, Author at Post Road Magazine

Recommendation for Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker

by Emily Carr

Lately, I’ve been asking writers I respect if they’ve read anything in the last year that they think everyone should read. A book that, given our limited amount of time on this planet, simply Must Be Read—regardless of whether everyone’s going to like it, learn from it, etc. I’ve been asking this question partly because I have an answer: Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker: a Novel, which broke my heart open in all the right ways.

Why? To explain why I love this novel so much would be reductive: like saying I love my partner because he’s smart, has a good sense of humor, and is willing to clean up after me. These things are true, but as we all know, you can’t quantify love. For the purposes of this recommendation, however, I will attempt to get specific, and list four reasons you should read Heartbreaker. (But before I do: please, please, just read the novel and see for yourself. I promise it will be better that way.)

#1: A recent LitHub article titled “11 Books for Adults Featuring Talking Animals” inspired me to curate a reading list composed of literary fiction that incorporates an animal perspective in a way that’s nuanced, complex, and three-dimensional—novels that let the animals speak for the animal, that get at what Joy Williams really means when she lists “an animal within to give its blessing” as the fourth essential attribute of the story. Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker was #7 on Lithub’s list; Emily Temple writes: “This novel has three narrators: Pony, a girl; Supernatural, a boy; and Gena Rowlands, Pony’s dog. The three live in the Territory, a place no one leaves—until someone does. It is, as is also true in everyday life, the dog who knows the most about what’s really going on.”

The novel is, indeed, broken into three sections, and told from three perspectives: Billie Jean’s pre-teen daughter, Billie Jean’s dog, and Billie Jean’s teenage lover, who turns out to be her husband’s illegitimate son. The perspectives layer, like a palimpsest or film that’s been exposed twice. We figure out what’s happened—why Billie Jean first fled to and then fled from the Territory—as one perspective builds on another. As Temple explains, the dog’s point of view is crucial, and an important reminder that, while we assume we are alone when spending time with our pets, they are in fact paying attention and we are never, in fact, truly alone.

#2: You might be wondering “what is the Territory?” The Territory refers to the legendary far-northern reaches of Canada, those places you can only reach by driving a hundred miles or so over a frozen lake. The Territory is populated by a cult that settled there in the 1980s. The story takes place as the first generation is exiting middle age; the leader has died (mysteriously, of course); and the cult members have had to improvise to keep the community afloat fiscally (via selling their children’s blood to the outside world). No one comes out. No one comes in. As a consequence, there are plenty of love triangles, love affairs, incest, and illegitimate children. Despite this premise, the people, the place, the compromises, the affairs, and the children have depth and breadth and Dey treats the situation without judgment; she draws us into the community so we can experience it from the inside out.

In a recent Instagram post, Dey writes: “I read many FLDS [Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints] cult survivor accounts when I was writing Heartbreaker. This photograph is from Rachel Jeffs’ ‘Breaking Free.’ The pastel line up of girls, soon to be made wives, under a neutral sun. It is one of the most sinister images I have ever seen. What is left when you are forced to give up your moral and physical agency in the name of God? Lorrie Moore writes: ‘Terrible world. Great sky.’”

#3: My recent reading spree has also, purely incidentally, involved contemporary fiction that focuses on mothers and their estranged daughters, or mothers who estrange their daughters, or mothers who have, with all of the best intentions, done motherhood “wrong,” or mothers who have, without quite meaning to, failed their daughters. I’ve been suffering from work-related stress and indulging in genre fiction, so most of these plots have all of the melodramatic gracelessness of reality television. Most of these mothers were abused, and in turn, become abusers, often of the passive-aggressive sort. Mostly, I (though my own relationship with my mother is, for reasons both personal and systemic, fraught) empathize with these mothers. Mostly, I get angry because I think that reductive narratives of blame and abuse don’t help us daughters, as we try to be both ourselves and mothers in our own rights. Mostly, what I want is story that turns this narrative INSIDE OUT.

The plot of Heartbreaker, for example, hinges on a thirty-three-year old mother who ran away from mostly absent, wealthy parents as a teenager, re-named herself Billie Jean, had a brief but intense love affair with the eighteen-year-old boy Supernatural whose true origins are unbeknownst to her, gets pregnant, has the baby, gives up the baby, deals with some more baby- and lover-related tragedy, and, in utter despair, flees, abandoning her fourteen-year-old daughter, Pony Darlene. (The names! Oh, the beautiful, heartbreaking names!) Later, Billie Jean recounts the story of nearly hitting a bison in the night. “You know the truth when you look into the eyes of something wild,” she concludes.

Despite this technically accurate yet completely misleading and melodramatic summary, Heartbreaker is, in fact, a nuanced exploration of mother-daughter relationships: all of the ways we get it right and get it wrong and have to be willing to start over, again and again.

#4: Advance praise on the dust-jacket of the hardcover includes Leslie Feist, who writes, “I want Van Halen to write the soundtrack and the Coen brothers to make the movie.” Lauren Groff is a “giant fan” of “Claudia Dey’s wild brain” and Sheila Heti says that Heartbreaker gave her “chills all of the way through. “Also,” Rivka Galchen writes, “it has one of the most awesome dogs in literature…”

All of this is true, and all of it is, necessarily, reductive. If I were invited to write an endorsement, I would say, “this novel is for the heartbreakers and the heartbroken, for the new hearts and the old hearts, the hearts we sometimes have to hold together, and the hearts that hold us together. By which I mean: this novel is for EVERYONE. Please read it immediately.”

Emily Carr writes murder mysteries that turn into love poems that are sometimes (by her McSweeney’s editors, for example) called divorce poems. These days, she’s Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the New College. Her newest book, whosoever has let a minotaur enter them, or a sonnet—, is available from McSweeney’s. It inspired a beer of the same name, now available at the Ale Apothecary. Emily’s Tarot romance, Name Your Bird Without a Gun, is forthcoming from Spork. Visit Emily online at www.ifshedrawsadoor.com or on Instagram as ifshedrawsadoor.

