Author: Post Road

Arlington­ or ­No ­Arlington:­ That­ is ­the ­Question,­­ Or ­At ­Least ­One ­of ­Them­

Gail Hosking

A veteran I met once named Bob, a former Mike Force Commander in Viet Nam, says he adored my father who was an enlisted man under his command, called me this week. “I know your dad wanted to be buried at Arlington,” he said out of the blue. “If your family is interested, the military can make that happen because of his Medal of Honor. They can move his body from New Jersey to D. C. I’ve already spoken to the nearby Deputy Commander at Fort Leavenworth.”

            I paused and jotted down the details while the past churned up as fast as I could put the phone down. Why was Bob thinking of this so many decades after my father was killed in Viet Nam? Was it his continual loy- alty to a friend who did not survive the war? A feeling he owes my father something? His last act of love for a comrade? Or was it his allegiance to the military? I called my sisters and brother right away to leave the ques- tion in their laps, to see what they thought. The heaviness of the war’s return filled all four of us, though it’s been a long time since our father’s body arrived back to the states in a black body bag, years since he was buried in a family plot next to his father and grandparents in northern New Jersey. His death and that war were suddenly there again and could not be denied.

            I didn’t want to deal with this.

            I recalled that funeral day when I was seventeen as if yesterday. The fog, the drizzle, the cold, the bugle blown in the distance, the rifles salut- ing in the air, the soldiers on “funeral detail” who had flown all the way from Viet Nam for the occasion but would return as soon as ceremonies were over. I recalled the casseroles that my father’s cousins brought to my grandmother’s green and yellow house on New Street, my mother smoking one cigarette after another as she sat on the couch unable to move. I recalled familiar soldiers standing in the corner near my grandmother’s antique plant stand talking about my father—One hell of a soldier! I recall Reverend Highberger putting his hand on my grandmother’s shoul- der under a canopy at the gravesite, him repeating the Lord’s Prayer, and my Uncle Bob—my father’s only sibling—bending his head into his wool dress coat and sobbing. I remembered the undertaker refusing to let my grandmother see the body. “You don’t want to see this, Luella,” he said.

            All this to say, when the former soldier called we had a language to link us. My dad was there again with the pull of the military as palatable as ever. It was my grandmother who insisted he be buried in a family plot. She would have nothing to do with Arlington way back when her first- born son was killed in action. I thought such questions were gone. Now they had returned. My sisters ask, who has ultimate say over his body? Is it the military, his family, or his fellow soldiers?

            When Bob called me in previous times, he talked about how my fa- ther told him in Viet Nam to go home and make something of himself— get a Ph.D. “My dad, the one who dropped out of high school told you that?” I asked. Bob left the military after his final tour in Viet Nam, and by the time he got to Fort Bragg from Saigon he was told that my father had been killed in action. Surely he knew it was just a matter of time be- cause it was a statistic that kept getting repeated day after day. Bob was profoundly saddened, he said. In fact, to this day he carries a picture of my father in his wallet. “He was a character,” he repeats each time he calls. “And so smart. He taught me a great deal.” He says he owes his Ph.D. and career to my father who was older, had seen the Second World War when he was just 17, and then the Cold War in Europe where my father trans- lated Czech messages coming across the Iron Curtain and prepared for the Third World War.

            Over the phone Bob reminds me again of the time he accompanied my father to the Bien Hoa PX to buy pearls for my 17th birthday. “Your father wasn’t allowed in the PX anymore because he would buy a case of whiskey and drink it all,” he said. “That’s why I went with him.” I picture officer and enlisted man walking in the door of a place filled with familiar American items a soldier might need or want for his family oceans away. Immediately I remember that green velvet box inside a yellow cardboard box arriving to the housing project I lived in with my mother and three siblings as we waited for his return. I can still feel the magic of opening such precious cargo that came from a place I could not begin to imagine. “I can hardly believe you are becoming a young lady,” my father wrote in red ink on the box. “And every young lady deserves pearls.” I wore them to the prom that month. The last gift. The last communication.

            With Bob’s call, everything else returned in a rush like the details written down for military files, for the ceremony at the White House of his posthumously awarded Medal of Honor, or the Hall of Heroes pho- tographs in the Pentagon going back to the Civil War. Gathered details sum up what I can only tiptoe across because even to this day they are un- imaginable. Especially when someone asks, So what happened? How did your father die? “Crossing a river near the Cambodian border,” I always begin, “with a prisoner under his command.” When the prisoner grabbed a grenade off my father’s belt and attempted to throw it at the rest of the group, my father threw his body on the prisoner. You can imagine what happened next. The tattoos on my father’s arms were what identified him later. Nothing I want to talk about further, except to say eventually he was awarded the Medal of Honor. Nixon and the White House. His name on the wall in D.C., 17 E, five names down.

            A long time ago.

            But what wasn’t written down in the formal papers was the grief of family, the weight of carrying around the dead, or how easily the country forgets. What was left out was what war does to family, how my young mother was never the same again even with cards and letters stored in her nightstand drawer until the day of her death twenty years later.

            I’m not sure how I remember this or even if it’s true, but I think my father said he wanted to be buried at Arlington or else on a funeral pyre in Viet Nam like the Buddhists he admired. But my grandmother wanted neither. My mother who by then was recently divorced from him, didn’t have a say. So it was he is buried in New Jersey in a family plot bought by my great grandparents. The cemetery also holds the bodies of soldiers going back to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, soldiers whose names have been forgotten. I wonder if it matters where he is buried. Where is his spirit and would he care anymore? Earth to earth. ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I go through the day with these thoughts on my shoul- ders, the pressure of decision, and the past swimming through big holes.

            Many years ago, a Boy Scout troop noticed my father’s burial stone and contacted a local military unit who now hold a ceremonial service by his grave every Memorial Day. They decorate the grave with flag and wreath on the day my grandmother used to refer to as “Decoration Day.” My sister who lives in New Jersey attends and plants red geraniums just like my grandmother did before she died at the age of 102. Back when she insisted he be buried near her family, I didn’t fully understand. I was so used to our lives as military, and because of that I expected Arlington. But now as a mother of two sons like her, I appreciate her need to be close by; in other words, to have him back home after decades of leaving to fight America’s wars. When she was buried next to him decades after his death, I watched the dirt from his grave mix with the dirt around her cas- ket. Mother and son.

            I understand.

            So now after all these years we are asked to decide again, Arlington or New Jersey? The energy—big energy—awakens and my sisters and I cannot decide. We lean one way because maybe it was his wish. We lean the other because it’s too late and what’s done is done. One sister insists he is New Jersey’s son with a park in Ramsey holding a bust of him. A hometown street is named after him. His name is on the New Jersey Viet Nam memorial. Beyond this, what is the issue? Another sister says she will agree with anything we decide, though maybe he belongs with his military tribe. “More people will notice his grave there long after we are gone,” she says. Our brother insists Arlington would be best, but he too will go along with anything we decide.

            A feeling of loneliness comes over me when I picture his grave in some corner of Arlington. Perhaps with a small wreath or a flag on it just like all the others. “Oh, here’s someone who received the Medal of Honor,” I can almost hear strangers saying as they roam the mowed hills of our national cemetery. The truth is I want to put the war down, want to close the final door on those sorrowful years. But it seems impossible suddenly. My writing, calls from strangers, and new wars—no way to for- get. One minute I think he belongs there in D.C., and the next minute I cannot go against my grandmother’s wishes, a woman who cared for us often in his absence. Either way, he is gone. The troops have returned home. The Black Wall details the names of the dead.

            A kind of loyalty exists in the military, the kind I keep running into with phone calls and letters out of the blue. Caretaking remains after the horrors of war. Even all these years later, soldiers seek me out to talk about my father. I’ve written a memoir about him. I’ve been to Viet Nam with a grassroots organization called Sons and Daughters in Touch. I’ve awoken in the night with leftover grief, sorrow for that 17-year-old los- ing her father and unable to talk about it, and sorrow for that father who surely knew loneliness himself, so far from his family, so filled with the craziness of war that he had to drink that much. The color gray—not black nor white, neither hero or looser—crowds my nights sometime even now when I’m older than my father ever was.

            My son is now the age my father was when he was killed. The number stands out as if a blinking light. Now I understand how young forty-two is. I call him to ask what he thinks. “He gave his mother so much trouble by leaving her so she should have the last say,” he says with confidence. “I think you should let his body remain where he is.” A doctor friend insists we should consider my father’s wishes. A nephew says he could see both ways. All the while as I listen to others’ opinions, I picture a case of hand grenades under my father’s cot. His red, white and blue Mike Force scarf around his neck. What the French called terra rouge under his jungle boots. That Song Be River and the chirping of birds. People he would die for. Did die for. It’s armed forces competing with family. The rest between two notes as the poet Rumi wrote. What do I owe my father? What does he owe us?

            Call it a painting we are not done with yet. With every phone call I’m back at the easel wondering what to add or subtract. In one way my father no longer exists, though he is very much alive in the painting of him at Fort Bragg’s Hosking Field House, on the black wall in D.C., in my books, and in the memories of soldiers still alive who embrace the grieving. And yet. And yet.

            What I’m sure of is that my father would be proud of his four chil- dren. In spite of what comes home from war, in spite of poverty and grief, we all became something. Which is to say, we have lives. Children. Homes. We have all gotten on that train, as Frederick Douglass said once about courage, and headed forward. It could have been otherwise. We are left with what he taught us: disciple, love and the poetry he read to us as children. We are left with the insurance money he arranged before his fi- nal tour of duty so that we could all attend college. In spite of alcohol and absence and the tug of war, we always knew he loved us dearly. No small task in the world he inhabited.

            But is digging up his grave and sending his bones to Arlington just another military experience taking over our lives? Would another MOH stone speak to passers-by of patriotism? I can still see his Charlie Chap- lin style civilian clothes, a Rudyard Kipling book in his pocket, his blond hair in a military buzz cut. A man who loved his family but struggled with home life as he cleaned his weapons at the kitchen table. I could go on and on. The discrepancies abound. A carved Buddha around his neck, an AK47 across his chest. There is no place to put such a man. Not New Jer- sey. Not Arlington. Then again, what does it matter?

            Why am I struggling so much? How could one body hold so much power? “We’re military, Honey,” my mother used to say when I com- plained of moving again. Is giving my father’s body over to the military another return to that way of life? I wonder what she would say now.

