gathered round to assure you that the actress had in fact survived the accident.

Her death was an invention, just as the story I told when I returned to the Prague apartment was an invention. My father had asked us to pack the car: we were headed back to the West. I had carried my suitcase and sleeping bag down the three flights of stairs, into the arcade that opened onto the butcher-shop, with its stale smell of death, and then through the heavy doors. They locked behind me, and because I had neither a key to the car nor to the building, I remained on the street a long time, waiting for the others to come down. I didn’t know what to do, where to look: the street was empty, dirty, except for the Lenin Museum across from the parked car, where an old woman mopped the steps. I counted the stars, tried to remember the words to some song. No one came; no one in the apartment above heard me shouting.

Eventually a man said something to me I couldn’t understand, then opened the doors. I followed him in, carried my bag and sleeping bag back up the circular stairs. Meanwhile, they had been caught up in looking at pictures of Filip as a boy, Filip who couldn’t come home, who had made himself homeless. I was frantic when I entered the apartment, a panic incommensurate with having being locked out, so when they asked what was wrong I said that a man had held a knife to me on the street. What he had wanted, I couldn’t tell them, and they laughed at the story, asking why I would say such a thing.

But there was a threat, though not to me. And we could say nothing of him, in case the apartment was still bugged. But I never imagined who might be doing the listening, crouched in some too-cold attic, hunched over some gray desk.



8

Words I didn’t know crept into my sleep, and what I wanted to say was, I worried, the wrong thing, and might put them all in danger. That he hated the cartoon we liked, for example, slammed the kitchen drawers as we watched until he had enough English to call them Damn Commie Smurfs. So we spoke of nothing in particular in a third language none of us knew very well, commenting on the weather, gray, the food, knedlíky and carp, parce-ce que confused with peut-être, cause with chance—

We went in his stead, were his surrogates, his sister as if our sister, his mother, as if ours, too. But it was to us a foreign country, its beauty more striking because subdued, queues in the city streets for toilet paper or eggs, while the state-owned shops selling glassware and garnets were empty except for us. We spent the money we had to exchange each day of our stay, buying the things they couldn’t afford as pretext for our trip. At the border, an officer fingered the receipts, checked the addition to be sure we hadn’t traded on the black market, and was too distracted opening the boxes of crystal, the jewelry boxes, to find the treasure we smuggled back, the papers that made Filip’s case tucked into the suitcase lining.



9

By “filmmakers of the Eastern Bloc” I mean those making films about what it was before it was an era, not of it as in belonging to it. But you couldn’t have known, one says in the thick accent, I mean, they didn’t know that it would come to an end.

But that time did end, which is why indeed it is an era. Returning years later, I found the stars stripped from the building across from 26 Hybernska, the grocery store downtown transformed into a Kmart. Filip had returned, suited up, resumed smoking. I too had changed. I was sleeping in the front room when I heard him calling my name from the street below. It had seemed in the dream like the right thing to do to kick off our shoes, to live like burning and to burn where we’d been. But the stalks were sharp, the fire fast, and the frantic voice fit with that scene—

The dream can’t make sense of the voice speaking your language when you are so far from home. I mean, I thought I was dreaming that he was calling my name, saying Please open the door.



10

Barefoot in the arcade, trying each key on the loop in the lock, Filip on the other side, his voice raised over their jangling. The crack in the threshold not wide enough to slip him the key. Some trick to it, once the right key was found—inserted not quite to the hilt, if a key has a hilt, then turned in the old lock.

For each door, there’s a key: that was the premise of all my favorite books as a child. Or, for each key, a door. As if the story existed somewhere, and the question concerned the approach.



11

We were as sister and brother

We might have been ——







Jessica Fisher’s first book of poems, Frail-Craft, won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her poems appear in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Colorado Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, Puerto del Sol, The Threepenny Review, and TriQuarterly, and her translations appear in The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, where she is currently a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetry and Poetics. She lives with her family in Oakland, California.

I think of it now as a late valentine to Muffy, my first love, but that day, as I and my pack of friends chased her down and dragged her to the sewer drain, the only emotion I knew was rage—stripped bare and feeling its way in some unmentionable dark. I see that dark surrounding Aaron, expressionless as he turns my makeup mirror to glance at his face, exploded vessels risen now and spread over his mouth like a macabre shade of lipstick. I see myself naked and cold under its weight as he prepares to go.

He zips a suitcase shut on the bed. It is my suitcase, because he doesn’t have one. In it, he throws clothes, deodorant and toothbrush, his Halo games. The Xbox he will undoubtedly return for, so I do not remind him now. He touches his bloated lip, pressing it over and over.

“Does it hurt?”

“It hurts when I push on it.”

“Well don’t push on it.”

“I like to push on it.”

He pulls the suitcase off the bed with a whooshing noise. I am fiddling mindlessly with the ankle bracelet. It reminds me of the arthritis, before it went into remission. Aaron waves. His brown eyes bludgeon me. I want desperately to run over and put my arms around him. But he opens the door and nudges the cat away with his foot, saying Stay put, and I think he is talking to me.

• • •

It was late March, just days before my grandmother died. A slow thaw had descended on the Cereal City. Bailey Park’s surface was strewn with cigarette butts and brown bottles, and it had taken on a spongy, bog-like consistency. The park was a sort of land bridge over which we traversed on our way to W.K. Kellogg Junior High, our downtown middle school, in the days when the walk to school, not the drive, was the locus of our morning social gatherings. As high school juniors, we arrived at Battle Creek Central only by car, namely a 1988 Toyota Camry driven by Jennifer Goldman, my best friend. Only those with no friends, and thus no connections with a licensed driver, still walked over the sad, soggy space that Melissa Bryson, our leader, had fittingly dubbed “Bumley Park.”

This waning Michigan winter, Marisa Snow, who was usually called Muffy, had no such connections. We spied her on her way to a forensics club meeting on a Saturday: I, Jen, Miss, and the fourth member of our pack, Maria Rodrigues, who we and the general population of Central knew as Rio. Muffy was tiny but quick and would prove to be a voracious kicker. She darted in the opposite direction when she saw us coming through the park, but Miss’s long spidery legs soon caught up with her, ensnaring the hood of her heavy black cloak with one outstretched hand. Stringy, pale, and tinny-voiced, Miss would never strike anyone on first glance as the leader of a group of venomous bullies, but the sophomores of Battle Creek Central knew better. She was as mean as a cornered raccoon and had a tongue that bit like teeth.

Miss snapped Muffy into the waiting clutches of Jen and Rio, who had come wild-eyed and panting right behind, ponytails wagging, thirsty for the wet feel of fists on flesh. Come on Pootie you gimpy little bitch, Miss called out to me, because I had of course fallen way behind, struggling to run against the bitter refusal of my uncooperative joints. The winter damp had aggravated my rheumatoid arthritis, the bane of my teenage existence, and my ankles were swollen to the size of baseballs. When I finally caught up to the pack, I heard Rio telling Jen through an errant mouthful of her own dark hair, as she attempted to put Muffy in a headlock, We might not get hauled in if only Pootie wasn’t so pokey… The three of them had managed to immobilize her arms and head, but now had to contend with her feet, which dug hard and fast into the stinking muddy grass.

The drain that I had designated was just north of the park, in a less-traveled block of Sherman Road, nestled against a curb. Shortly after we had moved to Battle Creek (my mother, my sister Beatrice, and myself), I had discovered that such grates could be removed. Bea and I were exploring our new neighborhood when we saw a family of ducks on their way from the river being driven out of the middle of the street by a passing truck. The mother led her babies over the grate in a panic, and they slipped into its vents and disappeared. Bea, who was ten at the time, screamed when they plunged. The frantic mother duck circled and squawked, calling for the children she could not see, the little voices still drifting up from the river of waste below. Hoping to soothe my distraught sister, I had run around the block looking for passersby to help. Twenty minutes later, I met Jen Goldman and her brother Sam, whose smile always sucked the clouds out of the sky.

Holding Muffy in position over the fast-running sewage would be easier than getting her to the grate. First of all, it was clotted with a winter’s worth of decaying plant matter. My weak wrists and arms being less than helpful for subduing a squirming Muffy, it fell to me to clear the cold muck away. I began by trying to shove it aside with my sneaker, already black with mud from the park. By the time Jen and I were able, amid audible grunting, to lift the grate from its place, drag it up the side of the curb, and drop it clanging on the sidewalk, my hands were frozen and Jen’s curls were soaked with sweat. Rio and Miss had no choice but to pin Muffy to the wet pavement. She began to scream for help, potentially attracting the ever-hovering police. Miss answered her cries with a barrage of forceful slaps, which caused a gurgle of blood to spring from her nose. Rio’s white knuckles clutched a fistful of her hair.

“Keep it up dyke bitch,” Miss growled. “Rio, see if you can get my knife out of my pocket…”

It was a classic Miss bluff, and for a moment Muffy was shocked into silence. But when the smell of sewage wafted up, rich and acrid, our victim’s voice (my victim’s voice) again echoed through the misty air, this time as a despairing, wheezy howl. Jen caught my eye, her breathing ragged and her head shaking.

“Pootie,” she said, quietly, so only I could hear. “Forget this. We’re gonna get hauled in. We gave her a good scare, now let’s jet…”

Under the usual circumstances, I was on the sidelines at such events—a toady, there to mutter supportive comments like Yeah bitch! and That’s right! while the girls dealt out their lacerating brand of education. But there existed in me, at age seventeen, a drafty little hole, which during certain moments would widen to a yawning chasm and bluster forth a gale-force rage. Within that anger, the girl I should have been (the pretty and small and liked by one and all) spun around in the tornado and became just a blur, and I turned into someone mythic and unrecognizable: a monstrous doppelgänger. The seconds after Jen suggested we abandon the plan, my plan, was one of these moments.

The sewer had been my idea, and this was my enemy. When I’d described the plan, Miss and Rio had looked at me as if they saw me for the first time. The four of us were gathered at Rio’s cousin Ricky’s on Cherry Street, just a couple of blocks from the YMCA, where I often told my mother I was. (This way, it almost wasn’t a lie.) Ricky was what I would call a boyfriend, though had anyone asked at the time I would have denied it. He was as beautiful, dangerous, and entertaining as a circus tiger, with sad eyes that never changed expression, even when he gave in to his paranoia, diving behind the couch at the sound of a knock or the ring of the doorbell. Jen had lost her virginity to him in the eighth grade (he was a senior at the time) and had been trying to get us together since Sam left home that fall. Sam was a friend of Ricky’s, too, though like most of Ricky’s friends, had grown bored of him. Lonely, Ricky had taken to inviting us over to watch this game or that, giving us beer, feeding us salad, and making us laugh with his imitations of others in the Rodrigues family. He’d seemed as animated by my plan as the girls did (though his eyes remained sad—always). On the way home, walking in zig-zag fashion down Calhoun Street, Miss had thrown an arm around me.

So I could not, would not, suffer my plan to be upended. I swept over to where Miss and Rio held Muffy awkwardly against the cold street and swung my foot as far behind me as I could, then brought it forward with a mighty thrust, embedding the toe of my sneaker in Muffy’s abdomen with a calamitous crunch. A hot shard of pain traveled up my foot and pierced my ankle. Muffy emitted a sound like a furnace shutting down.

“Now get into the sewer with the rest of the shit…”

The name Pootie was a variation of Pattie, itself a nickname (for Patricia) that I had been trying since the sixth grade to shed in favor of the more feminine Trish. I had earned Pootie that afternoon with Jen, Bea, and Sam, at fourteen, after allowing myself to be dangled over the swirling sewer, baseball cap in hand, Sam holding one leg and Jen and Bea holding the other, my arms and face being flecked with the foulest grime imaginable (some of it landing, I recall, in my mouth) as I scooped the brood of terrified ducklings out of their smelly trap. As we stood there years later, suspending Muffy the same way, that act of kindness to my wailing sister suffered a diabolical reversal. The moment of weakness that had led me to give in to the irrational tenderness of Bea, who was heavier at age ten than I was at fourteen, who was unable to stomach even a boxing match, much less the horror movies I was never allowed to rent, would make me an equal among my merciless pack. Muffy’s wails and pleas sounded distant as foghorns coming up from the depths, the ends of her hair and her quaint cloak possibly dipped in filth. Her hands were busy holding her purple skirt over her panties. Miss and I held a single lace-up boot while Jen and Rio clutched her by the other calf, all of us huffing and puffing and stifling fits of laughter that would have sent Muffy splashing into the rancid river below.

The many times I had pictured her bare legs, I imagined them to be as covered with freckles as her arms. I envisioned them coated with wispy auburn hairs, like the ones I saw along the back of her neck when she wore her hair up in that ridiculous knot of ornate braids. Not so. Her legs were as smooth shaven and stark white as my own.

• • •

I have fantasized about apologizing to Muffy at our ten-year reunion, seen myself approaching her and seen her turning, perhaps arm-in-arm with a new lover, surprised, discombobulated, but pleased to see me, as when I walked into Advanced English for the first time. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. You know, for everything. You know what I mean. I’m sorry for putting you through, you know, all that… (Even in my fantasies I stammer, unable to avoid pointing out to the other person what they know—what I should not have to say.) Then I would hug her, tightly, and bury my face in her hair, and smell it again, and remember with pain and with pleasure. She would break away from me and maybe smile and perhaps hold my hand or pat my shoulder and say she has already forgiven me.

I see Rio, Miss, and Jen there, maybe, apologizing too, and that disturbs the fantasy, like my mother’s presence in a sex dream. My apology must be separate, because it is different. I am not merely apologizing for tripping her in the hallway, for calling her “carpet munch,” for flinging pennies at the back of her head during a pep rally.

But I am afraid. Just look at me, trying to be a poet, still in school—I, who hated school.

