Out Line: A Proposal That Won’t Be Accepted

by Kristine Langley Mahler

I am seeking permission to access the places I never entered, the memories I packed in cardboard boxes and shoved into the archives, a place whose impact on me I am still trying to understand.

Project Description:

A return to an in-between place, a liminal place, a preadolescent place with four years of phantom occupation. The town never admitted I was there, but a dash between 1992 and 1996 doesn’t make it an epitaph. History needs beginnings and ends, but not my history. 

An outline, a delineation of the line that I traced out, or the one encircling the city that kept me out.

It is a trip I have taken for years; the errata litters my Google search history. I sent the historical society fifty dollars for the 1300-page county chronicles so I could learn the secrets of every family profiled. But the families submitted their own stories, I realized partway through, so now I am paying attention to what is included, and what is absent.

Pitt County has always been over one-third Black. But the family histories in the book are nearly all white.

My middle school bore the name of C.M. Eppes, a reference to the principal of the Black high school which had mysteriously burned down in 1970. Its destruction had forced the county’s hand, and the long-delayed desegregation finally occurred as the Black students joined the white students at Rose High School on Elm Street. Twenty years later, the conjoined student body moved to a newly-built high school, and the former Rose was converted into a middle school—C.M. Eppes Middle—one year before I began sixth grade.

The soapstone lab tables had decades of gum adhered to the undersides, a constellation of colors. It was not all spearmint-white.

I will return to that town, hog-belly-up on the coastal plains of North Carolina, to document what I wanted to see but did not. Or I will document what I did not want to see but did. I will produce an essay about the essay I will write about the essay I would write if I actually had to return.

Here is my cable cord, here is my fractal wire, here is my spider thread. All I have to do is open a browser.

Product of the funded activity:

The disorientation I already know. Things have changed, things have not. Arrival was like a choked inhale, departure like a choked exhale. I will take out my yearbook and look up everyone on the Pitt County tax assessor website so I can drive by their adult houses. Maybe I will catch a glimpse of someone, like the time in 2005 when I saw the thin Mr. Grace, which will make me reconsider the futures I assumed were fixed.

I will leave out the nice encounters, or I will reframe them with the skepticism of a girl who remembers the sight of her broken diary in a friend’s hands, a mother looming behind, when the doorbell rang. 

I will circle my old house like the boys who had come when I was home sick. I called the police because I was thirteen and alone and I was scared because one boy had picked up a metal pole by the basketball hoop, feinted like he was going to hit my dog. When the police arrived, the boys scattered into the ditch creek behind my house. After rustling them up literally by the scruff of their shirts and tossing the boys into the back of the car, the police told me they’d asked the boys what they were doing in this neighborhood because they obviously didn’t belong there. 

I should have mentioned the boys were Black. I should have mentioned that when Bojangles started building on the corner lot, someone spray-painted get your black restaurant out of our white neighborhood on the brick wall. I should have mentioned that the neighborhood kids biked over for Bo-Berry Biscuits anyway. I should have mentioned the boys were my age, but boys my age had gotten O.S.S.—Out of School Suspension, not I.S.S.—at my middle school for bringing guns.

The window has been open while I’ve been elsewhere. I will lick the yellow pollen that’s settled on my shoulder; I will spit and rub a circle on the windshield until I can see where I’m parked. 

Activities/Process/Methodology:

Will I drive or will I fly? Won’t I want my mix tapes—tapes, not iTunes playlists—in the car with me? Will I want to hear Toni Braxton, Janet, SWV? I’ll need to re-buy them. Maybe I’ll go to the mall with the cemented graveyard in the middle of the parking lot. If I am unable to locate a music store, I will flip the top of my notebook and scribble sic transit gloria mundi.

I will wait to hear the right songs on the radio. Or I won’t. They are there, somewhere; I am there and those are the familiar chords of “Carolina in my Mind.” But I cued them up.

I have chosen my Airbnb, a house barely a block away from the house where I lived. I’ve picked my weekend—the 100th anniversary of the county fair, the last weekend of September. I will buy a soft-pack of Marlboros from the vending machine on the east side of the Holiday Inn up the road from Betsy’s house, shoving in quarters the way she did, and I will pay attention to how my body reacts to the old smell of tobacco smoke. Maybe I’ll inhale for the first time in my life as a performative metaphor for how living there damaged me.

I will dissect the neighborhood names of “Westhaven” and “Club Pines,” the conjoined places that made up my world, to emphasize how it was both a haven for white people in the southwest of the city and a club bordered by tall pines like a fence.

My daughters cannot come. My husband cannot come. My parents and my siblings cannot come. The only person I want to retread those years with me is dead, which is why she is the only one I want.

I will see if I can drive, by memory, the route Sherman or Quefe took as they bussed us from Club Pines into the decaying heart of the city so we would integrate the schools. Past the Piggly Wiggly, past the mortuary catty-corner from my elementary. I don’t remember the mortuary being there when I was a student, but the reference is too elegant to leave out. The Google Maps car captured a man on the front porch of one of the shotgun houses that faced the fifth grade wing of my school; I will recount the time my teacher had to call the cops because the rap was blasting so loud we couldn’t hear her trying to instruct us. They’ve removed the barbed wire from the top of the chain link fence that surrounded the playground, but now I’m not sure if the barbed wire was really ever there, or if we just wanted it to be.

I will get a guest pass to tour Eppes, find the U.S.S. trapdoor in the band room we always swore was where the really bad kids got Under School Suspension. It’ll be football season, I can smell the pigs roasting in the massive grills under the stadium rows down the street at Ficklen. 

I know how I need to look. I’m growing my hair out, I’m practicing my foundation. I’ll buy an old t-shirt at Goodwill, a company with a regional name that can’t be found everywhere, but I won’t wear the shirt until I’m on my way back home. Then I’ll write about how I wear that town on me like a brand.

I have returned a hundred times; I have never come home.

Budget Justification:

The Airbnb is ridiculously cheap—something like $59/night for the entire house. The listing shows three bedrooms, two of which have unframed beds on the floor. The new owner is only half-trying. That neighborhood used to mean something. I will work the word “crestfallen” into the essay somewhere to echo Crestline Boulevard, the street with my house. The Airbnb is only thirty numbers down from mine. The Airbnb is actually my brother’s friend’s old house—I confirmed that through the county tax assessor website because I wasn’t sure I had remembered correctly.

But the backyard is the reason I want that house—I want access to the ditches snaking through the neighborhood. I will live out my fantasy of rafting through the drainage. I have mapped their paths. I know I can enter the ditch behind the Airbnb and paddle until I am behind my own house. It is the only way I can get into my old backyard, now, because the new owners put up a six-foot fence surrounding what we used to leave wide open.

The people to whom my parents sold our house twenty-three years ago are the people who still own it. Their daughters are married, their son has left town, the old man is near retirement age. I have to go to my house before they leave, while my last name might still carry currency. I will stand on the front porch and prove I lived there once; I will ask if they still have the hook-and-eye latches on the cubby doors leading under the eaves in the upstairs bedrooms. I will ask if they ever found the shark teeth we strained from the creek and brought back in our pockets, little bite-threats, still sharp thousands of years later.

I will promise, like the Miranda Lambert song, that if they will just let me in I won’t take anything from the house that broke me.

Nowhere hurts like the place you learned to be hurt; nowhere hurts like the place you were a preadolescent. I will not think of the empty stairwell where I stopped to remove the sports bra I did not need, wiping at my underwear with jean pocket corners that I inspected, looking for red and never finding it. I will not think of the bus seat with the hand thrust over the top, his quick fury when I declined to draw a starburst because he was a boy, not because his skin was darker, shame that I could not vent because I was afraid of men. The answering machine messages filling up the tape, playback I would muffle with my thumb.

I will go to the site of the old Pier One and tuck dollar bills onto any shelf to pay off the change purse I stole. I will go to Brody’s and buy any prom dress I want because I cannot have the jean vest and white tulle skirt I desired when I was thirteen. I will buy myself a lot of things as reparations, and when I get home, I will lay them out on my bed, photograph the lot, and store it all away in a box I will not open because I just need to possess. It will be an adroit metaphor for the entire trip.

Project Timeline:

Can I bring myself to eat at Ragazzi’s? Will I allow myself to be buttered up with breadsticks? Will I go to the head shop and buy the butterfly polymer clay candle holder out of spite? Do I even still want it?

I will contemplate moving my family there, that much I know. I will tell myself that if I can just get a membership to the Lake Ellsworth pool, my daughters’ adolescence would be different. They don’t have to be Northerners coming in clueless. I can give them Cotillion, teach them how to slur -ville into -vul.

I will not remember to check my privilege because when I lived there, I thought I had none. But in that town, every white person does.

I’m in the county fair building with the pumpkin I entered in the decorating contest, the white one I painted with splotches of brown, hooked with sunglasses, and angled a floppy black hat atop, an honorable mention ribbon tagged on my Michael Jackson. I didn’t have to get an honorable mention; not every contestant did. I will compare that memory to the Gravitron, the feeling of being pinned against the wall as the floor dropped out, stuck in whatever position I had assumed, arms either indefensibly splayed open or else crunched against my chest, my own weight crushing myself.

I will reference the apocryphal line I said when my family first moved there, the one where I swore I cried when we arrived but I’ll laugh when we leave. I will not mention that I cried when we did actually leave, or else I will make a reference to a familiar syndrome, ham-handedly renaming it Stokes-home for the county town nearby.

Of course I will cry when I leave because all leavings are like the first one.

When I get back to the Midwest, I will note the humidity, how it’s different. How the prairie sun burns but doesn’t leave a slick sweat coat on my skin, a damp sunscreen I always tried to wipe off. I could not recognize the secrets that place tried to reveal to me, which is why I have to return over and over until I learn that I don’t have to return. I will always witness what I want.

Contribution to the field/conceptual importance:

There will be something I have forgotten that I will disclose at the end. I said “disclose,” but I wrote “enclose” the first time. I’m still watching for the out line.

The wallpaper in the bathroom of the Airbnb house reminds me of the wallpaper in my old bathroom, which is another reason I will rent that house. I will comb through the rooms at leisure, finding the right place to perform the displacement game. If I curl on the floor facing the same direction I once faced, covering my exposed arms with my childhood blanket, I can transpose locations—as long as I keep my eyes closed, I am actually there, in my old house. All the physical facts are in place. 

I have had dreams where I rented my old house, but there were rooms that didn’t exist. These are the portals I will access to slip through memory into the places I didn’t want to see when they were corporeal.

It will all seem smaller, closer. It always does.

The tobacco fields that have turned into an extension of the subdivision will be representative of the town building atop its history. I will not use those houses as emblems of progress, because progress means growth and too many things have remained the same.

A few years after I left, the parents’ association filed a lawsuit against the public school board, alleging that their white kids were being discriminated against: they were still being forced to desegregate lower-income elementary schools nearly fifty years after Brown v. Board. The town moved with its own deliberate speed, building an elementary school near my old neighborhood which the board claimed the burgeoning southside population required. Then the town tucked under its lower lip, sliding a court-approved policy across the table: race cannot be the sole measure of diversity.

There used to be a house I remembered on the way out to the new hospital, which is no longer new. The house had a wide circle driveway; the house was set back far from the road. The house was two stories tall with white pillars and it looked like Tara in Gone with the Wind. If the house is no longer there, I will describe the old South making way for the new. Or constructions of the South being replaced with new construction. If it stands, I will find some way to tear it down.

---

How can you write yourself back into a place you once inhabited where you never felt like you belonged? This essay encircles the premise of taking a trip back to a county where I lived for four years, while confessing that the trip will never actually occur. That the trip, in fact, does not have to occur, because I already know how I would shape what I might see based on what I would want to see. But the examination of memory widens the cracks to find concurrent narratives I did not recognize at the time. I framed the piece like a grant proposal, because ultimately, I am seeking permission to access the places I never entered, the memories I packed in cardboard boxes and shoved into the archives, a place whose impact on me I am still trying to understand.

—

Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays 2019, received the Rafael Torch Award from Crab Orchard Review, won the 2019 Sundog Lit Collaboration Contest, and has been published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, The Normal School, and The Rumpus, among others. She is the Publisher/Editor-in-Chief at Split/Lip Press. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.

Hopkins House Condominium Association

by Shou Jie Eng

There is a tension, a gap between this ocularcentrism and the body of dwelling—a productive space that bears revisiting.

I’ve been eyeing a carriage house, she tells me, late one night. I see a house in the dark, full of carts, without horses or humans. There is a painter on the second floor who is moving out. He is not there when we visit, but the space still has his scent. Whites and blues on the plywood floors, paced uncertainly into greys in parts. Tape marks on the walls. Racks, nearly empty, out of two-by-fours with their lumber stamps left on.

/

Six parking bays for the five apartments in the main house
and the one in the carriage house
a historic house the John D. Hopkins House
the carriage house is in the record too
the stair that leads to the second floor
is only accessible from the face
invisible from the street.

/

She wants me to draw up the apartment for her. It will be on the second floor of the carriage house. She wants a large kitchen to cook in, and for friends to be with her as she cooks for them. She wants a six-foot tub with a good back, so that she can soak fully and sit up. She wants to replace the hanging fluorescent work lights. She wants to keep the heavy timber frame. She wants the light from the three p.m. sun to fall on the curve of her back, where her spine dips between her shoulders, on the weekends, when she is at her desk.

/

There is no gas line to the carriage house. And no hot water heater, either. How did the painter wash his brushes? I wonder silently.

/

The second floor is not large, which is why it has not sold. I show her two options for a bedroom, given the limited space. In response, she surprises me by asking about flexible living environments. She surprises me by bringing up critical Italian architecture from the 1960s. I remember a time when she used to hate talking about architecture and architects. You’re all so full of shit, she told me once, in the middle of an argument. You’re so full of shit, she meant. We talk, now, about soft surfaces and bedrooms. The give that a mattress has when you sit down on it, heavily, and let yourself fall backwards in frustration, I want to say, but do not.

/

We go back to the carriage house to take measurements for my drawings. She busies herself with the realtor while I set up. The smell of the painter is nearly gone. She knows that I prefer working in the vacancy of a space that has recently sold. The old stories are faint, and the new ones have yet to move in. I make a quick sketch of the apartment, pulling my tape from column centre to column centre, and filling my sheet with dimensions. The red spot of my laser measure dances across the clear span of the roof beams and lands on a white plaster surface. Somewhere below, a door closes. The laser catches her shoulder as she comes up the stairs. A shoulder I know well. Trapezius, deltoid, acromion, clavicle, the clavicular and sternocostal heads of the pectoralis major. Can you forget a body?—Often, I find myself recalling, with great fondness, a parapet detail, a ledger, a scupper. Occasionally: the clients to whose projects they belong.

/

Every client is not a lover. Not every client is a lover. But in some way, all clients are lovers.

/

Towards the end, around our last argument, we did not speak. In hindsight, it seems our problems arose because I do not speak. My gestures, however, spoke volubly. We separated, I moved away, and then she did too. Four years ago, I was surprised when she sent me an email, saying that she had seen me through a window as I was passing by on the street. What are you doing in town again?

/

A friend tells me that the painter probably washed his brushes in jars of turpentine and brush cleaner. That he probably saved the dregs in a container, taking it to a facility periodically. As I work on my drawings, I see the painter and his pail of runoff, both getting murkier over time.

/

In a flexible living space, millwork becomes key. Cabinets become closets become tables become shelves become screens. You walk through a door, you walk into a wall. We start to talk about folding, turning, hiding, reciprocity. The language of everyday things gets loaded with meanings. We find ourselves face to face with our selves in a mirror when we close a door-wall, unable to look away. We pause, remembering, in the pantry-hall.

/

Some parts of the timber frame will have to be swallowed up by the insulation, padded on the inside surfaces of the walls. We agree to mark the locations of the hidden columns with a piece of trim, a vertical detail, an annotation in space that says, at regular intervals, that something lived here.

/

She tells me that she will build out the interior herself. She lays out and frames the stud walls, toe nailing each member to the bottom plate, heading out the doors and tying the assembly together with the top plate. The pencil in her hand marks a piece of spruce-pine-fir; the circular saw pauses, its foot resting on top of the lumber as she sights her mark. Her finger closes on the trigger, and the blade springs to life.

