The Harvard Advocate
Commencement 2010
Vol. 145 No.4
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THE HARVARD ADVOCATE
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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES BEN COSGROVE thinks he can put it in a safe behind a painting, lock it up, and leave. Composed of an infinite number of lines is MARK CHIUSANO. MARY CATHARINE CURLEY is a native of Vermont, where bears roam free and nuclear reactors have cracks. Her original draft of this story contained more Cher references. CORA CURRIER has good need of her blazing sun. MOLLY DEKTAR is the sister of Charlie Dektar and Katie Dektar. MOLLY FITZPATRICK is celery, apples, walnuts, grapes. In a mayonnaise sauce. ARTEMISHA GOLDFEDER prefers to be called Artemisha from now on. ABRAM KAPLAN to excess. REBECCA LIEBERMAN, these sentences comment on art, but are not art. YAN YAN MAO constructed a life size gingko tree for her thesis. People totally like COLLEEN O’BRIEN just as much as they like Caesar. LOREN RABINOWITZ, two-time U.S. figure skating champion. IRINA ROZOVSKY (b. 1981, Moscow) received a BA in French and Spanish from Tufts University and an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art. She lives and works in Boston www.irinar.com. DAVID RICE asked him which was the way back home. He said take a right at the light, keep goin’ straight until night, and then, boy, you’re on your own. MADELEINE SCHWARTZ Amaze, slender witch? XINRAN YUAN thinks neither installation nor participation is that interesting of a word.
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Art
Emma Banay, Ruben Davis*, Molly Dektar, Julian Gewirtz, Dana Kase, Rebecca Levitan, Rebecca Lieberman*, Thalassa Raasch*, Anna Raginskaya, Madeleine Schwartz.
business
Ankur Agrawal, Ben Berman, Sanders Bernstein, Catherine Humphreville*, Andrew Izaguirre, Andrew Karn, Iya Megre, Jaron Mercer, Sasha Mironov, Arielle Pensler*, Anna Raginskaya, David Tao, Natalie Wong, Emily Xie, Millicent Younger*
design
The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com
Editorial Board President Publisher Art Editor Business Manager Design Editors Features Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Technology Editor Pegasi Dionysi Circulation & Publicity Managers Librarian Alumni Relations Manager Community Outreach Director
DANA KASE Charleton Lamb Madeleine schwartz Benjamin berman Wendy chang Lauren Packard Kevin seitz RYAN MEEHAN ADAM PALAY Jeremy FEng MATT AUCOIN MARK CHIUSANO SOPHIE DUVERNOY EMILY CHERTOFF SOFIA GROOPMAN DAVID TAO ANNA RAGINSKAYA EMMA BANAY IYA MEGRE ANDREW KLEIN
Board of Trustees Chairman James Atlas Chairman Emeritus Louis Begley Vice-Chairman Douglas McIntyre President Susan Morrison Vice-President Austin Wilkie and Treasurer Secretary Charles Atkinson Peter Brooks John DeStefano ESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER L A. Whitney Ellsworth jonathan Galassi Lev Grossman Angela Mariani Daniel Max CELIA MCGEE Thomas A. Stewart
Charlotte Alter, Lucy Andersen, Isidore Bethel, Wendy Chang, Hanna Choi, Jessica Henderson, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, Rebecca Lieberman*, Joseph Morcos, Anna Murphy, Lauren Packard, Aimee Wang.
features
Anna Barnet*, Brittany Benjamin*, Sanders Bernstein, Emily Chertoff, Mark Chiusano, Rebecca Cooper, Ben Cosgrove*, Eva DeLappe, Sophie Duvernoy, Molly Fitzpatrick, Anna Polonyi*, Madeleine Schwartz, Kevin Seitz*, Jessica Sequeira, Georgia Stasinopoulos.
fiction
Sanders Bernstein, Emily Chertoff, Molly Dektar, Eva Delappe, Erik Fredericksen, Carolyn Gaebler, Sofia Groopman, Justin Keenan*, Seph Kramer, Michal Labik, Charleton Lamb, Max Larkin, Charlotte Lieberman, Linda Liu,* Teddy Martin*, Ryan Meehan, David Wallace, Scott Zuccarino.
poetry
Matthew Aucoin, Erik Frederiksen, Ted Gioia, Rachael Goldberg, Julian Gewirtz, William Jeffrey, Chris JohnsonRoberson, Abram Kaplan*, Andrew Klein, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla, Jake McNulty, Adam Palay, David Wallace, Joshua Wilson.
TECHNOLOGY
Ben Berman, Jeff Feldman, Jeremy Feng, Kevin McNamara, Mark VanMiddlesworth, Lakshmi Parthasarathy, Anna Roth, Scott Zuccarino, Qichen Zhang.
* The Harvard Advocate congratulates its graduating seniors. The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate.com, features@theharvardadvocate.com, fiction@theharvardadvocate.com, or poetry@theharvardadvocate.com. Submissions may also be mailed to 21 South St., Cambridge MA 02138. All submissions should be original work that has not been previously published. If you wish to have your submission returned to you, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Questions about submissions may be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com. Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continually published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from 21 South St, Cambridge MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and international addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase at www. theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2010 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.
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table of cont Art
Lead around whitetail deer Osage sculpture 4 layout Untitled Installation Ports 3, 4, 6 one to nothing
Colleen o’briEn rebecca lieberman Yan yan mao artemisha goldfeder Xinran Yuan Irina rozovsky
7 14 18 22 23 30
Madeleine Schwartz molly ďŹ tzpatrcik MarK chiusano
4 8 24
Ben cosgrove
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Features
Notes from 21 south street Romain Gary: A short biography Slouching towards hollywood Catching proteus Envoy Carriers
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t ents Fiction
bear bread drifter jim
poetry
Night Hunt Atonement Morning Meets the lodge last winter
mary catherine curley molly dektar david rice
Cora currier loren galler rabinowitz abram kaplan Cora Currier
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28 29 56 57
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Notes from 21 South Street
Romain Gary: A Short Biography Madeleine Schwartz
By the time Romain Gary shot himself in the head, the French-Russian writer had published over fifty novels under four different names, directed two movies, fought in the air force, and represented France as a consul. His marriages—first to the British writer Lesley Branch, then to the American actress Jean Seberg—had brought him celebrity. He had enmeshed some of France’s literary giants in an elaborate hoax that broke fundamental precepts of the country’s cultural institutions. But Gary always saw his own life as a series of incomplete drafts. Even as he planned his own death, he remained on the path to self-improvement. “To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence,” read the essay he left with his suicide note. It’s perhaps no surprise that biographies of the author often seem overwhelmed by the slippery nature of their subject. “Romain Gary: The Chameleon,” “Romain Gary: The Man who Sold his Shadow.” Gary was one of France’s most successful writers, but he lived the life of a spy. Roman Kacew was born in 1914, perhaps in Moscow but just as likely in Kursk, a small city 4
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near modern-day Turkey. His mother was poor and Jewish, an outcast in the Russian Empire. He never knew his father; the name Kacew came from a second marriage. From a young age, the boy began inventing stories about his heritage. He decided before the age of ten that he came from greatness: his father was really the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom he shared a fierce stare. Kurksk didn’t last long. Next came Vilnius, then Warsaw, then Nice in southern France. Moving was tough for Kacew, who was scrawny and had to learn new languages fast. It was worse for his mother, a former actress who worked as a maid to support her son. She was driven to prove her son’s greatness. In each new town, she pushed the young boy to find his passion— dance, music, theater—always leaving open the possibility that he might write. Looking back on his childhood in his semiautobiographical novel Promise at Dawn, the writer would later paint this search for a passion as a search for a public identity. The question
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of a pseudonym runs through the novel. Even as his mother exhorts her son to impress his French peers, she asks that he tailor his work to their expectations. “‘We have to find you a pseudonym,’ [my mother] said sternly. ‘A great French writer cannot have a Russian name. If you were a virtuoso violinist, it would be great, but, for a titan of French literature, it just won’t do.’” The name Romain Gary came to him while he was defending the country in the air force. Romain was just the French version of what he already had; Gary was a new flavor. In Russian, it means “burn,” and it’s a command in the imperative. He knew it best from gypsy love songs. “Gari, gari… burn, burn my love.” His colleagues began to call him Romain, then just Gary, which they often took for his first name. Gary Cooper was a popular figure in wartime France. After the war, Gary became French secretary to the United Nations, then General Consul in Los Angeles. He was well-polished and a good public speaker. Pictures from the period show him hand-feeding elephants or looking thoughtfully through a mansion window. One has him signing books, dressed in a navy military uniform. It was in Los Angeles that he met Seberg. She had just finished filming Breathless under the direction of Jean Godard. He had just turned forty-five and was getting bored with his marriage to Lesley Branch. At his wife’s suggestion, he began to date the actress as a means of distraction. But Seberg soon became pregnant, and Gary left one woman for the other. They were a public item—the pair dined with the Kennedys and with General Charles de Gaulle. She entertained as the beautiful actress, while he, acting the part of the expatriate intellectual, always showcased his refinement. A reporter eating dinner with the couple described Gary as the Pygmalion to Miss Seberg’s Galatea. “‘You should see what I gave her to read,’ Gary began. “‘Pushkin, Dostoevski, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert...’” “‘Madame Bovary!’” Jean sang out. “‘That could have been me if I had stayed in Marshalltown one day longer.’” Gary may have seemed a little eccentric. But still he was a talented diplomat: he could make any young American see her life reflected in the French canon.
Gary was slowly infiltrating this canon. His novels, published under the official name, met with instant success. A European Education was acclaimed by its 1945 audience; Jean-Paul Sartre speculated that it might be the first great novel about the Second World War. By 1956, Gary had achieved France’s highest literary honor. His novel, The Roots of Heaven, won the Prix Goncourt, an award given annually to the best novel written in French. As Gary rose in fame, his marriage began to wear. A rumor surfaced that Seberg had slept with a member of the Black Panther group and was now carrying his child. The actress became depressed; she was found on a tropical beach half-dead after an attempted suicide. By the time Seberg gave birth to Gary’s child, the two had already agreed to separate. A few months earlier, Gary had discovered Seberg was having an affair with Clint Eastwood and asked for a divorce. It’s said that he first challenged the actor to a duel. Emile Ajar was a ruse. Romain Gary had been “classified, catalogued, taken for granted” by the critics, which, to the author, precluded them from taking his work seriously. Emile Ajar, however, was relevant and fresh. He was a Franco-Algerian medical student living in Brazil in order to avoid charges of terrorism. And Ajar’s first novel seemed to offer the novelty it promised. Loosely translated as Cuddles in English, Gros-Calin tells the story of a statistician who falls in love with his pet python. It is a touching, humorous book, and only a few critics discerned that certain lines echoed Gary novels. Ajar’s next was even better, said the critics. Madame Rosa (Life Before Us) seemed to seamlessly bring together all of France’s post-war worries. The earnest account of an Arab boy living with his Jewish foster mother, an obese Holocaust survivor, touched on guilt, immigration, and French identity. To the discerning reader, The Life Before Us might have seemed a rewrite of Gary’s Promise at Dawn, with the attention now shifted to another boy-mother pair. To France’s literary elite, it was worthy of its own Goncourt. Ajar’s own ambiguous identity made the prize all the more The Harvard Advocate
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important. The name was neither definitely Jewish nor definitely Arab, which, to critics, tinged the political narrative with an uncertainty. By uncovering the author’s true identity, France might earn insight into the book’s meaning. Emile Ajar was carefully planned. Gary would send manuscripts to his son Diego, who, like the supposed Emile Ajar, was living in Brazil. Diego would then send them to the publishers in Paris. Only Seberg, Diego, and a couple of close friends could claim to know Ajar. But the Goncourt prize made the scheme difficult to hold up. The recipient of France’s highest literary honor can’t just hide out across the Atlantic—the secret had to be divulged. Before the ceremony, a revelation was released to the press: Paul Pawlovitch, Romain Gary’s distant cousin, had written the books. As a decoy for the writer, Pawlovitch accepted the prize and moved into Gary’s apartment building, where he and Gary continued forging papers and preparing speeches for Emile Ajar. They were successful—even when Gary revealed himself to be Ajar in his suicide note, several critics refused to believe it. After all, they had made a place for Ajar in their own pantheon. “Ajar marks the revolt against the literature of our daddies; Ajar is the anti-cliché combatant,” wrote one critic. In France, The Life Before Us is the highest selling novel of the twentieth century. When the ten members of the Academy Goncourt come together to discuss books, they’re self-consciously making history. On the second Monday of each month, some of France’s foremost writers and critics meet in a private room on the second floor of an elegant restaurant. There, they talk about the state of French writing and survey the country’s talent. The search for the best novel of the year pauses in August, when the group splits for vacation. Academy rules are strict—one book a year, and the award can be given to any author only one time. It’s been that way since 1902, when Jules and Edmond Goncourt founded a prize to celebrate French prose.
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The room has hardly changed. I ate there once, on my grandmother’s eightieth birthday. The “Salon Goncourt” is shaped like an egg and lined with pictures of momentous gatherings. When you close the large wooden doors, you can’t hear a noise above the clinking of silverware on porcelain plates. This was the institution against which Gary was writing. It was insular and back-scratching and he hated it. “Outside Paris there is no trace of that pathetic little will to power,” he wrote. So as he conformed to French standards, he was also chipping away at them. He had integrated himself into the country’s cultural monolith only to gnaw at it. Romain Gary spent much of his existence inventing secrets, but at the end of his life he was very clear. As he prepared to kill himself in 1980, he wrote in an essay: “And the gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar… I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.”