Forgetting Everything I Know

by Marston Hefner

Everyone agreed in the neighborhood that she was the best. She was the beauty. How could she let everyone know she was nothing but a pile of shit? Oh, well. Nothing, really. She did everything perfectly. Not a thing wrong with her. No conflicts. Oh, all the men loved her. Her boss especially. She was such a hard worker. How was it possible to still be beautiful at forty years old? How was it possible when you had two children?

Everything coming easy to you entitled you to a few things. The first was praise. The second was recognition of your beauty. The third was a small but imprecise aching indicating that one was hungry for something one did not know of and that one wanted to reach this place by the end of one’s life. It was what caused people to fall in love. It was what caused people to go into the present moment. It was that insatiable itch that made her that much more interesting. That much more human. She cried at night. Did you know that? She cried when no one was looking because she was perfect and it was sad to be perfect in your imperfections. The itch could not be scratched.

She only knew there was something completely wrong. Eventually she cried in front of her husband in the marital bed who handled the situation terribly. Then she cried at the dinner table in front of her children. There were long bouts of silence in the household. She found it difficult to go and be productive. To go to work became a chore. It was just depression. Did that make her more perfect? More human? More down to earth? She was getting older. Her age was taking a toll. She started smoking cigarettes. She wanted to be closer to death, desired for things to be finished. Here. This is your life. Did it make you proud to be beautiful?

What was it that pained her? Why was she crying now in the bathroom? The only light on in the house. Her husband asleep. Her children breathing light steps in their dreams. The more she asked the less clear it was. She wanted sleep. No. She wanted death. No. She wanted fame. No. She wanted rest. No. She wanted everything. Yes. Everything in the world handed to her. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Limitless growth wasn’t the answer. She needed a stopping point. Someone to tell her this is enough. Point to her children. This is enough. Point to her husband. This is enough. Point to her house. This is enough. All of it is enough.

The twins in the bed did not stir. Perhaps they could go to her eyelids while she slept, place their fingers gently on them and announce that everything was OK. There was no need to cry anymore. Everything that would happen would happen. Everything that did not happen was meant to be. All that we wanted was part of being human. The hunger never goes away. The children knew hunger. They wanted As. They wanted to be the best at the sports they played. They knew it. Knew it in their skin. In their genes. They were never happy either. They would touch her eyelids and tell her to rest. Rest for a week. Childhood is not like dreaming, they’d say. Go into a coma. Bang your head against the porcelain sink accidentally and forget all you know. Forget everyone. And rest. Just rest.

There was a man going down river in a canoe. It was his yearly summer outing. Even though the canoe had gone far, even though its owner had worked his arms to reach what was almost the end, a natural anomaly occurred and stopped him from ever completing the course. A wind pushed his canoe back through all the river he had waded. Back over the rocks and waterfalls. It was the opposite of a miracle. He reached the end which was the beginning, went on the sandy shore, bent down at the foot of the river and screamed.

In his free time, Marston Hefner plays backgammon, video games, and practices yoga. He is 6’4” with a strong jaw line. He has short hair. He has a toned upper body but working the thighs is difficult because of his height.