/

Before she became a carpenter, she used to work at a wine distributor’s. They gave her bottles as gifts on occasion. I remember that a hundred bottles, give or take, would lie about her apartment, hidden behind furniture like cats. We would drink one and two more would watch us. They will need a home in the carriage house too.

/

The trades rough in as she works on the millwork at her shop. Lines of water, supply and waste, gas lines, junction boxes. Blue board hung and taped at the seams, and a skim coat of plaster. Hands of hands unknown. I help to receive a plywood delivery at the shop, loading the sheets on a cart and moving them to the table saw. She lays each sheet down on the cross-cut sled, halving an eight-foot panel into two four-by-fours. Her hand grips the crank that raises the blade and turns. Teeth emerge from the throat of the saw. The language of the saw is an uncomfortable thing. The throat is a hole that does not really exist. Look in any manual. You will find the throat plate covering up the gap. You will find every last set screw described with a name and part number. But you will not find the void itself.

/

Superstudio and Archizoom are the collectives most people think of when they think of critical Italian architecture from the 1960s. That is, if they think of critical Italian architecture, or if they think of Italian architecture, or simply, of architecture. The work of Superstudio is a work of figures and grids. Bodies—naked and clothed, cities, dogs and cows, friends, families, one child or many, parties, protests—are enmeshed in hashes of lines intersecting at right angles. The unit of the grid is practically scaleless, ranging from three centimetres to thirty metres, and the grid itself runs on to infinity. In one proposal, Superstudio dreamed of turning off the flow on the American side of the Niagara Falls, temporarily, as the Army Corps of Engineers did in the summer of 1969, to build a rectangular basin with a mirrored, stainless steel finish. The flow would then be restored, and water would thunder back into the basin, filling it up in 33 minutes, no seconds, and 94 hundredths [1]. During that time, water and reflected sky touch, throatless.

[1] Superstudio, ‘Niagara or the Reflected Architecture,’ 1970. In Superstudio: Life Without Objects, by Peter Lang and William Menking, 84, Milan, Italy: Skira, 2003.

---

I think, often, about the history of the specular that is embedded in speculation, from the links between sight and early modern science, to the algorithmic seeing of our present and future lives. There is a tension, a gap between this ocularcentrism and the body of dwelling—a productive space that bears revisiting. In a time where bodies and their worlds have become constantly framed and viewed, whether through glazed windows, Zoom screens, or political associations, I find myself returning to this space again and again, seized by the way that a detail, a line, or a thought can effect a change in scale and occupy the difference between senses. For it is not only that the “door handle is the handshake of the building,” as Juhani Pallasmaa writes; it is also that it says here I am, it is through me that you must pass.

—

Shou Jie Eng is an architectural designer, researcher, and writer, whose work examines the relationships between spaces, bodies, and the material histories and cultures of craft. He runs Left Field Projects, a design studio located in Hartford, CT. His work has been published or is forthcoming in CARTHA and Paprika! and has been exhibited at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, WY.

Boo Who?

by Hannah Lund

Where we dwell is how we dwell. And memory is malleable. It warps with time. It shifts as it gets contextualized.

There’s a ghost with a hangdog face in my childhood closet door that’s due for a reckoning. 

He was always there once I closed my bedroom door, mouth yawning wide in horror. Before I started my homework, whenever I took prolonged breaks from practicing my violin, every time I rushed up the stairs to my sanctuary when my mom stormed through the living room and silence as thick as soup descended upon the house. We’d latch eyes as I held my breath to keep the quiet unbroken, and he’d wail in mockery. 

I’ve long thought about the next time we’d meet. I’d press my nose close to his face, his body whorling with the grains of wood like smoke from a blown-out candle; I’d harness all my dormant exclamation points and expletives so sharpened over time; and I’d yell, unstopped, his eyes bulging back in the gnarled knots. 

No matter his tricks, I’d talk first, and I’d have the final word. I’d also insist on the venue. It wouldn’t be his familiar haunt — that cursed closet door — or even a forest where he’d probably try to travel through the wood. I’d choose a place with a plug so I could bring a vacuum cleaner and suck his spectral form right into the bag before he had a chance to do his worst. You could do that with spiders. Ghosts couldn’t be much different.

My mom couldn’t provide answers on the ghost. She’s unaware of our rivalry.

“Do you see the face in the closet door?” I’d asked her once when she’d come in my room.

“No, I don’t see it,” she said.

I asked her to look again, insistent. She flicked her eyes to the closet, shook her head, and reminded me that dinner was almost ready. 

I listened to the creak of the stairs after she left, straining to hear the rumbling conversations below. Sometimes I’d even sneak down the stairs, stepping on the edges of the steps where I thought it wouldn’t creak, and I’d cover my mouth as I listened to Mom and Dad talk about their days at work, trying to decipher the negative spaces of their thoughts. Trying to hear inside the pauses, the silences that spoke volumes if you listened.

There was nothing for it. I’d have to summon the specter to my battleground myself. Our encounter would begin with his confusion at how he even ended up there — in a place without lumber, of all things! I’d greet him and say in a sultry voice, vacuum clutched in muscular fingers, striking a pose that would cast a long, domineering shadow with astonishing cleavage:

ME: Nice try, fucker. But I’m the one in charge here!

GHOST: Oh no! You are too smart and clever!

ME: (with a femme fatale laugh) Tell me, big boy: Who do you work for, and what were you doing in my closet door all those fucking years?

GHOST: Ah! You caught me! I am an agent of subterfuge! The devil commissioned me to whisper dirty deeds into the night for his hellish army that would have attacked all in the land had you not bested me!

ME: Never underestimate me. I’ll always beat you. And guess what? I’ll do it again.

And I’d suck him into the vacuum, and that would be that. 

It would be an abrupt, cruel end to the creature that gaped at me all day, all night. But it would be like ripping off a Band-Aid, quick and brutal. A job well done after spending the better part of my childhood and adolescence locking eyes in a glaring contest with his screaming countenance, his body falling down the wooden door like melted wax.

My brother says he can see the ghost. We talked about it with my sister over a bottle of whiskey after his kids had gone to bed, rehashing all the moments growing up that, if you looked at them sideways, meant something different.

“Do you remember the weird face in my closet door?” I said.

“Yeah, I remember that. Creepy,” he said.

“I know! Felt like it was always watching me. Stuff of nightmares.”

My brother sipped his whiskey as my sister refilled her glass. Then he said, “Have you ever thought about how much time we spent looking at the backs of doors?”

We were silent for a while after that.

The one-shot showdown with the ghost wouldn’t be enough. I’d need to ask better questions, draw it out. Maybe I could ask if he had a family. For all I know, he’s been a tragic figure all along, out for vengeance for the witch who trapped him in the wood in the first place and for the woodcutter who separated him from his ghost-lover. All of our pent-up rage for each other was perhaps born from a misunderstanding. He might have been screaming to be let out. Screaming to be heard, even for the things he’d never said.

I might drop the sultry voice and opt for something more badass. I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to be a Clint Eastwood-type gunslinger. Maybe I could stride into the room. Maybe I would be wearing cowboy boots as I dragged the vacuum behind me.

ME: Okay, kid, you’re out. Now talk: Who are you, and what are you doing here?

GHOST: Thank god I’m free!

ME: (smoking a cigarette) Seems god’s not the one to thank.

GHOST: You’re right. Thank YOU for letting me out. You see, I uncovered an evil scheme by the Warlock of the Basement Stairs who wanted to snatch up all the children running past at night.

ME: (flicking away cigarette) Figures. What’d they do to you?

GHOST: I tried to sound the alarm, but he discovered my plan and trapped me and my family in the wood! Oh, we have been trapped here for decades. I kept trying to tell you, but you couldn’t hear me. But you, only you knew how to let me out!

ME: It’s part of the job.

And then I’d suck him up into my vacuum and release him somewhere outside the house to complete his quest.

Maybe that would be justice. Maybe I could be a hero, or at least the kind of protagonist you’d root for because they were the coolest in the room, not because they learned the bassoon all on their own in the course of a year. Maybe I’d be the kind of figure written about for great deeds, not because they “seemed like they had stories.”

However I’d meet the ghost, it would need to be punchy. No room for filler words, and no time for awkwardness. I wouldn’t go on tangents about “Lord of the Rings” theories or tell him about the latest TV show I was watching. I wouldn’t tell him how long I’d been waiting for this day or how his gaunt expression hadn’t been welcome in my refuge, the place I could run to when Mom got mad and started slamming kitchen cupboards but wouldn’t tell us why. I wouldn’t tell him how every time the three of us kids would scatter, I’d end up in that room, staring as he wailed, wailed to ears that would never hear. I wouldn’t tell him about much I wanted to hear a full-throated yawp as we held our breaths in separate rooms, fixated on wooden fixtures, my fear and anger mangled into one confusing, silent cry. I wouldn’t tell him how in the silence, watching him unstop his screams where no one could hear, I’d be listening for the creaking stairs, for the steps to my room, for the light drumroll rap on my door as my mom and dad poked their heads in for the all-clear, saying some days were harder than others but we all just do our best. I wouldn’t tell him that some days were harder than others for me, too, but sometimes my best wasn’t good enough and I’d never had the stomach to give it the vocabulary. And in all the things I wouldn’t tell him I’d be just so succinct, because the outcome finally belonged to me.

But realistically, our conversation would catch me off-guard. Not so off-guard that I didn’t have a vacuum with me, mind! But I wouldn’t have good comebacks, because I never have good comebacks. I would be me, an adult, reduced to the same stupid 10-year-old with buck teeth and overlarge butterfly clips as he sized me up and saw how much had changed, how little had changed.

GHOST: You’re back. Nice to see you.

ME: Hehe… yeah. Why aren’t you screaming?

GHOST: I don’t scream.

ME: Okay, fine. Then why do you look like you’re screaming?

GHOST: I’ve never screamed. I was shouting because obviously I was on a cosmic roller coaster.

ME: Bullshit.

GHOST: Your bullshit.

ME: Fair.

GHOST: Hey, I’ve been dying to know: What was so special about the door? Why were you staring at it? 

ME: Because you were staring at me!

GHOST: Not the closet door. The other one. The one you always looked at. What was so special about it? 

ME: That door? Oh. I was summoning the knock.

GHOST: Summoning? But doors are for opening. Couldn’t you have just opened it?

ME: Yeah. Well. I didn’t. 

GHOST: Did the summoning work?

ME: Usually. Sometimes. I don’t know. Now I sort of wish I’d tried that cosmic roller coaster.

GHOST: It’s overrated.

We’d look at each other in the lumber-less place I had chosen, me without a gun or a quip, he without a convoluted backstory. He’d just be a witness of all the times I’d entered and left that small, private sanctuary of mine, wondering when I would leave for good. I’d just be a witness to my imagination and penchant for assigning myself the best bits in a confrontation that would never happen. 

At some point, we’d part ways. We might devolve into family gossip; we might talk about my latest musical obsession; we might talk about how small the hallway really was, but how impossible the distance when love was in the way. 

Eventually, I’d turn on the vacuum, and as the intense tug of hot wind beckoned me in, I’d let the sound of my voice yell alongside that sonorous hum. My forehead would press against the wall of the dust-filled compartment once I’d crumple inside. I’d stare deep into the barrier. And I’d scream, my mouth agape, body twisted like a melted candle-stick. 

I’d scream, until someone screamed back.

---

Much like Emily Dickinson’s line “I dwell in Possibility —” this essay speaks to the power of “would” — in the form of wood — and its space to draft confrontations and self-narratives without consequence. Growing up, I had a healthy childhood and an immensely supportive family. But I also had a cornucopia of anxieties I didn’t yet understand or dare to voice. My room thus became a dwelling of possibility and ifs until I opened the door and turned thought into action. Using a speculative narrative frame gives space for unreality within reality, as well as the inherently fickle, nebulous nature of childhood memory. Where we dwell is how we dwell. And memory is malleable. It warps with time. It shifts as it gets contextualized. Dwelling within the possibility and the forking paths of “if” is how we unearth what’s on both sides of the door, and the ghosts in-between.

—

Hannah Lund is a writer, translator, and editor with a master's in comparative and world literature. She currently co-directs the Shanghai Writing Workshop's nonfiction wing and edits for Sixth Tone. Her work has appeared in Narrative, MacQueen's Quinterly, and The Shanghai Literary Review, among others.

Grilled Bananafish

by David Stromberg

How do we read reality in light of the stories that shaped us before we knew how to read them critically?

It happened to be that I reread Salinger's "Perfect Day for Bananafish" – which I remembered as being a story about a couple’s trip to a hotel on the beach at the end of which the man kills himself – on the very same day that my wife and I went to spend a weekend at a seaside hotel. 

I was reading the story for the first time in nearly twenty years – and what surprised me most was that I’d entirely blocked out the section in which the man converses with a four-year-old girl and goes with her into the water. Reading it now, I vaguely recalled registering the inappropriateness of their interaction, but also feeling what others have said – that it’s ambiguous, that only perverse people interpret bananafish perversely, that it’s really a story about the difficulty of reconciling childhood innocence with the demands of adulthood. Now I could no longer read the story this way. It was, I felt, scandalous. 

It wasn’t the situation that did it – it was the images. The sausaged towel around the man’s eyes, the girl’s living in the town of Whirly Wood – the word wood is repeated four times in the span of half a page – the candles that she likes to chew, the delicate . . . blades of her back. Not to mention the bananafish, which like to swim into a hole, behave like pigs, gorge themselves until they’re fat, and have habits that are very peculiar. The man says these words – very peculiar – just as the narrator tells us that the water was not quite up to his chest, which is to say, above his torso. A wave appears, soaking the girl’s hair, and as it passes she says she saw a bananafish. It’s difficult to quote the narrator’s words just before this happens without feeling a little gross: her scream was full of pleasure. The man kisses her wet feet – while the owner of the feet protests. Out of the water, she runs off without regret. The man, for his part, walks back to the hotel carrying the slimy wet rubber tube – going up to his room, in the narrator's words, to put a bullet through his right temple.

There’s much in the story to shock a first-time reader, not least of which being the man’s decision to blast open his skull on the bed next to his wife, who could only have been scared to death by the sound of the gunshot, waking to the sight of bits of flesh and bone all over the room, maybe even on her. This probably shocked me the first time I read the story – but it wasn’t what bothered me now. I also wasn’t especially invested in the possibility that the man shot himself out of guilt for exposing himself to a little girl, since, if anything, it was his flirtation with the possibility that seemed to provide him enough proof for what he felt anyway: that he deserves to die. I wasn’t even particularly interested in the idea that Salinger – who was known for writing letters to teenage girls later in his life – had exposed some sort of hidden pedophiliac tendency in the story, for the simple reason that the story hid very little, and went to great lengths to insinuate as much as possible. 

I was bothered by something else. I just couldn’t understand why Salinger had gone out of his way, in 1948, to write a story about a thirty-something man’s sexualized interaction with a little girl – and then published it in a venue as prominent as The New Yorker. What was he trying to get us to talk about? What was behind this stunt? 

As we drove there, my wife asked me whether I was looking forward to our weekend on the beach. I said that I was feeling a little apprehensive. I told her about the story I’d read and the strange images I couldn’t get out of my head. What I didn’t say, but what I kept thinking as we drove down to the beach, was that I didn’t like the idea that life imitated art.

/

Maybe it was the crack in the bed, or maybe it was the bright sea sun, but for some reason we didn't sleep as well as we’d hoped. After coffee we went out onto the hotel terrace to read. I'd brought a new book with me, Joseph Roth's Weights and Measure, but I just couldn't focus. I looked up from the book at my wife, who was reading Masha Gessen's book on Birobidzhan, and said to her, "I just can't stop thinking about Salinger. How is it possible that no one ever mentioned anything about the story being so creepy? Forget that the man is having an intimate conversation with a four-year-old girl, that's obvious, but I’ve never heard anyone mention anything about the narrator’s words. Sasuaged. Yuck. Hole. What's wrong with us? How did we miss this?"

She'd put her book down in order to listen and then asked me why it bothered me so much.

"Because we missed it," I said. "As a culture. We missed this extremely obvious – this very-very-out-in-the-open – thing. I'm almost forty years old," I said, "and this is the first time I'm reading the story in such a graphic way."

"Are you sure people missed it?" she asked. "Has no one ever written anything about this?"