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Colleen O’Brien Lead Around Video: 14 minutes
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Slouching Towards Hollywood Molly Fitzpatrick
It is a rare rainy day in Los Angeles. At his request, I meet Allen Smithee at a bistro of the generic sort Hollywood directors like to frequent. He orders a salad. Allen—some spell it Alan; he doesn’t mind—lives in Malibu, or Santa Monica, or maybe even Brentwood. The films of Allen Smithee are—I use the word advisedly—awful, but he is nevertheless prolific. Smithee isn’t the kind of director you’d invite back to your trailer for a friendly cup of coffee, nor the kind you’d expect to see blubbering graciously on the Oscar dais. He is certainly not the kind typically featured in celebrity profiles such as this one. The first film credited to Smithee was Death of a Gunfighter, a Western released in 1969. When I ask him about it, he performs a quick calculation in his head. “I guess I’m getting old.” The direction of Smithee’s debut was praised by both Variety and Roger Ebert, who prefaced his comment thusly: “Director Allen Smithee, a name I’m not familiar with…” Since then, his directorial oeuvre has spanned comedy, horror, and drama, on both film and television. There is nothing he can’t do, and nothing he can do well. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he says. 8
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A waitress comes to our table with a fresh bottle of Pellegrino. He flirts with her, not too aggressively, as she fills his glass. “You really haven’t heard of me?” he asks. She hasn’t, but Smithee can’t really blame her. He, after all, does not exist. Sanctioned by the Directors Guild of America, “Allen Smithee” was a pseudonym that a director could petition to use if he felt—and could conclusively prove—that his creative control over a film had been irrevocably compromised. “I was perfect. ‘Smith,’ too obvious. ‘Smithee?’ Sort of chic.” He offers a glowing smile and spears a leaf of radicchio. Although pieces on Smithee have surfaced in The Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly, he has not broached the mainstream consciousness. But in lesser cultural estuaries, Smithee’s work has spawned not only an annual awards ceremony—The Smithees, which celebrate the worst films on video—but also a fledging field of academic scholarship. In 2001, the Allen Smithee Group of the University of Pennsylvania published the critical anthology Directed by Allen Smithee. For many such theorists, the name “Allen Smithee” invites a brisk stroll through the
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historical authorship dialectic. The New Critics, perhaps exhausted by the tedium of extra-textual research, claimed the author’s intent had no place in literary criticism. To liberate the text, Roland Barthes killed the author. Michel Foucault summarily filled the void with his nebulous “author-function.” I look up from my notes. Smithee is blowing bubbles in his Diet Coke. “Barthes is dead, Foucault is dead,” he says, “I’m alive.” He pauses. “Foucault is dead, right?” He has a point. A century of scholars have implored us to sacrifice the author to preserve the sanctity of the text—laboring under the assumption that the text possesses a certain measure of sanctity to begin with. Smithee’s films are no more than the labors of a golem, onto whom Hollywood has projected its capitalist sins. *** Smithee takes me to see his house—in Beverly Hills, it turns out. The seven-bedroom mansion he shares with his third wife has a screening room in the basement. It is there that we watch several of his films together. Smithee’s characteristic style is, necessarily, a complete lack thereof. Plot, character, and setting strain against the bonds of logic, defying all structural intuition and narrative principles. The result is often unwatchable. Yet, impervious to the desperate remediations of director, editor, and screenwriter alike, it is as though the film has achieved sentience. This is the genius of Allen Smithee. The Shrimp on the Barbie, released in 1990, is one of the longest eighty-six-minute films ever made. It was a vehicle for Cheech in the absence of Chong. Cheech Marin plays Carlos, who leaves Los Angeles for Australia and becomes romantically entangled with an uptight, inexplicably British-accented heiress. “Emma Samms, real sweet gal, was looking for work after Dynasty. She couldn’t get the Aussie accent down, but when I heard she used to do ballet, I was sold.” “Why?” “Flexibility. It’s key to acting; Robert Evans told me that.” Within three minutes of the film’s opening, Carlos will be kicked ten feet into the air by a
semi-domesticated kangaroo. Within ten, he will perform as Elvo, a Pakistani Elvis impersonator. Later, he will commandeer the microphone at a genteel garden party and, for reasons that are not entirely clear, offer a shrieking rendition of “Land of a Thousand Dances.” Smithee nods emphatically. “That’s the thing, sweetheart, it’s a picture about cultural exchange. Cheech loves the song. I love the song. I’ll be damned if Australians don’t love that song, too.” 1990 was a banner year for Smithee—it also saw the premiere of Solar Crisis, which featured both Charlton Heston and Peter Boyle. Within the first thirty seconds of the film, in a Star Wars-esque cascade of introductory text, a typographical error appears on-screen. In the interest of journalistic integrity, I should admit that, to avoid watching more, I get Smithee on a tangent about the relative merits of kundalini and bikram yoga. But one of Smithee’s movies stands alone, the one he calls his favorite—1998’s An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. It is his Citizen Kane. In this bewildering, big-budget picture, Eric Idle stars as a beleaguered first-time director The Harvard Advocate
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who cannot abide his own bewildering, bigbudget picture. The official DGA pseudonym is of no use to him, for his name is Alan Smithee. “Clever, right? I know.” Burn Hollywood Burn boasts an improbably famous cast, including Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Chan. I remembered seeing a poster of Stallone hanging in Smithee’s foyer. “Was that from the film?” I ask. “Oh, no. I found one from Rambo, sliced off the title with an X-Acto knife. Sly is Sly.” The catastrophe that met the film during its production is almost too ironic not to have been a post-structuralist publicity stunt—but, regrettably, the emphasis falls on the “almost.” Director Arthur Hiller (who served as president of the Directors Guild in the early nineties) elected to replace his own name with Alan Smithee’s when the studio chose as its final cut a version of the film edited by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. In a bold flourish, the movie’s title was henceforth prefaced with “An Alan Smithee Film.” Art imitates life, but life imitates bad art. Burn Hollywood Burn cost $10 million to make, but grossed less than $50,000. Accounting for inflation, its box office
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performance was inferior to that of even Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), widely considered to be the worst movie of all time. I asks Smithee if he has any regrets about this, his magnum opus. “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” he offers sagely. “Especially when each of the cooks has his own agent.” *** Allen wants yogurt, yogurt from Pinkberry. Not from the Pinkberry on Santa Monica Boulevard, three minutes from his home, but from the Pinkberry in Venice. “Trust me, it’s—it’s better. Not as tart. Because it’s closer to the ocean.” We drive there in his car, a high-end electric model, accelerating through a yellow light on Pico. In “Artificial Auteurism and the Political Economy of the Allen Smithee Case,” an essay featured in Directed by Allen Smithee, Craig Saper aptly described Hollywood’s as a “conveyor-belt approach to filmmaking.” In Los Angeles, there is no backspace key, no eraser, no $100-million wastebasket into which ill-fated films—once in production—can be tossed. Prior to the release of 1990’s Catchfire, both actor Joe Pesci and director Dennis Hopper demanded their credits be removed from the film. The DGA left Pesci unattributed— but subbed in Allen Smithee’s name for the disgruntled Hopper’s. For the studio, it was more vital to preserve the illusion of a cooperative director than to acknowledge the presence of an actor plainly visible on the screen. We park in a disabled space; Allen has a rearview mirror tag left over from his ex-wife’s knee surgery. He kills the ignition and reflects on what I’ve said. “Yeah. Auteurs, and all the French shit.” In a way, he is right. The negative consequences of the wide embrace of auteur theory were perhaps best foreseen by Pauline Kael in “Circles and Squares,” her bristling response to Andrew Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” The vitriol drips off the page: “[The auteur critics’] ideal auteur is the man who signs a long-term contract, directs any script that’s handed to him, and expresses himself by shoving bits of style up the crevasses of the plots.” I read Kael’s quote aloud and Smithee giggles with delight. “That’s me!”
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“What do you mean?” “No one wants to see a marquee full of mangy orphans. That’s sad, that’s goddamn Dickensian. I don’t mind what a movie is, what it looks like, whether it’s any good. I’ll take them all in. As long as they sell.” Smithee isn’t asked to do Hollywood’s dirty work, but to take responsibility for the dirty work which has already been done. The rain’s stopped, so we walk north along the beach with our yogurt. Alan tells me about his birth. Director Robert Totten quit Death of a Gunfighter over discord with leading man Richard Widmark, who replaced Totten with Don Siegel. By the film’s completion, neither Siegel nor Totten would deign to take credit for it. The DGA settled the dispute with the introduction of Smithee. *** Now, more than forty years later, Smithee’s golden years in Hollywood have ended. From the pseudonym’s first implementation, directors who made use of it were technically forbidden from speaking publicly of their involvement in the film, but adherence to this ban quickly eroded. Prompted in particular by Burn Hollywood Burn and by director Tony Kaye’s highly publicized (and ultimately unsuccessful) struggle to extricate himself from authorship of American History X, the DGA discontinued the Smithee pseudonym in 2000. Smithee’s name still appears occasionally outside of the official jurisdiction of the DGA and has popped up at least once as a meta-gag in a Simpsons episode. The current Guild policy is to generate a unique pseudonym for each contested film—a process that seems all the more insidious for its ambiguity.
Now, Allen Smithee lurks within every director; every director is somewhere inside Allen Smithee. But it’s much more than that—Smithee is every hack screenwriter who tailors a script to maximize its opening weekend, every big-name actor who takes a well-paid role in an abysmal film, every agent. If Hollywood needs Smithee to conceal the ugly, commercial nature of filmmaking on a mass scale, we need him just as much. The fantasy of the creatively engaged director preserves our collective deception as to the quality of mainstream movies; he is smoke and mirrors personified. With Allen as director, the illusion intrinsic to movie-going extends to a second dimension—we move beyond the suspension of disbelief in what we see projected on the screen to the far more naive expectation that what we see was created in good faith. The optimists among us insist that there is room for art within the bowels of the financial Leviathan of the American film industry. But when, through the person of Allen Smithee, even its offal is repackaged for our unwitting consumption, it is difficult to be hopeful. As Hollywood lurches toward the great hulking inevitable, Smithee—if not the name itself, then what it stands for—will remain a horseman of its apocalypse, the incarnation of a creative crisis intrinsic to the medium. He is its diabolus ex machina. We reach the Santa Monica Pier in time to watch the sun set behind the Ferris wheel. “What will you do next?” I ask him. He chuckles, and shovels a raspberry into his mouth with his miniature spoon. “I’ll be around for a while,” he says. I believe him.