            Weeks after many family conversations and thoughts, I finally call Bob after dragging my feet. It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon and I’ve just finished watching the movie Summer of Soul—a documentary about a music festival in Harlem and life in America in 1969—with friends in upstate New York, a documentary about a music festival in Harlem and life in America in 1969. All I can envision is that year I went to the White House, that college year I tried so hard to tiptoe around the war protes- tors, the grief I carried in silence. When the film is over, I reluctantly pick up the phone to settle the question once and for all. I lean into the wall in another room as I stare out the window to the red maple trees with their falling leaves in the distance. Bob says he understands. “It’s what the fam- ily wants,” he says. He knows it must have been a tough decision. “We will stay in touch.”

            “War lasts a long time,” I say into the phone just before we hang up, as if seeking assurance.

            “Yes, it does,” he says with a tender yet confident pause.

            For a moment the truth lies in the space between us.

            When I hang up I burst into tears as if it were 1967 again, the year of his death. What I am carrying, what I have always carried since the war, releases off my chest and I cannot stop crying. I recognize there is no right answer, no way to say Arlington or New Jersey. Still, I feel as if I have let someone down—maybe Bob or my father or the tribe of the military or my family. That teenager I once was suddenly cannot stop crying.

            The documentary I’ve just watched from that summer of soul brings back time. The music questioned our country’s psyche, divided us and brought us together all at the same time with songs like Bad Moon Rising, Everyday people. What’s Going On? With that the war returned for me and added to the weight of that final answer I gave Bob. Though the word final is clearly not the right word. The dictionary defines final as ir- revocable, conclusive, last and indisputable. The decision of Arlington or New Jersey is none of these.

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Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (University of Iowa Press) and a book of poems Retrieval (Main Street Rag Press). She holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and taught at Rochester Institute of Technology for 15 years. Her poems and essays have been widely published in such places as Lillith, Consequence Magazine, Reed Magazine, Upstreet, Waxwing, South Dakota Review, Collateral, and The Florida Review. Several pieces have been anthologized. Two of her essays were considered “most notable” in Best American Essays and she’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

The Woman and the Watcher

Melissa Hunter Gurney

            There’s an oddity that comes with being told you might die. An ability to float above yourself, as if you’re dead already. An eerie feeling that your insides have fallen out—left your body empty, yearning, while they watch from outside. You become two people—the woman and the watcher. It’s the watcher who eventually tells the story—the watcher who knows everything each time you try to forget.

The woman asked cancer how long the ravaging usually took and whether there was a way she could make it beautiful. She wanted to keep cancer to herself—as if it were part of a dreamworld, as if explaining it would somehow make it less fantastical, as if it was a sexual experience that only her and cancer could understand—an intimate moment not to be shared. She whimpered, stroked the ribs along its stomach, nuzzled her head into its armpit, and closed her eyes. She asked it what it meant when death happened in a rented apartment. Asked it if people felt better when they died in nature—beneath long strands of willow or curled up in the crevices of oak. She asked it if it was true that people could heal themselves. She asked it if Western medicine was a farce. She asked it if she could keep it to herself—die in the night without anyone noticing. Her talking turned to whispers and then she went silent. She came to an unknown length of time later, like those moments when the driver all of a sudden realizes they are driving but can’t remember the road behind them. She looked up, towards the shadow of a neck, and mouthed the words—I’m on the left before allowing herself to cry.

            The woman told cancer the history of those words. She told it how a childhood friend and she invented the saying, on the left, as they moved into the realm of adulthood. She told it she didn’t remember when they came up with it, or what exactly the context was, but she knew it had something to do with the panic that came with perusing one’s existence and something else to do with being a girl who would turn into a woman. A girl who would turn into a woman—she tongued the words between breaths. There was something mystical about it, she said. She knew that somehow, during this transition, being able to say— I’m on the left today—was imperative. She told it that the left was representative of a place inside themselves, a place that caused fear, angst, and sometimes revolution. She told it that she knew the simple murmuring of those four words to a friend who understood what they meant, would bring relief. Even if the depth wasn’t understood, there was one person who would relate to the girth of it, she said—one person who would know what it meant to be on the left, too. She waited, but cancer was silent.

            Two months after the day she was told she had appendiceal cancer, two long months of living on the left, she was in the hospital for a second surgery. Five more scars on her belly, three feet of her insides removed, and a wound vac pulsing right below her heart. The nurses told her she had to walk today. The catheter slithered out and with her fluids removed, she went cold. Cancer was lying next to her. It was time to fly through the sky like an angel in heat. This isn’t what the nurse said, but it’s what the woman was imagining—flying through the sky like an angel in heat. She repeated it softly so the cancer could hear. There was a patient on the other side of the curtain, a patient she shared a room and a toilet with for five days, a patient who was ninety-seven years old and spoke Spanish, a patient who had a son, a daughter-in-law, and a cancer too—a patient who had priests in and out of her room at night. So, when the woman woke up, she found herself thinking about religious ordinance and places in the sky she’d never seen before. She asked cancer if it mattered that she wasn’t religious—if it was where we believed we’d go that we actually went. If not knowing, and therefore not believing anything, meant she’d float into an unknown field of matter. She asked it about the heat too. Maybe the heat’s because I’m a thirty-nine year old woman still wondering what it would be like to go through the pains and pleasures of pregnancy, she said. I never had a strong belief around babies either, she whispered. She asked cancer if it meant something. If lying in a hospital room, having had three feet of her insides cut out, no one coming to bring them back in a cute little bundle was symbolic—she left it for cancer to think about. The woman wondered if she’d ever feel heat again, or if from now on the only heat she’d feel was the heat of her own urine as it ran through her. Cancer never responded.

            The nurse was still talking, singing almost, you’ll have to walk today, my darling. But, the woman couldn’t hear her. She asked cancer what it meant to be in heat—for your body to change like the colors in a light stream—for parts of you to fly through the sky while the rest stayed on the ground sifting through dirt. She asked it if some wombs birthed death instead of life—empty sacks filled with disease. She asked it if walking was merely a distraction from flight—if she was meant to be here to begin with. When she finally came back into focus, she desperately wanted to send a message to her childhood friend that read—I’m on the left . . . help. But she didn’t.. She realized she was in her first trimester and cancer was the father—the only one she was allowed to rub her belly in front of, the only one who understood the fragility of what grew inside.

            I hear it’s time to walk. The woman’s partner was in the room staring at her—he’d clearly said something she missed while she was in conversation with cancer. Heeeelloooo—where are you . . .? he said as he put his hand on her arm.When she came out of herself and saw him, heard his voice, she had a momentary flash to a version of life where their child had just been born. She envisioned passing the baby to him and watching his face as he held it. This is the only way she would have imagined their partnership in a hospital room before. When her eyes came into focus, she saw him looking at her with pain and worry, covered in death—the death of spontaneity, the death of safety, the death of everything that comes with knowing the people you love are healthy. She turned away from her partner, leaned into cancer. Don’t let him see me like this, she whispered. Her partner placed his hand on her chin, gently turning her face back towards him. He used the voice he used when he was trying to make her laugh—a voice that seemingly hid the fear within. Don’t do that, he said. The woman saw him—his flesh, his truth, the vastness of his humanity filling the room like the song of a babies’ first cry—the palatable smell of metal waste bins and empty syringes brought her back. She put her head in her hands wanting to hide her tears. I can’t walk, she said. I’m not ready—it hurts too much. Her partner leaned in and put his forehead to hers, something they did by mistake one time that somehow became a thing. When she closed her eyes and felt his skin, she pictured cancer watching them. She asked it to stop. She asked it to leave them alone. She asked it why it was doing this to her—why it implanted itself between them.  Cancer ignored her. I’ll do it, she blurted—I’ll walk.

            She had no idea that upon trying to walk for the first time she’d once again run into the concept of lefts. She closed her eyes as her partner helped her get to a sitting position on the side of the hospital bed. The messy braid her hair was in fell across the middle of her breast and she could feel her gown separating in the back—air wrapping around her incisions. The wound vac continued to pulse, but the pulse felt more like a stab—a heart that was trying to kill her. She could hear the patient’s son entering on the other side of the curtain while her partner moved her pole, her bags and her wires closer to her. Hola, mi amor, the son said, and the sound of dry, tired kisses rose to the ceiling while the woman rose to her feet. She stood hunched over, holding on to the metal pole as if it was a life force. The woman would never forget that moment. It was the first time in her life she knew she couldn’t escape. She’d fractured a bone in her foot when she was younger, but even then she could crawl or hop out of a room, move quick enough to hide beneath a bed or behind a curtain. 

            Now, she was stuck in limbs and muscles that didn’t work. Stuck in the realization that death was in her—some kind of gene mutation—a conspiracy of her body and mind. How could death be in her? She couldn’t imagine it. Stuck in something so beautiful—a symbiotic river of power and life, a luminescent shell holding everything she knew to be her. Stuck in a womb pulsating blood and nutrients to her emotions, her mind, her heart. Stuck in a sensory being that glows with ecstasy when others touch and peruse its crevices, fondle its curves, lick its paws, breathe its scent, taste its pleasure. She turned to cancer. How could this vessel that holds all the mystery, all the beauty, all the secret worlds of me—all the whispers, all the dreams, all the characters, all the philosophies, all the empathy, and all the fucking love? How could this place I worship, this place I learned to treasure so much so that I carved my entire life around it—the choice not to get married again, the choice not to yearn or plan for children, the choice to build a sanctuary around this body, this constantly evolving root entangled with the vastness of the universe. The choice to allow those who want to come to come, those who want to leave to leave. How could death be in this vessel of mine? She repeated it sharply so cancer could hear the pain as it tinged through her wounds. 

            Her partner brought her back again. Heeeeeey . . . are you with me . . . we can do this, you know. With his help, she pushed the pole and moved one foot in front of the other again and again until they were in enough of a rhythm that she could go back—back to the left where she’d been residing quite permanently now—back to cancer. She asked it how death got in her. She told it that she understood it would happen one day. She told it that when she was little, the thoughts of death came in the night—she’d pictured a man under the bed with a knife waiting to pierce each layer and turn her into a bird. She told it that as she got older she imagined the walls dissipating when the sun went down—her body vulnerable, seen by the ghosts of those who entered before her. She told it how a snake would slither in from the wilds—the kind of snake that takes birds from their nests and swallows them whole she whispered. She told it about the human hands pushing her in front of the train as it rushed into a station. She told it how she thought about the bridge collapsing while she was driving across, the explosion rippling through the subway tunnels and the being alive for a few hours buried beneath a city and a people—buried beneath breath. She told it she thought about the plane going down, smashing through a mountain range or into an infinite ocean. She told it the sharks were a constant—piercing her flesh between coasts. Rising up from dark harbors. Tearing through a leg where rivers fall into seas.