Two Stories — Andrew Morgan

Doctor Tukes, Off the Clock

But that’s all blather. I can’t even remember how old I was. Can’t remember my teacher at the time, my closest friend, or whether that summer I played T-ball, “minor league” (where the coach pitches), “major league” (where I pitched, “hard” and under the pretense of “wild”) or even later still when there was but rocks and glass and a gameless kind of running. I can’t remember whether we’d yet crossed from printing to cursive, which I do remember took place in third grade which was the same year that Susan Crandle, prancing across the gymnasium as she was lunch-hour-prone to do, tripped—“it must’ve been her laces”—and broke her nose right there on the free-throw line and wailed a gurgled wail and dripped a splatter which even years later when me and Teddy Lagere snuck in after hours for some one-on-one, even then, and that must’ve been at least ninth grade ’cause Teddy didn’t transfer back till I’d started shaving and that was on a rainy night at some point in the summer before high-school (having started not so much ’cause I needed to but ’cause I wanted to and why not I had just enough money for a razor and other needs for a razor and so what with birds and stones and whatnot there I tremored, determined, eye to mirrored eye beneath the single swinging light of the basement bathroom which hissed as its arc’s apex occasionally synched with the random rain’s drip making it down past what sealant there was between the trapdoored porch and the alcoved chunk of mirror Timor, my sitter’s younger brother, and I snatched from his Auntie’s when she was away at her praying; there, without cream which I hadn’t the money for and without method which I hadn’t the traditional intactness of family to provide, bringing a blade to bare not for the first time [but near the first time] with purpose) but even then, Teddy and I at least a year deep in friendship and not for the first time (or near the first time) sweating in the gymnasium’s half-dark, tested our athleticism a little too vigorously, and limbs tangling, ended up both face down on the floor at that same line where even then, after who-knows-how-much sweeping and waxing, a shadowed hint of crimson haze still remained somehow clear-as-day apparent and I said “Look: it’s Crandle’s randle” and that took us funny and we laughed and clutched one another unsurely in what I remember thinking would’ve resembled, in collective contour and especially so from above, a more cursive styling than that of standard print. I can’t remember if I’d yet to lose a tooth or already had those I grind while not remembering this or if this was somewhere in between the two when Allie Alters called me “notch face” and I swung at her all clumsy like ’cause she was pretty but she swung back, not one bit clumsy, and doubled the gap which had inspired the namecalling. I can’t remember if my sister had yet begun her womanly or when that actually was as she at least twice prematurely claimed her adulthood ’cause her friends at least twice beat her to it. I can’t remember my nose-ornament status or that of my nipple(s), my hairstyle or its color, my lunchbox, parent of custody, or even my handedness for sometime ’round then I switched dominance left to right as I was still but the beginning of a golfer and it was still, then, a righty and only the wealthiest of lefty’s (and I was certainly not, not by far, the former of the later) sport. I can’t remember if The Falcon’s training wheels were on or yet off or even if this was before or after The Falcon was traded for a Mickey Mantle rookie card Bubba’s daddy found in the wall when the plumbing blew out in the winter and he had to half-ash fix it himself because Little Lil was only two and was small and cold and sick and Bubba’s ma was havin’ none of that or so Bubba said when he handed me the sticky envelope with Mantle inside and I, clutching its stick and suddenly remorse-fearingly uncertain about my choice’s wiseness, knee-jerk spun and kicked The Falcon over straight at Bubba’s feet and stood silent as its handlebar gouged his shins and Bubba dropped and cried and said “mah mah mah” over and over like he said Lil did when she kicked off her covers and frostbited her toes ’cause of the blow out and it being winter and all. I can’t remember if I loved Dora or Nina or Carl or Otto. Can’t remember if it was before the glasses or after the glasses with the contacts or during the glasses just before the contacts when Rudy kept thieving my lenses for convexing the sun onto flies. I can’t remember the decision, its ease; how it was void of malice, of cruelty, how there was even a taste of the generous. Can’t remember the red gloss on the pavement, the reflection of the streetlight like a bubble-gum bubble somehow rippling as if notifying us all of an earthquake we had yet to register. Can’t remember Willie—compelled against the nature of safety, compelled by the nature of fearing not fitting-in—sticking the tip of his left thumb first-knuckle-deep into the center of that bubble and then rigidly freezing, eyes focusless, as if he had instead inserted that thumb’s filed-point-of-a-nail straight on into an electric outlet. I can’t remember pushing Willie back, can’t remember jumping into the midst of that gloss, can’t remember sweeping my feet left and right like miniature snowplows gale-caught and hauled straight on across a thicker-than-water lake, can’t remember the splatter along Willie’s arm and along his shoulder and across his neck, thickening as it climbed until curling off with a clearly-cursive-not-print flourish to form a toothless clown smile just beneath the bobbing nose of his Adams apple which was itself bobbing beneath the I’ll-never-smile-again clenched-in-horrorness of his lips. I can’t remember Willie’s eyes the instant his pupils exploded away any hint of the pulse-blue his mumma called her “cloudless frontier”; can’t remember the drip of snot from his left nostril or how it revolted me that he wouldn’t wipe it away, couldn’t wipe it away; can’t remember the woodpeckering tap that kept increasing in volume until there was a thunderclapping crack and a wail from Willie as he unfroze and thrusting both hands into his mouth removed what seemed to be fistfuls of shattered teeth. I can’t remember my mother weeks later driving white-knuckled with her left hand at ten and the right ticking down to three and then to her lap and the sound of a bottle and up again to her mouth, toss toss gulp gulp, polly want a num num and then ticking back down to three and her for some reason not responding as I ask again and again why Willie don’t want to come over and play. And I wish I could remember the day nearly a month after that when Willie showed up unexpected at the front door and still all just gums and bandages rang the bell with his red gauzed left stub of a thumb and I peeked from behind the curtain of the window beside the door and seeing it was Willie got very still and kinda lost focus with my vision and then with my body entire and felt all of a sudden like I was sitting in a bath and tasted the steam deep in my throat and heard the sound of fingers on doorknobs and the bobbing rubber of miniature animals afloat and the creak of hinges and the rippling water and its warmth on my thighs but why only my thighs? and with that hiccup of confusion coming back to myself at the door, so close to and yet separate from Willie and it feeling proper and like something expected and I began to (gently and then with a little more force) allow an inkling of hope to buzz deep behind my eye only to see it swiftly peter away startled bird-like as I realized the dampness as wholely real and bodily and wrong just wrong and I wailed and Willie ran and my mother turned up the volume on the radio either so she didn’t hear me or so I didn’t hear her practiced twitching and the gulp gulp of the pellets down her gullet and polly-want-a-numb-numb numbness for a long, long time. But that’s what I’m saying. All blather from far and long ago and not very interesting at all to poor oublietted Dr. Walter Reinhold Pence, my colleague (and so much brighter than the others), whose interest, at the moment (but not for the first time), is bloodshot-and-non-blinking-eye lasered in on beggary and how its potential to elicit the ultimate of mercy might be somehow realized through force-forgetting the camouflage of why I’m making him repeat the polly numb numb thing and focusing instead on the singed fingers of the melting mannequin and why I painted its eyes in the endless tones of a cloudless frontier.