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rebecca lieberman Whitetail deer, a to Z; 2009-2010 two-channel video installation on monitors Approx. 1 hour running time, looped Above: installation of Whitetail deer, a to Z (bizarre Animals at the harvard museum of Natural history, march 26, 2010) opposite: Stills from Whitetail deer, a to Z (Part one)
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Bear Mary Catherine Curley
Two days before she left, my mother pinned a newspaper clipping to the corkboard in our kitchen. January and February 2002: “Seafarers and satellites notice something amiss in the Gulf of Mexico. The seas north and west of the Florida Keys have grown dark, with nearly 700 square miles of water (two-thirds the size of Rhode Island) taking on the color of black ink. Tests show this ‘black water’ has normal salinity and oxygen levels, but researchers suspect an unusual, non-toxic algal bloom. There are none of the usual signs of a HAB, but fishermen note that the black water seems to be devoid of fish.” Our corkboard was covered in articles like these: in October, a swarm of three dozen blackbirds flocked in panicked patterns above the trees in Philadelphia for over two hours. Three teenagers cutting class to smoke cigarettes captured it on video on their cell phones. Two years ago, seven dead dolphins had washed up on Revere Beach in Boston. Their bodies formed a delicate straight line across the sand. Recent tests at Lake Karachay in Russia, former storage site of nuclear waste, revealed that a human being standing for thirty minutes at the shore would receive a dose of radiation that could kill them. There had been a time when I asked her about the articles. “What do they mean, Mom?” I might have asked when I was fourteen, fifteen. Elizabeth would shiver, as though she were equipped with an eerily fine-tuned plague-sensor, a direct line to Moses. There were days when this direct line was so distracting she could barely focus on things like turning the stove off when she left the house, or picking me up from school. I would find her sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair with her boots up on the railing, her hair hiding her face. “Mom?” I’d ask, poking her shoulder. “Mmm? Hey, baby girl. Hey.” Some days she’d pull me close to her, especially when I was younger, still young enough to sit on the couch with her and act out Bible stories, young enough to laugh when she put on a red bathrobe and pretended to be Mary Magdalene. Alice was crazy and funny in those years, playing the part of the angry Pharisee or, more often, demanding to be Jesus. We 16
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could do this late into the night, so that we’d stop to brush our teeth and Elizabeth would return with her big hair out, and we sang “Stop (in the Name of Love)” as the Apostles. In my mother’s absence, I had continued adding to the corkboard, pinning a note up each time I sighted the bear. Last night she’d come over the top of the hill like a dream. In the twilight she looked smaller than she actually was, and colored a black so deep she was blue, moving so smooth she was water. The time before that, she’d been snuffling in the compost, a couple hundred yards down the road. She’d buried her nose deep in the slimy noodles and swiped melon rinds with her dinner-plate paws. Then she was a color just darker than the trees when they were wet. She turned and rolled past the crest of the hill with her hair matted back in the wind, too far away to make a sound. Since I’d first noticed the bear in our front yard a week ago, I’d dreamt almost every night of being carried off by her, waking up with my hot cheek pressed against her fur. According to the Encyclopedia of Wildlife in the Halifax Free Library, she could weigh up to five hundred pounds, run thirty miles per hour, and swim rivers. She was incredible. The first time I’d seen her, Mom and I had been driving up the hill back to our house, when her shape appeared at the edge of the field, between the trees and all the wet green leaves. “Look!” I whispered and jerked the stick shift down into park. “What?” Mom yelped, then pressed her forehead against the foggy window. “Is that—” For a minute I couldn’t imagine what she was. I couldn’t see her snout, just her enormous shoulders moving up and down like a seesaw. We’d see rabbits all the time flashing across the field, and every once in a while deer flipping their white tails up and disappearing into the woods, but never a bear. In those first moments seeing her I imagined she was something from out of time and space, something so huge and powerful she appeared only as a furry mountain of muscle. When my brain put a name to her I whispered it—“Bear!”—and said it over and over in my head. Bear. Bear. Bear. I switched off the heater. It was silent inside the car. Elizabeth pressed her nose to the glass and made two little mushroom clouds of steam against the window. “Wow,” she whispered. My mother is beautiful when she is awestruck. *** Three days ago, my mother Elizabeth packed a little plastic green suitcase and said she and her boss Mr. Jackson would be at a conference for the weekend. She had packed a couple of her nicer skirts and old thinning T-shirts to sleep in. The next day the answering machine blinked red with a call from Mr. Jackson. I didn’t listen to it, since I already knew what he would be asking. I went to work as usual, refilled all the coffee cups in the diner and washed the cheeseburger cheese off the thick ceramic plates, came home to an empty house, cooked pork-n-beans, called my little sister Alice, and went to sleep. Each night before I fell asleep I traced the moon out my window with a finger, then rolled onto my side and looked toward the crest of the hill, which looked like the dark heavy side of a dinosaur, the grass like tufts of belly hair. On the second day I called my sister Alice about it, who lives in New York City, where she is an “actress.” “She’s gone,” I said. Alice made the sound of a careening airplane with her lips. “Mama was a rolling stone,” she said. She can get really obnoxious. I sighed and for a minute or two we listened to the hiss on the line. I took the time to count the cans of beets on the pantry shelf. “Is it lonely there?” she asked. “Mmm,” I said. “I’m good. Eatin’ beets.” “You don’t even like beets,” she said. I balanced en plie, high on both toes, and counted the cans of beans. Twenty two. “Well, there are a couple other things, too. Like potatoes.” “I’ll mail you a check.” I nodded and hummed, gazing around the pantry. Alice has zero money. I wanted to tell her what it was like out here alone in the house, at this time of the year in Halifax when the roads go The Harvard Advocate
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yan yan mao osage sculpture 4 layout (1 of 7) Digital print on enhanced matte photo paper 12� x 11�
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shin-deep with river water, and our field looks wet and gold like the belly of a fish. “I gotta go,” I said. “Call me when she gets back.” Talking to Alice or a couple of the nuns you might think that my mother is drunk all the time, which is not true. That isn’t what an alcoholic is anyway. What she is, is forgetful. Things just slip her mind. Some days it’s like she never woke up; she turns to me in the kitchen and has turned blind, like an old dog. Like this last year. Quite simply, Mom shut down. She disappeared. When we woke up so early the birds weren’t singing yet, her bedroom was already empty. As we finished breakfast she wandered in the backdoor, and when we asked her where she’d been she smiled in a watery way, like she was having trouble maintaining her balance. It was as though she stopped hearing us. It was too much for Alice. She was gone. I rifled through my mother’s drawers. She had left almost everything, even her lucky necklaces, though her wallet was missing and her boots, of course. I fluffed her pillows, beat them flat and fluffed them again. I considered the cans in our basement fallout shelter, examined the map on the wall distributed by Yankee Nuclear Power Plant to every town resident on the first of the year: five concentric circles spreading out from the plant like pond ripples, from deep forest green to safezone lime. For the first time I noticed that Mom had fixed a little clownfish sticker to where our house was, and now its fin was peeling off, paddling its way through dark green waters. I scrubbed the counters hard and made up prayers as I have been taught to do. Our Father, who art in heaven. My mother Elizabeth Horowitz is in utmost need of your assistance. Please relay to her the information that she is being an idiot and should return to her daughter. Her daughter and her home, her house, etc. Her daughter will get a dog and they will laugh at the jokes on popsicle sticks and swim in the ocean and all will be well and all will be healed. Amen. “It’s funny,” said my mother from a kitchen chair once, with her boots up on the table. “When you get mad, you clean.” She had been trying to make a point. My mother always wears these heavy Frye boots that clomp and smack against the wood of the porch every time she comes home. She was the only mother at St. Mary’s who picked up her daughters in cowboy boots, waving her big hands at us. She was the only mother who spilled things on her shirtfront and still wore the shirt. She was the only mother who was missing teeth, who swore in front of her boss, whose eyes went flat for days at a time and who went wandering in the woods. *** For a few years my mother was involved with protesters against the nuclear power plant, who believed that of all the various signs that could denote the end of life as we knew it, a mushroomhumped plant so old it had a visible crack down the middle of its reactor was definitely in the lead. They were fond of talking about the pile of radioactive waste the plant had produced, which they said was “five stories high.” This made me imagine an apartment complex of neon-green waste, with a door and windows. A couple times, right after I got my license, Alice and I would drive slowly by the plant limits, which ended a good half-mile out from the facility and were lined with chain-link, barbed-wire fencing. When we slowed down to 3 mph and Alice leaned across my lap to look closer, we still couldn’t see any neon-green pile of goop. “Maybe it’s underground,” I whispered the third time we’d come by. “Maybe it’s right under our noses!” Alice shrieked in a rush of eleven-year-old adrenaline. I reached over to pinch her side so she screamed and didn’t talk to me for a mile and a half. Elizabeth’s protest career involved what they called “die-ins,” in which several dozen people would gather outside the chain-link fence, and then when the test sirens went off, pretend to die. The Harvard Advocate
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When Elizabeth first introduced this idea to us, Alice asked, “Do you pretend to die, like gag and stumble? Or do you just lie down?” Elizabeth frowned. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it.” I staggered towards her. “Help,” I croaked. “The…raaaa…dee…ay shunnn.” “I’m melting!” screeched Alice, always the diva, sinking to the ground with her arms flung helplessly over her head. Elizabeth laughed, the kind of full-on adult laugh you’d kill as a kid to hear out of your parents. A few days later we came home to her hurling junk out of our basement window. Elizabeth is a strong, hard-biceped woman who can throw one full paint can in each hand, and they were coming out fast. When we came halfway down the stairs we saw that she had covered a wall with makeshift plank-and-brick shelving, and lined them with cans of beans and beets. Over the next couple weeks it became a full-fledged fallout shelter, guided by her activist friends until it was haphazard but loaded, complete with a Mason jar full of potassium tablets, ten cans of Fluff, silver emergency blankets, and an old Moxie box of steak knives and two baseball bats. In the corner, next to a foot-high stack of batteries, the Yankee Nuclear Emergency Radio reported the weather in a monotonous male voice. Worst of all were the disposable toilets that Elizabeth got from a mail-order catalog, which looked like nothing more than plastic bags you could hang over a seatless folding chair. After a little bit Elizabeth let us play down there, and for a couple days Alice and I had fun sitting under the stairs pretending the apocalypse had come. We were well-versed in the assured drama of the Second Coming, which Alice argued would look something like the “Thriller” video, while I believed it would begin with animals beginning to speak á la Doctor Doolittle. We debated the order in which we’d eat the food. “Fluff first,” said Alice, “to counteract the radiation.” “Fluff last,” I said. “It will never go bad.” “Neither will beans,” said Alice, and sensing my dissent, switched the subject. “How long do you have to stay in a fallout shelter?” At the time I’d told her a couple weeks, tops. Our house is so deep in the wet woods that we use candles during storms. When it snows, we three dig ourselves out swift as wolves, using only shovels. When the power goes out and the roads pile up we are untouchable. I thought, no one could find us. Nothing could reach us. That was before we learned about half-lives in an algebra word problem, when I realized that to avoid being flooded by radiation, one could come back out in ten thousand years, and when we did, we’d be living on the shore of Lake Karachay. *** I set up my guard on the porch. I’d been hoping tonight the bear would get close enough for me to see her claws, which I imagined might look something like the most fearful fingernails in the world. A couple days ago she’d come closer to the house, where our patchy flower garden was. She didn’t even seem to notice the house, her head rumbling along close to the ground, nose trailing something I couldn’t see and couldn’t hear through the double-paned glass. After she lumbered away over the hill I swung open the screen door and listened, trying to hear the sounds that had been filling her ears, wondering if it was the whippoorwill that drove her away, or the sound of the creek bubbling up with rainwater. I leaned back in the rocking chair. I had everything I needed: cordless phone ready on the railing, jar of Fluff and a spoon, a wide-bottom pan and a spatula. There was absolute silence over the field. From where I sat the scoop of the Big Dipper arched over the porch roof and the moon hung way out over the mountains, just a fingernail sliver. 20
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An owl hooted. I imagined all the places Elizabeth could have run away to. There was an abandoned, mildew-chomped house halfway between here and Lake Champlain that we’d once pulled the car over near. Elizabeth had flung her winter coat over the glass on the first-floor windowsill and crawled through. I stood outside and listened to her pull the furniture across the floor to make a path. “Reesie!” she called. “Baby, this is wild.” And there was the Stone Head beach, where she’d taken me before Alice was born, where she had dropped me. She had dropped me and I had washed out to sea, below the waves so that I could look up and watch them roaring over me in silence. Elizabeth had not let the lifeguard touch me. She fished me out with one arm, an arm that wrapped me up tight and sudden. You are saved, she whispered to me later, as I fell asleep in the car. We are saved. I pulled the afghan closer around my shoulders. It was now almost entirely dark. At eight-thirty, her usual time, Alice called. She had gotten a bit part in a Costco commercial. “I’m supposed to swipe this roll of toilet paper at the check-out, see the price, and go, ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!’” she said, way too loud. I clicked her into speakerphone and balanced the phone on the railing. In the rising wind, the air felt wet and charged, slick petals from the flower garden sticking to the porch rails, flapping in a growing wind. “Is that too Meg Ryan?” she asked. “Listen to this one: I can’t bee-LIEVE it!” “Way too Meg Ryan.” “Is Mom there?” I slipped my boots off and flattened my bare feet against the wet boards. It wasn’t too cold. I rocked back onto my heels and then onto my toes. “No, Al.” “Oh.” I opened my mouth but looked out into the field instead. Rain was starting softly now, as though a hand were guiding it all the way to the ground. I knew by tonight it would be punching our roof with its fists, conjuring up thunder that sounded like a whole fleet of planes breaking the sound barrier. At the edge of the woods, something moved.
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misha goldfeder tall (stack) Paper Pulp 157” x 9” No emotion is the final one wood, dowels 101 1/2” x 3 3/8” x 4”
Peak Paper Pulp 44” x 14 1/2” x 22 1/2” Brush Burn drill Push to imperfection Pegboard, Dowels 21” x 24” x 24”
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xinran yuan Port, 3. 2010 Poplar wood, bleached pine, glass, acrylic paint, walnut dowels 14” x 33” x 11” (clockwise from bottom right) Port, 4. 2010 Poplar wood, glass, walnut dowels, 11 1/2” x 25” x 14 1/2” 4, and Port, 6. 2010 Poplar wood, glass, acryclic paint, Poplar dowels 10” x 120” x 7 1/2”
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Catching Proteus Mark Chiusano
John Wallis sits at his desk in Oxford, England, surrounded by books and mathematical instruments. It is 1655. At the top of a piece of paper he writes the words “Proposition 190” again, hovers over the area underneath, and stops. Out of habit, he crosses the words out. At this point he stands up and sighs, looks out the window, and thinks about his simple, code-breaking youth, before Parliament “honored” him with this Professorship and Chair of Geometry—it really is a terribly drafty workspace. He wonders if these three years of blank pages could have been spent any differently. At this point, Wallis considers the fact that he has done enough work for the day. He mulls over the idea of walking a few buildings away to talk with his good friend Seth Ward, the Professor of Astronomy, about stars or the rings of Saturn. Nice, healthy, real world stuff. Once again he writes “Proposition 190,” at the top of his sheet of paper. Then he tosses the thing aside to go have a visit across the lawn. Wallis is writing a book called The Arithmetic of Infinitesimals. Years later, his modern translator will comment that it was “perhaps the one 24
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real stroke of genius in Wallis’ long mathematical career,” though she also called it an “often tedious approach through scores of uninspiring Propositions and Corollaries.” When it is done, it will do things like annoy the printer, who will be forced to spend three years fitting Wallis’ odd symbols and drawings into the unwieldy press. It will give Thomas Hobbes, philosopher, fits of cranky rage. It will bridge the gap between geometry and algebra. It will convince a 22-year-old Isaac Newton, after he finishes reading, to invent his calculus. Mostly, it will provide a formula for a funny number called pi, discovering an estimate that is better and cleaner than anything that has come before. After it is done, mathematician Doctor William Oughtred will proclaim Wallis’ “understanding and genius, who have not only gone, but also opened a way into those profoundest mysteries of art, unknown and not thought of by the ancients.” Right now, however, Wallis is stuck at an uninspired part. In the Comment attached to the end of Proposition 189, he writes, “But here, at last, I am at a loss for words.” He whines at the cruel mathematical fates: “Until now we seem to have
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carried the thing through happily enough.” He is entirely lost, “For I do not see in what manner I may produce the quantity .” This value represented by this little square, whose discovery represents the climax of the book, is really pi (If we take 4 and then divide it by , we get π). Pi is a number that appears in every circle: it is the ratio between the circumference and the diameter. In decimal form, it is a number that never ends and never repeats, following no discernible pattern. It is interesting and important because it shows up in all branches of mathematics, from probability to real analysis. The problem is that it’s impossible to define with an exact decimal value, because such a decimal would never end. Indeed, the history of mathematics can in some ways be defined by this side-pursuit, this Holy Grail quest for a good formula for pi. Wallis was one of the first to find one, and his formula laid the groundwork for those that came later. At Proposition 190, Wallis is still groping for the formula. He doesn’t know all the details yet, though he suspects that he’s approaching something magnificent. Indeed, he calls this elusive a “slippery Proteus whom we have in hand, both here and above, frequently escaping and disappointing hope.” At times like this the Arithmetica sounds more like a personal journal than a textbook, which is the way Wallis likes to write about math, letting his exuberance for the material pour out unobstructed. When he includes, in the autobiography he wrote near the end of his life, the requisite information about wife and children, he does so only dutifully: “On March 4. 1644/5. I married Susanna daughter of John and Rachel Glyde of Northjam in Sussex; born there about the end of January 1621/2 and baptized Feb. 3 following. By whom I have (beside other children who died young) a Son and two Daughters now surviving.” But when he talks about his first exposure to mathematics his tone changes completely. “One evening as we were sitting down to supper,” he writes, “a Chaplain of Sir William Waller shewed me an intercepted Letter written in Cipher.” It was a curious little puzzle, and it suited Wallis’ interests from the start. “It was about ten a clock when we rose from Supper,” he writes. “I then
withdrew to my chamber to consider of it . . . In about 2 hours time (before I went to bed) I had deciphered it.” It was the first time he put mathematics to use. Educated at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, he had studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Theology, and Logic before undergoing the Holy Orders. As an afterthought, he taught himself rudimentary mathematics from his younger brother’s trade books over the Christmas holiday. With that basic knowledge, Wallis would develop some limited renown for his skill in decoding, working for whatever political group was in power at the moment, by using arithmetic and the laws of numbers to translate letters of utmost state importance. In 1649 his success led him to a professorship at Oxford, where “Mathematicks, which had before been a pleasing Diversion, was now to be my serious Study.” In 1652 he penned the first words of the Arithmetica, subtitling it, “a New Method of Inquiring into the Quadrature of Curves, and other more difficult mathematical problems.” What Wallis was doing was moving from geometry to algebra. He was convinced that there was a better way to solve the great mathematical problems than with the circles and conics and outlandish shapes of the Greeks. He wanted to play with numbers. His realm was a pure Platonic one of symbols, ideas. Instead of defining the The Harvard Advocate
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area of a triangle geometrically he wanted to do it with a series of numbers, added neatly together. That’s how he began, with Proposition 1. Then, in Proposition 3, he ran headlong into the ill-humored Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes considered himself a terrific mathematician. In a description of his accomplishments written late in life, he wrote, in the third-person, “In mathematics, he solved some most difficult problems, which had been sought in vain by the diligent scrutiny of the greatest geometers since the very beginning of geometry.” In truth he was fairly inept—ridiculed on all sides in the mathematical world—and didn’t quite understand the nuances of more intricate mathematical concepts. In mathematical philosophy, however, he was annoyingly sharp. It was over such a matter that the Wallis-Hobbes dispute broke out: when, in Proposition 3, Wallis writes, “For the triangle consists, as it were, of an infinite number of parallel lines in arithmetic proportion.” Hobbes had
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a problem with “as it were.” “’As it were’ is no phrase of a geometrician,” Hobbes scolds. The vague wording, complained Hobbes, belied a greater ill. In simple terms, how could width-less lines, even an infinite number of them, make up a finite shape? Philosophical differences on this small matter of infinity led to an increasingly hostile exchange of letters, whose cheeky titles ranged from, “Due Correction for Mr. Hobbes; or Schoole Discipline, for not saying his Lessons right,” to “Markes of the Absurd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church-Politicks, And Barbarismes of John Wallis Professor of Geometry and Doctor of Divinity.” Though the essential mathematics of Hobbes’ challenges were entirely wrong, his qualms about Wallis’s conception of infinity still ring true. An example: if you stand one foot away from a redbrick wall, you are a foot away from it. If you go half the distance to the wall, you are half a foot away. Go half the distance again and you’re even closer. But do this forever and you’ll never hit the wall. That’s infinity. Hobbes refused to wrap his head around the wall. “Whatsoever we imagine,” he wrote in Leviathan, “is Finite. Therefore there is no Idea, or conception of anything we call Infinite. No man can have in his mind an Image of infinite magnitude.” Wallis, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to stick an infinite number of lines in a space two inches wide, to have numbers march on in sequence forever. He just doesn’t worry too much about “out there,” where the numbers get really big. He has a gut feeling that it’s not really necessary to be so exact, and ultimately he’s right: this is where we leave Hobbes, who can’t get over his stubborn adherence to principle. Wallis’s willingness to fudge things, to keep working forward even if he’s not entirely sure what he’s doing, gets him through nearly 200 propositions, concerning a wild range of information on sequences and arithmetical-geometric connections. But now he has hit a dead end, because, around Proposition 167, he’s found this number, , that keeps popping up in his wonderfully neat and interesting sequences. He doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s a number that defies expectation.