"I never heard anyone talk about it that way," I said, "but I'll look it up."

My wife went back to her book and I started googling. I googled Salinger bananafish penis and waited for the results. I was using a phone, so the text was a little small, but I opened up a few links in order to see what I could. No scholarly articles appeared in the search but there were about six or seven sites that discussed the possibility that bananafish was a phallus. One said bananafish is an "obvious metaphor for his penis," another that "bananas are a go-to phallic image," and a third asked directly: "Does bananafish allude to his greedy penis which is clearly beyond his control?" Another said the story's "utter transparency as a pedophile story is probably why no one (that I know of) has ever mentioned it before. It's just so in your face." I was partly relieved. There were others out there who were asking the same questions that I was asking – and having the strange feeling that "no one" ever really talked about this aspect of the story. But these kinds of questions, which should have resulted in many more search results, were also obviously not part of the public consensus.

Then there were the defenders. One, referencing the man’s suicide, said that it’s only "cynics who think he did it from remorse after exposing his penis underwater to his angelic interlocutor." Another took a more practical approach: "Sybil is facing outwards, towards the ocean, and Seymour is behind her. So that scenario doesn't work." And a high-school paper, written ten years ago by a certain Lauren, put it in even stronger terms: "why does our society automatically pin the cause of this behavior on a societal sexual taboo? Have we as a nation become so desensitized to illicit sexual behavior that we instinctively deem this the reason behind every action?" She, too, had a point. Do we see these kinds of behaviors behind every action that looks strange to us – and, perhaps more to the point, is that wrong?

People on the internet were having a conversation, not always coordinated, about “Bananafish” having sexual elements that were relatively clearly appropriate. But what about scholars?

After a little more searching I came across an article with the subtitle: "Jerome David Salinger, author of Lolita." Its author noted that Nabokov had graded all stories in a New Yorker collection, and reserved an A+ only for himself and Salinger, both of whom had published tales of what she calls child-brides in 1948. She then quotes another academic who put forth a theory that various autobiographical innuendos suggest Nabokov was molested by a relative he calls Uncle Ruka – so that the Dolores Haze of Lolita is actually a gender-reversed Nabokov, while Humbert Humbert is a version of his uncle. I'm not here to postulate on the accuracy of this theory. But, from this perspective, it seems interesting that Nabokov shortened his uncle’s name, Vasiliy Rukavishnikov, to Uncle Ruka – which, translated into English, would be Uncle Hand. And hands, when considered from this perspective, are anything but innocent. 

As I read this article, I thought, again, about the girl in "Bananafish" and did a gender-reversal on her. What if she were a version of Salinger and the man a version of someone who showed him his bananafish?

I went back and googled Salinger sexual abuse. There were many results – mostly around  Salinger's role in first writing letters, and later developing real-life romances, with teenage girls, some before and some after the legal age of consent. This was disturbing – but it wasn't new. Allegations of his misbehavior had been around since I’d read "Bananafish" twenty years ago, and very few people, regardless of their opinion of his writing, still considered Salinger to be anything other than a weirdo. So my surprise wasn't really about Salinger the man. It was about "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and how our culture seemed to have missed the conversation around sexual abuse that it should have engendered seventy years ago.

And then I found an anonymous blog post titled "The Secret Rape of Holden Caulfield." The entry describes not only the scattered innuendos but also the systematic way that child sexual abuse is discussed and thematized in Salinger's most-read book. The analysis is powerful in that it traces this possibility throughout the entire span of the novel before concluding that Holden "is a teenager whose psychology and personality have been tragically damaged by pedophilia and our tendency to condemn those who expose uncomfortable truths." He ends by suggesting that we should read Catcher in the Rye "as an example of how teachers and other trusted adults can manipulate children into madness." 

I read this line – and then I started crying.

/

My wife noticed I was crying and put down her book. She sat next to me and hugged me – asking what was wrong. I put my phone down but I couldn't say anything. I could just barely whisper, "We missed the whole thing. We missed the whole thing." 

"What?" she asked. "What did we miss?"

I still had tears in my eyes but I was starting to regain some composure. I waited a few more moments, took some deep breaths, and kissed her hand. 

"The pain, the abuse," I said when I could speak again. "We missed everything. "

She picked up the phone and saw the article. And then she nodded in understanding. 

"Let's get out of here," she said, "and go on a walk. I heard some people saying they were going to Apollonia – some kind of Crusader-era fortress nearby. Let's go check it out."

I nodded back. 

"Let's do that," I said. 

/

I have no desire to save Salinger from judgment, but I do believe that understanding him can help us understand the damage he might have caused. Salinger gave us a chance to examine the consciousness of abuse – the way the mind and heart function after emotional torture of one sort or another. Why am I so sure of this? Because I, too, am a survivor of abuse. Except that, in my case, I don't even know who or what it was.

I have no memory, no image, of what happened. But in recent years I’ve become aware of a pain – which I apparently felt as a child and managed to bury for about thirty years – as part of what's called re-experiencing, a kind of regressive sensation in which your consciousness returns to the time of abuse and you are, suddenly, caught in what are sometimes called emotional flashbacks. My wife has come to accept that there's little that she, or anyone, can do about this sensation – especially since, in my case, it’s an amnesiac mystery. Which doesn't make it any less real.

So her suggestion to go to Apollonia was perhaps the best thing she could have done: get out of the world of books, the world of words, and enter the world of buildings, ruins, and history. The ancient Persian-Hellinistic-Roman-Arab-Crusader-Mamluk-Ottoman-British-Israeli site was just big enough and just varied enough to give an unexpected foray into local history – and to remind us that we live in a land of conflict that has been that way for many thousands of years. Sure, it's a history of devastation and war, but it's also a real place with beautiful views of the beach, wild spring flowers blooming, fresh sea air blowing in straight from the Mediterranean. 

We talked about all kinds of things – and I admitted how nice it was, despite my grumbling, to get away and see the blue waters, to feel the sea breeze, and experience the heat of the sun on our faces. At some point, we turned back and headed to the car. It was almost Shabbat. 

/

The trip had done what it was supposed to do – I managed not to think about Salinger for a while – but as soon as we got back to the room, and I saw the beach below, I felt I was back inside "Bananafish." I looked down from our fourth-floor balcony and saw all those people – women and men, girls and boys – and I thought about all the Seymours that could be down there, and how I, too, just by being near the beach, could be seen as a Seymour. It was the last thing I wanted and yet I couldn't deny that, from the outside, anyone could be anything, and who knew what kinds of intentions people hid deep inside? We all have the potential for evil in us – and it only gets more powerful the more we try to deny this simple fact. 

After showering and lighting candles, we went to dinner, finding a table for two on a platform at the end of the room – the closest we could get to having a quiet dinner alone. My wife made the Friday evening blessing on the wine, we tasted it, and then went to do our ritual hand-washing became coming back and breaking bread, over which I said the blessing. A young waiter, standing just behind us, said in Hebrew that he’d never heard the wine prayer sung that way. My wife said it was a family’s tradition – that her father had sung it that way and that his father sang it that way and probably his father before him. The waiter smiled.

We went over to the buffet, put food on our plates, and came back. I gestured for the waiter in order to order some wine – my wife asked for a white, I asked for a rose – and he left, returning with our glasses. I asked him where he was from and he said he grew up way up north, in Kiryat Shmona, but that he was a student at the local college, where he focused on computer science. My wife asked him what happened to the uneaten food – whether it was given to employees to take home. He said employees were allowed to eat the food but that regulations made it illegal for anyone to take food away. She asked whether the hotel worked with any organization that picked up uneaten food for the needy. He said he thought they did but that he really didn't know because this was his first day on the job – and, he added with a smile, probably his last. We asked him why and he said it was obvious: he couldn't bring himself to spend his nights asking people whether they were done with their plates. He needed the money, and nothing was easier than getting this job, but he just couldn't do it another day.

I nodded and noted that he was the first Hebrew-speaking waiter we'd seen since arriving the night before – everyone else being either Russian-speaking or Arab-speaking. I told him that I spoke Russian, too, and that it made it awkward to overhear what people said to each other when they thought no one understood. He pointed to a young man, about seventeen, who he said had come from Russia two months earlier, and was working while waiting to start his army service. I looked over at the young man – he was pale, thin, shy, almost afraid, like someone who didn't say much of anything to anyone. I had never before seen anyone who looked so much like how I’d imagined Bartleby. When he came over, later, to clear our plates, I smiled and said spasibo. He perked up, surprised to hear me speak Russian, and nodded shyly before going on to clear someone else's table. 

/

The next day my wife and I skipped breakfast. I got us a couple of cups of coffee and we sat out on the hotel terrace reading. She was reading her book on Birobidzhan and I read Joseph Roth's Weights and Measures, a book about the disintegration of a young couple. But this story, at least, took place in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, well over a century ago, before the Second World War, before even the First World War, and the couple’s problems, though human problems with which anyone could relate on an elemental level, did not resonate as deeply and directly as did those of Salinger's characters – so that I was able, one hour after another, to read through the novella almost to the end. 

But each time I put the book down and looked up at the beach – I again thought of Salinger. I didn’t know what, but something still bothered me about "Bananafish." Why had Salinger created a story in which a young man who is himself a danger to little girls recognizes this about himself – and does what Humbert Humbert should have done before touching Dolores Haze?

Time had come for lunch and my wife went into the dining hall to get us a plate from which to snack. And then, just as she left, I remembered Junot Diaz. Everyone had loved Junot Diaz as soon as he published his first stories, some of which appeared in the New Yorker too, and he became a sensation, like Salinger, as well as a literary voice for minorities in America. I’d met Diaz once, as a student, and found his poise no less impressive than his prose. Then last year, long after moving to Jerusalem, I read about the controversy of his own confession in The New Yorker. He had been raped as a child, had never been able to cope with the fallout, and had hurt others in his attempt to hide from his own pain. I remember crying when I read that confession. I’d had an urge, then, to write to him and to say that I, too, had been abused, and that I, too, had probably hurt others. But then I read more and saw that not everyone was satisfied with how he'd handled his revelation, especially his decision to combine the abuse caused to him with the pain he'd caused others. Some considered it to be an attempt at avoiding responsibility for his own abuse. Others defended him. I didn't know myself what to make of it at the time but, now, almost a year after his confession appeared, I realized something I’d not seen then. Just like with Salinger, it was the pain in Diaz's writing that our culture seemed to have registered, but also missed – or at least not openly recognized, even though he'd put it all in the fiction. He’d revealed the whole thing in 2012: "I always wrote Yunior as being a survivor of sexual abuse,” he said about one of his characters in an interview. “He has been raped, too. The hint of this sexual abuse is something that's present in Drown and it is one of the great silences in Oscar Wao." Six years Junot Diaz sat with his pain without anyone in our culture asking whether the hint in his literature might be to something real that should be discussed about the lives of children. Six years Junot Diaz hurt others despite his fictional attempt to draw attention to his rape which, bringing him critical attention and accolades, failed to recognize the pain he was passing on to others.

Junot Diaz's ability to transform pain into literature was rewarded, yet his pain – which perhaps drove his writing – remained unacknowledged. But Diaz, unlike Salinger, was still alive, and able, despite everything, to reveal what was likely the post painful part of his own childhood. Even if it did not excuse the pain he caused others, at least, in his next book, he would not need to hint about rape. 

/

After lunch, I went back to reading Weights and Measures. It was so beautiful out – cool, sunny, breezy – that my wife and I stayed on the hotel terrace for the rest of the day, reading. I finished the book. It was sad, but also powerful, and it filled me with hope to see someone turn desolation into such fine writing. 

"A good book," I told my wife as I set it down. "Depressing."

"You wouldn't read any other kind," she said.

I smiled.

"But it's not just depressing," I said. "It's also good."

I got up to get myself another cup of coffee and asked her whether she wanted anything. She asked for herbal tea. I went into the dining hall and over to the hot beverages. As I walked out with our drinks in hand, I noticed the Russian-speaking teenager I'd seen before. This time he came over to me and asked who I was. I told him I taught literature in Jerusalem. He said I seemed different from the other people at the hotel. I asked him how, and he said he couldn't say, that I just seemed different. I asked him where he was from, he said that he'd been born in Israel, but that he’d left at the age of five and grown up in Russia, first in Krasnodar and later in St. Petersburg. I asked him where he lived now and he said he'd found a room in a dormitory in Tel Aviv. I asked him what he was planning to do and he said he was waiting to start his army service – hoping to become a computer programmer. The conversation, stunted and awkward from the beginning, had reached its end. I had nothing else to say to him and he, it seemed, had nothing to say to me either. He was called by his boss to clear someone's table and as I smiled, about to say goodbye, he leaned over and asked, quietly, "Do you have any work?"

I was stunned. How could I not have seen that someone in his position, alone and vulnerable, would look to another man, who went out of his way to smile at him, for more than moral support? I’d missed the whole thing.

"I don't," I said to him, feeling rather powerless. "I don't have any work." 

He nodded, disappointed, and left without saying another word. Not even goodbye.

I went out, sad, because I'd seen his pain – the loneliness of immigration – but I hadn't been able to recognize what he needed, which was a way to earn some money, and maybe, beyond that, a friend on whom he could depend. All weekend long, I'd been inside "Bananafish," but I now found myself in Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man" – where a desolate man, walking home deciding to shoot himself, is approached by a young girl asking for help. His first instinct is to brush her away, but when he gets home, he agonizes over his dismissal of someone so needy – having a series of strange dreams. His guilt reaches such heights that, when he wakes, he resolves to find her, to help her, to help others – convinced, suddenly, that humanity can be good. 

I turned around but no longer saw the young man. I wanted to go looking for him – but then I caught myself. He wasn’t Dostoevsky’s little girl. He wasn’t even Bartleby. He was just a young man looking for work – of which I had none to offer. 

I went back out onto the terrace, feeling a little like Bartleby myself, and put our mugs down on the table. I settled down next to my wife, kissed her, and together we watched the afternoon sun sink slowly into the sea.

---

This piece is grounded in several related speculations: What happens when our perception of reality blurs with our literary perception? How do we read reality in light of the stories that shaped us before we knew how to read them critically? Or, in the most abstract sense, how does our naive or preconscious self influence our conscious life even after we have awakened to the need for critique? And, finally, when and how does intentionality in life – particularly our striving for integrity – get shaken by our personal trauma, which can sometimes threaten our faith in ourselves or in others? And both the ability and need to speculate on these issues comes, in this piece, directly from the confluence between going to a seaside hotel with one's partner for the weekend just after reading a story about a couple at a hotel on the beach. The dwelling in the real-world locale is coincident with the dwelling in the story, and the two can no longer be separated – it's a double-dwelling in which each influences the other. The story suddenly takes on a physical aspect while reality turns literary – and what appears from the shadows of unprocessed emotion is pain. In dwelling, we are able to slowly separate between the sources of past pain and the reality in which we are now located, making it possible to more clearly see the people around us.

—

David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Jerusalem. He is the author of four cartoon collections, including BADDIES (Melville House, 2009), and two critical studies, Narrative Faith (U Del Press, 2018) and IDIOT LOVE (Palgrave, 2020). His fiction has appeared in Ambit, Atticus Review, and KGB Bar Lit, and his translations in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. His nonfiction has appeared in The American Scholar, Literary Matters, Entropy, and Public Seminar, which published a series of personal essays about growing up on the ethnic and cultural margins of Los Angeles.

Editor’s Comments

In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand. —Robin  &  Leila

Living temporarily in a tiny cabin adjacent to my home in Iowa, this would not be my first choice of a dwelling if not for my current circumstances. The two-room cabin, less spacious than many motel rooms, is appointed with floor-to-ceiling knotty pine paneling throughout and features a kitchen with no cabinets and a dorm fridge. A flimsy privacy screen provides the only barrier between the kitchen, toilet and bathtub. The cabin belongs to my neighbors who live in a stately Victorian-era home with Tiffany stained glass windows, the house once owned by the son of a 19th-century lumber baron. Now I find myself unable to enter my own home, stuck instead in the cabin that was once home to the carriage driver of the lumber baron’s son.  