Aaron has been by while I’ve been at class. He has taken the Xbox. His smell, he has left—a mix of oniony night sweat (he eats the Vidalias like apples), smoke (he does not, but the casino patrons do), and a body spray (horrid) now gone from the sink. He also appears to have poured out the vodka that was in the freezer. A Post-it note on the makeup mirror says Im okay Hope U R 2… God, the gap between one love and the next is excruciating.

I decide I will not attend the reunion. Not with a tether on my ankle like a badge, and not even if, by mercy of the court, it is removed ahead of schedule.

Poetry and poverty are almost the same word, Aaron always says.

• • •

There were only two openly gay juniors in the Battle Creek Central class of 1997. Muffy was one. The other was Eric Ames, a younger member of a prominent black family who owned a local restaurant. I sat with him at lunch whenever Miss skipped school, which was often. (Jen and Rio had a different lunch period.) Eric hung out with the drama club kids, mostly the girls, and he was very outspoken. He could appreciate a jibe if it was good (What’s a gay horse say Eric? Haaayyyyy…), and would humiliate or outdo his abuser if it was bad (Pillow biter—well that is such a new one and so original. Would you like to hear one about your mama that everyone’s heard before?).

Marisa Snow was also outspoken, though not intentionally funny. She had the gall to want her sexuality to be taken seriously—granted dignity, even. A tall order, since she insisted on wearing that garment like a witch’s cloak, in addition to other random seventeenth-century baubles and accessories. Eric knew her from drama, but she was also a member of a Magic: The Gathering card game club and part of the forensics team (two strikes). Worse still: instead of answering jibes with sarcasm and equal vulgarity, she corrected those who taunted her, like an exacting piano teacher with a knuckle-rapping ruler.

It was this attitude that had earned Marisa her nickname. When Miss called her a “muff diver” in P.E., inciting howls of laughter from the entire class, she had only scowled and informed her tormenters that the act was called “cunnilingus” and the body part was termed “vulva.”

“A muff,” she said, “is an item that keeps your hands warm in winter.”

“Ewwww that’s how you keep your hands warm?”

Henceforth not only was she called “Muffy,” her hands were universally avoided in the halls of Battle Creek Central. I heard the story second-hand from Jen, who clutched her sides and rolled around on her mother’s carpet, repeating… v…vulva… cu…cun…cunnilingus, tears oozing from the corners of her eyes. I was excused from taking P.E. because of my condition, so once again I had missed out on one of Miss’s triumphs—one that, given my relationship to Muffy as time wore on, I would have particularly enjoyed viewing.

I had classes with Muffy myself, which I outwardly endured and secretly devoured. Psychology, Ancient History, Advanced English. In these classes, Muffy was constantly raising her hand, even when the teacher hadn’t asked a question. She spoke like an adult, often starting the teacher down a long road of explanation that drew sighs and hisses from the many students who spent every class staring longingly at the clock, six times a day, five out of every seven days they lived.

“Mr. Roberts, that’s preposterous,” she said, unprompted, during a lecture on the Trojan War early in the semester. “Why would Menelaus take her back? It’s as if the war was pointless! It’s as if it had nothing to do with Helen’s affair with Paris at all but was just an excuse…”

“Well it’s more complicated than that, Marisa, you see…”

The truth was, I found ancient myth—and particularly ancient war as depicted by Homer—enthralling. Mr. Roberts’ delivery, furthermore, was very theatric. He swayed back and forth from toe to heel, his arms crossed in front of his chest, the drama heightened by his in-depth probes into the personalities of each figure. It was like a tabloid saga—the romances, the gruesome deaths, the quirks and hang-ups. What a treat to read of Clytemnestra’s revenge against Agamemnon for throwing their daughter into the sea: how she and her lover tossed a net over him as he bathed and then stabbed him full of holes. I identified with Achilles, angry and indignant. And Muffy was exactly right. Helen was a scapegoat.

My obsession with Muffy as a possible target began in Advanced English. I had been placed in this class, which focused on the American classics, by my bottle-blonde, overly made-up guidance counselor Mrs. Lattimore, with whom some meddlesome English teachers had conspired about my potential. I generally claimed to understand nothing important about the books we read. The fact that I loved Huckleberry Finn and My Antonia and The Great Gatsby—that I read them with rapturous ferocity, making excuses to my friends so I could continue reading instead of driving around with Jen looking for boys or sipping hawked booze in the loft above Miss’s parents’ garage—did not mean I wanted to be asked any probing questions about them in class. I just wanted to read them, answer the rote vocabulary and comprehension questions on every quiz, and be left alone. But Mrs. Lattimore had insisted I needed the challenge.

I never talked to my friends about my grades, though I often listened to their frustrations about theirs. Jen received an allowance for clothes shopping and movies as long as she managed a C average. Due to absences, Rio and Miss straddled a particularly thin border between repeating their courses and doing just enough to depart from them forever. Miss’s parents initially yelled at her about the problem, but were often too occupied with her autistic brother to dwell on the subject. Rio’s parents left her alone in such matters. Several Rodrigues adults hadn’t finished high school and had found a way to survive. They seemed to believe in Rio’s ability to do the same.

I, on the other hand, had maintained an A average as a freshman. My junior year I had increasingly gotten Bs, thanks to Chemistry, which I found frustrating, and Economics, which I found stultifying. My mother didn’t hide her disappointment, but deferred the lecture to my stepfather, Mike, a middle school principal. “It’s not that these are bad grades,” he told me. “They just seem beneath your potential, that’s all. We’re just a little confused.” My mother even suggested that I quit my job shelving at Willard Library, which I protested. It was peaceful, unobtrusive work that allowed me to unwind among the dusty shelves. Thankfully my stepfather agreed with me, and the idea was scrapped.

It was important to me to keep my good grades a secret. My mode of operation was to leave the envelope that came for each marking period sealed until I got home. Junior year, though, I began to open them up on the spot, checking for Bs so I might prepare for the inevitable questions. I opened each envelope on my lap, pulling out the sheet just enough to glance at the information, then quickly replacing it before stuffing the whole thing deep within a textbook.

For a boy to have good grades was permissible. Handsome, athletic types like Trevor Winchell and Dave McAdams retained their popularity despite their academic excellence. But absolutely no popular or pretty girls got all As—at least none who would reveal such a thing. There was widespread suspicion about the dolphin-like swim team captain Laura Greenwood, and whispers circulated around Chelsea Meier and Latisha Adams, two other homecoming court candidates. But I believed no one suspected me. The attention of every boy in the school (black, white, or brown) hung in the balance.

At the end of the first marking term for Advanced English, Mrs. Brown handed us back our papers and our report cards at the same time, meaning I had to hide not one, but two documents. Though the class was heavily populated by the requisite nerds, there was also a smattering of popular kids, among them Chelsea, Trevor, and Dave. Dave in particular interested me. Despite Jen’s constant encouragement, I wasn’t falling for Ricky. He was gentle and funny and certainly cute, but I pitied him. Introspective and soft-spoken, Dave was unlike Ricky or the obnoxious, sex-driven popular boys, who I generally despised. He was close with a boy named Drew Jenson, who lived in the house behind ours. The more I saw Dave, the more my girl’s heart filled with a poison familiar to me from Sam.

I hadn’t expected my paper on Of Mice and Men to get an A. The goal of studying literature as we were was still cloudy in my mind. When I saw the letter, in red ink, at the top of the page, my instinct was to slide the paper onto my lap and quickly fold it in half. But in doing this, I dropped the open envelope that contained my report card on the floor. Before I could retrieve it, Muffy, who sat in front of me and was already no friend of mine, snatched it up. She knew I ran with Miss, the originator of her despised nickname, and with Jen, who regularly tripped her in the hallways, and with Rio worst of all—beautiful raven-haired, full-lipped Rio, who contemptuously ignored her.

Muffy had smiled when I’d walked into class the first day. You’re in Advanced now? she’d asked excitedly when I sat down. My response of What of it, dork? hadn’t earned me much favor. So instead of returning the envelope, she removed the report card and saw a row of six As. She registered the same look of surprise as that first day, minus the smile. We looked in each other’s eyes for a moment, and when I sensed she was about to speak, I bared my teeth. She quickly turned around in her chair, silent, and I thought a crisis had been averted.

It occurred to me the next day that I’d thought too quickly. Latisha, always chatty and nice, congratulated me in the hall. Then Drew, who hardly ever spoke to me, gave my long hair a tug and whispered Somebody’s a nerd in my ear. I seethed all day, deducing that that confounded lesbian had told Chelsea during group work in class, and Chelsea had no doubt told Dave, among others. At lunch I ranted at Eric, who had heard about my grades from Muffy herself.

“Who does that bitch think she is? Opening your report card,” said Miss, not absent that day. “I hope you burned that envelope. Lord knows what’s on them hands…”

“It’s none of her business what grades I get. That’s personal, right?” I had a vision of Muffy in her witch costume, burning at the stake.

“So you got all As. What are you so mad about?” Eric said. Miss and I answered with a resounding shhhhhhh.

“What? I wish I got good grades. I could get some money. You should be happy.”

Instead Miss and I plotted my revenge. She didn’t comment on the fact of my grades until we parted ways for fourth period.

“I used to get all As,” she said. “In junior high.” Then she swung her hips as hard as she could against mine, shoving me into the wall. “Dork!” she exclaimed, and ran off to class.

A few days later, I saw Dave walking down the hallway, hand-in-hand with Trevor Winchell’s blond sister Tori. Like that it was over, the revving of love interrupted by the groaning halt of reality. That night, lying on my back on top of the covers until dark, I heard boys’ laughter drifting up like an odor from the Jensons’ property: Drew and Dave playing a game of one-on-one on the driveway. Bea knocked, and I begged her to scram, but she whined until I allowed her to come in. I felt sorry for her. Her only friend was Courtney, Mike’s daughter, who was in the seventh grade. Courtney stayed with us every weekend, and I regarded her as a pest. She always left a coating of hairspray residue on the sink, and she was constantly clogging up the phone line. But she let Bea tag along with her and her little friends, because Bea promised not to tell on her for things like sneaking out at night to see her pimply little boyfriend, or putting on eye makeup and changing into a miniskirt once she got to school.

Bea sat on my bed and turned on the light.

“Turn that off.”

“It’s dark!”

“Turn that off.” She did.

“Are you crying?”

“What do you want?”

“Are you thinking about Grandma?”

“Well I wasn’t, but now I am.”

We began to sniffle. Bea crawled into bed with me. Her shoulder was soft.

“Do you think there’s a heaven?”

“She’s not dead yet.”

“Don’t be depressed Pootie.”

“Don’t call me that.”

We slept.

It was ludicrous, of course, for me to be blaming Muffy for destroying my chances with Dave. But I see now that the rage that besieged me that night and many nights after was fueled not by this trifle, but by jealousy and admiration—love—for Muffy Snow. This girl understood secrets I did not about the literature I loved. She accepted who she was without concession. She had thick, lovely mounds of hair. She had delicate, feminine little hands. She was smarter than me. However high my grades, she knew more. She did not belong in the cesspool that was high school, because she was an adult.

I slept with Ricky, for little reason other than to have something new to talk about with Jen. She’d tired of the subject of Muffy, and wanted to talk about boys—in particular a new one named Chad, who went to Lakeview and who she claimed had a huge penis (they all did), but also Ricky, for whom she had a lingering fondness. True, she would happily throw a foot in front of Muffy and send her diving to the tiles while socializing between classes. But she did it without emotion, and only to watch me string a garland of curses in Muffy’s direction afterward. My swearing amused her. I elaborated upon common obscenities (suck a bucket of dicks), or creatively skirted the school’s rules against profanity, turning ass into ass-inine or using Spanish terms like pinga or puta. She also enjoyed hearing me talk frankly about sex, and since I knew no other way to talk about it, we had these conversations often, most of them filled with lies.

The truth was, it had been many months since I had last had sex, and although my feelings for Ricky were lukewarm compared to what I had felt for Sam, they seemed easier. He didn’t mind that I laughed during the act, perhaps because he knew I laughed not at him but at myself. I spent much of the time, whether underneath or on top of him, looking at and thinking about my own body, its curves and inconsistencies. I rather liked, I found, the hang of my breasts and their shape, though one was noticeably bigger than the other. I liked the way my skin felt. Ricky’s body was well-made enough: lean and hairy and tattooed. But mainly I liked the way mine looked against it. I wondered daily, while I planted an acid stare on the back of Muffy’s pale, fuzzy little neck, what her body looked like naked. Whether her belly and breasts were like mine. Whether her flesh jiggled like mine did.

With Sam sex had been frightening, not to mention painful, because he was the first. But even when the pain was no longer a factor, I became a blithering network of nerves each time I knew we were going to make love. Fortunately, Sam had a fake I.D. and always bought me a forty-ounce bottle of Mickey’s malt liquor when we met. Halfway through it, I would be pleasantly warmed and relaxed enough to eat dinner with him and then slide into his lumpy, boy-scented bed, where he would be brutal and chaotic. When the act commenced, I felt a cold, quick sensation that I couldn’t quite name, like Emily Dickinson coming across the narrow fellow in the grass, with a tighter breathing/And Zero at the Bone. I always bled a little. After, Sam would curl into a damp clump against me and become utterly silent.