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Imagine trying to think of something that doesn’t exist. Not something vaporous or philosophical, or extraterrestrial in its weirdness, but something that can’t be defined by our rules or systems. This is the difficulty with a number like pi: it cannot be described. It’s not a regular number, not an integer, like the amount of rolls you can buy at a bakery. You can’t get it by dividing two such numbers: it’s more irrational than that. You can’t even describe it with square roots or any such exponential notation, which was the extent of numerical inquiry at the time, after centuries of work. It is a strange number: natural, appearing everywhere, but indescribable, transcendental. (It deserves mentioning here that we’ve skipped over thousands of years of history, from when the Egyptians built the pyramids and the legend that their measurements had pi in them for spiritual purposes. The point being that mathematics has always been tied up with the world around it, a world that Wallis says is full of “Changes and Alterations.” His is a period during which people were murdered for being Catholic and not Protestant. It is a time “when, by our Civil Wars,” Wallis says, “Academical Studies were much interrupted.” This was a little before the time when Wallis proved the existence of the trinity by the three dimensionality of the cube. All these things are swirling around while Wallis sat at his desk, half a lifetime removed from code-breaking and intrigues of state; half-insulated from the real world in this cocoon of a university; momentarily dropping his religious duties so he could grope for this sea prophet, which, when caught, would tell the future of mathematics in its never-ending succession: 3.1415926535897932384626433 . . .) Again, here is Wallis, at his desk, at Proposition
190, stuck. He does the only thing he can do, which is keep going. He writes, “It will perhaps not be unwelcome to have put forward.” And then he goes into it, writing out his sequences, juggling them, massaging the information out. He knows what he is up against: “I am inclined to believe (what from the beginning I suspected) that this ratio we seek is such that it cannot be forced out in numbers according to any method of notation so far accepted.” He says, growing bolder, that “what arithmeticians usually do in their work, must also be done here; that is, where some impossibility is arrived at, which indeed must be assumed to be done, but nevertheless can not actually be done, they consider some method of representing what is assumed to be done, though it may not be done in reality.” This is a wonderful, literary, confusing way of saying that he’s going to use what he knows (infinite sequences of bakery-roll-counting numbers) to describe what he doesn’t know (). It’s an incredible moment when it happens—when he finally gets to “ =” –but somehow the excitement pales here, in words. One wonders if it’s the discovery, the pure math that’s exciting, or the history: the long search for pi, the march towards understanding, the debates over philosophy and the formative influences of politics and religion. Regardless, this is a moment of pure mathematical insight, a beautifully clean solution, and it made a man famous. One imagines that Wallis knows this as he writes down the last numbers. That he has done something, finally, important. Let’s just assume that when he’s done, he shoves some books from his desk, kicks his chair against the wall, and runs across the lawn to tell the Astronomy professor what has happened.
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Night Hunt Cora Currier
Under the night’s maw the boar waits heaving black and bristled breath, night roils down the hillsides in heat spirals collecting in omnivorous dark the hours’ end buffing night sounds and bating the mind’s early stillness. The ironwoods bend and whimper about bristling haunches rooting bristling roots of red clay white tusks between the shoulder blades of dogs behind a man borne down on scent wide across his broad back bulk of night cool on his thick neck Nascent light—here none— but the purpled hour like the dogs’ deep colored tongues still wet tremulous the boar still thrashing in the precipice raw gnarl of the tree vine and red flower the island’s gashes go boiling down its sides ashen-barked volcanic trees the boar barrels through the girls set on him their chorus of yells strains through the dark I wait the girls’ shouts into the terse dawn the dark tree-throats relinquish the yawing clamor at the yellow dawn and light discerns the long ocean’s sweep.
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Atonement Loren Galler Rabinowitz
And this is how we seek atonement. From its plastic chrysalis we unfurled a kite. A ribbon off the transverse axis dragged the industrial sand meant to offset the inward press of oceanic plates. The smallest, the narrow runner, holds the diamond by its belly and begins. The eldest stands anchored, remembering the dressmaker’s grizzled husband who fell off his motorcycle, his beard matted with wax. The eldest wraps the line round her palms and pulls in hard against the wind. We’re up, we’re up. The middle child stands in the surf and searches among the mollusks and wrappers for three unbroken shells she’d string into amulets.
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irina rozovsky From one to Nothing series, 2009 Archival inkjet Prints 24� x 24� The Harvard Advocate
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Bread Molly Dektar
It was the first day of April when I took from a man of about my age (though, I noted, not as hot as my boyfriend at the time) the light burden of his left eye. It was an accident, or at least as much of an accident as it could have been. By that April, all my friends had reached their senior years of college and I was still living at home in Tucker, being what my mother in a bad mood called a “waste of space.” I worked at a grocery store in Atlanta and took (stole, really) upscale breads for my boyfriend. I’d spent the winter realizing in increments how much I needed to get my life moving in some good direction. My life had been wandering for three years, ever since I didn’t get into the college I thought I wanted, Davidson, a college my boyfriend in a bad mood called “pretty enough.” It shouldn’t have been so bad, not getting into the right college, but that angry envelope unleashed gales that whirled my unhinged life into confusion. I mean, it really did—two days after the letter came in the mail some pre-thunderstorm weather devolved into a thrashing windstorm, which threw a rotten tree onto our garage. In response, I retreated into my own body. I began to skip school, to ignore assignments. I fell into an easily-sustainable pattern of squalor. I was never a drinker, and couldn’t stand the taste of my throat scorching with weed, but nonetheless (and how could this be more easily forgivable?) I got almost nothing done. I would come home from school and lie down in my unmade bed and take naps punctuated by naps, and I let myself grow filthy. I would wear a shirt for days until it grew soft and tempered with skin cells. I bathed in my own odor and kept the lights so dim my eyes stung. I lay around pantsless, putting black sharpie dots over every reddened follicle on my thighs. When I did have pants on, I could not keep my hands out of them. I was furious every day, outraged with failure. Sometimes my boyfriend would come over, my river-god, to slip himself like cool gelatin into my nest. At the time he shared my fascination with unscented products: he used unscented soap, unscented lotion, unscented detergent, and I would close my eyes and breathe in his unscent. I went to Georgia Southern for a semester, failed to complete a single assignment—hard drive failure, I’d told every professor every time, angrily like they were to blame—and came back home, 32
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thinking I’d try again the next year. But I liked being close to my boyfriend, who went to Georgia State. I stagnated. I remember one early summer walking down to the creek that ran in the woods of a neighbor’s land. The center of the creek ran slick and green, but the edges, snagged with branches and rocks, were sluggish from the mosquitoes that laid their eggs in the water, clotted white with foamy arterial plaque. The image personally disgusted me. I had to run back to my house. But really things weren’t all that bad, those three years. I was making money; my coworkers couldn’t smell me through the smell of the bread. My boyfriend and I were compatible in a spiritually gratifying way. I helped my mother cook dinner almost every night and I went on walks when I wanted to feel sweaty and purged. So along came this April of my mock-senior year. That morning at my grocery store, Fowler’s, the four women who came every morning to bake the bread unexpectedly made pumpkin-seed cheese bread, which was supposed to be seasonal. I took three loaves and texted my boyfriend, who didn’t respond. He loved seasonal breads mainly because he found the idea satisfyingly non-modern, and he’d always liked pumpkin-seed cheese bread. Pumpkin-seed cheese bread has these cubes of brightorange artisanal cheddar baked into the center. It’s a bread that refines itself. I was driving home, wondering if it would be as good in the moist springtime as in the fall. I was looking at my phone to start calling my boyfriend when my side mirror lightly hit the bicyclist. On the first of April, this is what I became. I became a girl who could clip a bicyclist with the right side mirror of her parent’s car, causing the bicyclist to swerve, hit a rock, flip off his bicycle like a plume of water sideways from a swiveling hose, land on the ground seemingly safe from damage, and then, after skittering forward a foot, plunge his left eye into the point of a broken sign pole by the roadside. He was lucky—how easily, sighed the doctors, the pole could have perforated his head, piercing its metallic trail deep into the lax oxbows of his brain. Lucky! Yet I removed his eye, destroyed it. I could have just as well laid my lips on his soft socket-skin and sucked the eye from his skull, wet globe with fire-red contrail, mine to round out my cheek and keep smooth in my saliva. As it was, I didn’t actually see the accident. I barely felt the bicyclist’s contact with the side mirror. He made less of a jolt than a squirrel. But I looked out the side window as I passed to see if I’d hit anything and I saw him lying on the ground, blood on his face, hideous. I remember my body trying to swallow itself. I pulled over to the shoulder. The pole, stolidly erect, was topped with gore like a gruesome candlestick. The man moved a hand to his forehead, to his eye, screamed. He had long curly hair and work boots with orange laces. I couldn’t stand the orange laces. I called 911, of course, which was not romantic at all. I called my mother. (My father, living his separate life in northern Florida, was left in the dark most of the time.) Along came an ambulance, and my mother, who said “Oh my god, god, god,” when she arrived at the crash, if that’s what it should be called. I told her to cut it out. It was an act easier than pulling on a hat, and more enduring. I pulled his dead eye onto my conscience, immense and bleak and spherule, like an astronaut’s globe helmet. I avoided people beyond the grocery store for a week, as my mother made phone calls. (This wasn’t actually much of a change for either of us.) After a week my boyfriend came over. “It’s all right,” said my boyfriend, stroking his thumb down my back. “He still has the other eye.” “Fuck that,” I said, crying. “He doesn’t have any depth perception.” “Who needs depth perception?” said my boyfriend. “I read that Rembrandt didn’t have depth perception, and it made him better at painting. And think how easy microscopes and telescopes will be for him now.” My boyfriend used to be celestially obsessed, but astronomy had proved too hard in college so he became a psych major. And right now he was missing the point. Why an eye, of all things? It was so wasteful—after the bicyclist had spent his entire life keeping it clean. I could as well have crept to my victim’s bedside each dawn for the rest of his life and, as he slept, applied a pirate patch to his The Harvard Advocate
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left eye. He will never again watch the goofy dissolve of a magic eye puzzle into its quilted window, the vibrating sparkle of glitter, the springing three-dimensionality of a stereoscope. Fuck me, that stupid bicycle, my fucking boyfriend. “Fuck Rembrandt,” I said. “Did you take any bread today?” said my boyfriend. “Let’s put it in the oven.” He started to kiss my neck. We had a mostly physical relationship. We didn’t make bread, of course—that’s what my boyfriend would call “too much”—but sometimes we’d heat a loaf up in the oven and then eat it in bed, in handfuls, hot. My boyfriend liked watching me get butter on my hands. I never knew why he liked me, and I used to think it was because no matter how messy he was, I was messier—how I didn’t use soap or warm water to wash my face, how I wore dirty underpants then no underpants at all, how I kept my room so chaotic that the bed was the only refuge. My boyfriend liked that I was always losing things, forgetting about things, scattering bits of myself (bitten fingernails, clipped hair). It turned him on. Anyway, he was not a “sweetie pie,” nor did he wish to “educate” me. I was the slut long before he was. I wish I could say he was much too good for me, but really it was just that we had very little in common. “Bread,” I said. I tried to remember. “You can’t let this drag you down,” said my boyfriend. “You can get through this. You should keep making the effort to go back to school and stuff.” “How can I,” I said. On this point I was acting more miserable than I felt. I thought that the bicyclist and his stray eye were bound to cause some change in my life. Just what I needed, I thought. He kissed both my eyelids. He was so large and graceful. He had large hands and feet, hands he could cover his whole face with, a rangy body that would say “big cock” to people who listened for that kind of thing. I have never loved anyone more—just the sight of his hands made me pant. We heated up the day’s airy batard, tore it into pieces, and ate the fluffy center out together before we ate the crust. This was how he sympathized with me, and I felt it. Then we fucked with violence and generosity. Sex is what we had. My mother did all she could do to deal with the crash. She spent so much time on the phone, holding the phone cocked under her ear while she washed dishes. I wondered if she was enjoying herself, wearing rubber gloves, rubbing the sponge hard enough to cast soap bubbles into the air against bowls that she could have just put in the dishwasher. It was unlikely she even noticed. I wondered what the insurance people thought of the clinking dishes as they talked to her. It fell out like this: a misdemeanor, reckless driving. Four points on my license, which meant six months of no driving, because I wasn’t 21 yet when it happened. I got fined five hundred dollars, which seemed so slight it was ridiculous. But the car insurance rates flew so high that I wouldn’t even be able to cover it with the money I made at the grocery store. And because my mom had to go to her secretary job she wouldn’t be able to drive me to work. My boyfriend could drive me during the summer, but when the fall came, I would have to find a new job and public transportation to it—that was the hardest thing about it, from one angle. My mother punished me by hugging me lightly and sighing. Then I fried myself in the pan of my guilt. I had been working at a nice grocery called Fowler’s for those two and a half years since I decided not to go back to college. I worked at the bread counter, and in the bread cooler. Four women came each morning at four in the morning to bake the bread as the sun rose. Customers liked to ask for bread recommendations, and I’d recommend whatever seasonal bread we had around that day. “Is it good?” they liked to ask after. In the days after the crash I spent so much time hiding in the bread cooler, a square room behind the bread counter, that I’m surprised I didn’t get fired. The bread cooler was meant to keep 34