            She told cancer that she convinced herself it was these thoughts that kept her alive. Predicting the danger before it had time to creep in. When she crossed the streets she pictured the trucks smashing her to the ground—the head she used to see in the mirror splattered across the ugly, flat pavement. It would be so much better if it was a dirt road, she’d think, and she’d walk across unscathed—traffic moving like light around her. She told it she was protected by stories, shielded by fantasy and fiction. Fantasy and fiction she hissed as she pictured cancer slyly smiling. She never imagined what it would be like if death was in her. Her feet came back into focus and she moved one hand to her belly—holding it so it didn’t have room to move. How are you doing? Her partner asked. Fine. She said. Do you want to get some tea or sit in a different space for a while? He placed his hand lightly on the edge of her back. No. She said. I want to go back to my room, I can’t walk anymore. She could feel the heat from his hand. Okay, he said, we’re getting closer, just a little further.She noticed a photograph of a mother and child sitting in a field of flowers. The mother wasn’t smiling though, her face was resting and the child sat beside her mimicking her stillness. Her partner told her to stop in front of it for a moment. He wanted to grab a coffee and he needed the nurse to watch her while he did. The picture of the mother and her child turned blurry and the woman turned to cancer again. How could this vessel, that she’d put so much into, be the murder and the violence, the death and the meal? How could this vessel be the monster she’d secretly and methodically been preparing for? How could this vessel—with all these roots and all this imagination and all this beating, screaming love—be the thing she had to fear most? When her partner came back, she looked at him and he looked at her. You’re doing great he said, we’re almost to the halfway point. When they started walking again, the woman looked at her feet, elbows and forearms resting on the rim around the metal pole, barely holding herself up in a hunched over position. I hate this, she thought, they can’t know how much it hurts. One foot in front of the other over and over again until she knew her feet would do it without her. When she looked up she could see the door that led her back to her bed. The number 223 B was getting close enough to read. She turned to her partner, moving slower and slower as she got closer. I never thought I’d be like this in front of you, she said. Be like what? he answered, his hands holding the unruly wires that kept getting stuck beneath her wheels—you never thought you’d be this beautifully human? She wanted to feel his sweetness but instead she felt shame and anger—the kind of shame and anger that made her want to tell him he should walk, not her. Walk away as quickly as he could.  It would only get uglier from here. Forget walking, walking was for people like her, he could run, he could do the escaping she couldn’t. She wanted to tell him she’d be fine, she had cancer now—she didn’t need him anymore. Just as she was about to say it, just as she was about to make herself look worse off  than she already was, she heard this loud rattling getting closer and closer to her, and all of a sudden a grey haired man, double her age with a Swedish accent said, passing on the left and whizzed by with his pole and the rickety wheels dragging behind him, trying to keep up. She stopped, looked at her partner, and they both broke out in uncontrollable laughter. The kind of laughter that caused unbroken people to lose their breath, but she was broken and it wasn’t her breath she lost, it was everything inside of her crashing together at once—an explosion of pain so sharp and so real she shrieked loud enough for the nurses to hear and come running. Stop laughing. She said please in a kind of whimper, I can’t . . . it hurts too much . . . stop . . . please. Her laughter turned to tears as the pain pulsed through and all the way up. She grabbed cancer, pulled it to her — this must be what it feels like to give birth, she said, and then she pushed cancer to the cold ground and felt heat again. When she finally got control of herself she looked at her partner and instead of telling him to run from her she thanked him for being with her during one of the lowest moments in her life. The moment a gray haired, Swedish man, double her age, outran her in the cancer ward. She turned back to see a shadow rising—maybe the left is where I need to be, she whispered loud enough for cancer to hear. 

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Melissa Hunter Gurney is a Brooklyn-based writer, educator, and curator. She is the co-founder of GAMBA Forest, a community art space and literary lounge in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Black Land Ownership, a grassroots organization put in place to combat systemic oppression around property in the Americas. Her work tends to explore the multifaceted experiences of Pan-American women and artists and can be found in various publications including: The Yale Review, Pank, Great Weather for Media, The Opiate, Paris Lit Up, Brilliant Short Fiction and Across the Margin.

Beautiful Things

Zozulka Hausler Lew

Corona. Only pharmacies and liquor stores will remain open. So everyone can get their drugs and their coronas. There is too much going on right now. I walk down the street frantically, paying no mind to the bodies around me. I’m just chasing after whatever sanity I have left, it is just out of reach, but I know exactly where to locate it. Everything will be okay. I have no motivation, no direction, and no desire to do anything. On top of this loss of control in my own personal life, half the world is dying from COVID-19 and the governor is considering a complete shutdown of NYC. My city is going to disappear so can you please just announce that all retail stores, including Levi’s (where I work), are shutting down already. I’m impatient when it comes to grim prospects of the world.

             “Just get on with it already!” I scream in my head, not directed towards anyone or anything in particular.

            The red brick brownstone where I grew up, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, comes into sight. Years of paint chipping away, now covered in illegible tags, and a huge “FOR LEASE” sign plastered to the face of the building shrieks at me. Shut up. I can smell the garbage and shit that rots in the downstairs entrance. Stumbling over the brick in the sidewalk that still sticks up, I know I am home.

            I unlatch the waist-high black metal gate across the front stoop and close it behind me a little too hard, causing that familiar metal clang. Our family installed the gate years ago to discourage passersby from loitering on the stoop (like I am now), and to give some measure of privacy. But now I’m safe, the sun hugs me in a warm embrace and the gate seals off the outside world. I can watch the people go by, and write behind this invisible wall. I find my spot, next to a big crack my family never got around to fixing, tucked away in the corner of the doorway entrance. The entranceway is huge: two side-by-side, 9-foot-tall, red-painted oak doors with large glass panels, still covered by old lace curtains strung across the inside of each door. A half-moon glass transom over the doors sports the familiar “No. 203” in hand-painted gold leaf.

            I run my hand over the cherry colored paint of the door and quickly scribble my tag “CHAOZ” with a chisel tip Sharpie under some intruders tag. Might as well. This is my space, my territory. So many nights spent on this stoop, talking to my dog Booey, watching people walk by on these crowded sidewalks, in this vibrant neighborhood, while my mother, father, aunt, and whichever one of their various friends came by to socialize, share laughs and drink beers. I long for the cool breeze of those evenings, watching the sun slowly fade; scents of pizza, Budweiser, and Marlboros converge in my memory. I used to imagine myself doing the same thing one day, drinking and laughing with my friends on this stoop, but not smoking because I promised my parents I would never smoke.

            Tears gathering in my eyes, I pull out my notebook, a small sketchbook I refer to as my Book of Chaoz. It’s filled with weird sketches, anecdotes, and inconsistent handwriting. I flip through, I need to pick the perfect page, and land on one somewhere in the middle. This is where my book on sexuality and my distorted sense of femininity begins. I’ve been meaning to put it down on paper, but could never bring myself to, so I’ve just been collecting all these thoughts in my head, locked away in an impenetrable space, just how I am sitting here, hiding. Drops of salty sorrows mix with the ink on the page as I’m already reminiscing on my childhood on top of reflecting on my painful experiences. At this point I’m just consumed by my emotions, trapped in my Book of Chaoz, burying everything away.

            Something catches my attention out of the corner of my eye, dragging me back to reality. I turn my head to the right and a tiny dog attached to a red leash is walking up the five steps from the ground floor entrance to the sidewalk. The ground floor sits half-way below the sidewalk level, an architectural design I will never understand in these old Brooklyn brownstones. From where I am perched on the top of the front stoop, it makes it hard to see who is on the other end of the leash. The dog reaches the top step, level now with the sidewalk, and I can now see him leading a young woman. Simultaneously, I hear a group of middle schoolers, to my left, walking towards me and my territory. I can tell they are in middle school by the pitch of their voices and the way they sneer and laugh. There are about ten of them and they’re screaming “EWWW DIRTY BITCH,” and other inaudible, vile, remarks. They remind me of a pack of hyenas.

            I see that they’re taunting the woman who is coming up the bottom entrance steps with the little dog. I direct my attention back to her. She is standing at the top of the steps now, still behind that gate, which is clearly not protecting her from the outside world as well as my gate is. She is wearing an army green sweatshirt, ripped cargos, and a worn-out army backpack. She has a shaved head and lots of face tattoos she did herself. I can tell by the technique, it is very similar to my DIY tattoos.

             “I’m going to fucking kill myself,” she mutters under her breathe.

            Not quietly enough though, because I hear her and decide to befriend her. I should have opened with “Fuck those kids,” because that’s what I am thinking. Instead I say, “Hey!” I think she also decides to befriend me or at least trust that I’m not going to harm her because I’m not in the best state myself.

            I smile and ask “Are you staying here?”

            Apprehensive, she turns towards me, but says nothing, sizing me up. I explain to her that this is where I grew up, in this building, and that I come here sometimes just to feel at home. I see a shift in her. She lowers her protective shield, realizing I’m not an enemy. She finally responds.“Yeah, I stay here. The basement door is always open. I stay here with my friends.”

            I tell her, “I haven’t been inside since we moved. My great-grandmother bought this house in the early 70s and it has been in my family since then. Until we sold it.”

            I linger on this statement in my mind. My grandparents immigrated here from Ukraine when they were kids, escaping WWII, after spending years in DP camps in Germany and Austria. They both grew up in Brooklyn, in this same neighborhood and eventually met in their teens. My mother and her sisters all lived in this house with their grandmother–my great-grandmother–at various times throughout their childhoods. My great-grandmother passed away here, in this house. I was born here and lived here my entire childhood, until my grandmother sold the house four years ago. I spent every holiday there with extended family–cousins, aunts, uncles, various in-laws. Christmas was my favorite. We would set up two long folding tables in the living room on the ground floor, cramming everything into the limited space like a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes we would have over 20 people on mix-and-match chairs sitting around the table, set with linens embroidered with traditional Ukrainian designs. My mom has old black and white photographs of my grandmother and great-grandparents spending holidays in the same room, the multi-course, meatless Christmas Eve dinners or the hams and assorted porks of post-church Easter meals visible in the photos. I often wondered if their celebrations were as chaotically joyous as ours.