He liked to cook: chili, spaghetti and meatballs, potato latkes, homemade pizza. Our times together in the Goldmans’ kitchen were more joyful than those in the bedroom. I ate great troughs of the food he cooked, though less than he by far. He marveled that I was so thin, and I would think of poor Bea, a vegan who picked at her food and yet had only managed to lose ten pounds in the past three years. If Jen was home, we all played rummy after dinner and watched slasher films in the red-painted rec room. If Jen was out with Miss or Rio or both, Sam and I went to his room and had strenuous, sweaty intercourse. Their mother kept entirely to herself. Their father lived in Lansing. If Mrs. Goldman knew Sam and Jen fornicated and drank alcohol in her home, she did not say so. On the way out the door, my hair wet and my clothes disheveled and smelling of Sam, I would stop in the living room to say hello without hesitation. Mrs. Goldman would look up momentarily from an Allure or Elle and ask how my grandmother’s health was. I would reply that it was not good, not good at all, and she would say Oh you poor lamb and return to her magazine.

I’d last seen Sam over Christmas break, when he came home from Western Michigan University in nearby Kalamazoo. He was stubbly and his hair had gone wildly curly, but his smile still skewered me. I saw him only at a party thrown for him at his friend Seth’s apartment, and we never got a chance to be alone together. Wherever the two of us were, Jen was also. Sam drank an incredible amount of hard liquor, in all varieties, and he kept sliding out of his chair to the floor like spilled sauce, cards in hand, as we played rummy around the kitchen table. At intervals, the 250-pound Seth would tug him upright by the back of his shirt.

Sam bristled at my questions about college, and my impression was that not all was well. In turn, I shirked on his questions about Grandma, who I had spent the day with at a hospice, mostly reading while she slept a gurgling, cavernous sleep. The conversation Sam and I had was therefore restricted to the Cowboys and Steelers, The X-Files, and the latest rumor circulating the neighborhood, which was that the recently divorced Mrs. Meier, fourth grade teacher and mother of Chelsea, was having an affair with Mrs. Lattimore’s husband, who everyone knew to be a womanizer and who hadn’t shared his wife’s bed in years. (This was confirmed emphatically by Miss, whose mother cleaned for both households.) I spent the night at Jen’s. Sam never came home, and I sensed that something had shaken loose from him.

Perhaps I felt more at ease with Ricky because I had managed to get myself on the birth control pill. All it had taken was complaining to my mother that my menstrual cramps were unbearable (which they could be, so that wasn’t really a lie). There was never any discussion of sex, and no accusations. Only a brief, unpleasant visit to the doctor. Miss was jealous that it was so easy. Her own parents had not only adamantly refused, they had begun listening in on her phone conversations with boys soon after she made the request. When her boyfriend Teddy, already on their forbidden list (understandably, for he was quite a stoner), implied a certain activity during one conversation, Miss had been locked in her room at night for a month.

Jen, on the other hand, was never punished for anything. The first time she was caught with alcohol was on her sixteenth birthday. She was granted the privilege of driving her mother’s old car soon after just the same. After my part in the birthday incident, my mother burst into tears and slammed her fists repeatedly into the kitchen cupboards. I was forbidden thence from riding in any car other than an adult’s (I reasoned that Jen’s Camry counted, since it belonged to Mrs. Goldman, and so that wasn’t a lie either), and from staying out later than eleven o’clock unless it was at the Goldmans’ house. (My mother did not know Sam had been a lover.) My mother liked Jen—so much more sophisticated than my old country friends. I cared more that Jen had been my friend back when most of my classmates were reluctant to start a friendship with me, the handicapped kid. Whenever we got into trouble together, which was steadily more frequent, my mother blamed Miss and Rio exclusively. Whether it was because they were the daughters of purported drug dealers and a local cleaning lady, I can only guess. Needless to say, Ricky’s name was not mentioned to her. Ever.

•

Later on, after the sewer battle was over, I went to Ricky’s so we could make love, possibly for the last time before I was confined forever or sent away. I watched him eat a delicious-looking salad topped with walnuts and some sort of white, crumbly cheese, and wondered what Muffy’s mother had said when her daughter returned home too early from her forensics meeting speckled with sewage, bruised, and maybe even bleeding. How does a mother attempt to heal such despair? Did she cover her daughter’s purple, muck-flecked face with kisses? Did she cradle her head against her breasts and rock slowly? Did she run her a hot bath with bubbles? Did she wash her thick pile of hair, thoroughly massaging her scalp and rubbing her temples in tiny, methodical circles? How long did the girl bleed? How heavy was her head?

Ricky jumped at the sound of the telephone ringing and stopped short like a spooked cat, ears twitching, fork in hand until the noise stopped and the answering machine came on. Rick, it said, Are you there? Pick up pick up pick up…

Later, I had an orgasm—something I hadn’t experienced since I was a child under the bathtub faucet. It was, as Miss Dickinson would say, a Whip lash/Unbraiding in the Sun.

The next day, the girls and I chose to make up a story rather than gracefully await our fates. We sat on beanbag chairs in the Brysons’ garage loft, flipping edgily through magazines and practicing voices of indignation at being accused of such a horror. What a liar Marisa Snow is! She’s starved for attention! We were at Lakeview Square Mall!

Miss instructed us to be specific.

“Rio, you tried on jeans at Express, but you didn’t like them. They didn’t fit right…” she said.

“Are you saying I’m fat, ho?”

“Shut up bitch. Pootie you did what? Shopped the back sales racks at Hudson’s?” She laughed. “Pootie’s mom said hit the BOGOOOOOO…”

“Of course. And I found a hot tank top with skulls on it. Pink with white skulls…”

“No, white with pink skulls! Because it had somebody’s lipstick on it…”

“Yeah and so I couldn’t get the hoodie—the gray one, not the black one, because I couldn’t get it half off.”

“It would be the tank top you would get half off on, dummy,” Jen interrupted.

“Shut up Jew. Only your mom would ask about that,” Miss said. “And where were you? bebe? You tried on six things…” Here she proceeded to make a list of possible garments, none of which sounded like anything Jen would wear. Jen frowned.

“And where did you go?” she asked Miss. “To the Gap? Like everyone goes into yours?”

I was certain our stories were ridiculous and would be regarded as such. We would be caught, and I would be punished. I dreaded living in the country again—the long lonely roads, the impenetrable dark of the nights. I dreaded living with my father, whose face bore the confused and erased look of an amnesiac at every visit. To him I was more and more a stranger. He clung to his memory of me as a little tomboy, helping him clean bluegills and riding with him on his snowmobile. He did not recognize the sullen, lip-glossed nail-chewer who appeared before him once a month, garish hoops wobbling under my ears with every silent nod and shake. I wondered if my mother would hit me. She never had, but I sensed on many occasions that she wanted to, instead opting to slam a door or bang any nearby hard surface. My stepfather would shake his head. He would remain calm, but would cut me nonetheless with a well-placed threat. I wondered, as I listened to Jen and Miss bicker over whether Jen would be caught dead trying on this or that, what it would be. You are not the girl we know, I imagined him telling me. You are not our daughter.

We waited out the day, then went home. I made Spanish rice, portobello mushrooms, and green beans, which my family complimented as they ate. I was trying to help Bea by cooking things within vegan limits. After dinner, Mike made popcorn, and we all watched the football game. The phone call, painfully expected, never came. Later, Bea and I stayed up and watched MTV together on the couch, gossiping about Courtney. I predicted (correctly) that she would be more like me in high school than Bea.

“Pootie, I wish you were more like you,” Bea said.

The next week in school, Muffy looked downward at all times. Her cloak was gone. If there were bruises, they weren’t visible or severe enough to evoke questions from anyone who might care about her. I spoke with Eric, who had begun bringing his own homemade lunch in a paper bag. He had also begun, randomly and inexplicably, to speak in a mock British accent.

“Hey have you talked to Muffy? Muffy Snow?”

“You mean Marisa, luv?”

“Yeah have you talked to her?”

“Of course, wankah! She’s in A Doll’s House with me, the saucy minx.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

“Like what, wankah?”

“She didn’t tell you that I did anything?”

Eric slitted his eyes and smacked his gums. “Now what did you thugs do? Thug life!”

The night before, I had torn a page out of an old copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. (My mother collected antique books, many of which I had secretly defaced.) I had folded up Sonnet 23 (As an unperfect actor on the stage/Who with his fear is put besides his part,/Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,/Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart…) and brought it to school with me. Before leaving that day, I slid it into the vents of Muffy’s locker. That night and every night, I hid in my room and read, ignoring the calls of the girls asking Have you heard anything? Has she told anyone yet?

Spring break came and went. Miss went with Rio to Texas, where they spent part of the week with Rio’s aunts in Brownsville and part (unbeknownst to the Brysons) in South Padre Island. Jen went with her mother and second cousin to Daytona Beach. Our family trip to Fort Myers was cancelled, due to my grandmother’s condition. It was windy and gray that week, and my grandmother was fading fast. Suddenly the event at the sewer seemed like a cold draft that whispers through window cracks and dies away just as fast. That Easter Sunday, my grandmother died of cancer.

• • •

I have thought that the present is always disappearing and the future under construction, while the past is as vivid and knowable as the words in a book. But I see now that this is simply not true. The past is in fact like the future, always being molded and caulked together.

Bea comes to stay with me for a weekend after I tell her that Aaron has left. She looks beautiful but pale—there are veins visible under her eyes. She has been working for Kellogg’s and living alone in the apartment complex near Felpausch in Battle Creek, across from the field where the local baseball team, the Battle Cats, plays each summer. Rio and Miss often bought drugs from a fellow who lived there, but I do not tell Bea this. Drugs horrify her. The ankle bracelet horrifies her. I am making homemade Asian dumplings, since we cannot go out. Bea has relaxed her vegan sensibilities and now eats seafood. She helps close the wraps by crimping the edges with a fork.

“You didn’t make these too spicy, did you?”

“It’s good for you.”

“Are you messing with me?”

After dinner, Bea and I sit cuddled on the couch, and I force her to watch one of the Lord of the Rings movies, which she pretends to hate, on DVD. I miss Aaron, but recall how much I’ve missed the warmth of my sister’s body, too. I have written poems about the soft sound of her breathing, so I know when she has fallen asleep without looking at her. When she leaves I will cry more than when Aaron left. I will cry against the flesh of my arms, moaning like a ghost in the bed I have left unmade three days in a row.

Since I no longer drink, I am run through in the night with memories like the sewer incident. I am open and spilling like a duck crushed in the middle of the road. The sharp crunch of my hand bones on Muffy’s teeth and the look of fear on her face—the last look she ever gave me. The puncture noise of Aaron’s lip as the pint glass hit it. The haiku he screamed at me:

Damn it. That is it.
This time you’re going to jail.
You are such a cunt.

• • •

When my grandmother died, Bea was helpless. Her crying was beyond a wail—it was a screech. The blood vessels in her face broke, peppering the orbits of her eyes and her cheeks with purple dots. She didn’t eat or shower and was kept out of school. Courtney was commissioned to collect her homework. Bea wore the outfit that she had worn on Sunday the entire week—the same socks as well. My mother was stronger, but distant and distracted. Normally, she would never have allowed one of her daughters to forego washing her hair until it hung in twisted strings from her scalp. She refused to let Mike help with the funeral arrangements, filling the days with much bustling and ordering and calling and signing and check-writing. In this we were alike. I went to school every day without missing a class, then went to the library for work or went home and did my homework industriously. At night, I went to Ricky’s, kissing and pawing and copulating, but talking little. The girls I avoided, speaking only to Jen when necessary. Mrs. Goldman had offered to host a small reception following the burial.

By the day of the memorial, I had been without sleep for three days—not from my own grief, but from staying up with Bea’s. I had stopped trying to ignore her howls, which my exhausted mother slept through, and had begun sleeping with her in her tiny twin bed. She thrashed and cried and snored, mucus gathering in her nose and the back of her throat. Her breath and sweat were acidic, redolent of burning fat.

At the funeral, the air in the church was stifling. My grandmother’s mourners piled in and spilled out into the vestibule. In the midst of the service, Bea began to sway back and forth in the pew. She finally keeled forward, smashing into the carpet in front of us in a lump. For the remainder of the funeral, I sat on the cement front steps with Bea’s face buried in the lap of my skirt. My mother appeared and offered to take my place, then my father, and later, Mike. I refused all three times. Exhausted, I skipped the burial altogether and slept through the reception. By the time I awoke in the Goldmans’ guest room, the food was nearly gone, along with the guests, and the sunlight had all but buried itself under the earth, leaving only a purple trace behind.

That night I dialed Muffy’s number. The girls and I had crank called her many times before the sewer incident. Usually Miss was the ringleader. She would pretend to be a salesperson or a surveyor and then drop her victim into a surreal abyss.

“Okay sir. First of all what is your city of residence?”

“Battle Creek, Michigan.”

“Thank you. And your zip code please?”

“49017.”

“Very good. And your sexual orientation?”

“I beg your pardon?”

I was surprised Muffy allowed herself to be a victim of these stunts. I expected her to give the phony salesperson a lecture, or to provide clear, concise answers to questions like When was your last yeast infection? and Would your call your mother a) obese, b) a crack whore, or c) a dirty obese crack whore? Either that, I thought, or to slam down the phone at the start. But no, she stayed on the line until she tired of being abused. Then she would sigh and finally hang up. When we would call right back she often, inscrutably, picked up again.

It was late. I took the cordless phone to bed with me and pressed it to my ear in the dark. When her mother answered our crank calls, we would hang up and try again later. But when it happened this time, I asked Mrs. Snow if I could talk to Marisa. When she asked who was calling, I said “Trish.” Muffy picked up, breathless, and I said nothing. Just lay there listening to her repeat Hello? Is anybody there? like an echo. Then something strange.

“Is it you?”

I shivered underneath my covers, and the speed of my breathing increased.

“I hear you. I hear you breathing.”

How did I know that tone of voice? It seemed so terribly familiar.

“Talk to me.”

I wondered if she could hear my heart drumming. At least five minutes of silence passed between us, heavy and deep. Muffy finally spoke again.

“Goodnight,” she said, and hung up.