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bread cool and dry and maintain the internal lattice of yeast bubbles and the texture of the crust. The air of the bread cooler was scientific, modulated, carefully purified and locked. I liked sitting in there, picturing myself a seeded loaf in its most perfect atmosphere. If I had gone to college, I would have studied something old, like Classics, I thought. The bakery and bread cooler were the most old-feeling places in Atlanta, so they didn’t taunt me with thoughts about how after that floppy collision the bicyclist’s world flattened out permanently. The Greeks ate barley bread and wine every morning and ate leavened bread at festivals.he Romans baked their bread in ovens with domes like temples and sweetened it with cheese or honey, and back then when no one bathed the world was flat for everyone. (I was lying to myself, of course, but it helped.) Then dark-age monks and feudal lords would have had places like this. And the serfs at least had their bread to punch down when it rose high and soft. As a kid I called baguette crust “bark,” but raw bread, breathing and sighing, suedey and semisolid like buttocks, is so much more like bodies than trees. It is small bodies kneaded from edible clay. I’d sit in the bread cooler picturing sailors and warriors and smallpox-doomed girls passing ovals of edible clay through their digestion and building themselves up in its gradual disintegration and I’d think, me too. This sort of bread is built into our ancestral memory. The air in the bread cooler was yeasty, fresh and lofty. Oldness pressed against me, and my eyes filled up with tears. The bicyclist decided not to press charges. My mother called him “a darling” when she heard that. It’s possible he thought it was too much his fault for being so far into the road. It pained me that he should feel guilty. During the May after the crash, my boyfriend and I saw each other much less often than usual. He didn’t tell me, but he was disgusted by the blood, or really the vitreous humour jelly, that I had on my hands. I could see his disgust in the way he refused to eat grapes around me. We used to love grapes. It occurred to me that we had a dirt-based relationship: I was the gorgon, he the hapless knight. Perhaps. Despite the fact that I had ruined someone’s eye, life seemed to move on as usual. In the shower I ran my fingernails down my legs and sloughed soft gray wads of skin cells into my fingernails. I caught a spring cold, collected my snot in napkins. I picked lint cream from my toenails. At night, I lay on my right side first, because my father had told me all the biggest organs are on the left, and if you lay on your left every night they will mash together and fuse in a heap. He told me sheep’s insides always do this. At night I imagined my organs hanging down in the emptiness of my right side, like Christmas tree ornaments pinned to my abdominal ceiling. The white clots drifted their tired way through my fingernails. All that May, where was my boyfriend? My body asked me for him. As it turns out, I shouldn’t have trusted him with so much. (I never should have trusted him with so much.) The fact of the crash seeped into my nonconscious body as well and I started to notice changes. I was having trouble sleeping. I couldn’t deal with the foggy noise of the air conditioner, switching on and off irregularly, so I wore earplugs. For a while I put an earplug in just one ear and slept with my unblocked ear on the pillow so I could hear my cell phone, which I put underneath the pillow. The faint sound of the air conditioning and my mother and the road leaked through the pillow like sounds underwater, like one of my ears was dead and the other one overfull with blood. But after a few weeks I tossed around too much to deal with just one earplug in, and I started using both. The wavering electric buzzing that my ears invented for themselves in the absence of sound would get to be too much and I’d pull the earplugs out most of the way, hoping for a little sound but not too much. I imagined myself floating through outer space in an astronaut suit—I’ve heard The Harvard Advocate
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astronaut suits called the littlest spaceships—this is what outer space would sound like if something went wrong. It would be this body-deep plug right before all organs pop open and unravel in the absence of pressure, tongue unscrolling, eyes wetly bursting, body unfurling into globs of blood and muscle fiber, then disintegrating. In my two-earplug stage, I’d miss my boyfriend’s texts, which was just as well because they only told me he was busy with school. My tote bag filled up with dirty earplugs, orange-foam bullets. My mother, after spending an hour each day driving me to work and then picking me up, decided that it might be best for me to go stay with my father in Tallahassee for a while. She hated driving after my crash, something I failed to notice, of course. Going to Florida was one of those drastic moves that had been nothing more than a bad idea since he separated from my mom during my sophomore fall and moved to go work on combat systems for General Dynamics. I’d never been down to visit him, though he came to Georgia occasionally. I gathered he spent a lot of time shooting and fishing with his equally masculine friends. I did not want to go live with him for the rest of the summer and the fall and the winter, which is what my mother told me I should do. I refused. Finally at the end of May my boyfriend was available. My heart surged when he called. “Let’s do something special,” he said. Should we go to a movie? Go downtown? He suggested a picnic, which is why he ruled. He came to get me. Oh, smiling was so easy, and there was no need to mention all the times he’d ignored me. We made up a picnic and put it in a canvas bag. We brought pain de campagne, a bastone, and challah. Among other things, we brought goat cheese, black olive tapenade, chicken liver pâté, apricot preserves, and gruyère, all from my grocery store. For dessert we brought crème fraîche and maple syrup. These seemed the only appropriate foods for a picnic. I miss myself, thinking about how I used to think. No wonder he had found sexiness in my messiness. I was messy as a body is messy, the mess of sweat and hair and the inevitable drift into uncleanliness. Looking back, I admire myself for my frankness, the frankness of eating chicken legs with my fingers, the rawness of cream-topped coffee yogurt, the foul richness of veiny cheese—these things I would eat in front of him, without a thought! I only realized as he was leaving me that it had always been him accepting me for who I am; it could never have been the other way. We decided to drive up to Grant Park, which was a wooded wedge in a hilly neighborhood. We parked on the road, which followed the low creek, and hiked up a steep grassy hill. The white day sagged on the grass, straining red through its green. The top of the hill was clear and offered a view through the rumpled summer hills all the way to Atlanta. The sky hung low, dark and dense as pith, and against it the birds stirred up their usual racket. Their polysymphonic chirping, running through this liquid day like wire thread, spoke to me only of inevitability. It had taken me a while to realize that dimness, not brightness, makes coziness. Once I worked that out, bright light affronted me. I liked these threatening days, when the sky leans so low a spongiform musk covers all objects. My boyfriend and I sat on the grass and got our pants dirty, talking about school and the weather, but in the best way. “Tell me about stuff,” he liked to say. As usual I felt the sweetness that came with being able to talk about whatever I wanted. My boyfriend, bewitchingly handsome on this viscid day, faked looking off distractedly into the distance. He was too smart or calculating to be ever actually distracted by the horizon while I was talking. (Thank goodness I was still worth listening to.) I told him about when I was little, how I used to draw landscapes where the sky was a blue strip at the top of the page, the sun a hairy quarter-circle in the corner, the ground a green strip at the bottom. Objects were always firmly attached to the green ground. What did I think all that white space was? I wish I had left that blue strip out—I wonder if I could have dealt with that idea, with no marked sky, while emptiness settles solid and heavy on each low form and crushes it onto the green edge. 36
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Meanwhile, we glowed. Our skin was perfect and pellucid. I was a dirty, scattered person, and this weather was indispensible to me. My boyfriend knew it. It makes me irrationally sad that already then I was secondary in his life. He breathed hot and buzzy in my ear. “You look so hot,” he said. He rubbed his hands down my arms and licked my neck. “You have the softest skin,” he whispered. It felt like he was hitting on me. I felt uncomfortable. Then his mouth tasted rotted-out, after he smoked. I could not get enough of that taste. I could never have gotten enough of that taste. I had not realized until then how utterly unimportant we were. An hour in, the sky licked down hot and thick and vitreoid, and we were devoured. It rained all over the bacon bits, the bread, the brie. I didn’t hear from my boyfriend again for a week. My mother was getting fed up with driving, and she didn’t understand why my boyfriend couldn’t drive me, as he was done with school. She wrung her hands. I had to call in sick a few days in a row. Then, as she had never done, she forced change upon me. “I’m sorry,” she said one evening. “I think a change would be good for you.” I knew immediately what she was talking about. “I’m changing!” I said. “You’ll enjoy the warm winter. The wildlife is beautiful,” she said. “I’ll get a bike and find a job in Tucker,” I said. “Your father really misses you. And you can come back in December, I’d say. Just take a little break,” she said. “I’ll get out of bed, if that’s your problem. I just don’t want to move.” As I said it, I realized how silly it sounded. “That’s not my problem,” she said. “You’re a mess, that’s the problem.” I was so surprised she’d noticed I almost didn’t feel hurt. Then I felt hurt. “I could,” I started. I could wear sleek leggings. I could cut my hair short as a boy’s. I could run my head, over and over, into a wall. I could cultivate a terrarium. I could tear pieces of bark from trees. “No. I cannot tolerate you here any more,” she said. That was the forcing. I knew she’d feel bad about it someday. The next week my boyfriend called me (he was right to call; it wasn’t really worth meeting up) and told me we should probably stop seeing each other. That didn’t matter, I knew—he would still be just as present in my life whether he actually was or not. I ate the sand from my eyes, the scabs from my skin. I peeled flesh from the soles of my feet like skin off a fruit. The bicyclist’s single eye glittered at me. It was your fault, you eye, for changing things, I thought. The eye had added an unpleasant thought into our relationship—not a thought of the doom we’ll all face, my boyfriend didn’t think that way. More that the eye had set a palpable breach into our formerly sort-of-equal relationship. I had become a hero, not a good one of course, but at least a force of damage, a producer of real enduring consequences. My boyfriend enjoyed taking other girls’ virginities but it wasn’t the same. He was unmoored and would have loved to find himself in a situation as ends-of-the-earth as mine. Where before we could deal, when I had simply been attractive because I had lived in a puddle of my own making, a model of self-containment, the god that kneels in disguise at his own altar. Beyond the heliopause, I had been a place so empty it can only be itself. Now I had no driver at all, so I had to sail away from my bread counter. I said goodbye to the four bakers on my last morning. Only one of them smiled at me. I stole four loaves of pain paysan, then my mother drove me home. There was not nearly enough ado, I thought, not even a dead tree falling onto our house. Alas, I had been searching for human connection, and this is what I found; I connected with an eye. Guilt blew across my face and settled like snow. The Harvard Advocate
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And so I entered the slack zone of my life. When in high school or middle school I would get nervous for a test, this was what, unconsciously, I had been nervous for. When I was encouraged to study, to get up out of bed, to clean myself—this was the end everyone had been hoping I would avoid. It was only the bleakest comfort knowing that this state right here was the seeping center of my life, a black hole like my boyfriend had described to me once, which dilates time with gravity so objects seem to take an infinite time to fall in. Six days before I left for Florida I made my mother drop me off at Wal-Mart so I could buy some toiletries. She didn’t ask (not out of delicacy; she wasn’t paying attention) why I wanted WalMart, which was farther into town, instead of Target, which I usually prefer. I wanted the Wal-Mart because it was right near the stretch of road where I’d hit the bicyclist. My mother dropped me off. I hastily bought a soap dish and three tubes of toothpaste—of course, I didn’t know how to buy toiletries—and then went out into the vast rainstained parking lot and down to the road. I walked along the grassy shoulder for ten minutes. The frank pale sky fixed itself in a glare. My mind hummed blankly. I could not connect this space (too little space, that had always been the problem with the bicyclist) to the ruin it had wrought. Walking, I reached a rhythm and became sweaty and came to another section of shops and parking lots—nail salon, pet supply store, shoe store, gym. In the vacant lot next to the gym there was a kids’ jungle gym and swingset, swings twisting above the tall gray grass in a foreboding attitude that stung my eyes. I was daring myself to go over to them when I saw a man coming out of the pet supply store. I don’t know why I looked at him. He was carrying two big sacks of dry dog food and a leash. He had short curly hair and walked weirdly with a kind of lope. As he got closer I could see his brown work boots, his orange laces—I already felt like screaming and then he turned towards me and his left eye was just gone, erased, blanked over with flat flesh. My heart fell down but I didn’t scream. His blank socket looked dough-filled. It was a fleshcolored eyepatch, I realized. He kept staring at me. He furrowed his brow. I wondered why he was walking so weirdly, sort of stumbling, tottering like a giant avoiding stepping on the things far beneath him. He wasn’t looking at me because he recognized me (he never saw me properly during the crash, and never saw me again after). He was looking at me because I looked so afraid. He reached his car. He unlocked the door and put the food in the back and I saw he had two huge fluffy dogs, those white ones with the hair matted over their eyes. They wagged their tails. He straightened up and closed the door to get into the front and looked up at me and smiled—the smile did not make him look any better. He smiled and I smiled (mine was the kind of smile I couldn’t have stopped if I had tried) and he got into his car. Then he drove away and the wind blew over me clean, clean, clean and I sat down on the curb without realizing I was sitting down and sat there for twenty minutes listening to the chains of the swings kill themselves in the wind. My mother picked me up eventually. She drove me home. Then in my final five days in Georgia that June I did not go outside. (I could not go outside, my body binding me the best it could.) All my circadian rhythms messed up. I got a fever. I had ecstatic night pleasures that became cramps so severe they woke me up. I drank so much water, and peed it all out. It was sad to me, when I had learned that the feedback cycles in our bodies never rest. There is never equilibrium. Living is always a kind of pain, whether you have both eyes or not. A game for the restless: notice the itchiest place on your body and then scratch it. Immediately another itch will fill its place. I lay in all sorts of positions on the bed but none of them felt any different. The bed heaved its weight against me. I imagined getting bedsores, their crawling progression, large mucilaginous scabs that crust over silkily, I imagined, like floured bread dough. Oh yes, I was soft. Soft as a medieval maiden, afraid to bathe to let the demons in. Soft as the fallen bird feathers I would find on the ground as a kid, that my mother would never allow me to pick up. Soft as the white pit of a pock38