            There are three apartments in the building, sprawled over four floors, all once occupied by relatives and family friends. Yellow peeling linoleum covered the hallway floors and steps of all the staircases, leading upstairs. There were more doors than rooms in the building, a result of many incomplete renovations. Each apartment had a marble fireplace, each doorway covered in detailed trim, and tiles of every color and shape could be found inside. My favorite tiles were the ones that covered the walls of the bathroom of the ground floor, that also led out to the backyard. They were perfect pink squares surrounded by blue rectangles with hand painted flowers. The backyard was beautiful. There were perpetual packs of cautious feral cats roaming around; grapevines covered each fence; and shady trees towered taller than our buildings, four stories high; all hidden from the outside world. My floor-to-ceiling, bedroom bay-windows overlooked the backyard and I remember always looking out at my secret forest under the night sky. I used to call it the Brooklyn Forest. I’m sure it more closely resembles a jungle now, wild and overgrown, without my mom and aunt to care for it and keep it neat and tame.

             “My friend Scoop, he’s a little crazy, I wouldn’t go down there,” the girl warns me, interrupting my daydreams of the Brooklyn Forest. “He poked someone up with his knife when they came down before. He’s really protective of this place because it’s kinda our home.”

            That’s when it hit me. This home that I have so many memories in, that I had spent most of my life in, and in which so much of my ancestors’ lives unfolded in, was no longer mine. It would always be my home, but I no longer lived there. I have to let go. And I did let go, at that moment. Hearing this stranger–always on guard against the world around her–say those words and seeing that she now took comfort in the same place that protected me for 14 years and still protects me now.

             “Do you know anywhere I can take a shit?” she asks.

             “There’s a Starbucks a few blocks away” I respond, giving her directions.

            She walks off and I am back to writing in my Book of Chaoz. A new sense of liberation and peace comes into me. I am safe here right now, writing on the steps of my childhood home. But I was released from this home, almost four years ago, and now I’m ready to let it go. In the same way these words will be freed from my Book of Chaoz one day and set upon the world. In the same way I said my last goodbyes to Booey, holding her close on the living room floor as she was freed from this world. In the same way I whispered goodnight to my Brooklyn Forest on the last night I spent here.

            The girl returns a few minutes later. We start talking again. As she’s telling me about all the places she has lived in across the country, traveling around, I come to realize she can’t be more than five years older than me. I offer her a Marlboro out of my pack, and smile to myself as I recall all the beautiful things I had the chance to experience living in this home. It is no longer my home, but will always be my portal to all the beautiful things in this world.

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Zozulka Hausler Lew was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and is Ukrainian-American. This is her first published essay.

Spaghettification

Ali Raz

Spaghettification is a scientific word. It refers to the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (i.e. spaghetti) in a very strong non-homogeneous gravitational field. A black hole would generate such a field, for instance—and not much else. This means that the phenomenon is purely imaginary. It is a hypothetical. Even the name suggests this.

            In 2018, researchers at the University of Turku claimed to have witnessed spaghettification. They wrote a paper about it. In this paper, they discussed having ‘seen,’ via high-frequency radio waves, the debris of a shattered star. The star had been shattered upon contact with the gravitational field of a black hole. The star had been spaghettified.

            In support of this, the researchers offered printed sheets of readings from their radio receivers.

            A character is spaghettified in High Life. It happens towards the end. After she is harvested, impregnated, soaked in breast milk, nearly raped, slapped around, and called an insulting name—she offs herself by leaping into a black hole. She doesn’t leap exactly. What she does is, she hijacks a space craft (a small craft which one drives like a go-kart). She cracks the pilot over the head with a spade (the pilot’s brains splay out like intestines) and then makes away with the go-kart spaceship. At first she’s laughing. After all, she is where no one else had been before—an explorer, an adventurer. Then her face begins to change. The mouth is pulled to one side. The cheek to another. She makes grunting noises, like one exposed to great tearing pressure. Then her head explodes.

            In the spaceship, they ate soft vegetable soups.

            What is space? By rights, there are times when I doubt that it exists.

            One gets lonely all alone. One gets lonelier than lymph, a vital fluid no one talks about.

            I had been talking to my grandmother. Our conversation was enabled by globe-spanning satellite networks and regimes of power decades (and more) in the making.

            Consider a song by Daft Punk. Put on their album RAM.

            A violent storm begins, full of lightning and wind.

            The visualizations of space in High Life are animated effects. Colored swirls and strobing lights stand in for things that can’t be said. These are cheap effects. They don’t connote (except to designate the unsaid). I much prefer an earlier move. There is a moment, very early in the film, when a character (a man named Monte, whom the others call a monk) drops a spanner from his perch atop the spaceship. He had been performing mechanical repairs, tightening lug nuts and such. Then he knocks, by mistake, a spanner off the side of the ship. He begins to lunge after it—then stops. The spanner falls an infinite fall. Slowly and steady, at one even rate, it falls into the unrelieved black. There is no depth to its fall. No background against which to sense it. It becomes, to the poor stricken character and also to us, as flat as a cardboard cutout, dimensionless as a video game. It is an effect of the mind to derealize what it can’t understand. And it can’t understand an object falling outside of time.

            Sensations of scale.

            The near-vertigo of scale.

            A storm in space would be an invisible, battering, particulate wind.

            I would eat an apple in it.

            Drop the core down your rotten throat.

            The girl I loved would not be here. She would not be anywhere at all.

            Not in the gaps of each synapse, virulent and spreading, more motile than bacterial fins.

            There are some people—some actors—who are, how should we say this, soaked in such charisma—such personal force—their aura is so reaching and strong—that the hand simply itches to photograph them. Even the camera wants it. The camera itself wants to film them.

            Buster Keaton for instance, have you seen him? Getting repeatedly hit on the head with the spinning handle of a well. He doesn’t look like much. He looks like another grain of sand from the desert behind him.

            Or Robin Williams. He is a better example. The flickering of that fluid, vital face.

            High Life is less frightening than Solaris and less infinite. In its center is a specter of sex; this specter inaugurates, inside the film, another film.

            The split of a schizo, hapless structure.

            Or the passage, unmarked, of fear between my breath.

            My teeth. Your hands.

            My teeth, carious. My hands, removed by your sparkling blade.

---

Ali Raz is co-author, with Vi Khi Nao, of Human Tetris (2020, 11:11 Press), a kooky collection of sex ads. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the LA Review of Books, The Believer, 3:AM Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Firmament, and elsewhere. Her first novella Alien comes out in Spring 2022 from 11:11 Press.

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*image source: Krishnavedala via Wikipedia/CC

The Borders of Sleep

John Robinson

I have come to the borders of sleep
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
“Lights Out”
— Edward Thomas

Owen Wolcott hanged himself on Ash Wednesday. His attempt at suicide, however, was thwarted when a young female model he knew unexpectedly arrived and cut him down. He was just thirty seconds from death. Wolcott was surprised not by the fact of this botched operation (everything he had attempted since coming to Paris a year ago fell short of the mark), but by the fact that the model, a southpaw, was able to cut the cord. After all, the rope was thick, and in the past he had witnessed her struggle to cut hard cheese. Any taxing exertion seemed beyond her strength, let alone rescuing a man weighing one hundred and eighty-five pounds hanging in a stairwell. As he lay barely conscious in her arms, he was surprised to see, in his other worldly state, tears in her eyes.

            He knew that for the rest of his life, he would remember this holy day for his failed suicide. Until then, his only memory of the day was from church: throwing excess ashes off his forehead and onto his childhood friend, Jimmy Roy—who instantly retaliated—while their grammar school nuns had their backs turned.

            The year of his suicide attempt was 1925. The place was Montparnasse, Paris.

            Though his building was filled with artists, painters mostly, there were a few rooms rented by models who were sometimes employed by the artists for nude portraits. Owen Wolcott, the only writer on the premises, rented a small atelier on the top floor.

            He was also the only renter who hadn’t sold anything he had created. So many failed artists in his district had ended their lives since the start of the century, and they had become, after a time, a humiliating cliché. But worse than those were the ones who failed at both the execution of their art and themselves. They achieved a kind of ignominy that created a permanent spiritual banishment from the neighborhood, if not the city itself. After all, what was the point of living in Paris if you were not present for a serious purpose—and what was more serious in this city than the creation of art? If not a successful artist, then at the very least you could aspire to become an unsuccessful dead one. Now Owen Wolcott belonged to the ignominious group. And for as long as he decided to remain alive, he needed the model who saved his life, Sandrine Aubert, to keep his secret.

            If things didn’t go well he would try again. He knew that. If he returned to his writing and things continued to go awry, he knew he would try again. He had the added incentive of selective memory: he only recalled how dying felt during the act, not the painful and frightening hours before his action. What he remembered was the incredible feeling of euphoria and liberation that suffused every second of the hanging. It was as if he had been drugged. Post-suicide, he told no one about that feeling. He kept that knowledge a secret, a kind of insurance policy in case he wanted to try again. He knew one thing: if he had to exit the world, that was how he wanted to feel in his final moments.

            In World War I, he drove Red Cross ambulances in France. A few years after the end of the war, he left America and returned to Paris seeking artistic freedom and literary fame. He wanted to write the definitive novel on the war, a book so profound that its wisdom would prevent future wars. He believed only this towering accomplishment would make his life worthy, and he would be remembered in perpetuity as a literary master. By this singular achievement, he believed, he would cheat death. But more importantly, he would settle the score on all those, including his father, who had sold him short or abandoned him.

            Since he arrived in Paris, his worth would be determined by the anticipated longevity of his creations, and he knew that could only occur if his writing were published in important places. And since his work wasn’t commercial enough to be published in prominent magazines (called the “glossies”) back in the States, he knew his best chance lay with the erudite literary journals, called “small magazines.” These were magazines that had small audiences and paid very little to their contributors, but they had considerable cachet in the literary world. But since he arrived in Paris in 1924 and submitted his work to the important places of the era—The Transatlantic Review, This Quarter, and The Little Review—he had no success. He couldn’t even get the smallest of the small magazines to publish his work.

            Owen Wolcott had issues involving his worth. When he was barely seven years old, his father threw him out of their home in Kansas City, Missouri, and placed him in an orphanage. Because of this, he spent the rest of his life seeking ways to obtain acceptance and self-respect. To achieve that, he believed he needed to leave his mark on the world, and the only thing in his young life that seemed possible to obtain such a lofty goal was writing. In high school, he had shown some talent. English was the only class in which he received a grade higher than a “C.” It was absurd to think that, on so little evidence to support it, he had chosen to launch a literary career in post-war Paris, but he saw there was no other way.

            He had spent some time in Paris. He was granted short leaves from the battlefields where he drove ambulances not far from the outskirts of the city. There was nowhere else to go, but he liked going there. He liked the cafés and the artists he had seen there; they represented a way of life that seemed both respectable and compatible to him. There was nothing like it in his homeland. Once the war was over and he returned to America, he spent his time in Kansas City taking tedious and degrading jobs in order to save enough money for his new life abroad. He tried writing during this time but was too exhausted at day’s end to advance his cause. He was patient, however. As soon as it was financially feasible, he traded Kansas City for Paris.