That week in school some other strangenesses occurred. Eric asked me, out of nowhere, to the junior prom. I hadn’t given the event a thought. The catalogues had begun featuring billowy, sparkling dresses, but none of our gang took much interest. Yet there was a tension in the school hallways, something almost beneath awareness, like a loose tooth.

“You don’t have to go to the prom with me because you feel sorry for me.”

“What do you mean, butt-nut?”

I shrugged.

“Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pootie,” Eric said, and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re the hottest dude I know.”

“Oh eat me.”

“So that means you’ll go?”

“Well I can’t go with Ricky.”

“Why would you want to?”

“True.” I started laughing, because Eric had a small milk moustache. His lip looked like a negative of Hitler’s.

“So you’ll go?”

“Yes already! Jeez.”

“Hey I have to have a solid answer from you otherwise I can’t win the bet.”

“You’re a giant tool.”

Miss had not been at school all day, but suddenly, like a blip, she appeared onscreen. She was essentially in pajamas: hot pink sweatpants and a matching hoodie. Her eyes looked oddly dull without her mascara. She nodded at Eric and then faced me, straddling the bench with her hands tucked into her front pockets.

“’Sup.”

“Were you here today?”

“Did you talk to Jen?” Miss’s voice was hushed.

“No. I can’t get her attention.” As a matter of fact, it seemed as though Jen was ignoring me. In the car, she had blasted the stereo—Cypress Hill—and spoken not a word. Nor had she stopped to chat as usual between classes, instead powering down the center of the hall. I attributed this to my grandmother’s death, not to mention my bizarre behavior in missing nearly the entire funeral.

Miss leaned in and gave a sideways glance to Eric, who stared pointedly at her, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses like binoculars. She ignored him. “Did you cheat on Ricky?”

I laughed, almost choking on a rubbery school nacho. The idea that Ricky and I had any exclusive contract was ludicrous to me. Still, I said, “What? No.”

“Pootie, Jen thinks you cheated on Ricky and she’s kind of pissed.”

“Ricky’s paranoid. He’s just imagining things.”

“Jen says you did.” Miss looked at me with her head cocked. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

“No.” I felt the anger widening in me, and turned to face Miss.

“You didn’t do it with Sam at your grandma’s funeral?” Miss’s dreamy tone suggested she knew I had not. “Because that’s what Jen is telling everybody.”

The cafeteria seemed to turn red all around me. The other tables with their haphazard cliques of wilted teenagers. The wheeled garbage bins. The blue and gold of the brick wall painted with a mural featuring our mascot, the bearcat. All hazed over crimson like the budding trees in front of the church where my grandmother was memorialized. I turned back around to face Eric, who was shaking his head.

“Oh no she didn’t,” he said.

“I told her to cut you a break,” Miss went on. “I said you were sad about your grandma and all that. Shoot. Who cares about Ricky anyway? He’s a loser.”

“I didn’t do it with Sam.” My voice was raised.

Eric looked around us. “Chill out, butt-nut. There’s people about.”

“Well I don’t know Pootie. That’s what Jen said. I’m not mad. Rio’s not even mad.”

“Rio heard about this?”

Just when I felt myself breaking open, it occurred to me that it had been a while since I had been the butt of one of their pranks. The wind flew out of me, and I had to stifle a laugh.

“Okay fine I did it,” I said. “I did it with Sam at the funeral.”

“No kidding?”

“Yes. Anal. In the graveyard in fact.”

Miss and Eric both threw their heads back at the same time, guffawing.

“Girl you are crazy,” Miss said.

“You need to be put away,” Eric said through his fingers.

When the day finally ended, I had to catch up with Jen on her way to her car. She had left without collecting me. It was raining, and I had to struggle against stiff knees while fumbling with an umbrella in an attempt to gain on her. By the time we got to the car, I was out of breath. Jen was more impatient than usual about the slow process of leaving the parking lot, letting out audible puffs of frustrated air and pulling at her curls. I opened the window and unleashed every curse I had within me at Laura Greenwood and a couple of her friends, who were walking in front of us as Jen tried to move forward in the queue of cars. Jen did not laugh at this, nor cheer up in any way. Once we were finally on the road, I decided to ask Jen whether she was angry at me. She got right to the point.

“Miss told me you were laughing about it, too. Anal in the graveyard—very fucking funny…”

“Settle down already.”

Jen was clutching the steering wheel tightly at ten and two, rather than resting her hand in her lap and driving with one thumb as usual. She almost never swore. She was truly angry. Nervous and confused, I defended myself against the accusation.

True, Sam had insisted on tucking me into the guestroom bed. He had undressed me too, but just to my slip and camisole. He told me what sitting shiva was—that when Jewish people lost a close relative they didn’t get dressed up or eat their own food, but instead, for one week, stayed in, and people dropped by with dishes they had prepared. I told him Bea had been sitting shiva. When I was under the covers, he leaned down and kissed me on the neck, whispering my nickname before pulling away. Then he left the room and did not return.

I slept like the dead in that guestroom. At one point, I woke to my father sitting on the bed and smiling down at me. He held my wrist gently, as if feeling my pulse.

“Go back to sleep, baby,” he told me, and that was all I wanted to do. “I left you some money in your jacket pocket. Go buy yourself a milkshake, okay?”

As he kissed my forehead, it occurred to me that he thought not only that I was still twelve years old, but that this was the late fifties. When I slept again, I dreamt of Sam making me a milkshake in my old kitchen in the country. When I tried to drink it, it simply wouldn’t move up the straw. I awoke later to my mother weeping over me and stroking my hair. The sound of her crying was low, almost secretive. When I fell asleep again, Muffy invaded my dreams, as she had done many a night. I stood facing her in Sam’s rank bedroom, trying not to breathe. By the time I got up, everyone had left. Only the tofu remained. As we packed up and went home at last, I found a hundred-dollar bill in the pocket of my pullover.

There was no chance that Sam had snuck in and ravished me in my sleep. With Ricky that might have been possible, for he was as odorless and soft as a shadow. But Sam had never failed to leave my body upheaved. Whenever we had made love, I walked away with a phantom pounding between my legs and a coating of Sam on my skin like paraffin.

Jen was shaking her head. “I saw him…”

“When? How? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I saw him naked in his room! Walking around!”

I agreed this was strange, but the fact remained: “I was in the guestroom.”

“Oh yeah one room over. Why would he be walking around naked Pootie, huh? Why?”

“I have no idea. Maybe Sam’s going crazy. Did you ever think of that?”

Jen slammed on the brakes, sending me flying forward against the dashboard.

“Get out of my car,” she said. A car behind us was honking angrily.

“Jen!”

“Get out of my car before I kick your cripple ass out!”

Having seen her do this to a previous boyfriend, I decided not to test her. I grabbed my book bag and slid out into the rain. After she drove away, leaving me alone on Calhoun Street, I realized my umbrella was still in the car.

•

Without Jen to drive me to and from school, I had to rely on Ricky, who picked me up and dropped me off a couple of blocks away from home. He seemed to be the only one who didn’t care about my supposed infidelity. The girls left me largely alone, but I kept my eyes open just the same. I had once seen Miss pull a girl’s head down to meet her knee with terrible force, giving the poor thing a knob on her head like a rhinoceros horn. I’d seen Jen rip a girl’s earrings out. My only hope was that Sam would clear things up with Jen and all this would soon be over.

On Friday, Rio approached me suddenly in the hall. I braced myself, but she only wanted to inform me that Ricky would not be by to pick me up. He thought someone named Reggie was looking for him and was afraid to leave the house. I asked Rio whether or not I should bother asking Jen for a ride. She shrugged.

“Do what you want. I’m going over to DaShaun’s right now.” (DaShaun, her boyfriend, had graduated the previous year.) It didn’t look hopeful, and it was raining again. I sighed.

“Come on Pootie, quit being so mopey,” Rio said. “I’m gonna start calling you Pittie.”

I laughed in spite of myself as she walked away. Of all of us, Rio seemed to adhere most closely to the notion that all things were negotiable.

Walking home on the soggy sidewalks, I found myself tailing Muffy. She wore a long black vinyl raincoat with the hood over her head. Though she never looked behind her, I kept my distance. She lived on McKinley Street, not far from Sir Pizza, where a host of Battle Creek Central students typically met after football games. Her house was ranch-style, white, with a screened-in porch. I hid behind a neighbor’s hedges and watched her step inside the porch, wiping her feet. She fumbled in her messenger bag, apparently for a key, and then struggled to unlock the door, finally pushing it open with her whole body and disappearing inside. I waited there for a while, trying to catch a glimpse of her in the windows. Lights were on, but Muffy seemed to have dissolved into the house. It started to get late, so I began walking home.

Bea and I were doing our homework in front of the TV when my mother came in from work. She normally greeted us warmly and joked about how we could possibly concentrate with the TV blaring in front of us, but today she just hung up her coat and walked, arms crossed, into the kitchen. Bea and I exchanged puzzled looks. We listened to the sound of high heels pacing back and forth on linoleum for a few minutes, and then my mother walked up to us, her arms still crossed and her eyes dark.

“Bea will you go upstairs for a minute?”

“Why?”

“Don’t talk back to me. Just do it.”

Bea’s lip quivered, and she slammed her book shut and ran out of the room. My mother’s eyes stayed fixed on me. I tried to think what I had done, particularly since I hadn’t had a crew to get in proper trouble with for a week. Then I remembered, with a jolt, the sewer.

“Do you have something you want to tell me?” my mother asked.

I tried to recall our excuses. I had gone to the Gap—no Hudson’s… and why had I not bought anything? Or had I? My mind was gruel.

“No. What?” Deny! It was the only way.

“You know very well, so stop it.” Her hands fell to her sides and seemed to twitch.

“Know what?”

“Just help me understand. What do you see in someone like that?”

I was confused by the question. Now my mind was searching for the reasons why I loved Muffy. She was a role-game-playing, cloak-wearing, pretentious geek. She was pretty. She was a stomachache. She was a rebel. She thought she was somebody all right.

The bewildered look I must have worn angered my mother. Her voice boomed.

“Is that the sort of person you want to be with? Rick Rodrigues?”

Despite the consequences that would surely follow, I laughed. The way my mother’s cheeks flared, the fast movements of her eyes—all were ridiculous. I couldn’t stop.

“Do you think this is funny? Do you think dating a drug dealer is funny?”

She took two bounding steps toward me, and I stood up, balling my fists, ready. But she stopped short and pointed a finger in my face. I was not laughing anymore.

“You are absolutely not under any circumstances allowed to see Rick Rodrigues. Do you understand me?”

My mother was practically stuttering, which was not funny but pathetic. I ground my teeth together and envisioned punching her and telling her to open her eyes, for once, or I’d close them both in a way she didn’t like…

“Do you understand me?”

As I turned and walked away, set for Bea’s bedroom, she clutched my arm before I could get past her. I couldn’t wrench my arm from her grip. She clamped her other hand other around my chin and cheeks like a vise.

“Answer me.”

My jaw wouldn’t move above her hand, but I did my best to mutter a terrible curse at her—the second-worst words that can be uttered to a parent. With my forearm, I dealt her a powerful shove that sent her tumbling into her beloved Boston fern. I yelled the worst words and then ran as fast as I could through the dining room and up the stairs to Bea’s room. I would barricade myself there until Mike came home.

What my mother didn’t understand was that boys, or men, like Ricky were the only kind I had any chance with. Ones like Dave and Drew would never have risked their reputations to go steady with the school crippled girl, and those who aspired to such reputations knew to avoid the same. Ricky did, in fact, have a dresser drawer full of marijuana, which he sold periodically to friends, co-workers, and former friends and co-workers, but he was hardly a drug kingpin. He wasn’t violent, and he had nice teeth. That, I felt, was plenty for me to ask for. And that, more than anything, was the reason I fell crying onto my sister’s bed.

“Pootie, boys like you. All the boys in my class think you’re pretty…”

“Oh great. I’m glad the eighth-graders can see my secret beauty.” I buried my face into an unmade bundle of bedspread. It smelled like Bea’s foot lotion. Mint and medicine.

“Everybody thinks you’re pretty.”

This I interpreted to mean our parents. The issue was always fuel for Bea’s whining. She felt I got away with more because I was thinner and had fewer skin problems, rather than because our parents were afraid of my temper. The truth was, I was pretty, though I did not know it at the time. I had a lovely, creamy complexion (which I saw as pasty) and long, caramel-streaked, shiny hair (which I saw as brassy and greasy). I was slender but not gawky. Though I wasn’t exactly tall, I had a long, graceful neck. But when I looked in the mirror, I generally loathed what I saw.

Bea asked about Ricky, whom she imagined as a sort of action-movie villain.

“He’s been in jail.”

“I’m not going to marry him, Bea.”

“Isn’t he like twenty?”

“So?”

“Does he go to college?”

“No.”

“Does he have a job?”

I heard the garage door open below. “Mind your own damn business.”

I was forbidden from socializing with Miss and Rio and especially Ricky for the remainder of the school year, perhaps longer. I was allowed to keep company with Jen only in the presence of her mother, and never later than seven o’clock. (My mother was unaware that my friends had cast me out, but I did not give her the satisfaction of that knowledge now.) My mother would drive me to school and the library, and Mike would pick me up. I couldn’t leave the house without adult supervision. I was to break up with him over the phone in the presence of my mother and Mike. At the time, Ricky did not seem to grasp what was happening.

“Pootie I told you I’m not mad about Sam,” he said. “Your grandma just died and you weren’t thinking. All is forgiven. Come over tonight.”

“No I can’t. And I didn’t… you know. Ask him, will you?”

“Fine I’ll ask him. Are you coming over or not?”

“I can’t. I told you I can’t see you anymore.”

“Oh. Well call me tomorrow then.”

“I can’t.”