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mark. Beautiful as the lacy mold that creeps on moist leaves, plating them with ivory, coating them with tendrils. Harmless as the night sky wrapped in its dismal skyglow. I missed my boyfriend. I pictured us: how we used to lie down and feed each other spit. The sun would rise, then set abruptly, upset. My love for my mother churned me up, my mother who sat at the kitchen table under fluorescent lights, furrowed brow, reading glasses low, reading the local paper, frying herself an egg. These actions were not sad but they made me sadder than anything. She belonged to me only as much as an empty envelope, a pack of printer paper, a sheet of added-ounce stamps. Oh, I longed to hold her, almost as a lover would—at that time I did not know any other way. But I was perpetually bound to disappoint her, as the bread will never deign its sublime cooler air. There was only the hope of spending the summer, fall and winter in north Florida, with my fishing father and his uncouth, beery bachelor friends—a prospect I faced with as much enthusiasm as I would face sewing myself into a pillowcase. This is what I bear now, the jewelish ghost of some guy’s most beautiful organ. I am left alone, holding this eye, opalescent jelloid sphere, swiveling itself to madness in my palm. Oh my ovoid child, my seeing stone, be still. You won’t get to see or scorch off the face of your son, and you won’t get to star an ancient person’s face, a solace in a shriveled moue. Unpaired, the exploded sun to a loose earth, no Greek trickster has ravaged you. My side mirror and the road’s pole—undignified end! At least we are each other’s complements, I try to think to myself. I am as fit, soft and beautiful as I will ever be. And you are rent through with iron.
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Drifter Jim David Rice
The scene at the airport had fallen short of elegance, but it hadn’t lasted long. He didn’t come in with her because there was nowhere to leave the car; he double-parked near her airline and they got out, and he took her suitcase and her duffel bag out of the trunk, and then they climbed up the curb and stood near the big check-in hall windows where they each had a cigarette. His lighter had been broken and his efforts to get the last spark were so laborious that a kid smoking nearby with his mother came by and lent him his, which he used to light his and his wife’s cigarettes, and then there’d been an exchange in which the kid had wanted him to keep the lighter, and he’d tried to give it back, and the kid had in turn refused to take it, and on and on until he finally agreed to keep it, but by then it was time for her to go and whatever few words they might have said they did not say. The kid had brought that lighter and come there to mock him, he thought, pulling out of the airport parking lot and heading back toward the interstate, imagining her already in the air although in reality she was probably still just checking her bag and printing her tickets from the kiosk, or perhaps she was by now getting a bottled water and some gum at the newsstand, and looking at a couple of magazines that she’d decide not to buy without even having almost bought them. He thought about throwing the lighter out the window of the car, but in the end he just put it in the glove compartment. She had asked him for a ride to the airport as if it were a favor he might have refused. Now he was back on the interstate, thinking he would stop for lunch and then do the grocery shopping, getting the things he needed, walking up and down the aisle. His name was Will Strite and he was married to his wife Deb. Now she needed to spend the summer at her parents’ house, an airplane ride away, and get a few things sorted out and cleaned out and cleared up. At least when she meant the summer she said the summer, and not the weekend, and for that he was grateful. He had this lighter now and thought that with it he might burn down his car. He got a grilled chicken sandwich with potato salad, thinking this would start him out on the right foot, rather than the burger and fries for the same money, or even a dollar less. She might not really have been going to her parents’ house, he knew. He pictured her wandering the highway in some long distant state, looking for a ride, for someone with a big mustache who would pick her up and call her a gal. When the waitress brought the check he waved it off and asked for a scoop of ice cream, and then thought to ask which of the cars in the parking lot was hers, or if he could give her a ride if she didn’t have one, but he didn’t. 40
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The man who picked up his wife might ask where she was going, and then they’d laugh all the way to Oklahoma when she said she didn’t know. Or she’d just say Oklahoma and they’d go someplace else instead, for the weekend. According to Deb, she had had to leave because he had forgotten how to find her vagina. She was going to give him some time to think about it. There was no more delicate or precise way to explain what she meant, she said. At night, after they’d both finished work, or finished looking for work, depending on the night, and finished up at the bar or the bowling alley, or finished eating out or eating in, they’d wind up half naked on the couch, or all the way naked in the bed, and it’d be going along, stray thoughts popping into each of their heads and being cast out like the garbage on Tuesday nights or Wednesdays after Monday holidays, but then when it came time, they slipped away from and not into one another. He battered and butted away down where he couldn’t see, in the city of his ancestors, but all he could manage was to rub her thighs, or kind of hunch up and bear down on her belly. She would reach down and try to help him in, but it wouldn’t happen. They would toggle shapes and sizes, at first he’d be a little boy and she an old woman, and then she a little girl and he an old man, and then they’d lose track of one another all together, veering off into crude and hilarious shapes, her skin would turn to sandpaper while his turned to shampoo; his to seed chaff and hers to lemon pulp. Sometimes she would push him off the bed and spend half an hour looking for him on the floor, sometimes he would spend so long licking her bellybutton or the backs of her knees that she would wake up with a sunburn, or the sheets would become a desert and he’d be walking all alone, tripping over his boxers, the bottom sheet the sand and the top sheet the sky, yelling through his dry, dry mouth. The salt flats of the pillows, the gushing alarm clock. Their marriage hadn’t always been like this. At first it had remained mostly as it had been when they were dating, just enough of him finding its way smoothly into just enough of her, just enough times to keep their gills flapping. They were even ravenous with their bodies, on occasion, trying to go all the way in, she to eat him up and maybe spit him out or maybe not, he to strap a little light on his forehead and pin his arms at his sides and take the dive, only his little toes still sticking out, his head filling up hers, turning around to look out through her eyes and to stick his tongue out through her mouth. It became a kind of addiction, sleeping all the way inside of her some nights his beloved heaving sleeping bag with no zipper. But then, as if this miracle had been discovered and disproved, her vagina began to shrink at the same rate it had previously expanded. They each found work that spring, and spent their days apart, even waking up at different times and often not seeing one another at all in the morning, as if they each one were the other’s phantom landlord, renting the room at a bargain. They might order Chinese at night and eat it in front of the TV. The point at which her vagina actually disappeared was up for debate. She would say that this never actually happened—that it was still there for her in the bathroom and in the shower, and probably still under her skirt, as far as she could tell, as she sat at work all day—and that it was therefore entirely Will who couldn’t reach it, but when he asked her to show it to him, or to describe it, she could not. It was like pounding on a wall, or maybe more like digging through the dirt, a little headway here and there but no ultimate progress, no tunnel to the world beneath. They tried a number of creams and lotions, all of which rubbed in and got sucked up with no problem, but when Will tried to follow in their footsteps, there was no longer any place to follow into. It was as if the inanimate world had retained some instinct that both of their bodies had lost. She once tried to explain it by saying that she lost the sense of her whole body when she was with him, couldn’t feel her hips or her legs or even her arms, for that matter, and so her inability to find her vagina was a bit like the inability to find the pulse of someone all the way across the room. Each one began to wonder where the other was, not knowing where to look. His penis came to terrify them both, some mercurial living thing that came into the bed, came everywhere with them, all the time, and could not be sated or stowed away, some thing that chased after her and that she could not imagine what to do with. It was like a timid child that they kept trying to put to bed in its own room, down the hall, but that came running back into theirs with nightmares the moment it closed its eyes, or its eye, pleading for them to let it sleep in their bed once again, and that it would produce the money in the morning. The Harvard Advocate
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Feeling stranger and stranger about the state of her insides, Deb went to the doctor one day, and came back with this report: “you nibbled me up so bad in there that I’m likely never to get married.“ “What?” “I mean pregnant. I’m never gonna ... have one.” Will was glad to hear this, but then decided it was bad news. She went on, “you were too greedy. Why couldn’t you have gone just a little ways inside and left the rest of the way for someone else?” “Who, like a baby?” “For example.” He then made some joke about drilling a hole right through her belly and then just pouring the ingredients right in through there. There was no reason to think she would laugh, and of course she didn’t. Stirring with a big wooden spoon, wearing an apron, he went on, trying to cheer her. A baby named Martian. Earlier, there had been one panic scene when Will went so deep that he got lost. He couldn’t find his way back out, and he couldn’t find a way to keep going even further and maybe all the way through to some plateau on the other side. Deb couldn’t find him and thought he was gone forever. But then, just as she was going to call the poison control or the police or the lost children agency, he slipped back, soaked and waiting for his life to continue. He had, it appeared, failed to take root. His life gave him half an hour, to sweat and breathe, and then began again. Later that night he went out alone, as if for groceries, and came back with Cal, a waitress from the steakhouse off Exit 39. That night they fucked with their shoes on right on his bed, while Deb slept on one side, and the two things that Will still could absolutely not understand, were, one, why he had done this, and two, why Deb had not woken up—had not, he was sure, even pretended not to notice, but really, actually, hadn’t? Cal had seemed turned on by the whole thing, and her vagina had been warm and soft and right exactly where he’d imagined it to be. This only happened once, but it stuck with Will. It seemed like a precedent. He drove Deb to work in the morning and knew that it would not be long until he was driving her to the airport to spend the summer with her parents, taking four showers a day in the back of a freight truck, under the hot Montana sun, enjoying a weekend unhemmed by weeks on either side. Coming home from the grocery store, torn plastic bags escaping from his fingers, his car still beeping with the keys in the ignition and the doors open, he saw his neighbor, Mrs. Else, pacing her front steps while listening to a big cordless phone. Will grabbed the milk and a bag of charcoal for the barbecue and nodded over to her, kicking the trunk shut and hobbling up his steps and through his front door. Mrs. Else nodded back and made an expression like she wanted to talk to him only she couldn’t right then because she was on the phone. Will made an expression like if she needed to find him, it wasn’t exactly a secret where he would be. He nudged the door closed behind him, but didn’t lock it. The place used to be a motel, long ago, but had gone out of business and then they’d come with a giant saw and cut it into four distinct houses. Each had four rooms, two on the bottom and two on top, the two bottom ones each with their own front doors, and they were situated around a parking lot with far too many spaces and a dry outdoor pool that was now filled with dirt, someone’s stab at a garden, but the only plants in it had not been planted by anyone, and between the two rooms on each floor, not counting the bathrooms, were quite a few hallways. Will and Deb lived in one of the four houses, and Mrs. Else in another, and the other two were a bit up for grabs, people moving in and out on a weekly or monthly basis, or standing empty for long stretches. It gave the whole place a tidal atmosphere, people washing in and out with a kind of scummy regularity. Will lay back on his couch and pushed his mail over to him with a pool cue that he had picked up at a roadside bar a few years ago, when he’d been out drinking with all his friends. There was a bill from the electric company, an ad for some huge wrestling matches on pay-per42
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view, a few letters sent to the wrong address, a newsletter from the Graceland Foundation, whose mailing list he must have joined, and some coupons from the few pizza and sandwich places that would deliver out here. He turned on the TV and watched a lady spelling out the pros and cons of six large diamonds, lined up on a piece of black felt draped over a table in front of her, concealing, perhaps, her legs underneath. He felt tempted to nudge the remote all the way up into the no man’s land of the Spanish channels, but he didn’t do it. The diamonds stuck in his eyes like broken pieces of contact lens. They were all he could think about just then. The doorbell rang and he left the TV on when he got up to answer it. “Room service,” smiled Mrs. Else, handing him a box of Frosted Flakes. “Knew you’d be here on your own for a bit. Thought you might need a little help furnishing the supply chest. Do you have milk? Do you need any? Skim?” He took the box and put it on the ground next to the couch, near the Smacks he’d bought at the grocery store. Will was thirty-three and figured that Mrs. Else was right around forty. “Can I just mention something to you, quickly, before you get on to other things?” she asked. They sat by the dirt pool, which had chaise lounges around it like a real pool, and drank Fanta from the drink machine between their houses. Ralph the landlord kept it stocked, insisting, with a half-smile, that he was making a killing if ever questioned as to why he bothered. Looking at her in this late afternoon light, with her sunglasses up on her forehead, holding her hair back, Will thought that Mrs. Else was maybe closer to fifty than to forty, and then he started to wonder about his own age, if it was possible that he was actually closer to twenty than to thirty, but he soon gave this up and tried to hone back in on what she was saying. She had always been very friendly to him, always faintly hurt that he wasn’t friendlier to her. She was talking about her niece Claire, who was apparently coming up to visit later in the week. All he could think of, at first, was the kind of snide landlord remark that Ralph would likely have, something about one broad taking off and another showing up, and how you could always count on breaking even in this business. But he remained quiet. Part of his affinity with Mrs. Else was that neither of them had kids, or ever had. As far as he knew she had never been married, but that wasn’t clear. About the kids it was, though, very clear, and, while they never mentioned it outright, it often served as a pretense for whatever friendliness or familiarity there was between them, beyond that which there ought to have been between neighbors. The story about Claire was still going on. She had just turned twenty and had been at junior college, studying costume design, was what it sounded like to Will, who could also hear the engine noise of his wife’s airplane in one ear, and Ralph’s furious pencil working on the money. Claire had done a semester but had run into a spot of bad luck, trouble, as Mrs. Else put it. Will could never tell if he was supplying an exaggerated, old-fashioned phrasing and intonation in the way that he heard Mrs. Else’s speech, translating some more ineffable aspect of her personality into what he thought she said, or if she really talked like this. Claire had wound up in this trouble, anyway, and had ended up having a slew of abortions (Will couldn’t imagine what term Mrs. Else used for this delicate topic), as many as eight in the past year. Mrs. Else described it like it was just a run of rotten luck, like getting stung by a large number of bees in one particular summer. Will found that the story nudged him to the point of not wanting to listen to it. He tried to get away, but there was a certain amount of weight that Mrs. Else was pressing down on him in the way that she spoke, and it kept him, for the moment, in his chair. The babies kept passing through her, the story went, almost as if it were one baby that was trying again and again to be born, raising its hands aboveground and hoping to be snatched up and brought leaping and bounding onto the playing field, to win. All of this didn’t sit well with Claire’s parents, clearly enough, and since she’d been living at home through this whole debacle, she’d recently been kicked out, told, on the one hand, to get a handle on herself, and, on the other, to go out alone and penniless and fend around and then come back bettered. The Harvard Advocate