Marie to Eleanor, Resenting Her Elasticness

…or like a flower on a footstool with a soft summer breeze coming in from the porch where your grandmother’s casket is sitting half-opened in the sun and you’re whistling to yourself some stage tune your sister had a record of because her post high schools dream-year boyfriend thought he was a singer and not a rock star singer but an on-the-stage-some-day-singing-and-dancing-in-a-rustic-costume-while-people-in-suits-that-cost-half-as-much-as-the-set-stare-down-the-dresses-of-their-dates/wives-and-wonder-why-art-has-to-be-so-boring-and-why-it-isn’t-easier-to-stare-down-the-dresses-of-their-dates/wives singer and you wonder if your whistling would sound more inappropriate to your sister or to your grandmother but you know the answer to that because there was nothing that was ever fully appropriate in your grandmother’s book and your sister could give a shit because that boyfriend did become a singer and when he did he gave your sister a son he found in the alley outside the off-broadway theatre that burned down after the third night’s performance of his second play which, unlike the first, had some real moving parts and the role fit his voice if not like a sock does a foot than like a necklace does a neck and for once he felt positive about his choices and there was this son in the alley and he thought of your sister and how she played records and encouraged him and said to himself “I think she would be a good mom” and he took the child and gave it to her and the real parents, who apparently were just ripping a joint around the corner, were not happy to not find their child when returning and said some things to some people that were not quite true because they didn’t want to give all the details about the joint and such because that would have been bad news for the dad who wasn’t supposed to do that ‘cause of his heart and the fact that he was just up for new life insurance and he needed that because he was planning to off himself in a way that was not able to be recognized as self-offing so that the mother and the child could live a life a little less cold and empty, that and the fact that they didn’t want to be the parents who went around the corner to burn a joint and lost their child because no one really does and certainly not Claude and Marie who already had enough judgment upon them as both their parents had expected so much more of each and had told them so often and still did and would until one night Claude’s mother looks at Marie’s dad and says “I bet they lost that baby ’cause they went around the corner to smoke a joint” and Marie’s dad doesn’t respond right away but begins to think then and there that he’ll take Claude’s mother to a play sometime, just him and her, and during the play he will look down her dress and think about art and the grandchild it took from them and he’ll whisper something about Monet or Mozart which he’ll have researched beforehand and she’ll stare at him and half-smile and he’d half-smile back and a little later their hands would brush gently against one another and they’d both wonder what-if and then they’d correct themselves, readjust their posture and soon after leave early because of something they both would agree to find pressing and on the cab ride home Marie’s dad would tell a joke about when Marie was four and Claude’s mom would find it crass and there would be an extended silence no one would be able to do anything about and it would be forever between them and in the end too much so for Claude and Marie and Claude’s dad and Marie’s mom to ever think it was not something a little more than it was and everyone would eventually pull back and think about how much this isn’t what it should be and count the ways in which they were clearly the least at fault and so when he finally responds with “I bet you fuck non-Claude’s dad men all the time, what’s a fucking joint and a lost baby to you” it’s not because of what she said but because of what she would have done to him had he done to her what he wanted to do to her and the irony would be that she would think that his saying of this was actually an attempt to open up an opportunity for him to accomplish the same thing he had wanted to do and she wasn’t put out but tired by the whole thing and she half-smiled that response and Marie’s dad half-smiled his own smile and they would be no more lonely and not alone than they were before this exchange and they would both in their mind’s thank the other for that a little too often and a little too much until that thanks inevitably bent toward a resentment that would be forever between them and in the end too much so for Claude and Marie and Claude’s dad and Marie’s mom to ever think it was not something a little more than it was and everyone would eventually pull back and think about how much this isn’t what it should be and count the ways in which they were clearly the least at fault and having assumed custodial duties of their son your sister was far too busy to hear whistling and if she did her inappropriate radar was so-to-a-different-frequency tuned that she jumped not like the moon in the fog, but more like the feeling of the moon in the fog, like a whisper you’re chasing down a hallway in a nightmare you know to be nightmare, but not yet consciously enough to facilitate caution to an extent which eventually asks for everyone to just pull back a bit and think about how much this isn’t what it should be…

ADJUST, by Glen Pourciau

No one could say I was idle. I walked miles every day. I didn’t sit in my apartment moping. I had mixed feelings about being among people on a bustling sidewalk, exposed to their looks and judgments, but it was better than being alone in my apartment. When I walked I often had the feeling that someone was watching, either across the street or behind me, though I knew that no one had been assigned by some unknown force to keep eyes on me. I explained my sense of being observed as a projection of the unspoken voice yakking in my head. But it could be more accurate to say that the voice itself was the thing tracking me, portending a day of reckoning that I’d been spared for much longer than I deserved.

One day while walking down King Street I thought I saw a familiar face, a man who looked like a classmate of mine during the year I attended the local college. I didn’t know if he’d recognize me and I wasn’t sure he wasn’t someone else, but his forward-tilted head and the way he squinted through his glasses did seem distinctly like him. He was just a step ahead so I slowed my pace, dreading the thought of presenting an acceptable account of myself. He might ask me what I did with myself or what I’d become and I couldn’t imagine how I’d answer those questions without sounding as limited as I felt. I tried to believe it wasn’t him, but I couldn’t do it and I turned a corner to put more distance between us, thinking that perhaps he was in town for a visit and I’d never see him again.

At happy hour I went into a quiet bar I liked to visit occasionally. I sat to one side rather than in the long stretch of barstools, making it slightly harder for others to sit near me. I ordered a draught beer, two dollars off during happy hour, and only one other person was drinking at the bar, a man with three or four smartphones spread in front of him, his mind and hands fully engaged. I was at a safe distance from him, and he never looked up at me and seemed to have forgotten there was anything or anyone around him. In a way, I envied him.

I’d drunk about half my beer and was contemplating ordering another when a bulky man of around forty walked in and sat just around the corner from me. He wore white sunglasses and had short white hair that stood on end, aided by a hair-care product. He gestured to the bartender, pointed at my beer, and I looked straight ahead as the bartender brought him a glass of what I was having. I got tired of shrinking from the looks and sounds of others, but was I prepared to deal with all the ranking and judgments that would almost inevitably ensue if he started talking? The white-haired man sipped silently and then looked toward the smartphone user.

“Insatiability, I’d guess, is the opposite of fulfillment, but I can’t claim to know that for a fact. I won’t impose on you by telling you my name. Introductions can create an illusion that we’ve identified a stranger. The same is true with asking people what they do for a living. Their answers tell you how they spend their time but often little about what’s inside them. Why should we conjure up assumptions and hierarchies based on people’s occupations? Some people love to talk about themselves, but the question that occurs to me as I listen is why they want to impress me with their idealized versions of their identity. Others remain silent about what they do, which is much more interesting. Do they feel an aversion to the undercurrents of their own voices or do they prefer to listen? Are they too aware of ambiguities in their nature to present themselves as one thing?”

He paused. I said nothing.