“Are you going to need a ride tomorrow? Because my cousin wants to borrow the car.”

“No I don’t need a ride. I can’t get a ride from you ever again. I can’t call you. I can’t see you.” I looked at my mother and Mike standing over me as I said this. My mother’s jugular pumped against her necklace. Mike kept swallowing, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

Ricky was drinking something. The sound of the ice tinkling in the glass made me thirsty. “Okay well just call me when you need a ride, but not too early, okay? Call me the night before,” he said. “And stop by later, will you please? I’m bored.”

“I can’t.”

“Bye honey.”

My only chance at a social life was to join an academic club. (I couldn’t play sports, and I had no real hobbies.) I had heard that the Spanish club might be arranging a trip to Mexico. Although the club was overseen by Mrs. Connor, who had such a droning voice and bad sinuses that she managed to rob the Spanish language of its passion whenever she spoke it, there was an advantage to joining: I knew almost no one in the club. Most of its six members were what Miss would call dorks, but none were dorky enough to be one of her victims. None of them was a neighbor or the offspring of a teacher, and so none of them would accidentally or indirectly inform my parents if I were to skip a meeting. When I let Mrs. Connor know I was joining, she came alive like a jumping bean and welcomed me on the spot.

Meetings were Wednesday nights. The first order of business was the planning of a great Cinco de Mayo party that would be both cultural lesson and fundraiser. There would be a piñata, salsa dancing, a PowerPoint presentation on the history of Mexico, and a menu of traditional Mexican foods. It would take place at Darcy Strothers’ house, an enormous mansion with two cement Labradors on the front porch, located on Capital Drive across from the Y. I had walked past it many times but never knew the girl who lived there. I volunteered to make rice and a chicken dish with garlic and jalapeños that Sam had taught me. Most of the other kids at the meeting seemed dumbfounded by my presence. At one point I was forced to throw dagger eyes at Darcy, who kept staring at me.

The Magic kids met in the cafeteria the same night. Even Darcy and the other Spanish geeks sneered at them as they passed the door of Mrs. Connor’s classroom. I situated myself as far out of sight of the doorway as I could, expecting Muffy to pass at any second. Finally I heard her voice, high and lilting and almost relaxed, become louder and louder and then softer and softer again. I’d never known her to sound so at ease.

The next meeting, Mrs. Connor told us, would be switched to Saturday. We would assemble at the school and head out for lunch in her minivan. Then we would pick out green, red, and white decorations for the party and plant fliers and posters all over town. We were supposed to ask all our friends and all our friends’ parents to attend and donate. It sounded like a lost cause to me.

I did not tell my parents that the second meeting had been switched. Instead, I said that the Saturday trip was an additional thing, and that we would still be meeting on the regular day. That Wednesday after school, I plodded toward Henry’s Ice Cream Shop on Calhoun and bought a bag of M&Ms. I sat at one of the booths and ate them one by one. Then I walked to Muffy’s.

The sky was a pinkish silver color, and the smell of singed cornflakes permeated the air. Muffy’s house was dark. I entered the screened-in porch, which was unlocked. In a wicker chair with an orange-striped cushion near the door to the outside, I sat and I waited. Within a few minutes, I could hear her voice drawing near. She was talking to herself, but I could not understand her. When she opened the screen door, I placed my foot in front of her and held my breath. Although the pain of her legs colliding with my ankle was terrible, the trip succeeded, and her body fell to the floor of the porch with a clatter. I jumped up triumphantly and stood over her.

“Yes!” I exclaimed, doing a sort of end zone dance. “Totally rocked you. Woo!”

Muffy rolled over and stared up at me in horror. “What are you doing in my house, you troglodyte? Get out of here now or I’m calling the police.”

Before she could move I pounced on her, straddling her pelvis. Instead of trying to push me away, she covered her face with her arms.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she said. “I swear my mother is coming home any minute…”

I grabbed her wrists and pinned them beside her head, amazed at how easy it was. Muffy wriggled and twisted under me, dragging the heels of her boots on the rug beneath us.

“What are you going to do, spit on me?”

“Maybe.” I was grinning uncontrollably now. I had never been more excited.

Muffy redoubled her efforts, and the pressure on my own wrists and hands became painful. I leaned over and held her arms down with all my weight, bringing my face close to hers. That smell—a combination of her shampoo and hard, iron-laden water—engulfed me, mixed in with sweat and a heady waft of fear. I licked my lips and pressed my mouth against hers.

At first she struggled against me, clamping her teeth shut as I attempted to snake the tip of my tongue between them. When I pulled my face away, she let out a gust of air. Her face was deep red. Seeing her mouth open, I came down again and kissed her in deep, searching strokes. Her body went limp under me. When I ran out of breath I broke from her, smile still tattooed on my mouth.

Muffy sniffled. “You look like the Cheshire cat.”

“You’re a robo-geek.”

I placed my lips on the side of her neck and began gentle suction, slowly moving my arms along hers, down over her shoulders to her breasts. I had never touched breasts other than my own. She wasn’t wearing a bra, although my mother would have said she could use one. At first, she just let her arms drift to her sides, but then suddenly she pushed me away.

“Don’t,” she said. “My mother. She’s coming home. She’ll see us. Please.”

The thought of being caught filled me with horror. Quickly I jumped up, and Muffy slowly rose to her feet and dusted off her clothes. She was wearing a typically odd outfit: a black knit dress over a long-sleeved purple T-shirt and striped tights. “Just come inside. We can talk in my room, okay?”

Muffy’s house was clean, but full of mysterious junk. Her mother collected large and interesting trash: ceramic bunnies and frogs, cracked birdbaths, gaudy hip-high candlesticks, upholstered chairs, glass sculptures, giant lamps. She supervised the greenskeepers at Leila Arboretum, and on the weekends cared for the gardens of various wealthy families in Lakeview. The house itself was a jungle, even more vast and variegated than my mother’s collection of plants, but ironically it was also more unkempt, with dead fronds and wilted blossoms crowding together in clumps. A spotted cat darted out, and Muffy scooped it up and kissed its whiskers before it writhed out of her grasp. She told me her mother knew she was gay, but wouldn’t allow her to date. Her father lived in Indiana and was rarely heard from. Her older brother went to Michigan State and studied journalism. So as long as her mother wasn’t around, and I could escape mine, I could have her to myself.

I had often dreamt of Muffy’s room. In reality, it was small, about half the size of mine, and very messy. Nailed to each wall were cast-iron baskets with red candles in them, well-burnt. No dresser or shelves, just her bed, a well-worn quilt, a desk strewn with more candles, a pair of long gloves, a purple top hat, a portable CD player, a kitten flip calendar, high stacks of papers and books and CDs, and various accessories: barrettes, ribbons, bracelets. Clothing and comics and books covered the floor. A small lithograph on the wall featured Alice confronting the smoking caterpillar. A full-length mirror resting against the wall was nearly covered with writing in black and purple marker. A picture of the cat was tucked in a corner, and on the corner of the frame hung a dilapidated hand puppet with a skull for a head.

Muffy’s stockings, I discovered, did not go all the way up. Halfway up her thigh, beneath the skirt of the dress, was dewy bare flesh. When I took off her panties—plain red cotton—she pushed me away and demanded, still suspicious, that I take off some clothes, too. So I removed my tank top, which I was wearing inside out anyway (the school had banned it because it depicted an Uzi in gold glitter), and pulled my shorts down over my sneakers. She nodded, as if to give me the go-ahead, and leaned on her hands against the door. However, when I stepped forward, we both heard the sound of her mother arriving. I couldn’t help laughing as we wriggled back into our clothes. Muffy begged me to be quiet and told me to leave out of the window.

I still recall some of the things that were written on Muffy’s mirror. Together they make a decent poem:

forgotten knots wrapped secretly inside your boots
vine-encumbered
labyrinth of nighted silence
smells like passion
things I want: chameleon skin, cat’s inner ear mechanism, snake tongue
some fierce thing replete with too much rage
in the supreme horror of that second I forgot what horrified me and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images

• • •

My mother tells me Muffy resides in Ann Arbor and works at an LGBT resource center. She lives with a girlfriend and is doing well. Ricky is still in prison but should be out in time for a new niece’s christening. My mother sent him a book of Robert Bly poems, and he wrote her immediately asking for more. Today she will send him Wendell Berry.

Now that Aaron has returned, I see the ways in which he is too young for me. We do not communicate. And yet I am happy he is home, talking to the TV and to the cat. When he talks, his large hands gesture in ways completely unrelated to what he is saying. He is constantly falling asleep with his computer open on his lap.

The Huron Valley LGBT Resource Center is on Packard Road in Ann Arbor. I know the city well enough, having lived in neighboring Ypsilanti as a student at Eastern. I feel this is a sign of some sort. A tenuous and strained communication between God and myself.

• • •

The Cinco de Mayo party could be called a success. In the end, Darcy’s parents—a Kellogg’s executive and an assistant principal—donated most of the money for a trip to Mexico City and Puerto Vallarta the following winter break. I was battered with compliments on the rice and chicken dish, including one from Darcy, who chucked me on the arm and said You’re all right! My mother and Mike were pleased that I had taken part, and Bea laughed for what seemed like the first time in weeks when Courtney broke the piñata. Courtney sulked through most of the festivities, especially the PowerPoint presentation, but by the end was enjoying herself. I noticed that she referred to me as her sister when she introduced herself to the other kids, and I felt proud. I found myself wishing Bea could approach one of the kids she didn’t know and talk to them the same way. Instead she clung to me and nibbled on tortilla chips the entire time.

Muffy and I skipped the next meetings of the Spanish and Magic clubs. We spent three hours together in her room, kissing nude on the bed until we became uncomfortably excited, at which time she opened a book of H.P. Lovecraft stories and began reading them aloud. Her body was softer than mine. Though I was taller than she was, our hips lined up. Her breasts were larger and less firm, with bigger areolas. Her feet and hands were perfect like a doll’s. Resting my head on her shoulder as she read, I reached for her pendant, mistaking it for the Star of David.

“You’re Jewish?” I interrupted.

“It’s a pentagram, goofball.” So it was.

“Do you believe in God?”

“I pray to the goddess of nature.”

“For real?”

“Yes for real.”

“I believe in God, but I think I love my family more than God. And I think that’s supposed to be a sin.”

“That’s why I don’t worship ‘God.’ Why worship something that tells you it’s wrong to love your family? Only a male god would compete for your love.”

“Are you going to prom?”

“Prom is a materialistic celebration of patriarchal culture.”

“Would you go with me if I asked?” I was laughing.

“Stop teasing me.” Muffy frowned. “That’s not nice.”

“You could wear a tux.”

“You’re a jerk.”

She went back to reading. Beneath the lull of her voice, I tried to conjure a memory of my grandmother, but there were so few. The sound of her rickety old blender. The smell of flour. The feel of the plastic beads we would use to make Christmas ornaments between my fingers.

I felt between Muffy’s legs, and soon the book fell to the floor.

•

To be on the safe side, we both made sure to attend the following week’s meetings. A large part of our excitement and joy seemed to come from knowing we shared a secret. We passed each other in the hallway without speaking, and yet something would pass between us—a spell that vibrated us both. We glanced and smiled during our classes together, too quick for others’ eyes to catch. When she passed papers back to me in English, I made a point of touching her fingers.

That weekend, Miss and Teddy were pulled over for speeding on I-94. The police found marijuana and open intoxicants in Teddy’s Chevy. Finally pushed to their limit, Miss’s parents enrolled her in a Christian summer school program for wayward kids called Miracle Camp.

“Go to Canada,” Eric suggested at lunch. “That’s where I’d go if my folks tried to send me someplace like that…”

“How long? I mean, aren’t you kind of old for summer camp? What would you do there?” I asked.

“Damned if I know and damned if I care. I’m not going. I’ll burn the house down before I do, and then we’ll all be going to camp…”

The next week Muffy and I skipped our meetings again. While we lay locked together on her bed, the afternoon fading away, I told her what had happened to Miss. I expected her to be cavalier or even happy about the disposal of her old enemy, but she wrinkled her brow instead.

“Your parents wouldn’t send you to that place if you got caught with me, would they?”

“I doubt it. Better you than Ricky probably…”

“You’re already in trouble though.”

“Well maybe, but I’m not going to waste my time worrying about it. You can’t just go around not doing what you want because you might get in trouble.”

Muffy rolled off the bed, crawled over lumps of clothes to the mirror, and plucked down the skull puppet. She crouched low for a moment, and suddenly its little face was peering at me over the side of the mattress.

“Patricia Barnes,” it said in Muffy’s lowered voice. “You will now be sentenced to three months hard labor at an oppressive Christian prison camp. Do you have any words to say in your defense?”

“Will you get back up here please, you moron?”

“Patricia Barnes,” it said. “I love you.”

•

Out of nowhere, I received a call from Jen. My mother allowed me to talk to her, telling me that it sounded like something was very wrong. Something was.

“Pootie,” Jen said, her voice full of mucus. “I’m pregnant.”

Suspecting a prank, I asked if she was serious. She begged me to come over. It was nearly seven, but Mrs. Goldman was at home, so my mother indulged me. When I entered Jen’s room, she was sitting on her bed in her prom dress. Black lace over nude satin. Strapless. (Eric had approved of mine: a short black velveteen with spaghetti straps.) Jen’s eyes were swollen to slits and her back was hunched into a C.

“I know you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you. I thought you hated me.” I sat next to her on the bed and petted her hair. After a moment, I asked what she was going to do.

“I don’t know. Probably keep it.”

“What about Chad?”

“I don’t know if it’s his.” Fresh tears poured forth, and she buried her wet face in my shirt. She told me she had talked to Sam, and he had denied the funeral sex. He was as infuriated with her as her mother.