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This was just plain madness, said Mrs. Else. You couldn’t do that to a little girl, what with all the trouble there was. Claire was, after all, just a child—hell, it was practically just yesterday that she was born. It seemed to Will that Mrs. Else thought that just because she could remember Claire’s birth as if it had been recently, Claire could too. He tried to remember his own birth, and came up with nothing. He couldn’t even remember being a kid. His parents must have been just like him, he thought. The car, the sawed-in-quarters motel house… this may well be where I grew up, thought Will. Where all my friends used to live back when it was summer all the time. The old ash ground of some furious and empire-spanning fire. In short, Claire needed a place to go for a while, so Mrs. Else had invited her here. Having no children of her own and four rooms, two of them with their own doors, and enough hallways to spare, Mrs. Else often took in girls who needed a place. She was in touch with a few rehab centers around the area, and halfway houses and free clinics, that sort of thing, who sometimes referred people around. Mrs. Else invariably treated them as children and her house was known, apparently. She could often be seen taking walks around the parking lot with these girls, who always looked bored, scared, perplexed to tears. She would take them past the front office, where Ralph set up shop on rent day, and over to the twenty-four hour breakfast place down near Exit 30, where you could walk just going from parking lot to parking lot, only crossing the highway once, stopping in the hotel lobbies on the way to pick up brochures if you knew how and wanted something to read. Deb had complained about how this constant presence of really dizzy and makeup-blurred and trashed-looking girls lent the whole place a clinical air that simply wasn’t fun, like they were the neighbors of some sort of friends-only asylum. It had never bothered Will, but, now that he thought about it, there had been a fair number of times when girls would be shouting their lungs out just before morning, trying to jumpstart one of the cars in the lot, or throwing some guy’s suitcase down the stairs, or throwing bottles at him off the balcony as he ran away or tried to climb back up, and then Will would come to the door with a flashlight and just stand there in his boxers and watch the scene, not exactly helping in any definite way except to have been there and watched it. Mrs. Else seemed oblivious to all of this, with never anything but praise for the shining goodness of all of her charges, stories of how rotten their luck had been and how much better off they now were. Mrs. Else’s question, in this particular case, was whether Will would like—not would he mind, but would he like—to take a certain active role in Claire’s stay here, since his wife was away, and he could maybe use a friend in his life, and maybe she in hers. Just then a loud, sputtering scuffed-up red convertible screeching to a stop in the lot interrupted their talk, and a man in a tanktop and cowboy hat got out, striding mightily in his spurred boots, chains and necklaces bobbling most of the way down his chest, gathering all around his waist. Mrs. Else rolled her eyes as if she’d just caught a young boy scooping frosting off a cooling cake with his outstretched tongue. It was Drifter Jim, sweeping the parking lot with his low squint. For as long as Will had lived here, he had come at exactly the same time every day, prowled around for half an hour, and left. “Sure,” he said abruptly. “I’ll come by. I’d love to meet your niece.” Mrs. Else beamed contently as the last speck of daylight passed them by. He started out the week eating at the steakhouse every night, looking for Cal, and finished out the week eating every night at Mrs. Else’s. He spent the days slugging it out at work—he’d been booked for the summer to help build a stage and rig electrical equipment for a dance show that was going to be held in the city waterfront park in August—and the late afternoons looking out the window at the two vacant houses, vacant since April or May. His view of these houses would invariably be disturbed by Drifter Jim at six o’clock, and then his eyes would drift along with him for the duration of his visit, which consisted mainly (there was no other word for it) of prowling. He tried to guess Jim’s age, and came up with the ballpark of twenty-five. Dinners with Mrs. Else were pleasant in a way, not excruciating as they might have been. He just came home from work and ended up there, more or less, as if someone had handed him his schedule and that’s what it had said. 44
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They got to know each other, him saying whatever was available in the moments when he said it. She had won a modest sum in the lottery about twelve years ago, and had invested it in a rundown city block that now had three cafes, a mid-scale wine shop and two family restaurants, with the possibility of a third. The question of whether she’d been married never came up, and the one time she asked about Deb, politely enough, she made her sound like some mutual acquaintance of theirs, some nice enough but slightly witchy woman they’d both met at a party somewhere. The rest of the time they tolerated one another’s company. Mrs. Else cooked simply, chicken potpies and steak fries and big salads with creamy ranch dressing, radishes, big glasses of whole milk, which she insisted were for the best, cobbler and crisps for dessert. She drank no coffee or liquor, and seemed to have no books or videos or other media in the house. At the end of the evening she started clearing the dishes and then drifted off to the bathroom to brush her teeth, and her hair, leaving Will to show himself out. He shouted goodbye from the door, to an empty house, as if he worked a night shift of some sort, the schedule of which had long since ceased being exotic. He went home and turned on the TV and scoured the private channels for sex, but the reception was so poor that the few gasps and moans he could dredge up sounded like pleas for escape, an eyelash or a nipple peeking through the fuzz for a split second before being hauled back in by the vast hands behind it. His sex dreams took on this form, until he could hardly tell what was what, who was secretly speaking Spanish and who wasn’t. The mail kept coming, and he checked it for news from Deb, but there wasn’t any. Letters and magazines arrived for her, but nothing from her. Actually, as the days went on, more and more of the mail was for Deb, less and less for him, until finding his name on an envelope started to be more the exception than the rule. The odd wrong address. Claire arrived the next Monday, two days after she was supposed to, after a weekend of some sort. She wouldn’t say where she had been, in custody or in some strange city, on the ground, but she showed up that Monday with a cloth bag. Will watched from his porch as she checked her phone, sprayed mint spray in her mouth, swished and spit it out on the asphalt, and then walked up to Mrs. Else’s doorbell, ringing it once and clearly hoping that no one would answer. But Mrs. Else, as ever, did answer, popping into the doorframe with a big hug, helping her with the bag and closing the door behind them. Will went back into his room, took his pants off, and, in his boxers, found his flashlight, just to have it ready. Mrs. Else invited him over the next afternoon, spotting him driving back from work and waving him over, as if she expected him to just pull up to her house and get out and come in, without even going into his own house to wash his face. So this is what he did. The first time he met Claire he was drenched in sweat and had dirt all over his eyebrows and forehead, from where he’d been wiping and kneading his headache all day, moving it like a rag around his head. She was sitting in the kitchen with a pair of overalls hanging off her, the straps undone and the legs rolled up, a white top underneath. She had a stud in her lower lip and in one eyebrow, and a tattoo of a wavy black line with thorns ringing her upper left arm. She was sitting with her legs underneath her on a chair in the kitchen, where there were no lights turned on and those old thick plastic shades over the windows, so it was that kind of really distinct late afternoon darkness that seemed, in a lot of ways, to outdo the night. The two of them were drinking milk and there was a package of Vienna Fingers open on the table, a rubber band lying next to it, ready to seal it back up when they were finished. Mrs. Else made Will sit down next to Claire and poured him his own glass of milk and helped him to a Finger or two, and gave him a napkin. They were discussing the problem of pedestrians in the city, how there were always too many trying to cross the street when you were driving, and then too many cars whizzing by when you were trying to walk. “Maybe there’s just too many people in the world,” said Claire, and smirked in Will’s direction. He smirked back. The Harvard Advocate
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“Claire brought a very small guitar with her,” said Mrs. Else. “It nearly fits in her bag. She’s going to learn to play it.” The doorbell rang, and Will looked back at the two women and thought for a moment that they were two mannequins. They didn’t respond to the ringing doorbell until a fist started rapping on the screen, and then Mrs. Else got up. Will heard her muffled voice in the hall, a few chuckles and uh-huhs. He and Claire looked at each other, then at the floor, then at their hands on the table, then shuffled their hands and moved them off the table, and then had to look at one another, each, in the meantime, having gathered up his or her napkin. “So, is you last name Else too?” he asked. Claire just rolled her eyes, and pulled on one of her earrings. “It’s for you,” announced Mrs. Else, coming back into the kitchen. Will looked up, but she clearly meant it was for Claire. Claire re-clasped her overalls, bent over to look at her reflection in the glass of the oven, and went over to the door. Will swirled his milk in its glass and watched it stick to the edges and drip back down, like weak paint. He could feel a nervous, feinting energy coming from the doorway, tipping the house on its axis. “Who was it?” he asked, finally. “Drifter Jim,” replied Mrs. Else. Will looked at the clock timer on the oven and, sure enough, he was right on time. “What’d he want?” “Oh, just to say hello to Claire. To welcome her to the neighborhood.” “That was nice of him,” Will replied. When the weekend came it was Will’s job to get Claire in the car and take her for a tour around the city, stopping at key bus and subway stations, and explaining how they all connected on the map. Claire was to have a regimen of daily excursions, once she got her bearings, things to see, walks to take, a large number of ways, or examples of ways, to experience a city during the daytime, being back home, without fail, by dusk. Claire could not have been less interested. They ended up having steaks at the old steakhouse, Will peeping around for Cal, whom he still couldn’t find, and Claire zooming in and out of cross-eyes as her mood told her to. He dropped her off at home and stole into his house to collect the mail and watch TV before dinner. He heard a fist pounding, and, when it stopped, he looked through his window to see Drifter Jim leaning through Mrs. Else’s doorframe, his hand on Claire’s shoulder. He had what looked like a hawk’s talon hanging on a string around his neck, and big silver sunglasses that he kept lifting up to wink. Then he set them back in place. Claire played with her hair and chewed her lip ring, and the more this went on, the less Will knew what was happening. The sense of responsibility hovered somewhere in his living room, like a fly buzzing in the upper corners, alighting on the blades of the ceiling fan, but he couldn’t catch it. There wasn’t really anything that he was supposed to do, he decided. So he just watched. They talked for another minute, and then Drifter Jim leaned in and grabbed the back of Claire’s head and kissed her, clutching so hard that his biceps swelled up all around her neck and shoulders, like a rattlesnake eating an egg. She put her foot behind his, and they stayed like that until Will clattered through his door and, hearing it swing shut behind him, met Drifter Jim. All he could think was that this was the first time he had seen Drifter Jim’s face. Drifter Jim only suffered this mute examination for a second. Then he tipped his cowboy hat, clicked his mouth in a gruff “evenin,’” and leapt over the stairs and into his convertible, without even lifting his glasses to wink. Will stood there for a moment, then went down to the soda machine, got three Fantas, and brought them into Mrs. Else’s. Mrs. Else was taking a casserole out of the oven when he got there, Claire doing a newspaper Sudoku with a fat red crayon. He thought of how this house’s architecture was exactly the same as his, but two women lived here now, and no one at all lived over there. Mrs. Else served them casserole and apple juice and those Pillsbury bake-‘em-yourself biscuits, which, 46