For months my wife Margie and I had been successful in keeping Covid at bay in our household, though our efforts were complicated by a change in my employment. At the end of February, I signed a contract for a new position in New York City, where I was born. At any other time, the thought of moving back to New York would have thrilled me, and it did for about two weeks. The plan was for me to move there and for us to make frequent visits back and forth. Margie and our daughters weren’t going to move as our eldest daughter was about to enter her senior year in high school and in normal times we love Iowa City and our home there. As New York became the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., the thought of moving there suddenly seemed like the worst life decision ever. New Yorkers who could afford to flee, fled. When my new dean and I spoke, he told me of the view of the morgue truck parked across the street from his office. He, an avowed Brooklynite, fled the city, too.

Before my move to Brooklyn, I quarantined in an old farmhouse in an upstate town with the quaint name of Cuddebackville. Owned by cousins of mine, the house was hardly ever occupied. The last time I had visited was thirty years earlier, but the house had barely changed, except the evidence of its long-neglect was visible everywhere. Still the house felt familiar and welcoming, to me at least, though Margie, who accompanied me on the drive, hated it. For me, my younger self roamed through the halls and I welcomed seeing him again. For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening. Our one foray to a nearby park was like parting a jeering mob. Every few feet along the mile-long dirt road that led to the park, signs were tacked on nearly every tree, informing us that we were being watched and that we had better not step off the path. The entrance sign to the park was pocked with bullet holes. As in many small towns, outsiders are looked on with suspicion in Cuddebackville, though I was protected by my whiteness and the last name of my cousins. They had owned the house since 1963, and I used their names as my password every time I encountered someone who required such a password, say, walking along the defunct railroad bed near the house. Margie, a woman of color, did not want to stick around such dwellings where passwords were needed, and which might not even work for her. And who could blame her? I, too, would never have spent a minute in the place had I not previously spent five months there in my early twenties.  

My new dwelling in Brooklyn was faculty housing, which my dean warned me I shouldn’t get too excited about. Faculty housing and student housing were one and the same, and the three bedrooms of my three-bedroom apartment were labeled “A,” “B” and “C,” replete with 70s modular furniture and bass thumping sophomores across the hall, my closest neighbors. Still, three bedrooms in New York seemed wildly spacious, and by the time I moved in, things were improving in Brooklyn. The streets were lively and the vast majority of people I encountered wore masks, unlike in Iowa, where all summer I had encountered maskless men and women with their game faces on, plowing through the aisles of grocery stores. Nor did I require any passwords to walk freely.  

Over the months, the epicenters of the pandemic flipped. During my time in Brooklyn, positivity rates kept declining to the point at which they were at 1%. At the same time, Iowa, which never had a mask order or any coordinated government effort to stop the pandemic, started spiking to the point at which the positivity rate was 50%. I wondered, along with the rest of the country, whether to risk traveling from one dwelling to another over Thanksgiving. It turned out I had little choice.  

Margie’s unit in Internal medicine at The University of Iowa Hospital had been converted entirely to a Covid unit, and she had just come on her shift as a nurse when, before she had a chance to fully protect herself, she had to save a patient whose clogged lungs were drowning him. A couple of days later I received a call from her. “Mahal,” she said, which means “Dear” in Tagalog, what we call one another, “I tested positive.”  

A utilitarian antique phone, nothing fancy, hangs in my new dwelling: a black box with a simple earpiece dangling from a hook, but no dial. The point of this phone was simply to be summoned. The dead rarely command, as it turns out, though I’m sure that on some occasions, in some figurative way, they do. I admit to once or twice having picked up the receiver, with the tiniest of wild expectations of hearing the drunken voice of the lumber baron’s son, or the voice of my long-dead mother, or the man who killed himself in this cabin a dozen years ago, commanding in the manner of the first words ever spoken on a phone, “Robin, come here; I want you.” Still, it’s the living whose voices we are most often called to heed. It’s why I’m here, for the time being at least.  

Robin Hemley
December 15, 2020

Speculative Nonfiction as Practice in Disability Writing

by Gwendolyn Paradice

If someone were to ask me what speculative nonfiction is, I would say that instead of speculating about what is unknown, it makes what is known, to this neurodiverse mind, accessible to the reader.

When I was laboring over my master’s thesis, I wrote, In Vienna the bellhop shows me how to open the electric blinds in my room overlooking the Oper, and when I tell him I’m not impressed by technology, he asks me if I want to see where they keep the dead hummingbirds. He takes me to room 703, and the bathroom floor is littered with tiny jewels, overflowing the bathtub and sink. Each a jester’s miniature body: whole and full, mocking our confusion with their deaths. I ask him why they don’t rot, fall apart, and he says he doesn’t know. He says: Every so often when it rains the birds fall from the sky like hollow stones onto the roof, unbroken. That the hummingbirds are too beautiful to wrap in plastic and throw away, even if it’s done slowly and with wonder. He picks one up, palm cupping the small body, and unfolds its wings. 

When I was finally in my defense, a committee member said, Hundreds of hummingbirds didn’t really fall from the sky, did they? 

She was referring to only one essay, but she could have chosen any, or all, of what I’d written in Histories I do(not) Belong to, a collection of flash that rejected words like “perhaps” and “I imagined” in favor of declarations that were, apparently, too impossible to believe. 

When I walked out of that office, trying not to cry until I got to my car, I blamed myself. Why couldn’t I defend what I’d written as nonfiction?

/

Up until recently I’ve told people I write lyric essay, hermit crab essay, and genre-benders. I’ve dug deeply into these terms, researched how other writers define them and attempted to define them myself by constellating their ideas, movements, and content. I’ve been dwelling in modes of essaying, categories of essay, sub-genres of essay, because I’ve wanted so badly to be able to label my own writing—the essays that arise, poof!, when I am not thinking, but instead, following my instinct as a neurodiverse person.

While I understand what these forms or modes allow for, none of the terms have been able to adequately address Histories I do(not) Belong to, which included the flash essay about Vienna. That collection, the mode of writing I employ within, is inherently tied to my neurodiversity, and yet, “disability writing” doesn’t seem to capture what I want to convey.

So I’ve begun to ask: what happens when there is no label? When you need to invent a new term? Perhaps you are told you are doing good work, doing what academics and writers are supposed to do: make new spaces. But perhaps you are told what you are writing is not nonfiction, and you are told this because the education of nonfiction can also be an education in ableism.

When I reflect on my education now—the eleven years I’ve dedicated to creative writing in the academy—I look for holes. And it turns out that my history of education is full of holes: places where representation (and conversation about representation) has been crucially lacking. I’m speaking here of the times where it is necessary to talk about identity in conversation with writing about identity. I cannot subscribe to a formalist critique because to ignore an author, and to ignore the environment which produces writing, can be an act of erasure. 

One of my holes—the gaps in knowledge—pertains to disability writing. In my first five years of formal creative writing education, I cannot recall being assigned, or encountering, a single nonfiction text authored by a disabled or impaired person (and with this, I acknowledge that to be known as disabled is not the same thing as being disabled), and I cannot recall any nonfiction texts about disability or impairment.

Now, this absence of disability writing in my courses flabbergasts me, because if we live long enough, all of us will experience or encounter impairment or disability with our family and friends. You too, reader, are likely to become, at some point in time, impaired or disabled.

/

Histories I do(not) Belong to accumulated dust for five years. I wanted to turn it into a book—a memoir-in-essay—but I didn’t know how. I sat on it. Ignored it. Returned to it. Put it in a drawer, again. The master’s defense, combined with limited workshop attempts, told me the book was cryptic and too confusing; the crux of the issue was always what was real and what was not. 

I didn’t understand until recently that the feedback I received had a subtext: when you are writing your neurodiverse mind, you need to explain it to your reader. When you are writing nonfiction, you cannot just claim you wandered into a store in Salzburg and discovered souls stored in wine bottles; you should discuss how your neurodiversity led you to this alternate reality. When you write about your ex-husband as a man who turns into a raven, you cannot claim a human truly became a bird; you must describe the circumstances—his yelling from the other room misheard as a bird’s shrieking and his emergence in the doorway the result of your invention: a mental overlay of flesh and wings. 

The feedback I received said, you must contextualize this use of speculative fiction within nonfiction by owning your disability on the page, and to do this, you should tell us what your disability is.

The thing is, I do want to “own” my disability on the page. I am a disability writer, and I am a disabled writer, but I want to represent myself on my terms. I don’t want to be asked by my readers to write my disability in a way that misrepresents my experience by filtering it through explanatory language. 

Consider how much of me is erased when instead of writing 

I feel his flesh and the skin isn’t right. It’s a catfish skin, cutting my hand with an arm’s sharp fin, blood wash shining against a grey mottle body, blood tasting of metal pennies soaked in milk or like sweat on a chest made wet by the sun.

I write 

I feel his flesh and the skin isn’t right. It’s LIKE a catfish skin, and I IMAGINE cutting my hand with an arm’s sharp fins….

When I write, I am always thinking about the dialogue between a text and its reader. I would like to write only for myself—and my instructors and friends have urged me to—but the truth is to be a writer in the academy, you have to publish, which means you have to think about reception, and part of reception, it seems, is being able to label and defend a product.

/

In Laura Hershey’s essay “Getting Comfortable,” she writes, “For a long time, and still sometimes, I have hidden the part of my life that involved the services of another woman’s strong hands, arms, legs, back. I saw no literary potential in scenes like the one above. They were merely background music to my story, I thought, not the story itself… Readers, I feared, may not be able to read such a writer, may not relax enough to follow me on the paths I choose to chart. A reader must trust her writer…” 

I think there’s always a vague, subjective question in writing of what an author needs to do, but this is also a two-part inquiry: what a writer must do for herself, and what a writer might do for the reader. The second part of that question is where disability enters.

I feel I’m a Janus coin of Hershey: here, in this essay, she contemplates the what-ifs of writing her disability. I am contemplating how to express mine, without stating it. 

So here is a question about process, about what, as a disability writer, I must compromise in writing nonfiction: how much of my neurodiversity do I erase from the page? What do I sacrifice when I utilize certain forms? What is lost—to myself, and to representation—when I acknowledge what some readers want? Or more specifically, what some neurotypical readers want? 

When, and how much of myself do I sacrifice? At what point do these sacrifices turn me into something unrecognizable to myself? 

/

We know, as nonfiction writers, that there is a difference between factual truth and the truth of experience. Truth is, perhaps, the first concept we learn: what is lying and what is misrepresenting. We learn about metaphor, about the forgiveness of metaphor, but still, we learn how important that writer-reader contract is: I am telling you the truth.

THE truth, a capitalized definite article, because somehow, there is only one. We do not say a truth because to do so would open too many doors. It is frightening to consider the rules of our reality as being so malleable, and this is where THE truth and disability gets tricky: when others are involved and they dictate what truth is acceptable. 

But if it is frightening for the rules of our reality to be fluid, it is equally as frightening—especially to a neurodiverse writer of nonfiction—to be told you have to conform to others’ conceptions of truth. To be told, through our social construction of disability, that what you write is not nonfiction. To be told in workshop—borrowing from the medical model which says disability can be “fixed”—that you need to make changes to your work so it can call tell THE truth.

/ 

I realize now that I’ve been building towards this essay for years, touching and fleeing on my way towards manifesto. When I wrote “Beyond Perhapsing: ‘Split-Toning’ Techniques for Speculation in Nonfiction,” I was seeking possibility for representation, quietly trying to argue a way I could justify my speculative nonfiction writing. When I wrote “Sudden and Marvelous Invention: Hearing Impairment & Fabulist (non)Fiction,” I was approaching arrival, beginning to whisper, look, I am here, and I am writing about my disability, why and how speculative fiction calls to me. And now I can say, I write speculative nonfiction, and I’m demanding a space be created for my neurodiverse mind.

/

If someone were to ask me what speculative nonfiction is, I would say it is a home, a safe space for my disability writing. I would say I’ve always been drawn to speculative fiction because it is a space where we must suspend disbelief—to consider the impossible alongside the “real.” A place where things we don’t allow to happen do happen, and in fantastical context. I would say that speculative nonfiction could be this: a liminality wherein a writer is not concerned with binaries of truth and un-truth, writing that eschews “perhapsing” in favor of drawing on the speculative aspect of speculative fiction, which for me, produces nonfiction more representative of who I am as a disabled person.

If someone were to ask me what speculative nonfiction is, I would say that instead of speculating about what is unknown, it makes what is known, to this neurodiverse mind, accessible to the reader.

/

If I could do it over again, I would not have taken my speculative nonfiction into workshop. I would not have submitted that almost-book for my defense. Because if I’ve learned anything, it’s that many writers I know have not proactively (or productively) engaged work authored by neurodiverse people. Creative writing in the academy at times preferences craft over representation. There is not yet a space for speculative nonfiction, not in the way I think of it, because the history of disability, especially invisible disability, is a history of not being believed. It is a history, still in-process, that debates truth. 

I have seen this in my own friends, women who have gone to doctors and whose pains and concerns have been dismissed with phrases like “you have to work through it” or “it gets better” or worse, “there’s nothing wrong.”

I know women who have sought accommodations and found responses like “but have you considered” or “what about” or “you’re imagining”—phrases that turn conversations about an individual’s need into conversations about alternatives. These become conversations that also say, I don’t want to be inconvenienced by your disability.

You have seen this, too, and there is a chance, that you, like me, have participated in acts of erasure. Acts of dismissal. Acts of refocusing. 

So if someone would ask me what speculative nonfiction is, I would say, it is a mode of writing that allows my disabilities to be represented.

/

Another member of my committee pointed to the passage on page 91:

There’s an exhibition at the Tower of London, five hundred years of armor and arms; today, a war horse in plate shed its paint and plaster, smashed through a life-size vinyl poster, and kicked a man’s skull in. There was one half-moon hoof print of blood on the cement walkway below the broken window, and cameras clicked, apertures yawning for light and the rounded patterns of crushed gravel.

An example, I was told, that my work wasn’t nonfiction.

What I think she meant to say was, this imagining is too great for nonfiction, by which she meant, I have ideas about what constitutes the truth, by which she meant, I am more concerned with my reception of your work than your work being a reflection of your disability. 

/

You can make up your own nonfiction genre. That’s what my professor said when we were reading Victor Hernández Cruz’s “The Low Writings.” We can do what he did; we can invent new scaffolding and ways of telling ourselves, our cultures, and our minds. Nonfiction invites rebellion, he said with a smile.

It took thirty-three years of life for me to have a teacher that talked about disability in creative nonfiction writing. A teacher who was vulnerable and open about his own neurodiversity. And so, when I took his nonfiction course, and we widely explored the essay—reading Bob Kaufman’s “Does the Secret Mind Whisper,” Cruz’s “Old San Juan,” and Carolyn Gage’s “Hidden Disability: A Coming out Story”—for the first time in my education of writing, I felt I could write a part of me that had been suppressed. Repressed. A trauma of that thesis defense breaking open into productive exploration.  

It’s kind of funny, in a sad way, that I didn’t think I could do this—make up my own genre—until a professor I admired gave me license to.

/

I recently had a breakthrough on that almost-book, the one that contains Histories I do(not) Belong to. I’ve had enough of a breakthrough to be able to claim it as my dissertation, and that breakthrough occurred because I was fed up. I hit a wall. I was so tired of being challenged that I said, fuck it. And then the almost-book started becoming a book.

When I began to say to myself, I write speculative nonfiction, it was cathartic: a term that allowed me to be me. And when I decided to claim this space as my own—pages that don’t write in an adherence to “real” and “imagined”—I was finally being true to myself. 

I also found myself writing a preface. An author’s note. One small paragraph on the first page that explains how my book is disability writing.

It is a paradox: the preface both freeing and disheartening. One part of me overjoyed at the declaration of being a disability writer, the other frustrated that I still feel the need to contextualize my work. And in addition to this, an understanding that by contextualizing my work I may be doing someone, somewhere, a service. I suppose it’s a choice I have to make: how to (or if I should) acknowledge my disability for my reader. Because we always have to do this. Sometimes for ourselves. But sometimes for others.

/ 

If I were to also say that speculative nonfiction could be a practice, what I would mean is that speculative nonfiction is both a mode of writing and a method of reception. It is seeking a space for representation and ensuring that space by asking ourselves, as readers, what others must sacrifice for us. 