            The war unsettled him. He had witnessed some of the most gruesome images of dying, death, and destruction he would ever see or imagine. Because those images lodged in his head, he often had difficulty sleeping nights, but it wasn’t all for naught. He believed inside him was matchless material for a powerful novel on The Great War. He just had to devise how to organize all the ideas he conceived and the horrific scenes he had witnessed into a coherent and compelling drama. Since composing a big war novel seemed too large to navigate from the start, he stuck to writing short stories that would later become, he believed, chapters in his “novel-in-progress.” To stay alive in Paris, he would sell the stories and live off money he received from magazines.

            But the lack of interest in his stories sent him into despair. The war left him with disturbing images, and no financial gain. During the winter of 1925-26, as the rejection letters mounted on his desk, he ran out of rent money and was soon starving. He realized his plan had failed, and his father had been right all along about him. Quickly things became too painful to continue. He awoke one frigid Paris day from troubled sleep and decided to end his life.

            Six months after his bungled suicide, Wolcott gave a reading along with four other American expatriate fiction writers at Shakespeare & Company Bookstore. Like his fellow readers, he was unknown to the Left Bank literary scene. All, except himself, belonged to the Dadaist Movement, but in order to arrange a reading in such an esteemed place, he decided to lie and claim he was a recent but impassioned convert. All was not fraudulent. In the days before his reading, he attempted to create a style that seemed in concert with their philosophy. Or at least what he understood of it. He attempted to borrow the use of repetitions found in the work of two non-Dadaists: Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. To not sound too beholden to their stylistic eccentricities, he took the repetitions to even more absurd heights: at the start of his reading, a paragraph would begin and end with the same sentence, but as the story progressed, so did the repetitions. Suddenly, the first and last two sentences of the next paragraph were identical, and this style overran the composition, continuing until entire paragraphs became nothing more than one long repetition of similar sounds.

            This bizarre scheme might have had disastrous consequences had it not been for one thing—the way Wolcott read his story. Never one to volunteer to read aloud in school or in the public square, he skipped every opportunity to speak behind a podium. Reading audibly was painful to him. His voice sounded strange, and he felt ridiculous. In the past, he tried to get off the stage by accelerating his performance, but if he read too quickly, he stammered. That night he couldn’t abandon his reading. He was too desperate.

            The reading at Shakespeare & Company changed everything. This time he tried a new approach: he read very, very slowly, trying to avoid stammering. But this new style of speaking made him overemphasize beginnings and endings of each sentence. His weakness became his strength. At first, there was a great silence in the room. The audience wasn’t bored; it was transfixed. They misinterpreted the original intention of every sentence, believing he was satirizing the characters—the men in power during the war—especially their antiquated, solipsistic thinking and behavior. Suddenly, someone broke into laughter. It slowly spread. The laughter would begin in small spurts, and then spread across the room in reverberative surges. If Dada was created to mock the status quo, then the movement had found its perfect representative in Owen Wolcott. After that night, readings featuring him were booked and sold out everywhere in the Paris. From that night onward, he became a serious literary figure in Montparnasse, and his reputation soon spread to the city’s other arrondissements.

            In the six months after his suicide attempt and his breakthrough moment at Shakespeare & Company, Wolcott lived with the woman who rescued him, Sandrine Aubert. She rented a two-room flat in the same building as Wolcott, and invited him to stay with her until he was healed and had found employment.

            He was instantly lucky on the second condition: a painter in the building knew a local restaurant owner who needed kitchen help—mostly dish washing—and Wolcott accepted the job immediately.

            The work was good therapy. At first, he worked long hours. It was what he wanted. He needed a mindless task to occupy his recovery time. And after a few weeks of uninterrupted and arduous labor, he got reduced hours. He used the extra time to start writing again. He took his sketch notebook to the local park and wrote. He started with poetry but soon switched back to prose. He also started drinking for the first time since the war. He began with wine, then switched to hard liquor.

            Although his writing wasn’t much better than what he had created before his crack-up, it felt good to be writing again. After a time, when the weather got colder, he started writing indoors at cafés. At first, in public, he wore ascots and scarves to cover his sore, bruised neck. He let his uncombed and disheveled hair grow down to his shoulders. Because of this new look he soon was known as “Medusa” by those who frequented the same café society. He took no offense at the sobriquet; rather, he saw it as part of the healing process. Slowly, he was merging into a new self, one without the self-doubts and cynicism of the past.

            It was during this time that Sandrine and Wolcott became lovers. They decided to make their living circumstances permanent.

            Even though Wolcott had finally broken through as a serious talent, he had no major publishing accomplishments to his credit. In the months following his famous reading at Shakespeare & Company, he had gotten some of his stories and poems published in minor Dadaist and avant-garde Left Bank magazines, but still none of the important magazines and periodicals of the day either solicited or accepted work from him. Those destinations built careers. Earlier this reality would have undone him, but because his initial entry into the literary world had been launched by a misunderstanding, he believed he didn’t deserve instant fame or fortune for his writing. It was all about luck. After the reading, he had gotten more invitations to read at other smaller venues around the city, and editors of magazines in France and the US slowly began to request work from him. Though the journals weren’t the most celebrated in the literary world, places that had earlier passed on his writing now gave him space on their pages.

            He adapted to his new situation. He intentionally created stories with a satiric edge. What was once melodramatic writing was now tinged with irony and humor. What he was reporting about the war contained neither gravitas nor revelation. Instead, he was recording on paper an attitude, an acerbic style at loggerheads with the reality he knew was true. He was violating the very thing he had witnessed and thereby cheapening his experience. Though his readings drew large standing-room-only crowds, he felt not like a serious witness of his time, but as an entertainer mocking anything that resembled the status quo or the quotidian. His “style” was much mentioned in articles and reviews of his work, even if he was uncertain of what his style was. Whatever his reservations, he knew his new style was firmly ensconced in the right place and time: the 1920s. The decade of style. The generation called “lost” hadn’t a clue about the circumstances that led to a world war, nor any remedies against its return. Undaunted by that deficiency, they proceeded to create art as if it didn’t matter. Style was all.

            Wolcott knew that, like the others of his generation, he wasn’t in possession of any real solutions to the violent nature of his species. Though he was alive when it happened, he had no idea of the causes—and certainly had no remedies. Therefore, though he internally denied it to himself, he knew that he had nothing to say. He was like the Dadaists who applauded him: full of mockery for the conventional, but bereft of solutions. If another world war was on the way—and Wolcott believed it was—there was nothing to do but mock the purveyors of the conventional beliefs on ethnicity, class, and race—who were dragging the world once again into massive conflict. His Grand Guignol view of civilization prevented him from seeing anything but inevitable cataclysm. So why attempt to interrupt the inevitable?

            One of the most important sirens that attracted Wolcott to his chosen profession was the belief, held by some in his field, that a writing career was the best way to cheat death. Long after one’s corporeal presence had vacated the earth’s surface—the belief went—a writer would be remembered for his thoughts expressed by the printed words he carefully composed in books and periodicals. Taken as an article of faith, the belief was that—even if civilization should fall—somehow people would continue to read and to cherish his writing.

            Wolcott had a vision of a catastrophic future where most—if not all—of civilization had been destroyed but not all hope lost. Once mighty buildings toppled by angry bombs would still retain, beneath their hard and broken surfaces, the magical stuff needed to restart an enlightened society. In his vision, lying beneath the rubble were some of the books he had composed, and once retrieved and read, a new age of enlightenment would be underway. The courageous reader who discovered them got not only a glimpse of the tempestuous time in which the author lived, but was also vouchsafed the boundless possibilities of the human mind. Revealed to the New Reader were the most noble attributes—despite past epochal failures—of the poor monkey race in which he once celebrated and belonged. His work would achieve a kind of timelessness, and eventually liberate millions yet unborn who were not just beneficiaries of a wrecked planet, but of a new optimism.

            The problem with this flattering scenario, lay in the quality of what his pen had left behind. As the current hero of an eccentric movement, he knew his time was already slipping away. After all, what was the relevance and sustainability of an artistic movement whose worship of weirdness and anomie was at its core? As crowds packed cafés and bookstores each week to hear another audacious and provocative reading from his work, he couldn’t help think how ephemeral it all was. In a short time, he would be discovered as the fraud he knew he was all along, and nobody was going to believe his work was destined for eternal grace or applause. Though his writing was now selling briskly in Paris, he knew he was no more than a brief Left Bank fancy. He was not someone whose work would last much beyond the grave, if at all. His moment on stage would be brief and all he possessed.

            And if he were to die the next day, at the height of his fame, how long and how intense would be the memory of his achievement? Would it last till the end of the decade? The end of the year? Or the end of the day? Certainly, it wouldn’t last a century or more and at least a century was needed to clearly qualify as monumental as “cheating death.” Only two writers in Paris in the current year seemed destined for that distinction: Marcel Proust and James Joyce. In a few years, maybe others would emerge, such as the new guy from America, Hemingway. But the writers who were destined to achieve immortality were few, and if their work was the standard for legendary status, then it was not a realistic goal for anyone attempting to attain timelessness in the creation of art. .

            Though filled again with doubt, he continued to devote all his energy to writing, which he believed was his purpose for living in Paris. Once success finally came, he should have been happy, but he was not. Sandrine saw the change and was waiting for him at home when he returned from drinking at Café de la Rotonde.

             “You know,” he began, with slightly slurred speech, “I think I finally saw Hemingway today.”

             “Really,“ Sandrine said.

             “Yes,” he said. “He was crossing the street and looked like he was coming toward my table, but then got distracted by some drunks across the street at the Dôme.”

             “Really.”

             “Yeah,” Wolcott said. “He got dragged over to their table. It was quite a scene. Too bad. I was going to introduce myself. Strike up a friendship. Maybe share writing.”

             “I’m glad you did not,” she told him. “It would have made you unhappy.”

             Wolcott felt his face flush.

             “Why unhappy?” he asked. “My writing has gotten attention. I can pay the rent.”

             “But you don’t believe in what you are doing,” she said, looking straight at him.

             “What has made you popular has no meaning. It has made you sad.”

             “OK,” he said. “What am I supposed to be doing to get this so-called meaning?”