“My brother Tony suffers from a fear of being devoured,” he continued. “I think it’s an expression of anxiety about how he’ll ultimately be judged. He shudders in the presence of large barking dogs, and one day he felt a painful need to defecate when he locked eyes with a bobcat in his front yard. Tony has never overcome his feeling of guilt at being descended from a family with a criminal past, something I have also struggled to come to terms with. Every urge for revenge or fantasy transgression confirms his worst suspicions about his inherent identity. He experiences our family’s history as an indelible stain that runs all the way through him, a case of the destructive potential of internal storytelling. Tony has never accepted himself, and he’s now living somewhere off the grid. My direction also seems dubious to a few people I’ve encountered. I refer to myself as a PA; what those initials stand for is open to interpretation. I consider myself a personal adjuster or a personal account specialist, though to prevent any misunderstanding I must clarify that I never discuss money. Personal assistant is not completely wrong, but I don’t do shopping for hire or serve as an important-person surrogate on phone calls. Some people would call me a life coach, but that phrase makes my flesh prickle because it could imply that I know considerably more than I do. The painful truth is that at this moment I can’t recall a single thing I know, which doesn’t bother me in the least.”

He paused again and drank from his beer. I wondered if there was a real brother named Tony or if the so-called PA had invented him to provoke a response from me. Did he expect me to see myself in his fictional brother? Was he playing mind-reading games with me? How could he presume to know me, and why would he?

“I can guess how Tony would feel if he were in your shoes. He would rather not speak or react. He might harbor a subterranean fear that I’d come to see him about his personal account. He’d suppress questions and hide inside himself. I hope I haven’t bored you. I wish you peaceful footsteps, yours and those around you.”

He put a couple of bills on the bar and walked out, his bulk stirring a draft when he passed. Had his eyes been following me? Did that make any sense? I’d never seen him during my walks and how could I have missed him? I signaled the bartender, paid and went out the door, looking around for the PA, wanting and not wanting to see him.

In the following days as I walked I was dogged by the idea that he’d appear, and if he did I planned to avoid him. Yet the memory of his voice kept returning and I told myself that I deserved to hear any thoughts he had about me. I imagined trying to speak with his possibly fictitious brother Tony, but we merely nodded at each other, something deeper than words in the silence.

About a week after his monologue in the bar I thought I saw him in an ice-cream store, but that turned out to be a younger man whose hair was not as white as his. Later that same day I felt an impulse to look behind me, and I saw him maybe twenty feet back, same white sunglasses, gait rapid, his finger pointing at me. I abandoned any idea of eluding him and waited.

“I wanted to tell you that Tony’s in town. He’s staying with me for now, who knows for how long, but he’s feeling a little better. I told him about you, and he said that if you’re willing he’d be open to meeting you. We could go to my humble impersonation of an office and talk. It’s not really an office, no staff to overhear us, just a converted porch at my apartment. It’s only a block and a half down the street.”

I walked with him toward what I accepted on faith was his office, wondering what he could have told Tony about me and what I’d be letting myself in for, but I pressed on, resigned to hearing more from him and curious about Tony.

We climbed a wooden stairway that took us above a storefront, and at the top he unlocked a door that opened onto a walled-in porch furnished with an old kitchen chair and a lopsided desk propped up by a brick. “I’ll tell him you’re here,” he said and unlocked a second door, the original front door, and closed it behind him.

I feared intruding questions and that any answers I gave would lead to an assessment, and the thought of them coming toward me with their minds choked me. Yet I stood there, and a minute or so later the PA returned alone, his sunglasses folded in his hand. “Tony’s not around. I should have called, but he doesn’t usually like to go out. Anyway, we can start.”

I sat in the kitchen chair, and he went behind the desk and dropped into a desk chair that creaked under his weight.

“You look distressed. Let me assure you I’m not selling anything, not a book or a pill or a set of keys for living. As I’ve said, I know nothing. I’d hoped that Tony could benefit from meeting you and that you could benefit from meeting Tony. I don’t intend to ask you uncomfortable questions and stare into your eyes until you crack and give answers you’d later find embarrassing or humiliating. Let’s say we can sit here and rest together, and if an urge arises for you to discuss how you see yourself, for example, we can take that raw material and perhaps begin to adjust your perspective. In my opinion, everything rests with how we see things. If we see things from a perspective that damages us, suffering accumulates until we feel almost buried beneath it.”

I acted on my pent-up desire to bolt, the course of his words virtually yanking me up, and not looking back I went out the door and rattled down the stairs, my breath already coming more easily. But turning left at the sidewalk I nearly smashed into my ex-classmate and stifled a gasp at the sight of him. His arm rose between us like a shield and he glared at me but continued on his way without any sign he’d ever seen me before. And though I wanted to avoid being identified, it troubled me as we walked away from each other that I was nothing more to him than an obstacle to step around, an insignificant speck beyond recognition.

The next day the closed-in porch came repeatedly to mind as I paced up and down King Street. The PA had mentioned telling him how I saw myself. Where would my reply have taken us, and would Tony have returned? Would the three of us know one another by now, at ease as we talked and drank our beers? I went back to the bar where I’d first seen the PA and drank a beer alone at happy hour, preoccupied by questions. Did I want to lead my life into a void? Shouldn’t I expect more from myself? What did I fear in any questions he could ask me? I feared my answers, but my answers were nothing I could reasonably blame him for.

In the morning I rose earlier than usual. I sat on my front step and watched people pass by, waving at any of them who looked at me, working myself up to a decision.

When I reached the PA’s apartment, I found a for rent sign posted on the door. No one answered my knock, so I dug in my pocket for the cheap phone I carried in case someone tried to assault me. I called the posted number, and a man picked up on the first ring. I told him where I was and that I wanted to get in touch with the former tenant. The apartment had been vacant for two months, he said, and the man who’d lived there was now deceased. I said that I’d struck up a conversation with a guy on King Street, white hair, around forty, and I’d seen him go up the stairs to the property.

“That sounds like our assistant Tony,” he said. “He helps with most of our properties, but he’s not here. He’s eager for any task that gets him on the road, which figures since he recently moved here from out of state. He likes to drive away from himself, he says. I have no clue what that means, but that’s Tony. Want me to tell him you called?”

I said no, I’d catch up with him.