When I brought Histories I do(not) Belong to to my defense, I didn’t have the words to say that the slip into the fantastical was a reflection of my experiencing the world. Even if I knew it, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to say it, because my education was not one about expanding nonfiction, but one about defining it. And it was not an education that ever asked me to think about the form as a lens of representation—though thankfully, that did come later. My initial education was one devoted to critique and analysis, but never an investigation into how critique can be a lens for reflecting on the bias of readers. Not a way to think of the work we read, but a way to question how we read.

/

After my defense, I kept thinking I had done something wrong. 

I knew my writing was not wrong—that was not open to debate. I knew my signaling was not wrong—the title of the piece in question, Histories I do(not) Belong To, should have done the work of saying, Look, I’m playing with something here. Questioning something here. Trying to define what I’m doing. I wish I could have said, what I’m doing with this title is recognizing how I feel there is no space for me in essaying.

Now, I keep wondering if my defense was my professors trying to get me to explain my writing decisions in a way that showed I understood the conventions and history of the genre.

Now, I keep wondering if the defense, was instead, a kind of passive, unintentional, discrimination.

And today, I am still wondering which of the two it was.

Or maybe I am still asking the wrong question, trying to find a binary where there is not one.

/

If I could do it over again, if I could return to that room where I defended, poorly, my thesis, I would say, this is speculative nonfiction. And then, when asked to elaborate, because of course, with this term—its newness, its uncertainty, the myriad of ways we can theorize it—I would be asked to explain. I would say, speculative nonfiction is a mode of writing and reception. And then when asked how this prioritization is any different than any other mode, or sub-genre, or form, I would say, it is a mode that prioritizes disability writing and the lived experience of being disabled.

I would go on to explain that sometimes, using words that “cue” a reader into imagination, can be ableist. I would say, you asked if hummingbirds really fell from the sky, but what you meant to say is ‘this did not happen’ and you are saying that because you experience a different reality than I do. When you ask me to write “I imagined” you are asking me to erase my disability.

I would say, what do you think essay should do? Should it meditate? Should it narrate? Should it be accessible, and if so, for whom? Look, I’m not asking the reader to participate in determining what’s real and what’s not—I’ve already termed this nonfiction. I am asking the reader to think about the possibilities of expression for those marginalized by nonfiction.  

I would say, this is what speculative nonfiction does for me: it allows me to be neurodiverse in a space, that because of others’ conceptions of truth, tends to look at my work as untruth. I would say, I am desperate to find a space where I can be me. 

I would say, I am willing to continue, if instead of challenging, you accept. Because my whole life has been about being pushed to the margins, and I am tired, so tired of this. 

It is time for you to listen. No, stop talking, and listen, because in having this conversation, I am doing a tremendous amount of emotional labor. When this book goes out into the world, instead of asking if the words are true, assume they are, and then ask yourself, ‘why did I even doubt?’ 

I think you’ll find the answer more instructive than you thought.

---

Gwendolyn Paradice is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, identifies as two-spirited, and is hearing impaired. Gwen's first collection of short stories, More Enduring for Having Been Broken, Black Lawrence Press’ 2019 Hudson winner, will be published in January 2021. The chapbook she authored with poet Kara Dorris, Carnival Bound (or, Please Unwrap Me), is one of The Cupboard Pamphlet's 2019 editors' choices and is forthcoming late 2020. She is a Graduate Teaching Instructor and Ridgel Fellow PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, where she specializes in genre-bending, blending, and disability writing.

Ghost

by Mackenzie Epping

Speculation has dimension. For me, the words on the page are the residual trace.

Ghost, as in that which haunts. As in campfire stories. As in a peculiar house. As in occupied and occupier. There (still). As in a watchtower. Or something one just lives with: ah, there goes the ghost again. As in a gunshot, glacier’s melt. Unsettled and unsettling. Be warned. As in my words. As in my tongue—where the ghosts of words reside. How many ghosts tap-dance my teeth each day?

Ghost, as in supernatural, paranormal. As in those burned at the stake. As in every name. There is no way to make sense of terror. As in a cult. As in dark matter. As in a shared belief. As in the translucent fish that live deep in trenches in the ocean abyss, in every whale stuffed with plastic washed ashore. I make ghosts. Birch leaves skitter the wind. Footprints break snow crust and ice and leave a trail of blue shadows. Dead languages, now unspoken, some languages now not even shadows. As in unfound fossils. Every two weeks a last speaker dies. As in, once upon a time. As in, every story needs a body. 

Ghost, as in stones. As in a dry riverbed. As in time is a canyon and I walk upwards and downwards and north and east and south and west. As in, I started walking the Berlin Wall at a ghost station. I couldn’t help but feel as if I was never alone, even where the city edges gave way to the fields and forest (here, a sign on the road marked Berlin’s official end) and I spooked myself with my own imagination. Is a ghost less frightening when it becomes familiar? A trinket kept in a pocket. I can never decide: is a ghost, like a tree, a witness? Or is a ghost the consequence? A faded scar.

Ghost, as in something (someone) (someplace) shared. As in, Did you hear that too? I asked the dead last night to show me a sign in my dreams. I haven’t yet seen or heard response. Instead, I keep having house dreams (common; symbolic of the self)—never my home, people in all the rooms. As if ancestors and ghosts are one in the same. As if any ghost could be separated from my feet, from the dirt underfoot.

Ghost, as in breath. As in holy, as in spirit. A glimpse from the corner of my eye, the landscape itself. Does a ghost still lurk when no people are around? When no one is left to speak its name or recall its sight? I do not, as in the movie, see dead people. But I am certain I have encountered ghosts nearby. This is just a hunch. A reticent feeling upon entering. Uncanny, Unheimlich. As in another German word tucked in, a wavering apparition—Heim, home. As in the ghost, daily, I ignore. There, by the lake. There, by I-35 and the river. How tethered is a ghost to land and place? Can a ghost cross an ocean? I imagine a ghost transiting on a ship (though this seems unnecessary given ghosts’ permeability and capacity for flight). As in sea smoke. As in will-o-wisps. In silences. In epigenetics. An expression. As in, how far will the average ghost follow me?   

---

A dwelling can be a “place of residence, habitation, abode,” as Berlin and Minneapolis have been for me. Or also, “a stupor” or “a staying in place” (Online Etymology Dictionary). At times, dwelling can be dangerous. “Ghost” is part of a larger project that asks: in an era when patterns are increasingly unrecognizable, when the weather no longer matches memory or stories, when walls, new and old, continue their violences, when language falters, what does it mean to bear witness? I’m interested in speculation as a process and action. Place and time layer and fragment, become warp and weft. Speculation has dimension. For me, the words on the page are the residual trace.

—

Mackenzie Epping lives in Minneapolis. She graduated with an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

The House We Grew Up In

by R.S. Powers

We all know and don’t know why and how and who. We continue to live in our own versions of the same disintegrating story.

All my sister and I know is there was a foreclosure. When we were latch-key kids she’d slide an arm through the mail slot to unlock the front door. At twenty-three her arm still fits but there’s a padlock on the inside. We don’t know if our lawyer father or the bank put it there. Around back, where we buried the dog, where lightning hit the diseased towering tree, the deck is rotting and the kitchen door swings open. There’s no power. The kitchen tap coughs. We’re afraid to open the refrigerator. I take flash photos of everything. The dining room is junk mail. The living room is a lived-in couch and TV and DVD player; on the windowsill is a new family-size bottle of ketchup and a paper instant noodles bowl half-full of broth. Upstairs, my sister’s bedroom is white bags of dry garbage. Our parents’ bedroom is a round mountain of old clothes. All the toilets are missing and we can’t imagine why. My sister won’t follow me into the basement where my bedroom was. After my mother, my sister, and I moved out, my father emailed to say he moved into the basement since it stayed cool. An empty cardboard box big enough for a washing machine is where my bed was. Is it safe? my sister calls. A decade later, I no longer have that clunky digital camera. Before writing this, I decided against looking for the photos. I didn’t need them. I have no idea who lives there now.

---

Ask yourself: Where does the story of my family begin? Then: To whom does the story of my family belong? Next, consider your family’s story, and who it belongs to, in the context of the four-paned Johari window (popularized by Donald “There Are Known-Knowns” Rumsfeld): What do you know? What do you know to be unknown? What do you not know to be unknown? Žižek has called the fourth pane—the Known-Unknown—“the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.” About your family’s story: What do you know that you don’t want to know?

The first-person essay must grapple with what isn’t known. The constructed narrator of a personal essay positioned to both know and see all is basically blind. Speculation, ethically and responsibly signposted, affords the essayist the freedom to pose questions bigger than the self.

The house as my sister and I found it that day—why it was like that, how it became like that, how long it had been like that, who knew it was like that… We can speculate. She and I could each ask our father, our mother. They, too, could speculate. We all know and don’t know why and how and who. We continue to live in our own versions of the same disintegrating story.

—

R.S. Powers's fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Sou'wester, World Literature Today, X-R-A-Y, The Hunger, and other journals. His fiction has been a finalist for The Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, and an honorable mention for The Cincinnati Review's Robert and Adele Schiff Award. He is currently a PhD student in creative writing at Florida State University.

Replaying Doom

by DeWitt Henry

To dwell in, and on, is more than merely to visit, seek temporary shelter or escape; it is to be immersed, nourished, and hooked.

I’ve played and replayed Doom 2, the classic first-person shooter game, for some thirty years so far with pleasure, frustration, triumph and satisfaction; although also with some guilt. However gripping, it is a largely vapid pastime, requiring skill more than talent, and leaves behind no artifact or wisdom. Or so I’ve thought. If poetry, according to Sir Philip Sydney, is that which “keeps old men from the chimney corner and children from their play,” my hours of playing the Doom series have kept me away from literature, family, work and friends.

Doom 3D was released in 1993 and Doom 2 a year later by ID Games, while both its creators, Johns Romero and Carmack, were still twenty-somethings. According to David Gusher’s Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (Random, 2003), both had come from broken families, and had graduated from arcade gaming to school computer labs before becoming hackers. They first collaborated on Wolfenstein 3D, which helped to popularize first-person shooter games, but Doom 3D set a new standard for video gaming in general. It combines concepts and graphics from such sci-fi films as Alien, soundtracks of heavy-metal rock, and situations and player choices similar to those of the role-playing board game, Dungeons and Dragons; but as Carmack puts it, “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie; it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

If you’ve never played Doom and its sequels, here is a brief description (if you have, please skip). On a PC, with your mouse and keyboard keys for control, you take the perspective of a single Space Marine on screen as he aims a pistol ahead and fires when you hit the shoot command. Your mission is to evade or defeat a demonic horde from Hell (and/or another universe) by sabotaging their extra-terrestrial bases and strongholds. You don’t know your way initially and as you advance to explore caves, tunnels, castles, corridors, factories and craggy landscapes, you battle a hierarchy of clever, but non-human monsters, ranging from ape-like imps that throw fireballs, to fanged attack dogs, to bee-like lost souls, to flying tomato-like creatures that spit explosives, to oversized barons with blasters, to spider-brains, to giant and all-but-indestructible bosses firing missiles. You can turn, crouch, jump, walk, run; shoot and destroy—as long as your health and ammo last. If wounded you can find health boosts, but if health declines to zero, you have to start the game over. As you progress, you also pick up more powerful weapons, ammo, armor, and other supplies. The carnage is realistic and graphic. Demons remain splattered as roadkill, sometimes in heaps. There are howls, cries, growls, and groans, along with explosions and driving music. You are immersed in 3D action and space, evoked by 2D means. The fight/flight thrill is sustained as you work your way through the map and traps, locate three keys, and then the final switch that allows you to exit to the next of, yes, 32 levels. Other features include a save command (allowing you a do-over with foreknowledge at any point) and cheat codes that allow you to be invincible, pass through walls, and wield a plasma blaster with unlimited ammo, the ultimate weapon.

No previous computer game had been this brutal, fast, and visceral, created 3D views, Mannerist habitats, fun-house surprises, and complex tests of persistence and wit; and despite advances in hardware since (including innovations in AI, AR, and VR), none has surpassed it. Custom fails to stale its variety; and its spell remains potent. 

But still I wonder whether addictive play is innocent or dangerous. If escapist, is it as destructive as drugs, gambling, or sex (Doom has been called a “cyberopioid” and “heroinware”)? Or is it beneficial in any way, like running?

/

Even before the release of Doom 3D, moral guardians blamed graphic violence in film, video, and video games for corrupting youth, but almost at once Senator Joseph Lieberman and other lawmakers singled out Doom as a contributing factor in the school shooting at Columbine in 1996 (and in the others that followed). Both the adolescent killers at Columbine had been devotees of Doom and one had boasted to his journal that the massacre would be “like playing Doom,” and that his shotgun “was right out of Doom.” (Although it has never been found, he may also have modified a level of Doom to resemble his school’s layout, and its demons to resemble classmates and teachers.) Watch-dog attempts to ban video games eventually failed, yet did persuade industry leaders to self-regulate by posting adults-only ratings. In 2010, critic David Grossman cited Doom in particular as “a mass murder simulator,” and reported that the U.S. Army even used it (and other FPS games) for combat training.

/

And what of Hamlet, or even worse, Titus Andronicus—no matter how ironic the morals, monstrous the figures, or cartoonish the gore? And aren’t Doom’s targets demons, after all; and the heroic shooter’s mission, to save humanity? Games don’t kill people, people do, insist game designers and Doom fans. Meanwhile, so-called ludologists have attempted to link FPS games to the higher arts.

One game designer and scholar argues that “The same impulse towards play that drives our behavior in playing a first person shooter is present where we read a line from Homer or look at cave paintings” (Bryan Upton, The Aesthetics of Play, 2015). He proposes a “heuristics of play as a critical tool for understanding how art in general goes about structuring experience,” and offers such key terms as “active constraints” (rules, with give and take between player and system), opportunities for meaningful action, “states” (an evolving record of how a player moves within the system), flow, threat zones, phase space, horizon of intent, strategy, consequence, and satisfaction. “Day to day life,” he writes, “presents an unfolding sequence of choices, but these choices aren’t shaped by a coherent systems of rules,” whereas a video game presents us “with an evolving state that implies the underlying nature of the rules, but the rules themselves remain hidden.” Games supposedly “help us to understand understanding” and “generate the experience of self.”  

Playing Doom, he implies, is like reading a poem or novel. “The path we take to get [meaning] is convoluted and indirect…because navigating a well-constructed system of constraints is interesting and fun.”  

Ralph Koster, in A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2005), exhorts us, “Go play! In poetry and prose, play in wit, play in form, play in association, illogic, metaphor, allusions.” For him, play exercises the brain. Fun translates into “mentally mastering problems…and problems can be aesthetic, physical, or social.” He particularly praises flow, or “learning in a context where there is no pressure.”

Such efforts sound defensive and pretentious. And yet. Video games may have replaced narrative film as the “art” medium of our wired age. Koster argues that “entertainment becomes art when the communicative element is either novel or exceptionally well done.”  

Another brilliant feature of Doom 2 was the free availability of its code, so that amateur hackers could modify it. This resulted in thousands of MODS becoming downloadable online as long as players owned a licensed copy of the ID original. The maps for each level could be changed creatively, as could the weapons, background graphics, hero and monsters. Otherwise, the rules and play remained the same. Many of the MODS became experiences special enough to keep replaying. Some were camp parodies, where the Marine became Batman or .007 or the Cyber Boss became Barney the Dinosaur. Some are more elaborate than the ID original. Their novelty seems limitless.

Over time, I’ve experienced “gamer nostalgia.” Returning to a familiar map is like returning to my hometown and knowing the streets, topography, routes, and turns. I’d been here before. I half-remember this secret or that, this short-cut, this strategy or that. Earlier lessons I had learned. 

/

For better or worse, gaming has become a staple for post-millennial generations. In a recent interview Carmack, forty-nine and the CTO of Oculus, the VR headset company (he has since stepped down to concentrate on AI), described “E-sports and competitive gaming” as a world-wide phenomenon, complete with professional players. The dawn of this was with Doom. “When I did the Quake Tournament, I gave my first Ferrari as first prize (won by Thresh [a gaming superstar]). Only a year later, there was another tournament with a $100M prize.” His interviewer adds: “And today you’ve got the amazing celebrity of the top pro players. They’re now legitimate sports stars… Top earners like Tiger Woods are out-earned by three times, three million. The Super Bowl in South Korea for gaming dwarfs that for the football in the U.S. Millions are tuning in.”