“I’m sorry Pootie. I don’t know why I acted like such a bitch. You’re my best friend…” Jen was sobbing now, almost choking. “It’s just I get so jealous when you’re with Sam, and I’m afraid you’re only friends with me to be with him.”

“That’s not true.” Was it?

“I’m so sorry…”

“It’s okay Jen. Really. It’s no big deal. I would have been grounded anyway.”

“Not if my mom hadn’t opened her mouth.” Of course—that was how my mother had found out. I put my arms around Jen, and we rocked back and forth for a while, not speaking. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be pregnant, to face my mother and stepfather and father carrying a little Rodrigues inside me. An icy slush of dread washed over me, and I hugged Jen tight.

Our prom took place in the Stouffer Hotel downtown. I was surprised to be let out for the entire evening, even in the capable, platonic hands of Eric, whom my parents knew and liked. But I had not gotten pregnant, like Jen. I had not been arrested, like Miss. I had not been caught shoplifting at Lakeview Square, as Courtney had. By omission, I was granted a night of freedom.

When I put on my dress, my mother clapped her hands together and said, “Look at those gams!”

Bea said, “When you bend over everyone’s going to see your underwear.”

My mother and I agreed that Eric looked handsome and smelled wonderful. His tie was velveteen, like my dress, and he had chosen a tiger lily corsage. Before leaving, we posed for a few pictures in front of the fireplaces at both our homes and again in front of Eric’s mother’s car. I had told my mother I was going to accompany Eric and some other drama kids to a cabin on Goguac Lake, where adults would be chaperoning, but that was not what I would be doing. I had promised Muffy I would pay her a long visit as soon as prom was over.

The night went on and on. The dinner was bland and tepid. The DJ spun a glut of slow R&B songs, which Eric and I giggled through, alongside sporadic forays into old ’70s funk. When he played some tunes we remembered from childhood, like When in Rome’s “The Promise” and The Hooters’ “And We Danced,” Eric would drag me out onto the floor. Most of the time, however, we sat at the table and made caustic remarks about our classmates’ dresses.

Rio and DaShaun, however, looked like film stars. When they popped in, Rio ran over and embraced me while DaShaun chatted with his old pals in the senior class.

“Girl I miss you,” she said, and bit me softly on the shoulder.

“Hey!” She had never been so affectionate with me before.

She told me that she and DaShaun had booked a room in the hotel and invited me to come up and say hi after prom was finished. When she pronounced hi she put the gloved tips of her thumb and forefinger together and placed them against her pursed lips. DaShaun appeared and gave me a stunted hello before whisking her away for a dance. I quickly grew achingly bored and longed to leave. But Eric seemed to be having fun, joking around and dancing in rings with his drama club friends, so I stayed until the lights finally came on.

•

After a quick stop at Rio and DaShaun’s room upstairs, Eric dropped me off at Sir Pizza, where I’d told him I was meeting Ricky in secret. (Eric had done much stomping and groaning when I’d let him know I wasn’t coming to the cabin and the reason therefor. Trifling! Trifling Pootie!) From Sir Pizza, I walked to Muffy’s house and knocked on her bedroom window.

“Go away,” I heard.

“It’s me, stupid.”

“You’re late. You said you’d be here right after midnight.”

“Will you open the damn window, fool.”

She came to the window wrapped in her bedspread, and slid it up with her one exposed hand. I heaved myself in and tumbled onto the floor.

“You’re late,” she said. “You’re late and you reek of pot!”

“What are you whining for? I’m here now.” I pulled at the bedspread and brought her toward me. When I kissed her lips and nose, she didn’t respond.

“Did you have awesome good times at your precious prom?”

“No, it sucked,” I said. “Kiss me already.”

“It was certainly a lot of fun sitting here waiting for you like always.”

“Hey you said you didn’t want to go.”

“Well you could have not gone with me.”

“Will you stop crybabying and give me a kiss, or do I have to make you?”

“You’re being obnoxious.” She shuffled over to the CD player and pressed a button, and the Smashing Pumpkins began to play at medium volume. Then Muffy dropped the bedspread. Underneath she was wearing a sixties-style A-line dress in seafoam-green organdy. She opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a tiara, which she placed on her head. I put my hand over my mouth and doubled over laughing.

“I knew you would laugh at me,” she said, scowling. “It’s my mother’s dress.”

Still chortling, I walked over and put my arms around her waist. “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing near you.”

She put her head on my shoulder and we danced.

•

A Doll’s House opened during the last week of school. Eric played Torvald and Muffy played Christine. A complicated play for high school students, it had drawn numerous protests from parents who felt the material was too racy. This gave ticket sales an enormous boost. I found the play depressing, and Muffy’s part not large enough. Eric was astounding. I did not recognize him. The entire play I glowered, fidgeting, crossing and uncrossing my legs, prompting my mother, when it was over, to ask whether I was premenstrual. Actually, I had promised Eric I would attend the wrap party at his family’s restaurant, and I was full of pricks and nerves at the prospect of talking to Muffy in public.

My mother wished me the best of times, and when I told her I would be home at seven, she waved her hand at me. “Stay out until eleven if you want. I think you’ve been punished enough.”

And like that, my confinement was ended.

At the party, it was Eric who made the transition into public friendship with Muffy easy. He took me by the wrist and led me to her, then grabbed her by the wrist and shoved our hands together.

“Marisa, this is Poot—I mean Patricia. Patricia this is Marisa.”

“We know each other,” I said.

“Yes we’ve met.”

For the rest of the night we sat talking, an arm’s length apart. I told Muffy I didn’t understand the play, but she was great. She said she didn’t believe me about either. I told her I was no longer grounded. Her eyes bloomed.

“During the summer…” She stuttered softly, and her cheeks glowed red.

“I know right.”

“Promise me,” she whispered.

•

The last bell of the school year drew whoops of joy, and when the doors swung wide, a breath of sweetest summer met us all. In three weeks, the heat would become unbearable—a muggy Michigan jungle air would settle on the city—but June was mild and fragrant. I began working thirty-six hours a week at the library, and with the money was able to afford a modest amount of movies and records, and of the weaponry-emblazoned garments I preferred. Bea, now old enough, got a part-time job as a bagger for Felpausch. Miss, unfortunately, was shuttled away in the night by her parents. I didn’t get a chance to wish her luck.

I spent much of my time those first weekends with Muffy. Rio spent hers largely with DaShaun and rarely requested my company. Soon I convinced Muffy that lying out in the sunshine covered with oil was not ridiculous, and she introduced me to the comic book shop on Michigan Avenue. Nights I watched scary movies with Jen, who was beginning to show. She was morose and complained constantly about Sam. He was different. He was a mess. They didn’t know what to do with him. One night, when I dropped in with a copy of The Lost Boys as requested, I found the house empty and the door locked. The next day I was informed by my mother that Sam had come home very drunk, and at some point during the evening had tried to choke Jen to death.

Rio broke up with DaShaun toward the end of June, as the air was becoming dense and the Riverside Country Club pool less blue. Suddenly she was asking me to the mall, to the pool, to Meijer market for some aimless wandering—anything to pierce the crust of boredom. With Jen we could do little other than watch DVDs and play rummy, but Rio wanted to party.

Muffy and I had precious little time together, and she grew impatient at my outings with Rio. I pointed out that this was mostly her doing, as she was the one who insisted on not introducing me to her mother.

“You’re not one of my Magic friends. And you’re not in drama. She’ll suspect something.”

“Like what? That you’re friends with such a trashy girl?”

“You’re not trashy. You aren’t like your Neanderthal friends. I don’t know why you even associate with them.”

“You sound like my mother,” I said. “Listen. I want to go to South Haven for Fourth of July, and I want to bring Rio. And I want to bring you too.”

Muffy was removing a Type O Negative CD from its case. She stopped short and stared at her feet. “Why?”

“Because I love you.”

“No, why do you want to bring her?”

“Because she can get beer and a cooler, and we can get wasted,” I said. Her nostrils flared. “And because she’s my friend. She broke up with her boyfriend and she really wants to go.”

“I’m very perturbed right now.”

“Well what do you want me to do about it?”

“Why don’t you and Maria Rodrigues go and have a wonderful time.”

I jumped up from the bed and flew at her, pinning her to the wall by her arms—a method of seduction from which I still rarely deviated. Slowly I bent my head into her neck and then, when I felt her muscles relax, pinched her flesh with my incisors. She screamed Ouch! and pushed me away from her so hard I nearly fell backward onto the floor.

“You psychotic, stop doing that! You can’t do that to me all the time,” she said.

“Settle down.”

“Don’t tell me to settle down. In fact, do me a favor and get out.”

“No.”

“Get out.”

“Make me.”

“I can’t make you. You are a brute, you know that? You are a beast. You are the meanest, cruelest miscreant I have ever had the displeasure to know.”

“What’s a miscreant you mega-dweeb?”

“And stop acting dumb!”

“I’m not acting.”

“Yes you are. You pretend to be stupid so your stupid friends will accept you and in the meantime, you’re smarter than anyone I know. You could have a tremendous future ahead of you and every time you, as you so elegantly put it, ‘get wasted,’ you put it in jeopardy. Why? Why? Why?”

I paced in a circle, stomping over garments and crinkled comic books, and once I had rounded the room, I stepped up to Muffy, placing my face close to hers. In the loudest voice I could muster, I shouted, “Guess what? I already have a mother. And I don’t need another one. And when I do I will let you know. But I don’t. So stop judging me about everything!”

Muffy’s face broke. “I’m not judging you…”

“You are. And you don’t understand what it’s like to have real friends so you don’t know what it’s like to be loyal to them.”

“I have friends…” She began to cry.

“No. Your Magic geeks and those snotty drama bitches don’t count. Where are they, huh? Why don’t you hang with them outside of school? Because you and them are like Eric and me. You are in-school friends. But it’s summer now, and some of us still have people to see and things to do.”

“You’re so mean…why? Why are you… so… mean to me?”

“Okay. Stop crying please.”

I moved a patch of her hair aside and breathed into her ear, “Didn’t you hear me say I love you? Did you hear me?”

“Ohhh…”

“You’re coming with me. You have no choice, do you understand? So be ready.”

Rio was easier to convince. I told her and Jen that Muffy and I had made friends at Eric’s party after the play and that she was actually pretty cool.

“Yeah she is kind of cool, huh,” Rio said, chomping away on a radish from a veggie tray Mrs. Goldman had made.

“What?” Jen said. “Are you joking?”

I was equally shocked.

“She didn’t tell on us about that sewer thing,” Rio said. “That’s cool.”

“So you don’t mind if she comes to South Haven with us too?”

Rio looked skeptical, but I assured her that our sneaking a couple of beers wouldn’t cause a problem. Muffy would, as with the sewer incident, be discreet.

Jen shook her head. The bruises on her throat had faded into greenish smudges. “What the hell,” she said. “I get pregnant and everything in my life turns backwards.”

From this time on, Muffy, Rio, and I functioned as a threesome. Rio and I quickly put to rest her worries that we were lushes. In fact, our drinking was very infrequent: a couple of beers at night on the beach in South Haven, rum poured into a giant pop at the movies, a forty-ounce or two shared on Rio’s front porch. Muffy never partook, but Rio declared to me that she was more fun when we did, unlike Jen, who Rio had come to call “queen of the mopers.” It even seemed, after a while, that Muffy could see the humor in her own elevated language, such as when, at the pool, she referred to Rio tossing Laura Greenwood’s flip-flops into the garbage as a “ceremonious and symbolic gesture,” which was, of course, exactly what it was.

•

My eighteenth birthday fell on July 25, a Thursday. I called in sick to work and spent the entire day with Muffy. We went to Henry’s and shared a sundae, after which, owing to the oppressive heat, we watched old Tales from the Crypt episodes indoors. I did not drink, though Rio had given me, as a birthday present, a bottle of Hennessy, which I had never tasted, but which she assured me was delicious—one of DaShaun’s favorites. I did not call Rio or attempt to contact her, easy enough now that she and DaShaun had reconciled.

As evening closed in, Muffy and I lay on her bed, a rotating fan blowing our sweaty bodies dry. I sucked the salt from her collarbone, softening her up, because I had something to tell her that might upset her. Rio was planning an overnight trip to Cedar Point in Ohio. We would ride coasters all day and sleep in a Sandusky hotel at night, then drive back in the morning. Rio’s Aunt Marta would come with us, so there was no worry in terms of my mother and Mike’s rules. Muffy was of course invited—it was necessary in fact, because we would need an even number. Though she seemed an unlikely roller coaster lover, that wasn’t my worry. DaShaun was going to meet us there with Ricky. “And it’s not our fault or Marta’s fault either because oops—how did we know they were going to be there? What a coincidence! No worries, matey,” Rio had said.

Muffy sighed, as if waiting for something. Rolling on top of her, I kissed her throat. Then I told her about the plan. I didn’t love Ricky, I told her, which was not a lie. We were only friends, really, who hadn’t seen each other in a while. In truth, there were still moments when I missed him—his company, mostly. (Though the rest had not exactly been torture and there were times when my mind wandered mischievously in that direction.) Rio told me that he had learned to play guitar but could only play John Denver songs, and everyone in the family made fun of him. I had missed out on a rendition of “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” that had sent them all into hysterics. He was terribly bored and lonely, she’d implied.

At the news, Muffy began chewing her cheek, a habit she had picked up from me, and averted her eyes.

“Am I to believe you won’t be sleeping with this individual?” Muffy asked.

“Hell no. I mean hell yes. I feel sorry for him, that’s all. And this trip means a lot to Rio, too.”

“Maria is far too enamored with that DaShaun. It lacks dignity.”

“I want you with me this weekend.”

“Then stay here.”

“No. You come with us. With me.”

“I don’t like rides.”