             Sandrine was prepared for more than this question. Again, for the third time, she came to his rescue. She arranged a job for him with a friend of her Parisian family. Where once he drove ambulances to the trenches on the outskirts of Paris, he would now drive abandoned camions filled with refugees, survivors from the last war, mostly children, to country houses on large estates converted into orphanages. It was believed the outdoors would be healthy for them, and Sandrine thought it was also the perfect job for Wolcott. She believed he needed to leave the Left Bank literary scene while he could still walk away.

            He also needed to stop drinking, and she thought the fresh countryside air might be helpful.

            When the children arrived at the train station they all looked the same, though many came from divergent European countries and wore different clothes. Wolcott instantly recognized the fear and exhaustion in their eyes. Ranging in age from seven to twelve, they looked suspiciously at the adults who suddenly had dominion over them as if some new horror would, at any moment, spring forth and terrorize them again. Their clothes and bodies were dirty, and most hadn’t eaten in a spell.

            Wolcott, as a former childhood occupant of an orphanage, instantly identified with the passengers in his truck. He had felt the same fear of abandonment and lack of worth. So much so that he did more than just transport starving and homeless children to their new homes; he made subsequent inquiries about their health—mental and physical—making sure that they were properly bathed, fed, and groomed in their new environment.

            Existence took place in that narrow space between life and death, a place one poet of the time called “the borders of sleep.”

            And what finally mattered on the borders of sleep was not how long you were remembered but why, in this short life, you were recalled at all. For almost all who existed, it was the memories of simple kindnesses that lasted as long as consciousness lasted. That was cheating death. Those memories had a greater staying power than any book, unless that book reminded its readers of those who had been kind to them. And, by extension, cherished them. Without a memory of a cherished life, all literature was empty and sterile and meaningless, the kind of stuff that Wolcott had been creating with great success for others’ shallow amusement.

            When he tried to take his own life, he now saw, it was because he believed he didn’t matter enough to be held dear by anyone, and he would rather enter that deep forest of oblivion than live with that.

            After leaving the countryside, he returned to Paris and stopped at the Rotonde for a drink. When he was done, he stood at the corner of Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse, the very center of the artistic cafés of the Latin Quarter where he spent time writing like his life depended on it, and finally admitted to himself, for the first time, that he hated writing. Ever since the war ended, he had wanted to stop, but since he had no other options, he continued down a painful—even with his brief successes as a minor celebrity—journey toward oblivion. Now he knew how, and with whom, he wanted to spend his life.

            He would go home to Sandrine and tell her the news.

---

John Robinson is a novelist, playwright, essayist, memoirist, and short story writer, who lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His novels include January’s Dream and Legends of the Lost, and his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Green Mountains Review, Cimarron Review, Tampa Review, and epiphany, and has been translated into thirty-two languages. He has contributed political commentary, created award-winning drama, appeared in various anthologies, and written and lived in three countries: Scotland, Spain, and the United States. 

Fiddler’s Green

Dennis McFadden

Richie phoned on Saturday night, needing money, needing food, needing his guitar strings and allergy meds, wondering if Cathy could drive them up to the camp tomorrow. The camp, if you could call it that, was off a backwoods road deep in the Adirondacks—Richie’d had to drive twenty-one miles to the nearest town to call.

            “Why don’t you come down and get them yourself?”

            “I don’t want to take the chance,” he said, the words edged with a tiny, tell-tale slur.

            “What chance? Are you all right?”

            “Sure. Fine. I just need to keep a low profile for a while.”

            “Why? What’s going on?”

            “Life. Life’s going on. Can you bring up my stuff?”

            “I’m worried about you. How much have you been drinking?”

            “Oh, yeah—could you bring me up a bottle of vodka too? Maybe two?”

            “Richie, you have to get your act together. You can’t keep this up.”

            “I’m only drinking for inspiration. I’m writing songs. Me and Doggy.”

            “You’re pickling your brain.”

            “Want to hear one? It’s dedicated to you—The Lie Detector Smoke Detector Blues.”

            Three weeks ago, on her only visit after he’d gone up to the camp, she’d brought him a smoke detector. The place was half trailer, half shack, wholly dilapidated, buried deep in the mountains—Fiddler’s Green, their father had christened it. He’d had grand plans for the place, but, like all his plans, they’d fallen through. Richie was puzzled when he saw the smoke detector. “What’s this for?” he said, grinning, holding it up as though it were a box of tampons.

            “You can never be too safe,” Cathy said.

            Richie laughed. Doggy walked over to Richie’s guitar on the ground beside a washed-out yellow lawn chair, and strummed it with his nose. “Good Doggy,” he said. “Doggy wants to join the band.”

            Three weeks later, he sang, sort of, into the phone: “Been detected and inspected / Been neglected all night long / Been erected and infected / I been working on this song…”

            “Still needs some work,” Cathy said.

            “That’s ’cause I don’t have my guitar strings. Gotta have my guitar strings.”

            “I don’t know about tomorrow. Dillard and I are supposed to go to a chili cook-off. Over in Greenwich.”

            “You and Dillard? You’re going out with him?”

            “Yes. I told you that already.”

            “You did?” Richie said. “I don’t remember. I must have been drunk.”

            “What are the odds?” Cathy said.

            “Dillard’s a funny dude,” Richie said, still slurring. “Stay away from him.”

            “Stay away from him? Why? I thought he was a funny dude.”

            “I don’t trust him is all.”

            “Really. Who do you trust? Do you trust anybody?

            “No.”

            “How about me?”

            A laugh, of sorts. “Sometimes I’m not so sure.”

            Cathy was no psychologist, but if it looked like paranoia, smelled like paranoia, and quacked like paranoia, she suspected that’s what it was. She was worried. Very worried, and yet her first inclination, for a change, was not to drop everything and rush to him—up until now, it might well have been. Why? She liked to think her ex-husband’s, Philip’s, warnings over the years had finally sunk in—the misgivings, for that matter, of her sisters and parents, of family and friends, of just about everybody else, that she was only enabling Richie, not helping him, and that as long as she did, her big brother would never grow up.

            What she didn’t like to think was that it was because she’d been so much looking forward to going to the chili cook-off with Dillard.

            Despite the chili. She hated chili.

Two months earlier, before he went up to camp, Richie had introduced her—reintroduced her—to Dillard. Dillard and Richie had been friends before Richie’d been drafted, and afterwards too, until they lost touch. Dillard had sated a travel lust, living for a while near Boston, then Denver, substitute-teaching mostly (as he’d explained it to Cathy), whatever it took to get by, till he’d landed back home to undertake other adventures. Many of which seemed to involve partying with Richie, a long-standing tradition. Dillard had been there the night Richie’d come home from Viet Nam, they told her. In fact, Dillard insisted, Cathy had knocked over his beer that night. A Utica Club, the last Utica Club, and he’d never quite been able to forgive her.

            She remembered the spilt beer, though not Dillard specifically. Just a host of grown-up, partying people. When he’d come home, Cathy was only eight, and during the tumult of the celebration, she accidentally kicked over a beer, a clearly unforgiveable sin. She began to cry. Richie picked her up, held her on his lap. “It’s only a beer,” he said, rocking her, “just somebody’s stupid beer,” and he laughed and hugged her, aware that she was crying not only because of the stupid beer, but because her big brother was home at last from the war. For much of the party she stayed there, safe in his lap, the center of attention with Richie, her big brother, drunk on Heineken, high on pot, everybody’s hero. Cathy just as drunk, on joy.

            Now, twenty-five years later, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been drunk on joy. Twenty-five years later, Richie had somehow become her little brother, even though he was still twelve years older, still drunk on Heineken and high on pot (when he wasn’t drunk and high on other, more formidable substances), still her hero. Not so much anyone else’s. When Philip had asked her why she kept bailing him out, kept letting him crash on their couch, kept lending him money he never repaid, she looked at him as though he had socks on his ears. “He’s my brother,” she said.

            This was when Philip pointed out that Richie was also Phyllis’s brother, and Mary’s brother, and the son of their parents, yet none of them could be seen to be standing by their black sheep with such stubbornness. He would bring up the two interventions, involving the whole family, that had failed, and after which the others had essentially thrown up their hands. Cathy simply shrugged. “He’s my brother,” she said again. She couldn’t explain to Philip how or why everybody else was wrong. She couldn’t explain to him that the bond that had taken root the night Richie had come home was inseverable, that there was another kind of love which she could only conclude that Philip and the others knew nothing about.

Every Sunday, Philip picked up the boys, spent the day with them. Cathy was fretting in the breakfast nook with her coffee, fussing with the fringe on the placemats, thinking about Richie, about meeting Dillard later and the chili cook-off, when she heard Philip drive up. The boys were still getting ready. She called up, then went out to the top of the sloping driveway. The air was damp, the sky overcast and threatening. Last summer, just after he’d left her, Philip had bought a Mustang convertible. Cathy knew how he hated to drive it anytime in summer with the top up—sure enough, it was down. Philip stood beside his sky-blue Mustang, tall and narrow-shouldered, light eyes beneath heavy eyebrows, looking more like a professor than the first assistant chef at The Ginger Tree Restaurant. When his smile went away—as it did when he looked up at the glowering sky over Londonderry Circle—it looked as though his mouth was melting into his neat brown beard. “Damn,” he said. “We’d better get this top back up.”

             We? Then Cathy saw the woman in the passenger seat.

            “Cathy,” Philip said, “do you know Heather?”

            “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” Cathy said. Philip glanced a warning at her. Heather, sleek and smooth with a grim little smile, got out of the car and nodded at Cathy, sunglasses despite the gloom, short blue sundress, lovely dark hair like the hair of a college track star. Cathy found herself smoothing her skirt over her thighs. She was wearing a skirt Philip had given her a few years before, a clunky pleated skirt, olive with a floral pattern, and a plain white blouse: a uniform, a girl scout uniform. She felt like a girl scout, a plain, dull, pudgy girl scout in a silly, bland uniform.

            The boys came out with their golf clubs as the first raindrops began to fall, looked at the sky, stood beside their mother under the garage overhang and rested their clubs on the blacktop with a sigh—all very much in unison. Scotty was wearing his New York Mets jersey, Josh his Chicago Bulls.

            The rain fell harder. Philip and Heather secured the top and scurried up the drive to stand under the overhang with Cathy and the boys.

            “Not so sure you’ll be needing those,” said Philip, nodding toward the clubs.

            “Poop,” Josh said.

            “Josh,” said Cathy, scolding, a habit. She was on auto-pilot. Philip had never brought a girlfriend around before. From under the overhang, they watched the raindrops pelt the driveway, staring glumly at the rain.

            “Okay, here’s the plan,” Philip said. “We’ll head up to the Adirondack Museum. We’ll put the clubs in the trunk in case it dries up.”