However, attempts to make feature films out of Doom have flopped, lacking any viewer interaction; while attempts to turn popular films into role-playing FPS games, where the player is James Bond, say, have enjoyed some passing success.

Notes Jay David Bolter in Wired: “New audiences…seek their cultural centers elsewhere—in video games and social media. One of the principal pleasures offered by both video games and social media is the experience of flow.” We’re swept along. Point by point choices and actions blur in motion, like flip cards, or cells of movie film, or fragments into meaning. We discover grace, like a pro full-back evading tacklers with twists, plunges, dodgings, straight-arms, and speed, until crossing the goal line, ecstatic and triumphing; from inertia into glory.

/

Jane McGonigal, a “game evangelist,” believes that “intense concentration in a game can be harnessed for social change by turning real-world problems into collective online games.” A dubious prospect, I think. But so is the familiar claim that poetry (or narrative itself) improves mutual understanding and our capacity to feel, despite the equally familiar objection that high culture and Wagner didn’t keep the Nazis from being Nazis. I simply can’t imagine a version of Doom where the demons learn through “play” to be humane. Or where “humans” learn not only to out-think, evade, and outgun challenging demons, but manage to transform them and to be transformed.  

Perhaps Doom engrosses precisely because I am exasperated with “real-world problems,” which seem unsolvable. It’s a relief to take action as the righteous, persistent and resourceful Marine. And if I’ve only played at the medium level, or if I’ve used save and replay for second chances, if sometimes I’ve been stymied and had to resort to cheat codes, still better players than I exist and have won fairly—look at the Youtube recordings of best games. 

I love the programmers’ joke hidden in the impossible level 32 of Doom 2. If you use God-mode and clipping (which allows you to pass through walls), you can penetrate the hole in the forehead of a sphinx-sized supreme demon, from which flying cubes steadily issue—cubes that land and turn into endless ranks of demons—and there you find a living and tormented human head on a stake—recognizable as John Romano’s. Bombard that and you win.

/

I think of Shakespeare’s Prospero as the ultimate designer, who puts his enemies through a dream of shipwreck and survival on the strange island where they marooned him years before with his young daughter. Now under his spell they are tormented and act out their viciousness on each other, until Prospero’s hench-spirit, Ariel (portrayed as a robot in one sci-fi film adaptation), reminds him to see them as fellow humans.  

“The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance,” Prospero decides, then breaks his spell and forgives the repentants as he wishes to be forgiven, though the problem of Caliban, the island’s native and the offspring of a witch, remains. Indeed, most recently, post-colonial, feminist, Marxist, and anti-racist readers have sympathized with Caliban and condemned the Eurocentric, patriarchal Prospero, who may abjure magic at last, but is still more at fault than he admits. And there’s the rub: what can we do, this side of Utopia, to transcend division, violence and crime? 

In life, it seems we only have imperfect attempts, ranging from the well-intentioned to the self-hating and sadistic. We don’t have innocent solutions. How do we prevent recurrences? How do we rehabilitate the Nazis after World War II? How do we reason with fanatics? Saint Genet? Jihady John? Klansmen and supremacists? And what about psychopaths? Where imagination fails, our games at least keep teasing our philosophy. 

---

To dwell in, and on, is more than merely to visit, seek temporary shelter or escape; it is to be immersed, nourished, and hooked. So it has been for me with Doom, the classic first-person shooter game, first released in 1993. I keep returning to play, fixated and intrigued. I speculate whether this is for good or ill—for me, or for our culture—as violent computer games are being considered both “mass murder simulators” and high art.

—

DeWitt Henry’s most recent prose collection is Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays (MadHat, 2018). A new collection, Endings and Beginnings: Family Essays, is scheduled for 2021 from MadHat (excerpts featured in Juked and in Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices). Henry was the founding editor of Ploughshares and is Prof. Emeritus at Emerson College. Details at www.dewitthenry.com.

Int. / Ext.

by Nathan Austin

[…] to “think through the feeling and phenomenology of disaster” in a present moment that is haunted by the absence of either the here or the now.

The windows on the south side of our apartment open onto a courtyard; immediately outside them, a second-floor walkway. When the pandemic came, we shut them to keep from sharing air with passers by. Most of the time, we keep the blinds closed too—to keep the heat out—and in the afternoon, we watch our neighbors’ silhouettes come and go. 

/

For the past six months, I’ve been no further than one-point-six-four miles from my front door: the nearest mountaintop, one Empire State Building high, I say to the friends I left in Brooklyn when I moved back to California. On a clear day, you can see Catalina. “Twenty-six miles, so near, so far,” goes the old song my mom sometimes sings. The map says it’s more like fifty. If the local newspaper’s online wildfire map is accurate, the particulate matter smudging today’s sky is from the Bobcat fire, which means it’s come twenty miles or more. 

For the past week, a strange bird has kept me awake—calls that sound like someone screaming. There was a heat wave and then it passed. A few days ago, I was startled in the night by helicopters dropping water on a brush fire less than a mile away. I start to wonder if the bird was displaced by the world-historical wildfires the western states are battling. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated, at least. “No jays, crows, ravens, quail, turkeys, or hawks,” birders report. Birds overcome by smoke and heat drop dead.

/

From Oakland, my sister explains that the smoke she’s seeing there is from fires in Oregon and Washington, blown far out to sea to the west and north, then rushed back on shore by the jet stream. A couple days later, I see a photo: greasy grey clouds sucked offshore and into a vast spiral a thousand miles away from the flames, higher up than planes fly.

A thousand miles away, people are reminding each other to turn off their porch lights so migratory hummingbirds don’t lose their way.

/

The word solastalgia—a kind of homesickness you feel when your home is dying—has been in the air for weeks now. Read “mood” for “word.” For “air,” “air”: the sky smells bad today. In 2019, Kimberly Skye Richards defined solastalgia by listing artworks that gave it expression before it had a name. Picture Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”: “a contorted figure in anguish against a lurid red sky.” He said blood red.

Add to the list Monet’s "fog effects" in his paintings of the Thames, J.M.W. Turner’s polluted sunsets. A photo in the New York Times shows Mt. Shasta as an island adrift in a sea of fouled air.

“Home isn’t safe now either,” the news reports; “wildfires bring ashen air into the house.” Every once in a while, our smoke detector goes off, just for a moment, then resets itself. At the end of last year, the heater slowly filled our apartment with carbon monoxide. I read somewhere that luxury cars with self-driving AI have been mistaking the sun—turned an otherworldly magenta by smoke-overcast skies—for an endless stoplight. 

/

“The apartment where one happens to be may be identical to one’s apartment in a particular city,” Jalal Toufic writes. “But one may look out of the window and discover that one is rather in a different city or the desert.” Compare this dissociative experience with that of taking in the view from a room you’ve never seen. WindowSwap users share ten-minute videos from all over the world; it’s a substitute for travel, the site’s creators claim. But it’s much more unsettling than that: I feel like an intruder in someone else’s room. Sometimes, background noise makes it clear there’s someone else there, too. Noise from the street comes in my own window, behind me, blending with the sounds of someone at home far away. I spend several minutes squinting at a spot on my screen, maybe two inches square, looking for what almost looks like a face. When the person—behind me, in the virtual room implied by what’s on my screen—stands up, I gasp.

I watch someone else’s sun set. The mountains beyond the city vanish into the night; when the video loops back and begins again, the pre-darkened sky comes on like a flash of lightning. 

In another browser window, I’m watching as the evening sun is swallowed in time-lapse by a murk almost a hundred miles away. The stream was produced by a publicly funded network of webcams mounted on utility companies’ infrastructure and designed to monitor for fire. “Buildings and other structures,” a note explains, “have been blocked out from field of view.” Greyish rectangles obscure buildings already lost in haze.

/

“The change of one word in a line from one day to the next seems to be a minute change,” Stephen Ratcliffe says. For the better part of two decades, he has written a poem a day describing the view from the window of his Bolinas home. The seventh line of each of several poems in a row from September describes the wildfire smoke: “yellow red orange sun in smoke by shoulder of ridge,” and “orange of smoke against invisible shoulder of ridge,” and “grey whiteness of fog against still invisible ridge.”

sky here too apocalyptic orange seemed to stay dark

all day yesterday and early winter evening 5 o’clock

reddish pink sun in smoke against shoulder of ridge

Sometimes, he explains, what “seems to be a minute change … registers, I think, a big change, a cataclysmic change.” On Twitter, someone aggregates the edits to headlines in the New York Times: “Maps showing the major fires that are burning in the Western states.” “Maps showing air quality and where major fires are burning in the Western states.” “Where major fires are burning in the Western states and how unhealthy air quality has become.”

/

"I will continue to sit on this bed, to stare out this window,” Katheryn Krotzer Laborde writes. “Anything to keep from looking at the TV, from thinking." She’s talking about Katrina, somehow fifteen years ago now, another anniversary relatively recently passed. I realize that, for some reason, everything feels a little more bearable when I imagine all of the crises of the past twenty years as a single disaster, spread out in space and time. Not a matter of we’ve been through this before so much as this is all there has been for so long now.

I think of Melville’s Bartleby standing staring blankly out the window. “Dead-wall reverie.”

/

Miwa Matreyek sends a link via text: “Solastalgia,” a video she made in her apartment, two and a quarter miles away. Indoor plants have been shot to seem superimposed on the plants outside the window, blur the divide between interior and exterior. Breeze let in stirs things: curtain’s fringe, maybe, or a plant’s shadow cast into the corner, stretched out and trembling. Is there a word that means “homesick for someone else’s house”? In a text a few days later, she compares her place to a space capsule, windows sealed against the smoky air.

/

"We first pretend,” Filarete wrote, “to stand at a certain window through which we see everything that we wish to describe and draw on our plane."

An article about the famous "Falling Man" photograph describes a mother telling a "distraught child a consoling lie": maybe they're just birds.

Sparrows in Ratcliffe’s poems say oh dear and dear me. Helen Macdonald tells the century-old story of a pilot reaching from the cockpit of his biplane to pluck birds right out of the sky, mid-flight.

/

Sybille Lammes describes a man using Google Street View to track his own movements, as well as those of his wife and children. None of these people are visible in any of the images he’s able to find, but evidence of their whereabouts is: a bicycle in front of a shop, a car not parked in a driveway, a crowd assembled outside a schoolyard. From these clues, the man constructs a spatial story, Lammes explains. As stories go, it’s a peculiar one: at its heart is the question “Where am I? instead of Who am I?” Of course, the answer to one is the answer to the other: a list of my addresses is a list of the people I’ve been. The man Lammes tells us about “made his quest” fixed in place at his desktop computer. 

Me? I’m writing in bed.

I start from my childhood home, turn four times to leave the neighborhood, then follow roads between riverbed and canal, past oil refineries northeast towards the other end of town. To create A New American Picture, artist Doug Rickard “acclimated myself to this method of ‘driving’” with Google Street View. Images he captured document the failures of the American project: poverty, austerity, racism. “Thousands of travel hours logged for this project," Spring Warren writes of Rickard, "sitting in a darkened studio and virtually driving."

But “mov[ing] through” the world this way doesn’t resemble driving so much as it does being stuck in traffic: advance twenty or thirty feet and stop, then repeat. It’s barely moving at all, just clicking points on the image of a horizon to load another image. I switch to Satellite View, jump across town, skip ahead in my route. I’m writing in the living room now. Somewhere along the way the road was lifted up along Panorama Drive: it’s the edge of town at the edge of a bluff—below is the river; across that, oil fields. A left turn, a swoop downhill, and I’m back on the valley floor, crossing the river before turning right and following Round Mountain Road as it curves gradually upwards into the foothills of the Sierras. 

I’m back in bed again, it’s a new day. I’m right where I left off, driving among hills as dry and pale as bone. "Beavertail cactus is one indicator of the desert influences here. Streams drain westward to canals." A few years ago in the New Yorker, Mathew J. X. Malady described using Google Street View to track down his past: “I plop down in places I’ve been, places that mean something to me, and look around.” He’s looking aimlessly for memories; what he finds is the ghostly image of his dead mother standing in her front yard. But I don’t know what I’m looking for. The exurb my father was living in when he died isn’t covered by Google Street View, and I couldn’t begin to guess where else I’d look for him. And anyway, the route I’m following reenacts a drive I took as a teen to escape him, to flee from the anger he took out on his family. These were things we didn’t talk about. The road winds through canyons cut through the hills, turns to point me towards home again.

In what Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie call a “seemingly interminable, almost five-minute sequence” from Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a freeway’s “long tunnels,” “winding bridges and overpasses” stand in for space flight. "Visually bland" they say; they say "the weakest sequence in the film." When I turn left onto Granite Road, the sky changes dramatically from January to August, the cottonwoods by the creek suddenly green. The “home stretch.” By the time I reach the airport another half-day later, I close the browser window, finished, done.

/

In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker attempts to haunt Hitchcock’s Vertigo by retracing Scotty’s spiralling path through San Francisco’s streets. You retrace your steps to find the point where you’ve lost your way. In the movie, Alexandra Stewart explains in voice-over: “It seems to be a question of trailing.” If it could be said that he is searching for a ghost, he finds it: “The small Victorian hotel where Madeleine disappeared had disappeared itself; concrete had replaced it.”

/

Olivia texts to say that ants have infested her home. “They navigate by following scent trails,” Sarah says. She suggests cinnamon or peppermint oil; it overpowers the ants’ sense of smell, and they lose their way. Once, a colony swarmed our Brooklyn apartment, and we chased them with a vacuum cleaner as they flew around the kitchen. Just a few days ago, I happened to learn that the term “circular milling” refers to sightless army ants following one another’s pheromone trails in a loop. Some people call it a “death spiral”: around and around, they go nowhere until they exhaust themselves and die. 

It’s the anniversary of 9/11, and I’m listening to Disintegration Loops. I’m watching a GIF of the smoke from the wildfires being whisked out to sea, where it forms what looks like a cyclone over the Pacific. A book I’d ordered a week earlier comes in the mail: Allison Cobb’s After We All Died. In it, she describes ants forming supercolonies, ants sharing a social stomach, an ant colony as a superorganism distributed over many bodies. 

“The truth is,” Cobb writes, “shelter always eventually fails—the tiles crack, a fire starts, the ants thread their nests through the walls.” “Birds,” Annie M. Bracey explains, “are unable to recognize glass as a barrier.”

/

An imagined thriller in which our hero witnesses a murder through WindowSwap. Maybe they’re housebound by a pandemic; maybe they conduct an informal investigation using Google Street View. Traffic outside one window veers through a crooked and uncontrolled intersection, a hubbub of esses and tires hissing on wet asphalt. A driver swings right then turns left in front of another car to park nose-in against the curb. The light 

is raining. A cement truck swerves onto a side street; as soon as it’s vanished another appears, coming from wherever the other one went. The rain picks up. Maybe this is the kind of thriller where nothing happens, though it seems like it could. It seems like it’s cold, but someone bikes through the intersection—tentatively—in tank top and shorts. When it’s time for the parked car to leave again, the driver waits for a break in traffic, reverse lights on, ready.

Rain is pouring down now, drowning out the sound of the cars.

/

The news shares maps that predict the entire lower 48 blanketed in smoke. “Like a curtain,” the article says. On BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh describes AI-assisted software misinterpreting a photo of window curtains for Ryan Gosling. He imagines high-tech surveillance systems "finding crimes that never happened in the blur of a street scene," "hearing things … never said in a citywide wiretap." On Twitter a few days ago, Manaugh pointed out that a California town erased by wildfire several years ago still appears on Google Street View, intact. “Eerie,” he said. “The houses are still standing.”

“‘Reflection’ in a lake of old houses that did not exist.” Andreas Mavromatis documents the hallucinations that arise from within the threshold between wakefulness and sleep. In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker finds two different kinds of ghosts: the disappeared hotel and the tower at Mission San Juan Bautista, from which Kim Novak repeatedly falls to her death, and which was never there. In Google Street View, my childhood memory of an empty lot populated by ground squirrels and burrowing owls has transformed into a gas station I’ve never seen in real life.

/ 

Our homes are accumulations of toxic materials, Cobb reminds us. Think asbestos, think lead. When they decompose, they release these toxins, return them to the soil.