“I don’t know if this will help; he sometimes parks his car on King and watches people. Small car, dark-tinted windows. He doesn’t like too much sun. His eyes and skin are sensitive to sunlight.”

I thanked him for the information. I spent the next hour walking, disturbed that Tony could have been watching me for weeks, assessing me, thinking I had nowhere to go, no one to see, and that I was on the lookout for something I feared I would find. He could have planned to sit near me in the bar at happy hour and pictured my face as he rehearsed his monologue. But I saw no ill will in him, and I couldn’t say that I was in the habit of presenting my true face to people. So why had he created a persona to talk to me? How did he see himself? Had he recognized me in some way? Was being devoured his version of a day of reckoning?

Days passed, no Tony. Then one afternoon, a cloudy day, I saw a white compact car parked on King, tinted windows you could barely see through. I knocked on the passenger-side window and he rolled it down.

“Tony,” I said, leaning in. He looked surprised as he shook my extended hand. “It’s good to finally meet you.”

Dora Malech: Two Poems

Face For Radio

As usual I am unusually tired.
All night my fingers double-crossed me,
tangled up in someone else’s hair.
Breakfast is sand with a promise of pearls.
If I were an operation, I’d be fly-by-night
and very bloody. If I were a sow,
I’d be hog-tied. I was born under
the sign of the toy breed, the yapper,
if you will—and I will—on the cusp
of bikini season. Somersaults,
cartwheels. Call me poorly executed.
Call me late for dinner and a regrettable
houseguest, wet towel on the bed.
Call me go-getter, meaning going going gone.
If anyone needs me I’ll be at the arcade
across from the fire station, shooting
the teeth off the cardboard clown.
If you give me a dollar I’ll take
my top off and let you see my heart.

Quick Study

Put a hold on the have and to hold’em’s a game,
bets half-cocked at the big dogs, one shoe
on and running, chicken’s a nickname
and nick’s just a cut. Let me get you

where you want me, paint on some tight pants
and varnish the town. Call means I’ve got
your number. Fold means no chance,
each night cut from the same bolt

of cloth. Never say never mind,
never turn your back to back or show
your hand in mine. What’s mine
is minor but it still feels good to know

you and I could be big blind and small blind,
Adam and odds and even Eden this time.

#GentlemanlyPursuits in Paul Kahan’s Chicago,
by A-J Aronstein

I woke up on the hardwood floor of Tyler’s apartment, twisted into a crumpled pile of chewed up meat. There was blood everywhere. On my shirt, my pants. The tip of my thumb was sliced somewhat less than totally open and had turned an alarming shade of purple. Something (the alcohol) had sucked all the water out of my body and I felt like a dried out iguana. Bits of malignantly flaking skin hung off my lips. I ran my shriveled tongue against the raw roof of my mouth and felt something scrape off. I swallowed, coughed, and sputtered as the earth listed at hideous angles. It was eighty-five degrees in the apartment and near-summer sunlight gushed through the bay windows, activating a violent headache whose pulsations produced a fuzzy blinking purple dot in the upper right hand corner of my right eye. My stomach was still full of headcheese, pork pie, quail, tacos, oysters, and a poisonous soup of no fewer than seven different types of spirits. I probed the eyelid with my fingernail and the dot grew spindles and darkened ominously. It flashed in rhythm with a buzzing noise in my ear that ebbed and flowed.

I passed out.

During the previous four weeks, I’d told a lot of people I was writing a magazine piece about Chicago foodie culture. The basic premise: find a friend and eat at five of the city’s most popular restaurants and bars in a single night, get dangerously intoxicated, and “see what happens.”

Drafting Tyler as my companion had been easy. He has a squarely serious jaw, and despite a slender frame, bears a properly Midwestern affection for large, meat-centric meals. He wears blazers. He’s of Slovenian extraction, making him an excellent and careful conversationalist. And importantly, he can hold his booze. The five establishments we planned to visit were the brainchildren of Executive Chef (slash Chicago celebrity) Paul Kahan and Managing Partner Donnie Madia (along with a group of associates whose complex roles I can’t really figure out). Suffice it to say that on any given night in Chicago’s West Loop and Wicker Park neighborhoods, The Publican, Avec, Blackbird, Big Star, and Violet Hour cram in hordes of Chicago’s good-looking, loud-talking, plaid-wearing creative class.

There wasn’t much of a purpose behind the project apart from wanting to be part of that class. I was bored and close to broke—finishing graduate school, disinterestedly reading a lot of Dickens, living off of student loans, and converting my savings account into quantities of Schlitz and Ten High whiskey. With the exception of an imminently due thesis project on the “usefulness” of contemporary American short fiction, I wasn’t writing much of anything.

I was, however, spending more time online than at any other point in my adult life. Even now, two years and 2000 tweets later, I remain unconvinced that things like social networks make us lonelier than we are already by nature—as if loneliness hasn’t been the singular constant of human existence since before, like, Homer. But when we already feel alone, we eagerly indulge in the fantasy that we can refashion our real life based on virtual connections. The failure of our efforts to translate online relationships into something tangible in the world can certainly end up making one feel like it’s better to just stay in the house.

That is to say, I had recently started an online dating profile. I went out with a girl who—within fifteen minutes of sitting down at a Thai restaurant underneath the L—related her experience of witnessing a UFO in Guatemala (she never called me back). I’d also ramped up my Twitter account and tweeted observations about Aaron Sorkin as I marched through the first five seasons of The West Wing on DVD. I read articles about how to attract followers, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my underwear. And I spent swaths of record-warm April afternoons on Facebook, indulging in one of our contemporary moment’s favorite pastimes: trying to access photo albums blocked by exsignificant others.

Social networks promise to salve the constitutive loneliness of ordinary life, but instead leave us feeling worse about ourselves. I definitely fell into their trap, even as marked up drafts of an increasingly phonysounding thesis—in which I argued that fiction could rescue us from the isolation and malaise of post-9/11 America—accumulated on the floor of my Hyde Park apartment. No form of media (print, online, televisual) provided relief from this serious case of the blahs.