            Josh said, “Daddy and Heather are roommates now.”

            “We are not!” said Philip, as Heather tossed her head and rolled her eyes, smile a bit tighter. “What made you think that?” she said, ruffling Josh’s hair.

            “I don’t know,” Josh said, clamming up.

            “You dork,” Scotty said to his little brother.

            Cathy said, “If you’re going up that way, do you mind dropping some stuff off to Richie? He called last night. He needs his allergy meds, his—”

            “No,” Philip said, sounding like whoa! “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.” Then, “He’s still up there? I can’t believe he’s still up there.”

            “Neither can I,” Cathy said. “It’s been over a month. Him and Doggy.”

            “I thought that place was uninhabitable. What’s he doing up there?”

            Cathy sighed. “I don’t know. ‘Keeping a low profile.’”

            She didn’t mention paranoia. Philip didn’t need to know—nor did the boys. She was afraid the drinking and drugs had finally caught up to her big brother. He was in hiding, and her best guess was that all he was hiding from was his own demons and delusions. It was finally overtaking him, poor, goofy, faithful Richie.

            “Whatever,” Philip said, shrugging his narrow shoulders. “Ready, boys?”

            They moved quickly through the rain, stowing the clubs in the trunk, clambering into the car. Cathy stood in a trance, watching them back away. The driveway, broad and bowed, sloped down to the street, and she suddenly had the odd notion it was a tongue. She was standing watching a sky-blue Mustang roll down through the raindrops and drip off her house’s tongue, as though her house were a mouth-breather, a drooler. How could she live in such a stupid house? Her house seemed incredibly stupid, just as stupid as her plain white blouse and olive skirt.

            She couldn’t wait to see Dillard. With Dillard she was witty and wise, attractive and fun. It was obvious from the way he looked at her: He saw her as his Heather.

She quickly shed her girl scout uniform. She didn’t hang them back up, neither the olive skirt nor the dull white blouse. Wearing only her underwear, she carried them downstairs to throw in the garbage. She hovered for an instant over the garbage can, reluctant to commit, for there were coffee grounds in it, and milk-sodden Cheerios, and there would be no turning back, no changing her mind, as soon as she dropped them in. Of course she didn’t care. She’d certainly never wear them again. To drop or not to drop? Standing in her underwear in the kitchen, clothes in hand, an odd sensation crept up from her ankles to her thighs. Once she and Philip had made love on the kitchen floor, home from dinner and a movie, some sexy movie involving adultery and plenty of it, the sitter just gone, Scotty asleep upstairs in his crib. They’d done it in a frenzy, just over there, where a Cheerio had fallen on the floor, one lonely, stupid Cheerio. There was a fly buzzing around the garbage can, and the kitchen was dark and gloomy.

            She carried her clothes back upstairs, throwing them onto the chair in the bedroom. Maybe give them to Good Will. She was, after all, a sensible woman. In the mirror, she evaded her eyes, her forehead too wide and shiny, her brown hair rising up frizzy against the humidity. So, feeling so sensible, why did she walk back downstairs, still in only bra and panties, instead of going into her bedroom to dress? Why did she walk from room to room through the quiet house, into the living room where the curtain opened wide over Londonderry Circle? The rain was still pelting the street, the neighboring roofs, the lush green lawns, shrubbery and trees, leaves roiling gently. When was the last time she and Philip had made love on the sofa? Two years ago? Five? Probably more. For a while, they’d been adventurous, impetuous, trying different places, different rooms, different positions.

            Where did that leave Cathy? A little sad, certainly; lonely too, but, for some reason, possibly more than anything else right now, at this moment, here in her living room, wearing next to nothing with the curtain wide open, her naked feet cushioned in carpet—aroused.

            Dillard? She hadn’t had sex with him, not yet—she was biding her time, and he wasn’t pressuring. She was not a promiscuous person, and this would be only their third actual date. She’d made a couple of stabs at dating over the winter, before Dillard, once letting Sheila, her friend and co-worker from the Chamber of Commerce, fix her up with her cousin. Sheldon was big, quiet, affable, with sloping shoulders, large, soft ears and the odd, undazzling flash of wit. He worked for Social Services. His hair and the collar of his shirt were both plastered flat. They’d gone to dinner at Barney’s, and Cathy had been a bit disquieted watching Sheldon cut everything on his plate—chicken, spaghetti, parsley and all—into small bits before he took a single bite. Not necessarily a deal-breaker—she was used to eating with an eight- and twelve-year-old, and she’d managed a cheerful banter. She’d been surprised in fact that Sheldon hadn’t called again, and even more surprised when she’d learned later from Sheila it was because he considered her a sloppy eater. Another date—her only other date—hadn’t gone well when Barry, a wiry carpenter from Halfmoon with hair like black licorice, a member of the Chamber, had announced upon arriving that he was sporting an erection. Cathy shut the door in his face. Barry hadn’t been to another Chamber mixer since.

            Now, sitting on the sofa nearly naked watching the rain-washed street through the wide open window, the image of Barry’s imagined erection elbowed its way into her mind, where it morphed into an all-encompassing, shivering sensation, and she thought: What if Dillard got hit by a truck?

            What was she waiting for? A rainy day? Carpe diem.

Afterwards, after the rain ended and the sky was trying to clear, Dillard arrived unscathed. Part clown, part hippie, long brown curly hair flecked with gray, unshaven stubble bordering on beard. He wore his baseball cap backwards, despite the fact that he was in his forties. A big man in blue jeans and a red plaid shirt—half tucked in, half out—his expression was that of a mischievous boy at the cookie jar. She met him at the door, led him up the half-flight of stairs to the living room where they sat on the sofa, the same sofa, the same curtain opened wide over the same Londonderry Circle.

            “I have a dilemma,” she said.

            “I been meaning to get me one of those,” he said. “I saw a nice one in the Dilemma Shop window down on Broadway, slightly used, only one owner, this little old lady who only took it out on Sundays when she was trying to decide whether to go to church or the bullfights. They wanted six-ninety-nine for it, but they had an installment plan—I could go on.”

            “Not necessary,” said Cathy with her little smile.

            “Okay then. What’s your dilemma? I can’t afford my own anyhow.”

            She sighed, aware of how it made her breasts lift. She’d changed into her white pleated culottes that were too short, and her sleeveless red top that was too snug, but she’d changed into them utterly aware of the shortness and snugness. Her dilemma was this: She’d decided she wanted to go to bed with Dillard. She wanted to spend the afternoon there with him, instead of going to Greenwich to watch him eat chili, but she wasn’t sure of how to go about it. So far, he’d been anything but insistent, which she attributed to his being a gentleman, to his respecting her, and to his history with the family. But now, after she’d made the decision, she began to wonder if it was something else, if he was not anxious to get her into bed for some other reason—such as, did he not find her attractive? Did he want only to be friends? Did he consider them more like brother and sister, given his friendship with Richie, his history with the family? Would he think less of her if she were too aggressive, too suggestive? Worst of all, might he reject the notion out of hand? She was in no mood for more rejection.

            This was not, however, the dilemma she presented. “Richie called last night,” she said. “He needs some stuff up at camp, and wanted me to bring it up this afternoon.”

            “Why doesn’t he come down and get it himself? He’s a big boy now.”

            A noncommittal shrug. She didn’t feel like going into it again. Didn’t feel like discussing her brother’s wackiness, again. “I don’t know. He said he needs it today.”

            “I kind of had my mouth set on chili,” said Dillard. “But hey. If he needs his stuff today, I guess he needs it today.”

            “I didn’t say I would,” she said, “but I didn’t say I wouldn’t. Why don’t I make us some lunch first and we can think about it?”

            “A little lunch before a chili fest—that’s so wild and so crazy, it might just work.”

            “Aren’t they just these little, tiny bowls?” she said.

            “Yes. But after the first twenty or thirty, you don’t mind missing lunch so much.”

            “Thirty tiny bowls of chili?”

            “So what do you have for lunch? Got any chili?”

            She made three tuna sandwiches, figuring a half should be more than enough for her. She was at the counter when Dillard came in. “Talk about schizophrenic,” he said.

            She paused, knife poised: Richie? She’d considered paranoia, but hadn’t yet gotten around to schizophrenia.

            “Look at that,” he said, walking to the window above the sink, parting the curtains. “Hardly a cloud in the sky—two hours ago it was raining cats and dogs—see, look, there’s still a big poodle over there. A perfect day for a chili fest. Or for a ride up to Fiddler’s Green—if Richie really needs his stuff that bad.”

            “Richie told you the name of it? Our dad had some grandiose ideas.”

            “Oh, he told me all about it. Never told me where it was, though, exactly.”

            “Even if you knew where it was, you still wouldn’t know where it was. I have to look at the directions every time. It’s way up north.”

            “Well I’m game if you’re game. Matter of fact, I’m a little gamey, too.” He gave his shirt a quick sniff, crinkling his nose.

            Cathy smiled, though not so much at his antic. All was not lost. A new possibility had emerged in her mind, the possibility offered by thousands of square miles of Adirondack wilderness, isolated woods and back roads in the summer sunshine, and a blanket—she’d have to bring a blanket. “Why don’t I wrap these up then? We can have a picnic on the way.”

            “Ahhh,” he said, bobbing his eyebrows suggestively. “Au naturel! ”

Spit and Spat were statues of two strapping young men hunkering forward at either end of an oblong pool in Congress Park, forever spitting streams of water at one another through conch shells. Cathy watched for a moment, mesmerized by the endless arcs of the streams, the rhythm of the splashes and ripples, the sunshine burning the rain from the grass, the fresh smell of water and greenery. She’d always admired the musculature of the twin figures, albeit from a more esthetic point of view than she felt now. Now she admired something else she hadn’t considered before: the raw sensuousness.

            Dillard wiped off a nearby bench—they would eat in the park, barely on the way, but he was too hungry to wait. Then she noticed the frog.

            In a corner of the pool by the base of one statue—Spit or Spat, she wasn’t sure which was which—he was floating motionless, submerged up to his nose. He was in trouble, a foot below the edge, in three feet of water. How could he escape? There was nothing from which he could leap, no way to climb. Cathy stepped to the edge, peering down for a closer look.

            “I don’t think he can get out,” she said.

            “Who?” said Dillard, coming over. “Son of a gun. Guess he didn’t see the No Swimmingsign. Either that, or he’s a blatant scofflaw. I hate that in a frog.”

            “I don’t think I can touch him. My boys could.”

            “Me neither. Not before they’re cooked.”

            “We can’t just let him die.”