In another book, Cobb shows us a decomposed seabird: nothing left but bits of plastic. It’s easy to be reminded of the fact that certain plants evolved seeds that are spread by way of a bird’s digestive system. I contrasted the predictable and direct path through the body with the unpredictable route that the body takes over land and sea. 

This book came 344 miles, measured directly from point A to B, a straight line. 

“The gift is contact, sensuality,” Roland Barthes says. “You will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us.” 

I’ve grown to love the feel of touching distance like this.

Sources (In order of first appearance)

"26 Miles (Santa Catalina)." Bruce Belland and Glen Larson

"As Wildfire Smoke Blots Out the Sun in Northern California, Many Ask: 'Where Are the Birds?'" Deborah Petersen

“California wildfires map.” The Los Angeles Times.

“Solastalgia.” Kimberly Skye Richards

"Now It's Not Safe at Home Either. Wildfires Bring Ashen Air Into the House." Matt Richtel.

(vampires): an uneasy essay on the undead in cinema. Jalal Toufic

WindowSwap. http://window-swap.com/

ALERTWildfire.org

“The Poem That Marks Things.” Stephen Ratcliffe and Linda Russo. Jacket2

Temporality. Stephen Ratcliffe. stephenratcliffe.blogspot.com

@nyt_diff (Editing TheGrayLady)

"The Window of Hope." Katheryn Krotzer Laborde. Callaloo

“Bartleby, the scrivener.” Herman Melville

“Solastalgia.” Miwa Matreyek. Homing: A Group Exhibition. California Botanic Garden

“The Falling Man: An Unforgettable Story.” Tom Junod

"The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down." Helen Macdonald

Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Sybille Lammes

"Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street: An intervew with artist Doug Rickard." Spring Warren

Descriptions of the Level IV Ecoregions of California (poster). G. E. Griffith, et al.

"Commentary." Solaris. Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie

Sans Soleil. Chris Marker

Disintegration Loops. William Basinski

After We All Died. Allison Cobb

"The Gosling Effect." BLDGBLG. Geoff Manaugh

Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep. Andreas Mavromatis

Plastic, an autobiography. Allison Cobb

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Roland Barthes

---

A partly-improvisatory thinking-through of the vast gulf that differentiates here from there, and about the ways that there has taken on the same charge I associate with the rumor or the mirage. To put it another way: an attempt, as my friend Nick put it, to “think through the feeling and phenomenology of disaster” in a present moment that is haunted by the absence of either the here or the now. And so, a snapshot of a moment seemingly unmoored from both time and place.

—

Nathan Austin is the author of (glost), Tie an O, and Survey Says!, as well as the recent broadside Surround Sound (for Éliane Radigue). His work has recently appeared in The Believer, Talisman, ToCall, and Translation: a Halophyte Collective exhibition. He lives in Los Angeles. 

Author photo by Sarah Eichman.

At the Roebling Aqueduct, Alone

by Melissa Holbrook Pierson

I’ve been having the feeling lately that history is watching me, not the other way around.

Stones fall in, pushed by time and weight. Everything shifts. Everything continues to shift. Even blocks this enormously grand, set in place by the repetitive motion of Irish hands, working for 30 cents and a gill of whiskey a day. They worked digging this canal for its three years, then moved west to blast more rock and cart a hundred thousand tons of dirt for yet another canal, only to stay one day ahead of hunger. Stones fall in.

Poison ivy overcovers. What enticing lost object might have been waiting a century for me alone to discover under its shiny leaves? I’m not going to find out. 

Even though I know it’s something good. There’s this keen sensation of certainty when something that has been untouched for a hundred years is near. From amid the ruins of forgotten acts it exerts a magnetic pull, more insistent the longer it remains unfound. Unfound it almost always stays, no matter my increasing frenzy, whacking through the undergrowth of a battlefield woods, sweating and in need of water, or patiently toeing up shards of teacups and dirt-stained plastic in an old farm dump, convinced here are minié balls sunk into deep bark or there a book whose pages have miraculously remained unfoxed, free-turning, and not glued into an evil-smelling brick.

The hints that I have been so long living not in the solid world as I had been led to believe become increasingly noisy. They are loudly whispered suggestions that all this—you and your works, my fellows!—are holograms made only of light and projected fibs. For the longest time I could not see. Or perhaps it’s that I have only recently completed my transformation into that pitiable specimen, the history nerd. But suddenly I’m not only metaphorically veering across the center line because as I’m supposed to be watching the road I’m instead craning my neck in search of evidence. 

Everywhere I look, everywhere I go, I now realize, this ground beneath us—the history that put us here at all—is actually a good foot or two below where we think we are. From the buried past bits of truth stick up. The only passion I feel anymore is for spotting it.  

Look. The grass seems thinner down there—could that be a remnant of the Delaware & Hudson towpath? So the canal has to be nearby! Oh my god it just might be under the road. (Eyes back temporarily to where they should be; death or at least folding metal and showers of pebbled glass averted.) For years I passed by it a hundred times and barely noticed that fragment of rock structure; now it has the power to get me killed. An eerie mixture of perfect calm and sweeping hysteria floods over me. I brake, hard, for historic markers. I have yielded to genetic forces beyond my control: I have become my father. The torment of childhood was the summer vacation, so fondly anticipated for its promise of ice cream and, just maybe, a new ceramic horse figurine (palomino please). Instead, hot and vaguely carsick, we’d be pulled out by the side of the road where, next to the damn black cannon that burned my hand under the blasting sun, we’d receive a 20-minute précis of troop movements that apparently occurred once upon an impossible to imagine time that wavers on a distant horizon.  

Today, for a closer look at piles of stones that might reassemble themselves into a well-built and prosperous canal, I drive to the village of High Falls. I leave the car behind to pick my way through the silent woods where busy industry once assailed the senses. It was not a woods then. I’ve seen the ancient photos, even if I keep being unable to orient from them: where is that street now? Which direction does this face? I see that that building remains, but this one is gone. Or wait, did they turn it into the restaurant over there? As if on a balance beam, I’m advancing through the undergrowth along some sort of narrow six-foot-high ridge heading toward the river—it might have been a declivity in another time, since up becomes down after enough decades have cycled through—and I too am turning end over end. But first it brings me to a prohibiting fence around an abandoned house, boarded up, listing, once-red siding faded to the color of long-spilled blood. The earth keeps reaching up to reclaim it, but not yet. I press myself through a hole in the fence wires. Around back, the cellar door is open to me. How many of the most valuable things in life are found on the other side of a warning. Do not enter. Forbidden. We are watching you.

No one is watching. And disobedience is freedom. Trespassing is how you know you’re alive. Make sure to bring a souvenir from the past back into the present. Otherwise you may not remember you were there. I slip inside the cool air within the walls of the laid-stone foundation. I feel certain, in the heightened fairy tale writing itself into fact in my mind, this was a lock-tender’s house. It is next to an old lock, after all. I think. It is hard to know, but I fancy I can now read traces from a hundred fifty years ago present only to my keen and knowing eye. 

I will find him still here in the air dense with mold and earth, decay and rebirth.

Sheet music scattered on a broken table. Nearly a hundred years old, some of it. Though a chunk of cellar wall has been torn away, none too recently, the wind and driving rain of three quarters of a century have left the paper untouched. There is some reason for this. I take it that I can take it. No one would care as much as I do. I search through all then hide one pamphlet in my notebook. Chappell’s Famous Ballad Successes, a “thematic” it is called—an ad by any other name, hooking the hopeful with the first three staves of each song; if you want more, and it is ardently hoped you will, you must buy the full piece for 40 cents. There is some meaning to my choice. I’ll assign it later. I hear the locktender moving across the boards above. A boat is floating into sight, just exiting the long trough that is suspended on 8½-inch wire ropes, “well-varnished,” over the Rondout Creek a dozen yards away. A river of water over a river of water. The aqueduct is a necklace, strung from beautiful impossibility, decorating the neck of American ingenuity and commercial might. The artery beats with rhythmic arrival of the nation’s lifeblood, boatload after boatload of anthracite coal from Carbon County, Pennsylvania. It is bound for the brilliant, bursting future. First, though, it will stand in silent black mountains on the manmade island at the Strand near Kingston.

Stones fall in. I sit down on the aqueduct’s abutment arising from the riverbank. A ghost sits down next to me. If I stood up, I would hit my head on the wooden underside of the watery bridge. If only it were here. But it too was claimed by time and fire in 1916 after it was deemed an “attractive nuisance” from which kids would leap into the rocky water below. Its finishing stone was engraved “1849” and the people celebrated. Forty-nine years later the last boat passed through, then the water was let out of the D&H forever. The gaping maws of the Roebling aqueduct’s abutments try to speak to each other across the distance of the creek. The day is still quiet. I am alone. I am not alone. 

Next to me, another ghost enters the body of the first. And another. Their presence makes the air heavy. It is like the day itself is keening. 

I weep for my father, but he is here. I have so many questions only he can answer. I did not know I should have asked sooner. The last boat passed before I thought it would. 

He wants me to stop crying. Spilled milk, he admonishes, as he always did. But there is so much I need to ask you! Another ghost enters the body of the last. And then I know. That ghost in my father—it is history. History, idea. History, pursuit. History, unknown. The accretion of the dead who once passed this place, leaving faint marks getting fainter even as I sit, while the infinity of cells shed by everyone who is gone still sift through the air. They fall unfelt on my father and me. He looks out over the creek. I imagine I hear him say, with a certainty that joins the sound of water flowing past, “See? You too. You too will someday fall.”

---

I’ve been having the feeling lately that history is watching me, not the other way around. It’s near, it’s underfoot. It’s ongoing in parallel time, and it only takes a small sidestep to get from now to then if you stand among ruins and learn what it is you’re truly seeing. I had no idea for a long time that the places I felt most drawn to were actually the graves of old canals, or that they had been so transformative to American history. When I started studying them, I discovered that they were my origin, too: two canals were the sole reason my hometown of Akron came into being. I would never have been born there, or at all, if not for canals. Increasingly, the past—attained through the hidden doorway of its remains in the present—is the place I inhabit.

—

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of five books, including The Place You Love Is Gone. She is currently editing an anthology of writing about motorcycling, and working on a book about America’s canal era. Other work has appeared in Harper’s, Prairie Schooner, Hinterland, and Tinhouse.com. She writes about travel, history, books, photography, and film.

A Thousand Nothings

by Jenny Fran Davis

I'm interested in gossip as essay and essay as gossip, in speculation as a sort of femme accounting and narrativizing.

There are a few things I need in here and almost nothing I want. This world introduces itself in twos. Real wasabi. Irish oatmeal. Balsamic thyme. Lemon curd. Hulier et vinaigrier. Kale chips. Veggie sticks. Malt vinegar. Aiiiisle two! Canyon cut. Punjab eggplant. Full-fat coconut milk, twelve ounces, lasts six days when I’m the only one spooning it into my coffee. Aisle two? Near East. Field Day. Sweets & Beets. ExCUSE me. A mother and daughter step around the bread slicer, the girl’s face dented and vaguely Appalachian. Excuse me? Sparkling grapefruit. Spectacular kola. Lady fingers. Go raw. A pair of friends trying to find raisins passes again and again down aisle four, laughing at each other. I practice a mild expression in my eyes, how my mouth might turn when I see you again. Soft baked. Classic crème. APPROVED snack. Pot pie? Looks boooooomb. Klean Kanteen. Blissful agave. Turkish blend. Get cheese? No, meat. No meat. Nutritional yeast. My heartbeat makes my whole chest a drill. Loofah sponge. Oregon chai. Chai rooibos. Fair trade. A new toothbrush with a plastic hood, because my neurotic friend has told me that the forceful spray of flush toilets sends shit flying into exposed bristles. A new thing of hand soap that smells unlike the last one we had together. You are traveling, traveling, your body hurtling through space and time. Matcha love. Got it. A woman and her friend lean against the bulk bin of millet. We’re getting two new sprinklers, she says, because the minute Monty puts his paw on them, water starts spraying everywhere. Bulk etiquette: no grazing—no shaking—bag it—tag it—prevent spillage. I feel diffusive, like a conduit, like a pipe under construction. Like you can see the desire radiating off me in sheets, I desire what I have always desired, which is to be relieved of my performance, to be broken, to be penetrated, burnt, maimed, tamed beyond and into myself. Jam in glass to go with the bread. I carry a basket because pushing a cart requires coordination I don’t have. Ear candles. Ear candles! Mineral bath. A classmate in a mini skirt that has crept up her ass, her boyfriend hung up on the price of vegan cheese. How much? Foam bath. Two lesbians at the deli counter. What does epistemology mean again? Asks one. Ways of knowing, says the other. A compact square of Mexican chocolate cake for us to unwrap at midnight, the oily saran pulled from the surface like sunburned skin. A man holds open a paper bag and waits while his girlfriend feeds some bread through the slicer. Together they shove the efficient strips into a bag. Now wine, she commands. Dark twist. Endangered species. White honey. Where is—? Quinoa burgers. Body odor. Beer brands: sheer madness—big eye—gold coin—satin solitude. A woman and her friend leave the bulk bins of millet. The Greek philosopher Zeno had, as I once learned and think about often, a paradox called the Paradox of the Grain of Millet. A single grain of millet falls silently, he said, but a thousand grains of millet make a sound when they fall. Hence a thousand nothings become something, an absurd conclusion. I am afraid I won’t recognize you, what if you have found somebody else while I’ve been away at school. Slivered almonds. One bag, two overflowing scoops. Bag it. Tag it? Two hands, one motion. The bag of almonds fits in the outside pocket of my purse, bulges out. A woman with a long grey braid down her back at the register. Kind eyes, boxy thumbs. Member number? No, no. I pay for the things in my basket. The woman does not see the bag of almonds in my purse. Really they are mine now. I walk outside so easily. There is no climax. There is no one to stop me. My bag is full, there is the busy street to run across when there are no cars coming, there is the pink sublet where I sleep in someone else’s bed.

---

In one of my favorite essays, “The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson classifies Emily Brontë—according to Brontë’s own misspelling—as a “whacher.” It’s a word I didn’t know I needed, a word distinct enough from “watcher” to mean not just witness, but also mediator. Whaching does something to experience rather than faithfully represent it. I’m drawn to essays that whach instead of just watch, writing that intervenes by skewing, doubting, and reworking facts. I like essays that wobble between fiction and nonfiction and those that cultivate doubt. I’m interested in rendering not just what happened, but the feeling of what happened—what reads as true—and in representing dreams, delusions, and fantasies. I'm interested in gossip as essay and essay as gossip, in speculation as a sort of femme accounting and narrativizing.

—

Jenny Fran Davis is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. The winner of the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award in nonfiction, her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books and Washington Square Review. She's at work on a novel about femme performance and identity.

Problems with Enlightenment

by Jasmine V. Bailey

One steady fact that emerges in my attempt to inhabit these narratives is the power of abuse to erase those who suffer it.

A Fictional Account

I want to tell the story of my crimes: not just the ones I’ve committed, but those I’ve suffered, those I’ve wanted to commit, those I’ve understood. 

A woman stands before a classroom. Her colleagues are married. They say they love sculpture, or the Second World War, but actually none of them loves anything, especially what they teach. They live for changing out their mid-level SUVs every five and a half years. They like to imagine that not becoming I-bankers was both a choice and evidence of their personal virtue. They have children who they are determined should learn Mandarin on an immersion basis.

Her students are not impressed by their teacher, but it isn’t personal; they are impressed by almost nothing. They are here to learn Spanish, the most “useful” language their parents dream they are smart enough to learn. She has tried to move them with poetry, with the discovery of what a syntactically difficult sentence means in a second language, which you have to pull apart like a piece of origami at the center of which is an opal, lit with stone fire. But they do not pay attention. Two students pay attention, and with her help come to understand what the sentence means, and find the opal, but they are not impressed. They have personal devices and very, very expensive headphones. One day, they make her listen to Avicci on someone’s headphones, worth more than her car. They watch as she places them over her ears and listens. She is duly impressed by how the headphones make it seem like she is alone in the universe with the music she is listening to, which she doesn’t care for. She makes sure to say, “This sounds wonderful!” before handing them back, and when she yells this unintentionally because of the sound-cancelling power of the expensive headphones, they erupt into delighted, satisfied laughter. This represents a good day.