I realized that I probably needed to get out into the world. I craved an extreme bodily experience. I wanted to disappear into the flesh of happy hour crowds at Kahan and Co’s restaurants: to envelop myself in the damp embrace of a soft upper-middle class enjoying its soft uppermiddling privileges. And because I was questioning my faith in the notion that fiction can communicate deep truths/ideas/emotions to other human beings, the Kahan idea became a kind of lifeboat for writerly ambition. I could instrumentalize writing and make it part of achieving a simple, tangible goal. And, I figured, if I wrote a really good review and managed to publish it somewhere glitzy, I’d get a few years of goodwill—maybe even some free meals.

It turns out that food and wealth and loneliness and social networks and desire (the last of these split off into categories of political, sexual, financial, virtual, whatever) relate to each other in complex ways that obviate a thorough investigation of any one of them—let alone all of them at once. Moreover, although it’s easy to convince someone that you are an important writer (helpful tip: credentials-checking isn’t a primary skill of restaurant public relations professionals), maintaining this charade becomes more complicated in direct proportion to both (a) the amount of alcohol consumed and (b) the length of time the exercise lasts.

This proves especially true when the managing partner of five of Chicago’s most popular restaurants finds out that a young writer is doing a gonzo-style journalistic piece about his establishments, and takes particular interest in ensuring that the writer and his skinny Slovenian friend have a very good time.

The whole thing had started off earnestly enough. I met with Paul Kahan at The Publican in early May, having made it clear that I had no professional affiliation with any magazine and bore no guarantee of publication. For whatever reason (it’s entirely possible that he was just humoring me out of some knee-jerk service industry bonhomie) my favorite Chicago chef decided he’d talk with me anyway.

When Kahan sat down (I was drenched in a gallon of nervous sweat), he dropped a stack of file folders and a four-page staff meeting agenda printed on the back of menus. He had thick black rings around his eyes and his sandy colored hair was uncombed. It looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. A Blackberry sat on top of the pile of papers and periodically vibrated and blinked. Nevertheless, we had a nice conversation about his childhood in Chicago, about the restaurants he’d opened, and about his father’s own forays into the business of purveying high-quality meats in the same neighborhood.

When I walked out of the restaurant, feeling like a bona fide journalist, I got a bonus treat. As many Chicagoans know, when the wind blows the right way down West Fulton Market, the aroma of chocolate from the Blommer Chocolate Factory breaks in waves over much of the surrounding neighborhood. On humid days, the air hangs so thick with chocolate that you can almost feel it sloshing around on your tongue. I remember thinking about Kahan’s father, who had made his living here, and of the gentrification that has changed the area in the last fifteen years. The neighborhood used to be populated by Jews, then by an influx of AfricanAmerican immigrants. All the while, the entire neighborhood smelled like chocolate: Blommer opened in 1939. On my way back to the L, I breathed in the early-spring breeze and felt purified by the conversation and the chocolate smell—the idea that the neighborhood was alive with sense-memories.

That Saturday, the wind wasn’t blowing and there was no hint of chocolate in the air. When I arrived at The Publican for the first leg of the evening, Tyler was standing outside reading Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, wearing a blazer, and doing his best to play it cool. We went inside and I started taking notes about the atmosphere, the smell of smoke, the pictures of hogs on the walls. We watched patrons take iPhone pictures of their charcuterie plates. “I’m here,” Jeannie and Greg and Robert and whoever else tweeted and texted, almost manically, about their headcheese, their pork loin, their country ales delivered in goblets on the first truly hot day of the year. It’s this kind of impulse that has always fascinated me—the desire to immediately upload a real moment into the virtual space, which at once is for an audience and is always a mirror for oneself. We seem to be saying: “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here sucking the headcheese out of life and you, reader, are somewhere else.” And in that instant—the instant we preserve and reproduce for all ten of our followers—what do we feel? Together with someone else through the mediated space of their 140-odd characters? More certain of our own presence in the world? Distanced from the people that surround us?

Or just as lonely as usual?

Tyler and I drank another round and ate oysters, and were about to leave for a big dinner at Blackbird when Donnie Madia materialized at our table. He wore a blue suit and a mint green tie, and had the eager posture of a man who understands how to entertain distinguished guests. Tyler and I were not guests. We were graduate students. There was a hole in the crotch of my pants—the only clean pair remaining in my closet. But I’d been writing very conspicuously in a notebook, playing the part of a journalist, and was feeling supremely confident about my observations.

Caught up in the haze of those first strong Belgian beers and the salty food, I may have over-exuberantly (it was an accident if it even happened, I swear) let it slip to one of our waiters that “my associate Tyler and I” were working on a piece for a snooty magazine (NB: I can’t remember if I did, actually, say The Atlantic. But the nausea I feel when I try to remember rather suggests that I did).

If this article ever ended up as a series of restaurant reviews—if it ended up being the piece that Madia thought I was there to write as he stood there shaking our hands and smiling—I’d spend more time talking about his hospitality. About the ride he gave us to Blackbird in his Range Rover. (I did tweet about it—confidently: “Donnie Madia gave me and @TylerJ a ride from #publican to #blackbird in his range. This is going to be a great article”) About the flourish of his wrists as he whipped the tablecloth onto our table and how he brought us our decadent desserts after a dinner of endive salads and steak and quail and martinis, and hailed us a cab to Wicker Park, where he had reserved a table for us at the Big Star (a paradise of tacos and good whiskey for a class of mostly underemployed folks with mustaches or pixie cuts who will tell you they work in “design” and who carry complex-looking messenger bags), as well as seats at Violet Hour (where mixologist Michael Rubel made us old fashioneds from a private stock of bourbon hidden under the bar).

But I guess I want to argue that it can’t be that article, at least not anymore. I can’t separate out the way that I’ve told the story a hundred times from the things that I want it to mean. I have no recollection about what headcheese tastes like (I assume, chicken).