“Okay well then don’t come,” I said, and sat up between her legs. “But I’m going.” I stood and hastily began dressing. Muffy rolled over and placed her head in her arms. “And I can’t promise I won’t sleep with him if you aren’t there, okay?” That would do it.

Muffy slid up onto her knees, her eyes aglow with rage. “I knew it. I knew you wanted to sleep with him. You liar.”

“I just told you so I’m not lying. I’m just saying…”

“You don’t love me. That’s why you’re a liar. You ogle boys all the time. You don’t care about my feelings. You are a monster.”

“I do love you.”

“You don’t. You like boys.”

“Yes I like boys. You knew that.”

It was true that Muffy had often had to endure my and Rio’s frank sexual comments about the boys at the pool and the beach, with their dripping Bermudas, shiny and browned and lean. We speculated about whose genitals would be hairier, whose would be more massive—tried to follow the small ravine that ran from their hip bones into the fronts of their shorts to the undulations and striations underneath. Rio would apologize to Muffy in those moments, to my embarrassment, but Muffy always dismissed her, saying she was just as capable of making objectifying remarks about the girls in their bikinis, but that she was above it.

“If I slept with some other girl, you wouldn’t tolerate it. You would leave me,” Muffy said.

The words leave me pried something open in me. I stopped buttoning by jeans and my arms fell to my sides. “So you’re going to dump me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well that’s what it sounds like.”

“I merely said that if I were to sleep with another girl…”

“Don’t even think about dumping me. Don’t even merely think it.”

“I don’t want to dump you. I just don’t want you to sleep with that man.”

“Then come with me.”

She did.

•

Sometime that August we all began wearing black eyeliner, thick and raccoonish on the edges of our lids, and black-red lipstick on our lips. It was Muffy who started this trend. I came over one afternoon to find her seated before her mirror, cross-legged, staring at herself. When I crouched and gently bit her scalp, I saw that she had taken liquid liner and applied it far too liberally. I gasped, because she looked beautiful, striking, older. Her hazel eyes were suddenly shockingly vivid.

“Do you like it?”

“Kind of.”

Her fingers swam in a pencil box full of assorted tubes and wands and pulled out an expensive-looking lipstick.

“This is called oxblood,” she said, and smoothed it over her lips. It was aptly named.

I sat facing her and presented my own lips. “Do me.”

She slowly applied the moist waxy substance to my lips and then kissed me, pressing our creamy lips together with a smacking sound. Then we both turned and looked at ourselves in the mirror. When I smiled, I noticed the dark lipstick made my teeth look very white.

“Can you do my eyes?” I asked.

“You needn’t humor me.”

“I’m not. I like it.”

The truth was I loved everything about her. The makeup was lurid and silly, perhaps, but I thought it looked tough. Only Muffy would have been brave enough to try it. The semi-independent films she took us to were always more entertaining than they sounded. Because of Muffy, Rio had begun a collection of anime graphic novels in spite of her long-time resistance to books. Muffy was cool, even if no one but me had realized it until now.

She lined my lids with the coal-black liquid, then blew gently over my eyes to dry it. By the end of the afternoon, blackberry-colored lipstick covered our bodies. My belly. Muffy’s neck. My breasts. Muffy’s toes. Her feet were truly perfect, clean and tiny and soft as silk. Typically, when I put them in my mouth she squealed and begged me to stop (meaning, I’d discovered, not to stop), but on this occasion, she just sighed deeply and stared at me, her foot slipping from my hand.

She had been acting very solemn ever since the trip to Cedar Point, and I was fearful that it wasn’t just the looming specter of school. At the park, she hadn’t joined us on any of the coasters, and Ricky had been in an affectionate mood, picking me up and spinning me at the gate, raking his fingers through my hair as we stood in line, attempting to tickle me.

He insisted on staying with Muffy and me in our room, and though I told him that we were only going to be friends, he kept reminding me that I was eighteen now. That I was free to do what I pleased. Then, while I was brushing my teeth before bed, he began vigorously rubbing my back—stiff and bunched from hours of standing followed by being yanked into and out of the grip of gravity. My muscles, my nerves, and my skin had memories of this man’s body. They wanted to relive them. We were noiseless, save for the rustle of sheets and my breathless moans, which I buried in Ricky’s chest hair. Muffy (it appeared) had long been dreaming. When Ricky fell asleep, I crawled in next to her, cold with shame, and wrapped my arms around her waist. The next morning Muffy had said nothing, and I assumed I had gotten away with it, but the feeling had lingered, dark and stormy, that I was losing her.

Yet, more than ever, Muffy seemed willing to participate in the sort of adventures Rio and I enjoyed. She rode in DaShaun’s car with us when we egged Tori Winchell’s car, stopping to write “whore” and similar epithets on the windows with our plum-dark lipsticks. She came to Meijer and strolled through the aisles with us, listening to us coo at the rows and rows of makeup and toys and guns. She took sips of our beer and other alcoholic treats on the occasions when we could obtain them, and sips were all it took for her to appear to be sloshing drunk.

When we went to see The Crow: City of Angels at West Columbia 7, Muffy drank half of the rum and Hennessy concoction Rio and I had manufactured in a vat of cola. She made her ensuing intoxication worse by spinning herself around in the parking lot on the way to the car, forcing DaShaun to catch her before she tumbled to the pavement. In the back seat, she fell asleep in my arms as Rio and DaShaun argued bitterly in the front. She insisted I come home with her and climb in the window, even though it was far too early for her mother to have gone to bed. When I crawled inside, she was struggling heatedly to unhook her bustier, which she had worn under a ragged mohair sweater.

“Here dummy,” I said, and made my way over to help her. Her breasts bounced happily when they were released, and Muffy placed my hands on them.

“I want you so bad…” she said.

I hushed her and pushed her back onto the bed, then knelt at the edge and reached under her skirt, a very long one that seemed to be made of patches, and removed both of her tall boots. I went to remove her panties, but found the skirt an encumbrance. She immediately sat up and reached behind her to unzip it while I kissed each thigh impatiently. In that moment, Muffy’s mother, still awake and, as Muffy had often implied, enormously inconsiderate of her privacy, knocked on the door and opened it at the same time. When she saw us she immediately backed out and shut it again, wailing in apology (Oh my goodness sorry I’m so sorry I’m sorry…) while I, horrified, flung open the window and threw myself into the humid maroon night.

It was only an instant, no more than ten seconds, but that woman’s voice, and the sound of that door swinging open and—whoosh, slam—shutting again would echo in my memory for years to come. I ran as fast as any other kid could run that night, to my house. So many times I had fallen behind: at the sewer, toilet papering at Halloween, escaping police at an illicit party. But this night I ran faster than I knew possible.

• • •

Marisa Snow, aged twenty-eight, is on the phone behind the counter at the Resource Center. Her hair is piled into a bun on top of her head, with a pencil run through it. When she sees me, she blinks, squints, and blinks again, then drops the phone and runs out from behind the counter, bumping her hip (they have become quite a bit wider). Her arms come crashing around me and mine embrace her in return. Her smell is different. Different shampoo. Different water.

“I can’t believe it,” she says. “I can’t believe it’s you.”

• • •

For an agonizingly long week after being discovered by her mother, Muffy and I did not see each other. I waited for the phone to ring at home, imagined my mother’s ashen face when Mrs. Snow detailed what she had seen. But the only phone call came from Muffy herself, and I thought, at last, that everything would be fine. She implored me to come over, saying it was urgent. I half walked, half sprinted to her house. Upon entering her room, I collapsed in her arms and brought her face to mine for a kiss, but she pushed me away and nervously placed her desk chair against the door under the knob. I sat on the bed and caught my breath, letting out a giggle. She paced back and forth, biting her nails, another habit she’d gotten from me. Once I could breathe normally again I announced, “Well I’m horny. Who else in this room is?”

“No. I can’t do it.”

“Then just sit there and I’ll do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Hey, get over here.” Something in her voice, an ice bridge, hung off her words, prickling my skin.

“No Patricia. I can’t do this.” She drew her hands back and forth between her body and mine. “I can’t do us. I can’t do you and me anymore.”

“What do you mean?” But I knew. I felt myself crack open, deeper and wider.

“I love you. I love you so much, but you are… are… abominable! You are just… cruel and unfeeling and unthinking! As long as I am with you I am in danger.”

“What are you talking about, you big drama queen? Cut it out, will you.”

“And you… you don’t care. I drank because of you. I’m an accomplice to any number of crimes. But I can’t continue to drag myself into some abyss with you…”

“Don’t say that,” I said. Tears pressed my throat.

“No. I am not going to condone any more of your despicable behavior and then allow you to treat me like… garbage…”

“Don’t say it.”

“I’m sorry, we have to break up. This is over.”

“No.” I was crying now. I walked over and put my arms around her, sobbing into her breast.

“I’m sorry. Please go.”

I stood up straight and looked at her, waiting. She looked down at her shoulder.

“You can’t do this to me,” I said.

My rage whirled around me, like wind in a tunnel, howling and screaming and cold. Perhaps I should have slapped her then. Kneed her in the stomach. But I did not. Instead I climbed out the window and lurched home, letting the hole grow wider until it had no edge.

•

I called her several times, but Muffy was determined not to have any contact with me. I ignored all other calls and stayed mainly in my room, reading and listening to music. At night I cried and cried. My appetite disappeared. Food tasted like poison. One Saturday night, Courtney made a remark about the way I ate that implied I had an eating disorder. She had been learning about anorexia in health class. I replied that if she had a problem with what I ate, she could relocate. Then I flipped her off.

“Eat that,” I said. “And clean up the bathroom once in a while, why don’t you? Just because you have sticky fingers doesn’t mean the rest of us have to.”

“Okay, Patricia,” Mike said blandly. “You’re excused.”

“What on earth is going on with you?” my mother asked. I pushed back my chair and went to bed, imagining all the ways blood might spill.

The night before school started, my mother announced that Marisa was on the phone. I tore out of my room, where I’d been lying in the dark contemplating evil, and took the phone. It was Rio. She told me that Miss had come home pregnant. There were no morning-after pills at Miracle Camp. She and Jen would be attending night school and working toward their GEDs, and would receive their degrees months before I would. Then, before I could beg her not to, she put Ricky on the line. His greeting, Sweeeetiee, what’s happening… brought me to a gush of tears, so violent and unwieldy it pulled me apart. Ricky flew into a panic.

“Don’t… don’t do that Pootie. Please. I don’t like it…”

I hung up.

•

The start of school was like waking from a pleasant dream and being told we would not sleep again for nine months. We were all clouded over and twitchy with the remains of summer, but no one was more haunted than me.

I wouldn’t even make it through one day.

What I remember most was pain. Pain like nails driven into my hands and wrists—a noisy, hot pain. I had hurled Muffy against the wall so many times in the throes of desire I thought nothing of doing that to start. The moment her body collided with the lockers, my hands, which had for so many hot afternoons caressed and gently searched her flesh, balled into fists and began pounding her face, her chest, and her head in sudden, virulent strikes. I will not say I couldn’t control them. This was a case of mind over matter to outdo them all.

The joints of my hands screamed in ruthless agony. I could feel them disintegrating, and yet I willed them to continue as Muffy slid to the floor and tried to crawl away. She got away from my hands only momentarily, only to meet the tip of my sneaker head-on. When she collapsed, I set my hands to work again. Already broken, mangled, exploding with pain, I demanded their continued co-operation. Blood poured from Muffy’s mouth and nose. When I caught a blurry glimpse of her face at last through the red veil over my eyes, she wore an animal look of shock and terror and confusion. The taste of blood washed in, a rotting in my mouth.

In the end, I, not Muffy, ending up sitting in the emergency room at Leila Hospital. Her lip was bruised and split, one eye swollen shut, her nose bloodied. I had two broken metacarpals and two fractured proximal phalanges, and took three stitches on the inside of my mouth where I had bitten open my cheek. Following the treatment for my injuries, I was held in the Emergency Psychiatric Unit until a doctor and a social worker had seen me. Both declared me severely depressed. This they concluded from my silence, which is all I gave them.

The school’s officials deliberated and decided not to expel me. My stepfather and my mother met with the principal, along with Muffy’s mother, in the school office, to negotiate the terms of my punishment. At the least, I figured, my parents would take me out of Central and enroll me at St. Philip’s, the local Catholic academy, for the remainder of my schooling. Muffy’s mother certainly recognized me from that night after the movie. She had never called my mother. Now I supposed she wished she had. Her eyes were watery and dim. She was silent for a while, then put her head in her hands and told the principal that what was done with me was his decision. The principal informed me that Muffy had begged them not to suspend me. She knew I would not do this ever again. I swore it was true, and my heavily bandaged hands testified on my behalf. I could not dress myself, feed myself, brush my teeth or wash my hair, much less assault someone with my hands. In the end, they agreed on a week-long suspension, followed by six weeks of in-school suspension, and I was to see the school psychologist once a week for an hour for an indefinite period.

• • •

I never meant to hurt you. I’m so regretful of the way I mistreated you. I hope you can forgive me.

The beginnings of wrinkles beneath her eyes. I hope you can forgive me.

My glass refilled. I was ashamed of you—the person I loved!

I brutalized you…

Do we have this conversation? Am I me or am I her?

• • •

The day the casts were removed, Ricky played “O Holy Night,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” and “Do You Hear What I Hear?” on the guitar in our living room. Though it was only September, he had ventured from John Denver to Christmas songs and was anxious to try his skill out on my family. Ricky had been terrified to leave me alone following the incident, and had driven by the house so many times that Mike finally asked him to come in, at which point he darted over and gathered me in his arms. It occurred to me that I could cry in front of exactly two people in my life: Bea and Ricky. Again and again he ventured into our house, to the chagrin of Mike and my mother. It started with his delivery of an electronic toothbrush. Another time my mother walked in at lunchtime and discovered Ricky in the kitchen, feeding me a Speeds cheeseburger, rotating it so I got the best bites. Eventually he became a fixture, an extra set of hands. My parents had surrendered.