            “We can’t?” She looked at him with a frown and saw the hinted grin, the big, brown, playful eyes. In one motion—graceful for a big man—he took off his hat, stooped and dipped, scooping the frog neatly out of the water. He stood, holding the dripping hat in his hands, the frog spread low and quiet in the middle.

            “There!” she said.

            “There,” he said, easing the thing onto the grass by the pool. The frog took a weak hop, then crouched in a cautionary squat. Dillard wrung out his hat, mostly for comic effect, then placed it back on his head, wet and backwards. “Have you met Jeremiah?”

            “Jeremiah the bull frog?”

            “He was a good friend of mine,” Dillard said.

            “Did you ever understand a single word he said?”

            “Well, no, but I helped him drink his wine. As a matter of fact, he always had some mighty fine wine—I could go on.”

            “Not necessary,” she said with a laugh. They lingered, staring down at the small damaged creature. Her big brother, Richie, came to mind.

            “I don’t know if he’s going to make it or not,” said Dillard. “Frog legs, anyone?”

            “Ewee, no.” The frog didn’t budge. “They don’t go very well with tuna.”

            “That’s okay. I don’t like to eat ’em anyway. I keep thinking of all those poor little frogs hobbling around on crutches.”

            “I admire a man with a conscience.”

            “Truth be told,” he said, solemnly, “it can be a mighty heavy burden.”

They drove to Richie’s place to pick up his things, Cathy high with anticipation. The door to Richie’s apartment, a shabby duplex on Nelson Avenue, was unlocked, and they walked into the quiet dark, all the shades down. The place was a shambles: books on the floor, drawers pulled open, bedclothes in a heap by the side of the bed. Richie had always been a terrible housekeeper, and since Duffy, his second wife, had moved out, he was even worse. Still, it was even more of a mess than Cathy remembered.

            “Do you believe this place?” she said.

            “Of course. Do you know Richie?”

            “It looks like it’s been ransacked.”

            “Of course. Do you know Richie?”

            They quickly found his guitar strings and allergy meds amidst the clutter, and left. The quiet chaos was depressing, foreign to the jubilation that had been building inside her.

            They headed up the Northway toward Fiddler’s Green beneath a glorious blue sky, the rolling green hills around them swelling into mountains, the white line undulating along beside her like a long, sleek snake. The storm was far behind. The perfect tonic. She felt content, a perfect day to be high, sailing, flying. The radio was turned up high against the wind through the windows. Joy to the World came on: “Jeremiah was a bullfrog—”

            “Oh my God!” said Cathy.

            Dillard sang along, “Was a good friend of mine!”

            She grabbed his arm. “We were just singing this. Saying this. Something this.”

            “I never understood a single word he said,” Dillard sang, “but I helped him drink his wine!” They both sang: “He always had some mighty fine wine!”

            She squeezed his arm. “Do you believe it?”

            “Joy to the world!” they sang, “all the boys and girls! Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea—joy to you and me!”

            “Wait,” she said. “Did you say fishes or vicious?”

            “I thought it was vicious the first time I heard it. Didn’t make a lick of sense, but that’s what I thought it was for years and years.” He looked over and cocked his head, stubbled jaw jutting. “Actually,” he said, “I still think it is.”

            Cathy laughed. They sang. When the song was over, Dillard turned down the radio. “I have a problem with oldies.”

            “What kind of a problem?”

            “You know how they take you back to the time when it was popular, to what you were doing then, usually some exact moment? Kind of like a time machine?”

            “ Yes,” Cathy said. “I remember me and Marsha—my girlfriend—singing Joy to the World at the top of our lungs in her rumpus room. We must have been about eight. We were playing with her sister’s Barbies.”

            “See, now that’s the trouble. If you only listen to oldies, twenty years from now, what’s going to bring you back to now? Nothing. It’ll all be gone. These’ll be the missing years. When you hear Joy to the World twenty years from now, you’ll still think about playing with those Barbies when you were little—you won’t think about this ride up north to get Richie on a sunny afternoon. It’ll be gone. There’ll be nothing to remind you of it. It’s what I call an existential quandary. I’m not sure exactly why I call it that, but I do anyhow.”

            “You’re right—today’s songs will be the oldies then.”

            “Yeah, and see, we’re not listening to today’s songs.”

            Cathy didn’t say anything. She was watching the scintillating sky and the mountains, and something was trying to bring her back down to earth, but the sky and the mountains wouldn’t let it. Something Dillard said had snagged in her mind for an instant before it washed away—what was it?—and it was gone, quickly, and she was trying to consider where today was going, where it would be twenty years from now, certain it would not be among the missing years. How could it be? Warm air gushing through the open windows, Dillard cranked it up when Me and Bobby McGee came on, and Cathy and Jeremy Staat were behind the bushes along the splintery fence in Jeremy’s front yard on Jefferson Street, peeking down each other’s underwear.

            They left the Northway at Exit 29 above Schroon Lake, headed west on Route 2B. Cathy took the directions out of her purse, unfolding them in her lap. “2B,” Dillard asked, “or not 2B?” She looked up to see his naughty grin.

            “That is the question,” she said. “As a matter of fact, that is the question Philip asked every, single, doggone time we came up here.”

            “Oh,” Dillard said. “Sorry.” He glanced at her with elevated eyebrows. “Do I remind you a lot of Philip?”

            Both hands on the wheel, he looked over again, waiting for an answer, his naughty boy eyebrows still raised in an expectant arch. Cathy turned in her seat to face him. “Your hair is a lot curlier,” she said.

            “Is that the only difference?”

            “You’re quite a bit bigger.”

            “Yeah, well. I don’t like to brag. It’s just something I was born with.”

            Cathy checked her smile, allowing the innuendo to free-float in the air. She checked her breathing, which was coming more deeply. Dillard stared ahead through the windshield, less animated now, more quiet. More serious. Beside the road, boulders littered a creek bed that was nearly dry, a sheer rock face soaring up behind it. She remembered this spot, was relieved they were still going the right way—Cathy was terrible at directions, even those written down. For a few more miles, it was quiet. Lay Down Sally came on and Dillard nodded slightly, though whether or not it was because of the song, the fresh innuendo, whether or not he was even listening, she couldn’t tell. The song stayed soft, unsung along to, fading here and there—they were losing the station. Cathy fidgeted with the directions, folding and creasing, pressing them in her lap. Soon they would be leaving the beaten track for lonely dirt roads with dozens of shady spots to pull over, and the blanket was waiting on the backseat of the car, right where she’d put it. She wondered if Dillard was growing quieter for the same reason as was she—if he was also trying to plot the best excuse to plausibly pull over by the side of the road before they got to Fiddler’s Green. To stop, take the blanket and spread it on the soft grass by the roadside in a way that was not awkward and rough and not without romance.

            Finally, by a little turn in the road beside a brook, she said, “I think we’re almost there.”

            He pulled over, just past the narrow plank bridge. According to the directions, they were 3.1 miles from the camp. Her heartbeat made its way to the back of her jaw. The trees were thick and tall, sunlight filtering down, dappling the packed brown dirt of the road. Bird songs filled the air, shattered by the call of a crow.

            He looked over. “The call of nature,” he said. “The call of the wild.”

             Which call? But of course she knew. As graceful an excuse as any. Well done!

            He excused himself to step behind a tree, and she realized she should go as well—it had been a long ride. She picked her way into the woods, the sodden carpet of dead leaves concealing a phalanx of sharp things—shoots and twigs, rocks and branches—lying in ambush, waiting to attack her feet that were sheathed only in skimpy sandals. The woods were teeming. Brambles clawed at her bare calves and thighs. Sounds of wild things scurrying and burrowing and birds chittering loudly, distressed by the invasion. She found a spot behind a bush, and stopped, heart racing. Pulling down her culottes and underpants, she squatted to pee, then waited, dripping. Gnats began to seek her out, mosquitoes. Her breath was quick and shallow. She stood, considering for a brief, foolish, brave moment walking back out to him sans panties. She was wondering, trembling, deciding, desiring, when she heard the cough of the car engine starting.

            Then the engine raced and the gravel spit as the car pulled away, as crows and other black things scurried across the sky.

Richie had named him Venture ten years before, but everyone thought that was a dumb name, and it never stuck. No one named him Doggy either; it just took. He was big and brown and grinned quite a lot. Doggy loved to lie on his back, hoping for a belly scratch, pumping his paws in circles. The wheels on the bus go round and round, Cathy used to sing, round and round. She’d sung it to her boys, Scotty and Josh, pumping their small legs around, and Doggy’d always reminded her of that.

            He was lying in the ruts and weeds of the yard by the guitar that was face-down in the dirt. The washed-out yellow lawn chair lay on its back, arms reaching for the sky, a beer bottle lying spilled, kicked over by a different foot. Doggy didn’t pump his paws in circles, didn’t jump up to greet her, didn’t dance on his hind legs. He didn’t move, the side of his head matted with dark blood, a fly on his lip.

            The place was deserted. In the kitchen, a shaft of dusty sunlight through a smeared window fell across a sliced tomato and a bunch of scallions on a cutting board, a still life. Richie’s ancient VW bug sat hidden behind the camp, keys nowhere to be found. Cathy sat gingerly on the splintery plank that passed for a front step.

             Jeremiah was a bull frog! Was a good friend of mine!

            The song had been running roughshod through her mind for 3.1 eternal miles, all the way to Fiddler’s Green, frantically at first, with a manic beat, then slowly, like a funeral march. Dillard was right. She was in a vacuum. Someday, it would all be missing. I never understood a single word he said, but I helped him drink his wine! Splinters from the plank pricked the back of her legs, and she felt as though she were drowning beneath twenty thousand fathoms of sunshine.

            Lonely is the least of it. What she would give if loneliness was all that she felt. He always had some mighty fine wine! Through the prism of the moisture, she watched Doggy’s fur soaking up all the sunlight.

            But she isn’t there. She is not a speck in a vast forest teeming with life and decay. She is not stranded, alone, not without love or hope. Richie is not lost. Joy to the world! All the boys and girls! Joy to the vicious— She is playing with Barbie dolls, with her best friend Marsha, and they’re singing, joyfully, as loud as they can, and sure enough, today is nowhere to be found.

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Dennis McFadden, a retired project manager, lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His collection Jimtown Road won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and his first collection Hart’s Grove was published by Colgate University Press in 2010; his third collection The Signal Tower was a finalist for the 2020 Brighthorse Prize for Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, includingThe Missouri Review, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Best American Mystery Stories,and in the inaugural volume of the new series The Best Mystery Stories the Year 2021, edited by Lee Child. In 2018 he was awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is currently guest short fiction editor for Prime Number Magazine.