She has little time alone between classes and sports and study hall and “family dinners” with randomly-assigned students wearing awkward suits like undertakers-in-training, but she stays up anyway trying to write about how memory wants to kill us. She is more like a cicada than any human being in her life. She drives home to see her parents too often because they are the only interesting people she knows, with their failing nature photography business, the used Lexus they can’t afford to drive, the eighty-dollar pills her mother can’t sleep without that are probably making her compulsively buy jewelry online.

Eventually a student takes an interest in her. He is tall and in the best physical condition he will ever be in, swimming and wrestling against other young gods whenever he isn’t eating and sleeping to grow the body he brings to class to display before her. It is the fact of touch that she craves, to feel fingers rappel down her spine. She has not projected onto him a great mind or soul. What he really is suffices: a simple beauty, a new person with few thoughts clouding his determination for what he wants. First he begins to come for “extra help,” which is not a bad idea in principle, but doesn’t work in practice. Then he starts spending study hall in the art building, where she is proctor and there are a lot of empty rooms, including the instrument practice rooms, which are soundproof. She rapidly loses track of the convictions she’s carrying with her like the formula for compounded interest. He’s fifty pounds heavier than she is, but he doesn’t force her, and this gentleness intoxicates her. It may be true no one could appreciate him quite as she does. It is certainly true that soon enough he may become an average asshole, drinking Natty Light and trying to pass ECON. If he is rejected, he may forget how to look for whatever he sees in her and, instead, like everyone else, just look for women with low BMI.

If they are discovered, she could be fired and tried in a criminal trial. She would enjoy that the school would have to expend resources containing the scandal. She could be given twelve years, but the real cost would be the things people think about her. Straight men would say out loud, “I wish I had had a teacher like that,” while mothers would call her “predator”, “pathetic”. There are people who feel they are touched too often, whom you can teach the meaning of a sentence, show the opal, but never bring to awe.

A Story Tayeb Salih Made Up

At fifty-five the Headmaster is struck with love for a fourteen-year-old girl. He is not content to pine, and asks her father for permission to take her as his second wife. This is in a village in Sudan decades ago, but the father says no, says, the age difference would not give me peace, and thanks the Headmaster for asking in order to ease the embarrassment they feel, to gesture that he is not so horribly foolish, though he is. Everyone sees it: the honored man demeaned. He is equal parts in love and embarrassed, but love is strong, the body is an animal we rarely get a good look at in daylight.

The Kind of Story You Hear Every Day

Make the headmaster a professor, the daughter a college student, the time the present, place the father God-knows-where, and soon you have the plot of the Squid and the Whale. It is cold comfort to dismiss the fact before you as cliché and doesn’t work when you’re consoling your friend, for whom this affair, which ended seven years ago, is never finished. In the end, Jeff Daniels and the real-life Latin professor are either publicly disgraced or whispered about, but the young woman is not intact. For her, his mistake lingers; it goes bad like a piece of fruit left at the bottom of a bag, bruised by books and bottles, the rot sinking deep into the fabric of the bag so that you can never clean it out. But neither can you throw the bag away, because it’s your life.

One That Happened

Anna Stubblefield becomes a tenured professor, and her interests start to wander. She becomes fascinated by a new practice called facilitated communication, which purports to allow people who can’t communicate to do so with the help of a trained assistant. She ignores the abundance of research discrediting it. She learns how to hold the patient’s arm and help him point at images and type. She is struck with wonder and becomes a messenger of this good news. She involves herself in the case of a man with cerebral palsy who communicates, for the first time, with her hand under his elbow. She helps him take literature classes; she feels herself to be his prophet. Before long, they tell her he has fallen in love with her and try to seduce her. They type shocking things to her when they are alone. For what feels like forever, she resists. There is her husband to consider and their eleven-year age difference. And yet, they have crossed a fathomless deep to step onto the shore of a world they alone share, like two Italian B-actors in Swept Away. She has never been as beautiful as she imagines she is to him, lit with gratitude. Partly sex is something she wants to give him; partly it is something she wants to share. His family will learn this because she will tell them as the latest installment of the revelation. They will not see it the way she sees it; nor will the judge, whose decision about what evidence to allow will condemn her to two consecutive 12-year terms in jail and lifetime parole supervision. But first, the family’s anguish will take her by surprise. She will furnish evidence: “Tell them!” she’ll beg of her lover, with whom she’ll write that she resisted for a long time, the oldest excuse in the book. The word they will use to describe her resistance is valiantly. The term the jury will use for what she and her lover shared is two counts of aggravated sexual assault. This will send a tremor through her belief. But it is not unusual for prophets to be misunderstood. They are describing a world no one else can see, and the visible world is vicious in its jealousy to be the only one.

On Earth As It Is in France

Bardot makes the name Brigitte sublime just in time for you to enjoy it. You marry a banker and with him create three children, which, you discover, the body can survive. The first child is your introduction to how massive love, in fact, is. You are calmer the second time, acquainted, and your luck holds a third time, the beauty unfolding in a wave of blood. You work at a posh school, evaluating Latin translations with the patient tyranny of a demigod.  

You grow old slower than even other French women, and when Emmanuel Macron appears in a seat before you, a powerful man not yet grown, and even joins suspiciously your drama club, you do not turn away like a sensible woman because you know no one ever won kleos who wouldn’t gamble with the gods. You throw everything on their table, and manage, against all odds, to keep that job at the lycée, to never go eight months without a husband. Like Aphrodite you pine, but no boar comes for this Adonis; some sympathetic god makes him President instead.  Only of France, but you know when to take what you can get. And if he was born just months after your second child, the better to show love’s strange habits, how closely love tends to keep to pain.

The first Adonis was made to show all beauty for its dark sources. His mother, Myrrha, became crazed with love for her own father, and went to him under cover of night. Eventually dawn revealed with her rosy knuckles the crime. In his rage, her father chased her for nine months, until she pleaded with the gods, who took her resplendent child from her and turned her into a tree. That is the story of the first myrrh tree.

Cinyrus, angry at his daughter, his rapist. All he had meant to do was sleep with a girl his daughter’s age every night. He was the king of Cyprus; he could afford it.

Once, Someone, a Genius, Wrote Lolita

In the classic Sufi love story, Majnun, lovesick for Layla, wandered in tattered clothes ribboning in the wind, a beggar who forgot to beg. He wrote love poems, tore them up, and scattered them in rivers hoping they might carry one piece to her. She loved him too, from her tower of privilege, which meant marriage to whoever bought her. Some versions note that her husband was handsome.

In a version I read, Majnun saw Layla again after years of singing and wandering in single-minded devotion. She knew him at once and called out to him, but he didn’t recognize her, even after she pleaded with him. It’s a mystical story; its moral is that the things of this world are both illusions and means by which we may, with enough mortification, achieve union with the real Beloved. Leila’s face was a paving stone Majnun stood on to reach the lips of God.

I am a failed mystic because I think only of Layla’s eyes, no longer worth settling a fortune on, when Majnun looks right through them, how long life must have been after that. It is meant as a tale of enlightenment. But I turn back to earth, to the person in every story who doesn’t find a way out.

Freya Stark begins her memoir of her journeys in the remote Hadrhamaut with the harvesting of incense. Traditionally, only a few families were allowed access to the area where the trees grew, and were themselves considered sacred, inheriting the right to gather the gum. During the harvest they abstained from the pollution of women and the dead, which enhanced the value of what they gathered. Harvesters of incense travel to the scarred trees in the right season and wound them for their astonishing blood. A balm that can smear the rottenness from a carcass, or send the prayers of the desperate to heaven. Besides gold, these were the gifts the magi brought Jesus at his birth. Such a thing to give a child, a god, the only kind of person who would never need it.

I want to tell the story of my crimes: the ones I’ve committed, the ones I’ve suffered, the ones I’ve wanted to commit, the ones I thought I understood. Sometimes I want the freedom of the penitent absolved. But somewhere in the telling remorse eludes me. I am Myrrha going back night after night, and I am her father, so corrupt I mistake myself for pure. It is for me the ascetic harvests the trees’ blood. It’s worth the price of incense to smell better than you are. It was frankincense Freya Stark wrote about, but I misremember it as myrrh.

---

We take it for granted that people who write about the past, especially the fascinating figures of the past, deal heavily in speculation. But it takes speculation to write about people who are alive too—especially conflicts involving two or more people with different perspectives and internal ambivalences. When #MeToo began to gain traction as a movement, I began to think of stories of sexual misconduct (or that could be construed as misconduct) that had fascinated me over the years. They tended to be the least straightforward cases or those I related to in some way. One steady fact that emerges in my attempt to inhabit these narratives is the power of abuse to erase those who suffer it. Like the story of Myrrha, so many ancient Greek myths resolve this way—with a young woman running from a man; a god; a furious spurned goddess; a set of ugly, arbitrary rules—straight into oblivion. They must endure in part because we recognize the truth in that.

—

Jasmine V. Bailey is the author of Alexandria, Disappeared and the chapbook Sleep and What Precedes It. She has been an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University, a Fulbright Fellow in Argentina, and a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. She won the Michigan Quarterly Review's 2019 Laurence Goldstein Prize, the 2020 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize from Ruminate Magazine, was a finalist for the 2018 Gulf Coat Translation Prize, and is a contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.

to have eaten the octopus

by Jessie Kraemer

Some things are true, I wouldn’t dispute that. But the way a mind holds fact is a funny thing, and no two do it the same. A mind can hold real things in a really unreal way.

Things we haven't seen have a way of being things we’ve already seen—as having not seen them, we imagine them in detail, with familiarity. 

There is the state where I was born and lived most of my life, which upon imagining is pale. I imagine first a triangle on the east coast, and second, a farm down the road: two buffalo standing in the water behind a wire fence. One peacock roams, several baby pigs poked by squatting children. The woods beyond hold gnarled trees among what may be the little ghosts of trenches and deep buried metal nuts, or simply dirt. Only these images. 

There are continents about which I contain a wild and unsubstantiated understanding grown almost exclusively from things seen in National Geographic. And then the visceral and acute pain of choking on a live octopus, nearly universal. A feeling known almost so well that we do not need to imagine a second time.

Notions are fertile. A whisper can sink damply into a soil and grow fruit, while realer seeds are eaten and forgotten. 

/

Hair tossed like a scarf, I step from the platform alone in a burst of rivering bodies.

The Louvre is being emptied because of the summer flood. I see the man in pressed slacks tossing windy with each step as he—with dark hair and a pinched mouth—carries one end of a wooden crate of artworks. Stepping a black shoe backwards to, shining, lick the drowned cobbles, his face is unmoved, his calf, unimaginable. 

People glide through the green streetwater with an earned, middle-class pep that comes from being European in the time of the bullish America. The world throws up celebratory plastics, they fall almost immediately and do not decompose.

It is the Eurocup, among the tourists and the locals dressed in neutral tones, there are colorful jerseys with numbers. Who knows what teams are playing, and who would ever know, seeing as so many countries have the colors red and white. There would have been so much red and white.

When imagined unknowns are replaced with witnessing, then comes a realness that is underwhelming, neutralizing, and eventually forgettable. To come upon the Mona Lisa is to say, this is much smaller in person.

Concerning the Mona Lisa, I’ve never been to the Louvre.

Paris, for me you canceled two trains.

/

Many times I imagined the journey, crossing the French border. The sheep stand puffed and coiffed, their sloping backs like their mothers’ the hills. There stand the small houses, without the dumbing solar panels and turbines of practical Germany, basking nakedly in a relentless nature. 

Paris, 476 kilometers away, is both the lit cigarette and the mouth inhaling, realizing it is as well the burning of dry tobacco, as well the smoke in the lungs and the smoke curling through the labyrinthine stem of the cigarette. It is delightful to feel the uncertainty and the displaced sense of arriving, both smoking and being smoked, to see how the lit end erupts in a shine that is meandering like a thin red snake, like the sharpness on a turning coin.

 Pouring back and forth into each glass to rebalance the known with the known.

/

When my mother was a child she sat in the front on her knees for the class picture. I know this as I hold in my hands the class picture.

I know it to look at her, the other children, anonymous and grey, their thoughts are unsaved, but her I can remember. She has white hair and a handstitched dress, and in her I see a mystic. Her stare is boiled and plain, her eyes are two skinned nuts and two black pebbles. I think, I want that child to come back and teach me to be quiet and odd.

I wonder if she hid things, what she refused to eat, if she stored small resentments.

If she did not smooth all the wrinkles from the bedclothes, there was the witch who would grab her. There were the little dolls with their tiny outfits her mother pulled from the top shelf of the linen closet only when she was home sick from school with a fever. There were the baby lambs who cried as she fed them on her lap with a bottle by the fire. The willow in the front lawn. The peach orchard rented across town where she would rub the skins up and down her arm before the rashes came.

She grew very slowly day by day, not quickly in leaps like chapters in a story. She slept seven to nine hours each night, and this would have been much of her life, a few hours of sleep each night. She rode the bus to school and sat in chairs, and this too would have been much of her life. She would sneeze and push the dirty clothes to one side of the room, and these things would have taken up moments each week. I would like to live each day in her childhood like I would visit the real Paris.

/

My three days a week lover beside me in the grass, I touch the eczema on his wrist, something else that comes and goes. A bee mounts a clover.

I cannot know how I’ve moved even to get here. Like the balls of moss that roll on glaciers, in Alaska, in Iceland, the colder places, the blue sheen, somewhere my feet would never travel, the mountain of still water. The sudden green on the landscape, like balled socks, are called glacier mice. A mystery I cannot solve, nor scientists.

These balls of moss must somehow roll themselves, one inch a day, to angle each curve of their oval adjacent to the sun, to keep each pearl of moss alive. The odd thing is not that they roll themselves—that we do not know how—but that they all roll together. As one mind. Marbles that someone is shuffling with a big, immaterial palm. That to see them sitting it is somehow impossible not to see them in motion, creeping forward, even as the glaciologist, the chill of the air at their nose, watches, even in a photograph, even as we see them in the magazine, even then.

To see them still, is to see them in motion, even in the photograph, even then. And to feel it bodily, like a stone, the kind that could be carved into a Mycanean vase, picturing what a Cretan imagines of an octopus, a three-petaled flower and two ribbon arms with ribs like lace, and this in the Louvre, tucked in some lit box, with a placard explaining.

“The Octopus”—it offers—not saying what it would feel like for the same to be swallowed. Not intimating that at the level of the cell, an octopus is one step ahead of us, or eight, or like a thousand liquid stars, is always intimately recreating, an octopus manifesting himself like the environment around him. He sees the room, and imagines himself candescent. 

That an octopus could imagine himself exactly the texture of sand, that he could become a school of clownfish, means he could easily negotiate the thought of being sent to the restaurant kitchen. Being held up from the bucket of water, inspected, first interrogated for shape, and then separated at each limb. What he wouldn’t imagine may be the cooler skin of a glacier, what he knows of the smaller ice cube, the exposures of the sun on the water.

/

To come upon a Da Vinci, peering over the backs of many others to see it, one’s eyes electing to look at the pimpled light on the golden frame rather than hairless brow of the woman, may be to say, this is much smaller in person. Or I am much smaller than I thought I was.

It’s true, at least, to say that I did not see it. 

To enter an unvisited place is to enter every part of its air, an omniscience, a poured jar of bees, each buzz an inimitable touch.

---

Calling something nonfiction will make me immediately suspicious. If you go out of your way to tell me something is true, I'm going to assume you're lying. That antagonism is what I love about an essay. It’s like a lazzi, the same failure every time. There is no True. Everyone loves a lazzi, and we keep reading essays because they’re this awful analog for how we attempt to cohere narrative about our lives. It’s a kinship with this pseudo-impossible project of understanding the world.

Speculation is the currency of the essay, is any movement in the text, because if we only wrote confidently forward about what we knew to be true, there would be no essay. Some things are true, I wouldn’t dispute that. But the way a mind holds fact is a funny thing, and no two do it the same. A mind can hold real things in a really unreal way. All that’s there are stars, and we see constellations. A trick you learn is that beginning anything with “I imagine” makes it nonfiction. The fact of writing the fiction was true. But putting the focus there changes things: then we are watching you do it.

—

Jessie Kraemer is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, where she is co-editor of The Essay Review and teaches undergrads to like books. Her work can be found in Essay Daily.