It was a motley bunch there in the living room, circled around a plate my mother had piled with grapes and cheese and pretzel twists. Bea and my mother wearing the same befuddled expression—questioning the whys and wherefores of this dusky young man’s presence in their house. Courtney sulky and indignant and grounded again. Mike singing along merrily, Do you know what I know? And myself, hands pale and wrinkly but not forgetful. Suddenly my mother placed her hand over her mouth and erupted in laughter. Bea started singing along in spite of herself, her face splotchy red and her voice beautiful. Courtney had taken to wearing dark red lipstick and thick black eyeliner, too. She rolled her eyes and made obscene gestures in the corner. Mike, who was butchering the lyrics, plucked a grape from the bunch on the plate and whipped it at her head.

• • •

The ankle bracelet is removed before Thanksgiving. I make love to Aaron noisily in my mother’s house, his hands on my abdomen like vines growing slowly up a wall to the sun. Is he him or is he her?

I never meant to hurt you…

When you were hurt, when you were threatened…

Somewhere along the line I learned that to love someone is to break them down, to beat them into submission. Where did I learn that?

There you go, pretending you don’t know something when you do.

—

Ann Stewart was born and raised in southern Michigan. She is now a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she also teaches English.

This story is also available as a .pdf.

After the Thunderstorm, 2005, from The Prodigal Son

At Length: You have stated elsewhere that the two main themes of your photography are reality and communication. Can you expand on that?

Marc Baruth: Reality is always mere allegation, and in my works, I absolutely deny constructed reality, which may at best be found in the representation of a tiny, actually photographed element. From this accumulation of small, ‘real’ elements comes something which presents itself as reality or at least something clearly defined, like a landscape painting. With the recognition that this is not the case comes the recognition of some sort of ‘deceit,’ of a disturbance in the communication between author and spectator.

This flawed form of communication can be seen in New Morning (in the relationship between humans and humans) and The Prodigal Son (in the relationship between humans and nature). In the latter series, there is no communication left at all.

AL: The Prodigal Son is inspired by and clearly references the painter Peter Paul Rubens. Why is this?

MB: When I was looking for a diploma topic in 2005, only the two aspects of ‘landscapes’ and ‘digital manipulation’ were fixed. It also seemed appropriate to look towards classic painting, partly because New Morning had already referenced the traveling painters of the Renaissance.

Rubens came into play because he is a significant factor in the self-marketing of the town of Siegen (Germany)—without having ever actually lived and worked here. Siegen is merely his birthplace. To me, this kind of marketing always felt slightly desperate, and I wanted to address that in The Prodigal Son too—even if just on a secondary level.

The images of the series are composed of individual photographs taken in Siegen and in Flemish Brabant, the region in which Rubens spent the last years of his life, and where he painted most of the landscapes that inspired my pictures.

Cows, Shepherds and Duckhunters, 2007, from The Prodigal Son

AL: Do you feel you have any special affinity with Rubens, having been born in the same town of Siegen?

MB: Not with Rubens himself, and not necessarily with his complete work either. I certainly have an affinity with his late-period landscapes, and I understand the way in which the hard working people of the country must have made an impression on the diplomat Rubens in the last years of his life, to the extent that this topic became his passion.

I never wanted to move to a bigger city; it has always been more important to me to live close to nature, especially the woods.

AL: What is your response if someone asks why you reference historical paintings and not historical photographs?

MB: Because I greatly appreciate classical paintings in spite of having studied photography. When looking at a picture or painting, I want to be drawn into it, I want to be told a story and to be able to continue it. Many old works of art are incredibly detailed, allusive and referential, and I’ve always enjoyed them a lot because of that.

Another important aspect is the opportunity to remove the boundaries between painting and photography. I can use the individual pictures I take for my works like painters use their color palette.

Also, I have a tendency to lose interest in things that I have not discovered, and become fascinated with, by myself. Unfortunately, the history of photography is—in part—one of these things. I will not deny its significance, but it does not interest me to the same extent that classical painting and large sections of other contemporary arts do.

AL: Which photographers inspire you?

MB: That’s a tough one—I find greater inspiration in classical painting or contemporary art in various media. Jake & Dinos Chapman and Paul McCarthy are artists whose work I regard very highly. I don’t consider them provocative; rather, I admire the way they integrate references from the history of art and culture, and transform these into something personal.

Evening, 2005, from The Prodigal Son

AL: Your photographs are at once seamless, yet they exhibit numerous visual signs pointing to their artifice. The balance between the two must be difficult to achieve. What is your process of making the images and decision-making, in terms of your use of scale, light and the different components?

MB: I deliberately distanced myself from the original with regard to aspects like scale and light, and relied more on my intuition. I chose the individual elements for their effect and flexibility; aspects like focus and a photo’s scale in relation to the other elements were ignored. The resulting impact of the whole image surprised, amused and confused me equally. Ultimately, it felt ‘right’ and could not be classified at first glance.

Ultimately, I want the viewer to become increasingly aware of the ‘flaws’ in the picture as his spatial distance from it decreases.

On a technical level, I do appreciate mere detailed depiction that cannot be recognized as artifice, but it frequently lacks the storytelling element. I miss the areas of contact.

My works do not always develop in the same way, but most of the time, the process begins with the collection of images which may be used later on. For The Prodigal Son, these images were only landscapes painted by Peter Paul Rubens, for New Morning, only renaissance status portraits; for my current works I am working with a variety of influences for the first time.

Collecting is followed by sketching, attempting different color schemes, and assembling individual, re-usable elements.

With The Prodigal Son, I took great care to follow the original’s composition as precisely as possible, as that was the only way which could result in the confusion/vexation that I have described.

The Avenue, 2005, from The Prodigal Son

AL: How long did it take to complete The Prodigal Son and what were the main challenges?

MB: It took close to 6 months to complete. Certainly, the greatest challenge was the pictorial formulation of a convincing topic, and the subsequent balancing of direct and subtle depiction.

It may sound strange, but I don’t really like taking pictures. I mostly photograph ‘in one piece,’ within a fixed, manageable period of time. Usually, this doesn’t take long, and then I can focus on doing what I prefer by far: collecting, sketching, and working digitally.

New Morning #7, 2002

AL: Your earlier series, New Morning, is quite different from The Prodigal Son, yet you have maintained an interesting color palette between the two which connects them visually. How else do they connect?

MB: With New Morning, the co-author of this series, Bozica Babic, and I chose the color palette deliberately to achieve a cooler, starker impression which at the same time, possesses a certain patina that refers to its precedents in classical painting. Here, the ambivalence of what is being depicted and the mode of depiction was very important, too.

For The Prodigal Son, I aimed for a similar coloring, which radiates a certain lifelessness as a result of being almost monochrome. It was not supposed to be too ‘comforting.’ More apparent similarities between the two series are the fact that both were processed/manipulated digitally and have similar topics.

AL: With an expanded field of technological tools, there appears to be a resurgence in the practice of photo assemblage. Where do you see our work within this context? Will your future projects continue existing themes and use of assemblage?

MB: I find it hard to say where I see my work. It certainly does not show anything completely new, but I do think that it may be different from similar series/works due to the ambivalence I mentioned earlier.

After completion of the new series Old Land—which is not too dissimilar from The Prodigal Son, I would like to focus a lot more on the reduction of the individual elements. I have just begun with just that in The Hermit’s Cell—and I believe that this could be a rewarding experiment.

The works following Old Land will also have reduced amounts of references to existing works of art.

AL: In an ideal world, what response do you hope for from people when they see your photographs?

MB: To be honest, I hope that people/the viewers enjoy the pictures on the one hand, and on the other perhaps recognize their haunted quality.

The Hermit’s Cell, 2010, from Old Land

AL: Your most recent image The Hermit’s Cell shows a slight darkness in emotional tone, as well as a sense of movement. Is this an indication of the direction your work will be taking in the future? How has the overall concept of your work altered in this new image?

MB: Yes, The Hermit’s Cell defines the direction. As mentioned earlier, the pictures are now based on a variety of influences and references, such as private photos, film stills and a number of classical works. The images’ considerably more cramped composition and the reduction of elements are important here.

In spite of this, the picture appears to be denser and more self-contained, and to have much more plasticity and depth.

The images are not about variation of individual elements, but about the multiplication of very few elements. As a result, there is a kind of movement in The Hermit’s Cell which, in this case , is also a result of the picture’s composition.

Thematically and imagery-wise, the new pictures will be darker than The Prodigal Son, although parts of that series already hinted at such a direction. The deaths of my parents certainly play a (subliminal) role, and places we visited together when I was a child can be found in the basic natural elements—most of which were made in the Alps of Southern Bavaria.

AL: What are you working on now?

MB: Right now, I’m working on the next picture in the Old Land series, which will be based on Carl Blechen’s picture The Building of the Devil’s Bridge, amongst other things. The ‘material,’ i.e. the reduced individual elements, will consist almost entirely of different stone and rock formations.

Additionally, I’m currently working on further sketches, and their presentation as part of a group exhibition at the end of the month.

To see more work by photographer Marc Baruth, please visit his website. All images © Marc Baruth.

Unable to pass through water           our voicesleave the world of driftingship hulls             crab jaws                   a water ski salted by coral.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

And Newport—city lights strung together for miles
white out                  where the city ends                    and a new one begins
where the coast ends                     and inland begins
where night ends and dim begins.

I measure coast by salt-painted housesI measure a day by how far we wade

We wade to Anchorage
or a stone’s throw,

we wade inland, fifty-four miles—

those urchins are stones.Those days are porch lights.

The red lines on these rocks mean the property
was underwater once,                         even though
we are miles from the sea. This is still sea floor,
this is still.                                Now

in a white light on a dusty roadyou can see specks of earthin the air.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

—I’ll give you five acres of security
and a penny to put in water. You’ll
get a fence made of driftwood.

You’ll wade in the creekthe one leak                   I let through.

And the dimes are chattering
in a waistcoat
and the women grow silent
in a convenience store.

–Silence becomes you, youin white you’ll shine in white—

White like the ocean sometimes
in a storm. Like

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

His Kingdom come
to the surface. Silt-shining
on whale skin.
Now only body
spread out across black pebbles
on shore with people

called here by the smellthat reaches for miles—

the smell that passes through shop windows
and your nose pinched closed.

The children keep
pouring buckets of sea water
on the whale’s skin.

A ritual                                 they rememberfrom other whales           that landed in their world.

The man in yellow shorts—
we watched goose bumps peek out
between folds of hair on his legs
as he watched the whale.

He called the whale dead.

Of his legs in the weather, of the dead skin oranging
the wind peels
the flesh as it would sand
if it had a dune—

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–And we watch the wind shape the dirtas it shapes the body now.

And the salt water
tries        to fill the spaces between stones
before it turns away again, taking with it
that black                as the wet shine
turns stones the color of the sky.

Too easy to pass through flesh—
throwing a stone
makes a hole in the whale’s body.
I should have been stone.I should have sea legs.

What could make you rise? Is there a song
that could make you
die?           Rise

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–so fast from the deep waterto escape a ship trying to seewith sonar. Rise too fast

the bends
punctuating the whale’s body.
Too fast to survive.

And in the basin—
water appears in the pipes
and fills the bowl,
bowl made to be empty
and made to be full.

Or a lip of a glass bottle,drunk, named after what we did.Taken into the body, the liquid becomes me,those red faces, the stumble. No.Where’s the door for the skin?

When you waded into me—
night on the Pacific,did you know the ocean could catch fire?
A sink can catch fire.

We were kids. We kept a dead whale wet.
As a prayer or message
sent from the place it won’t get back to—

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Pray in your chamber, having shut the door,
I mean pray in your storage room.
Forgiveness in the towel closet.

For the kind of sonarthat pushed a whale here.For not trespassing.The ocean doesn’t pick its borders
the way we do. Our lungs sink and expand
when air visits.
Put no ash on the face.

It’s hard to stay underwater.Always rise like the voice, riselike the whale. The neighbor,

her work done. She closed the store.After sixty years in air
her heart stopped in her apartment.Dirt stripped from earthby the shovelful. By the shovelful,we hide her with dirt.

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Twenty years ago and walking
around one city block
you told me                            all the oceans                      would dry up soon.
I imagined still scales
and fish spines caught in wind,
endless beaches
where pebbles grow smaller to sand                              grow larger to stone
to cliff.

Suppose the seas rise tomorrow—gone are the cliffs
the driftwood
gone is the whale body                              gone home.
Back to the deep water                              submerged
and merged           once more                   the sun
warming the water, the water coloring the sky
the water covering the land
and uncoveringthe whale body.

Who was buried in a cliff wall
by Landsmen Construction,
imported dirt for what the stones don’t cover.

Can I make anything without dividing youfrom me? Suppose I’mnever old. Suppose the sea was a fountainspilling on gray hills.Emptying streetlights—

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You by the stove.          It must be winter.
You filling it with driftwood and matches.
You and I in the tool shed this time
mumbling.
Our clothes in a pile,this time                      the lamplight           the sea wind passing
through cracks in the wall. I say the word—
you—      passes out of my mouth        you
and into your ears,
the blue word, the shade of the sea.

And the navy ship called out to seewhat hid beneath. The sonarchased him to the surface.These sounds we make
to see beneath the water
turn the color of water.
These sounds we make
could call a whale from its world.










Laura Christina Dunn’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fugue, Alligator Juniper, The Bear Deluxe, Camas, Touchstone, Zero Ducats and California Quarterly. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Montana. Originally from Oregon, she lives in New York City.