There are things I do remember. On arriving at Big Star and finding a line of fifty people, I remember shouting at the bouncer, “Go inside and ask if Donnie Madia called ahead about a table for A-J Aronstein” and then being rushed, apologetically, to the head of the line. I remember doing shots of whiskey with Paul Kahan—who happened to be at the bar—and talking with him about meeting his wife at a rock show (I can’t remember the name of the band, but the ordinariness of it astounded me). I remember slipping behind the heavy curtains that protect the entrance of Violet Hour, and the flickering of my brain as it began to slow. Dry heaving on Damen Avenue after tequila shots; Tyler shouting “you people are communists” at a table of seven mustachioed designers; holding my arm above my head to slow the flow of blood from my thumb, which had at some point been gashed.

I don’t remember how.

But what point do these fragmented memories have without the shape of a story? I’m trying to make up for memory’s insufficiencies. This is an overdue attempt to reassemble personal history and fragmented events into something like a useful story. To try to assign meaning to what would otherwise make its way into the Library of Congress (they’re capturing all public tweets, FYI) as a series of a few pictures on the internet that depict a superfluous evening of what one might call #gentlemanlypursuits.

Is it therefore a fiction?

About an hour after I woke up at Tyler’s apartment, too hungover to see, I sat in the cab on the Dan Ryan Expressway, flipping through my notebook. My last fully legible entry is a quote from Tyler at 11 PM. “Spalding Gray is way better than Dickens.” Gray exemplifies a style of nonfiction storytelling that presumes audience comfort with a certain degree of truth bending. In light of the way that Gray approaches nonfiction, one might argue that Dickens, master of the sprawling chronicle of life in London, tells similar kinds of truths. But in his case, the artifice is to disguise those truths as fiction.

After the 11 PM entry, my script morphs into alien scrawls, from which I can pick out only occasional words, punctuation marks, possibly a salsa stain. It looks like Cy Twombly or a three year old or a senile man trying desperately to control his hand had gotten to my pen. There are spirals and something that looks like a deranged smiley face. To cap it off, according to my phone, I called my parents at 3 AM. A distant echo of my father’s voice still pads off my memory. Some gauzy, nasal declaration uttered in the mucusy tones of interrupted sleep. In what must have taken an enormous amount of effort, I had written a few more sentences in half-legible print before conking out: “Are we the generation that calls home? ‘Hey mom and dad its me. I call to say I love you—and then, go back to sleeping.’ The generational difference is. So. Different.” When it comes to operating by lizard brain, my instinct is to skew historical, generational, philosophical. Rather than tweet, I call home, reach out for the solidity of family history.

But history is a sleight of hand, just the same as fiction—both partway fact and invention. Both necessary to mend broken bodies and battered emotions. When we feel confronted by either of them, we are being tricked into having faith in narrative as a means of connection. This is what we do when we write. When we write either nonfiction or fiction, we color history with a deep desire for connectedness. We salve our absolute loneliness, not with the fragments of tweets and Facebook posts shouted into the cacophony of the online masses, but with the attention and engagement with sustained narrative.

A few months after my night in Paul Kahan’s version of Chicago, I went to a concert in the Near West Side underneath a Kennedy Expressway overpass. It was a “secret” Deerhunter show sponsored by a jeans company and promoted via Twitter to followers of the band. The chocolate smell brought me right back to the immediacy of that warm May night. And I became captivated by the story of the Blommer factory. Can the history of the Near West Side be told around a narrative of Blommer? From the company’s founder Henry Blommer in May of 1939, to Paul Kahan’s father in the Sixties, to Donnie Madia driving me and Tyler in his Range in May 2010? Sure. We might even reduce it to a single day and argue that the entirety of the neighborhood’s history revolves around it. Specifically: the day when Henry started up the machinery and set workers to their work at the family Chocolate Factory, producing sweets and candies for Marshall Field’s Department Store.

But what if we imagined a singular moment on West Washington Street—impossible to reproduce historically, to gather facts about, or research—but certainly a moment that took place in May 1939. Let’s say eight-year-old Avram Jakobsen (Abe to his Chicago-born friends), is on his way to school near Jane Addams House, stops and sniffs the mysteriously warm air, which on a spring morning is—as usual—overhung with the soot and grime from machine tooling factories. Can we imagine, for a second, the strange alchemy of confusion and innocent arousal that builds within his tiny frame when, amid the crush of poverty and bodies clamoring for Chicago spring, with the whistles of steam locomotives around him and the almost-stagnant river emptying inland from Lake Michigan, and everything slowly coming back to life, he turns his nose upward to catch the SW breeze?

The noise and the din of the city, and the exigencies of history that Avram hasn’t even begun to consider yet all fall away in that instant. There’s nothing but the body and its senses. Everything collapses into complete conscious feeling of the world: the upturned nose and a smile that builds on Avram’s face as he puts down his small bag, his fingers unclenching, and—could it be imagination? He considers the possibility that his own body is fooling him, because in that moment something magnificent and otherworldly, and altogether unexpected happens. Things like this defy the logic of context and history and narratives, because, as it turns out, sometimes things are literally just in the air for a moment. And there’s nothing for Avram to do but trust that what he suddenly feels must be something like what his parents talk about when they talk about love or hope or God, because some part of him thinks that if he ever loses what this so-sudden sensation feels like, he would die of the resulting loneliness. Think about how much or little it matters that the fire forced his grandparents to the Near West Side; that his father has been losing sleep over an unexpected and persistent pain in his abdomen; that his mother yelled at him for spending three cents that he found in the street at the movies (Dodge City). Right in this instant, the miraculous—think in terms of childhood expectations for miracles here—happens. True or false, historical or fictional, Avram becomes the first person ever on the Near West Side of hundreds of thousands to follow him to feel a particular sensation course through his body, connecting him to every one of them: a single moment of almost impossible joy in the rich air that anyone who comes to the neighborhood knows.

It’s in that moment that Avram smells chocolate.