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she announced, had been baked by Claire. The butter tasted not all the way baked in, and so he ate them dry, without adding anything. They had some dessert that looked almost identical to the casserole, and Mrs. Else offered to make up some Swiss Miss in the microwave. Will went back to his house and, in the middle of a yawn, turned the handle. It wouldn’t turn; it was locked. He began to feel drunk. He tried it again, and it was still locked. It must have swung shut when he went out to see Drifter Jim. He went down the stairs to his car, sat in the passenger seat and took his emergency cigarettes out of the glove compartment, smoking one with the airport kid’s lighter, and then two more. Then he tried to tilt the seat back and go to sleep, but the cigarettes had made him jumpy, so he got out, took a lap around the parking lot, threw a can over the fence and onto the dirt pool, and went back up to Mrs. Else’s, telling her what had happened. She seemed unperturbed, hardly even surprised. “Well, you’ll just have to sleep here,” she said. He thought back to when this place really used to be a motel, and imagined that he was checking into a new room, having had some problem with the old one She went into a closet and got him a pair of pajamas, and then disappeared, and reappeared wearing her own pair. Claire was nowhere to be found. Will used the bathroom, put on his pajamas, squirted some toothpaste into his mouth and scraped it around with his tongue, and then Mrs. Else escorted him into her bedroom, where she’d already turned down the corner of the bed. Any of the many things he might have said remained inside him, ripe fodder for a dream or two. They slept side by side in her bed, each on his or her own pillow, on their backs with their arms folded over their chests and the covers pulled up to their chins, and when the alarm came due at six, they were still in this position. The locksmith was slow in coming. Maybe Will was slow in calling him, distracted, befuddled in certain ways. The discussion with Mrs. Else was very minimal, hardly a discussion at all. He slept there one night, and then the next night, and then every night. She cooked tremendous meals, and always insisted that they be washed down with huge quantities of whole milk, bridging the gap between dinner and the Swiss Miss of dessert. Will had some mission with Claire, he thought, but he wasn’t sure what it was. He watched her out of the corner of his eyes, and tried to be polite, making attempts at humor that she shot down like tufts of floating dust. Mrs. Else was delighted at the whole situation, marveling at how much progress she was making, how much further from trouble she was now, how much closer to the bosom of safety and peace. Will wasn’t much of a church man, but there were moments when he could swear that he was seeing something come over Claire, a shift in hue or skin texture that started at her neck and went up to her mouth and then her nose and eyes and sank into her hair, and then was gone until it came back. There were evenings when, in the hour after dinner, the kitchen still hot from the oven, he thought of his house next door, the neighbor’s house now. The clothes that he found in the bottom three drawers of the bedroom dresser and in half of the walk-in closet were bland enough that they might have belonged to anyone. They fit him well and it didn’t seem impossible that he had picked them out and paid for them long ago. They weren’t clothes he could love, but they were certainly clothes he could wear. He didn’t know for sure what he smelled like, but the clothes had a smell that could have been his. They were, anyway, what he wore now. Some still had the tags in them, hanging faded from the collar, and so he went to work and drove around town now and even still sometimes looked for Cal out among the tag men, as one of them. He and Mrs. Else slept side by side in their pajamas every night, with no trouble negotiating the line in the bed, so little trouble that it wasn’t even a line. They slept like brother and sister, like fraternal twins, or two bugs stuck so tightly in a web that they could not even lean in against their own fists to stifle a yawn. Will was getting shivers of information, more and more about the nature of her household, and the particular way that she interacted with the girls she took in. They weren’t clues, they might never add up, but he could taste it, some of it to do with her, some with him. He was either as safe as he had ever been, The Harvard Advocate
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as close to the milky bottom of the lake, or in very grave and imminent danger, about to fall clean through that bottom and out into the nest of scorpions on the far side. In the mornings, if he woke up first, he would prop up on an elbow and regard Mrs. Else’s body like a corpse. If she woke up first, she would do the same for him. This sort of inert and possibly eternal marriage might have been the end of the story, had it not been for Claire and Drifter Jim. But had it not been for Claire and Drifter Jim there would have been no inert and possibly eternal story at all, certainly none in the sense of its being told. They are the true seat of foment, the axes along which the actual questions are being asked, whereas Mrs. Else has drifted so far off the chart by now that there’s going to be no coaxing her back. Drifter Jim still came by every evening, summoning Claire away from the table and into the doorway. The less that Mrs. Else noticed, the more of an impression it made on Will. He wanted to protect Claire from that which, he felt, she did not yet understand, but he also hoped and feared, on the other hand, that there was something, or plenty, that she understood far better than he. Some fact about who Drifter Jim was that had already insinuated itself deep within her. Will could understand that a drifter might pass by and try to feed on the young girls who turned up here, to trip them up for a night or two, but Drifter Jim had a seriousness, an air of propriety and ownership, that was another thing entirely. Will had heard rumblings in the night ever since he’d started sleeping in such silence here, but tonight they were louder than usual, like stray cats shrieking in an alleyway, and so he took a glass of water and wandered down the hallway, the wall to his left heaving with the force of waves, and then the solid thuds of a wrecking ball. For a while he traced ellipses around the area of the house—the other former motel room—that he knew to be Claire’s, where the noise was coming from. He heard nails tearing at plaster grout and the pop of exhalations through clenched teeth, a constant thrum of what sounded like people falling from the ceiling onto the bed and then crashing back up against it, and then falling again. He sat in the kitchen and nibbled a biscuit and watched how the crumbs in his lap vibrated, the sound of clenched teeth just about coming through the wall to bite him. All of this knocked him into a state not far from sleepwalking, if his state that summer had ever been far from it. It was in this state that he passed through the doorway, silent as a moth, into Claire’s room, where she and Drifter Jim were sharing a leg, only three visible between the two of them. They always had one arm or the side of a face on the bed, but they could not stay on it. They tumbled off onto the floor, under chairs, knocking them over, then stood up laboriously, Jim hoisting her with her legs locked clasping his back, onto her desk, then against the wall, sometimes so high up that she was near the corner with the ceiling or in danger of falling out the window, then they’d come leadenly back onto the bed, and bounce off in a new direction, a flurry of sheets and pillow fluff rising up around them. Drifter Jim’s hat was crushed under Claire’s hips, but then he’d pick it up and put it back on her head, and she would laugh a screeching, shouting laugh, and bite his earlobe or the part of his neck just under his ear, and then he would turn her all the way upside down and twist her into a single pile of skin. Will stood in the corner of the room, clumsy at first, knocking over lamps and smashing the window blinds in his attempts to stay out of their way, but soon he got the hang of it, and was circling at their rate, part of the tide, cartwheeling and levitating around the room as he watched them without blinking. The mornings now were devoted to vagueness and routine, and the nights to watching. Every night he rose from his coma with Mrs. Else and, carrying his water, stumbled into Claire’s room, to watch Drifter Jim flay her alive and to watch her dry him out until he looked like a corn stalk at the end of October. To say that they didn’t notice him would not be quite right, nor would it be to say that they did. It’s not that it turned them on or anything. It was more that they treated him like a dog, a creature able to watch but not to comprehend, not to elicit or feel any shame, neither shame nor arousal, nor anything but mute, sloppy awe, his tongue resting on the bottom of his chin, scattered with biscuit mush. 48
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They would look over at him sometimes, hunched in a corner, when they had reached their tender moment that brought on the dawn, Claire straddling Jim and rocking slowly back and forth, singing to him while he lay with his hands behind his head, panting with his whole chest, that hawk talon necklace like a tendril reaching through from his heart, a finger beckoning inward to the outside air. In these moments they might catch one another both looking over at Will, a thing like pity in their eyes. The abstraction was mutual. They looked over at him and saw a creature that could not know where it was, that had been dragged along by a current to a place where it could not be, like a gassed patient waking up during surgery, and he looked at them as if through a fluttering curtain or an insectencrusted windshield, mesmerized by their motions and sounds. There arose a tenuous sweetness and sympathy between them, over time, night after night. Jim and Claire, up there on the bare mattress, once the bed had been reduced to that and they had been reduced to lying prone or piled up upon it, their palms spread wide toward the ceiling and the lolling fan, and Will equally exhausted, the dawn starting to play over his face as he sat on the floor under the window. This was the mutual moment, Jim on the verge of sleep, Claire pulling her hair back onto her head, and Will, barefoot in his pajamas, looking up at the bed like a cliff ringed by clouds. Then came the next moment, when Jim groaned and stood, and began to gather up his drifter suit, fastening his jeans with their big shiny buckle, getting his undershirt and chains back in place, and his wallet and keys in the right pockets, and then his big boots and his hat, and his gun if he had one, and stealing out of the room, by which time Claire had wrapped herself in the sheet, patches of sweat shining through in places like hamburger wrapping, as Will found his way back to Mrs. Else’s bed, where he woke up in an hour and got ready for work. Even this became a routine. It proceeded along into the months when the summer expanded outside of time, beyond any season’s due course. Will spent the hours before dawn huddled down in his vantage point, watching Drifter Jim in his frenzy and Claire surrounding and containing him on all sides, ballooning outward until she went transparent and Jim condensed into a black pit at her center. He watched and went back to bed and woke up, and went to work, and ate listlessly, in near silence, with Mrs. Else, and he spooned down dripping quantities of baked fruit and whole milk and Swiss Miss. He started to put on weight and feel the pull of his old clothes as they grew tight around him, the tags like fly bites between his shoulders. All of this persisted until the night when he got touched. He was down in his corner in their room, watching it happen, casually distant from his body, when a hand came down and gripped his head fiercely and twisted him into place, so hard that it reverberated through his elbows to his fingers and through his knees to his toes. He was fixed in this place, breath heaving through him, and when he finally managed to look up he saw that Jim and Claire had stopped moving, Jim on top staring down at Claire, and Claire nodding yes and burying her head in his shoulder, and then leaning back and nodding again, answering, it appeared, some question. There was a second when the pressure dropped and Will could hear the trees in the parking lot shivering, as if fall and winter had come for a minute each, and then spring for a minute, and now summer again, as Jim leapt to his feet, gathered up his clothes, tossed his limbs into them like vegetables into a shopping bag, and clambered through door and into his car, leaving Will alone with Claire. He and Claire exchanged a look, each forever guilty before the other. A few days later, Will went down to Ralph’s office to pay his rent. There were still old sightseeing brochures and car rental coupons and a schedule for the airport shuttle, like it really was still a motel. He had felt slimy and wet ever since that morning when he looked at Claire, some kind of sweat that wouldn’t wash off. This, on top of the gut that he was developing from all the milk, made him feel like a real dirty highwayman motel guest, at last, as he stood in the office, an envelope of cash in his pocket. He scratched at his armpits and they felt wet with something like pumpkin innards, doused in Old Spice. The Harvard Advocate
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There was a husky guy in a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off in front of him, leaning way over the desk with Ralph, the two of them looking down at a notebook or chart that Will couldn’t see, each making marks with his own pencil. Ralph kept turning around and barking toward a partially ajar door behind the counter, which looked like it led into another office where someone else was sitting at another desk, with all of the lights out. This went on for a few minutes, to the point where Will picked up one of the brochures, read about a few things that he had never heard of that were in town, and then got ready to leave. Just then the big guy turned from the desk and walked over to the door. On his way out, Will could see that it was Drifter Jim. He seemed not to have seen him there. Then he went up to the desk, just as Ralph was hastily putting the papers away. “Yes?” he asked. “Here to pay rent,” said Will, taking the envelope out of his pocket and tapping it against the edge of the counter. “Room number?” asked Ralph. “Room what? It’s me… ” “Okay me. Room number?” Will got dizzy and looked around at the brochures for reassurance, but they were, as he had already discovered, full of places he had never been to. “Room 4,” said Will. “Okay, okay, let’s see here… yup, thanks.” Ralph grabbed the envelope and put it away. “By the way,” Will asked, glad that this part was over. “What was he doing here?” “Who?” “Drifter Jim.” “Guy who just walked out?” “Right.” “Lives here, man, just like you and I.” “No he doesn’t.” “Okay, boss,” said Ralph, opening the envelope and flicking through it with his pencil. “What’s his name?” asked Will, curious to see if the Drifter epithet had followed him into the books. “Don’t give out names, matter of tact. Don’t get too chummy with the clientele, right, people always on the in and out. No one sticking it out, so what’s the point if you’re asking me.” “Tact?” “Yes sir. Never asked anyone for your name, did I? Never even overheard it. You ever met Mr. Tact? He lives in the Waldorf Astoria down on Grand Ventura Blvd.” “Yeah, I know, I… you’ve known me for.” “What’s your name?” Will didn’t want to say just then. All he could think of was that between the two of them they had four eyes, and that that was an awful lot. Ralph raised one eyebrow. “See? What’s mine?” In that particular moment, Will couldn’t think of it. When he came back to the house, Mrs. Else and Claire were sitting mutely at the kitchen table, the familiar evening gloom finding its place on their shoulders. There was a pool of tea spilled on the table and a dishtowel set on top of it, soaked through, its corner dangling off the table and dripping onto the floor. He stood in the doorway and Mrs. Else looked over at Claire, and then she looked at him and said, “She’s pregnant” as if expecting him to ask “who?” Claire looked down at her overall straps, clasping and unclasping them, as if this was all their fault, adjusting her bare toe under the table so that the tea was dripping onto the painted center of the nail. “Oh,” said Will. No one said anything as the sun went the rest of the way down. Mrs. Else went to the fridge, took out an onion and a pepper and a box of pasta down from the cupboard, but then left them on the counter and came back to the table. “It’s you,” said Claire, and Will heard it through a can from the other end of a long white string. 50
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When it reached him, he looked over to Mrs. Else for support. “No,” he said. “I didn’t, I wasn’t, I was, you know me… in.” It was like they were accusing him of stealing money or blinding horses. “I was in bed right next to you every night,” he said to Mrs. Else, “I hardly even… moved.” “No,” said Claire, back on her side of the string. “Not by you. I’m pregnant with you. You’re going to be the baby.” He thought for a moment that she was going to lunge at him, and in that moment she thought he might lunge at her, or throw something hard. After this moment, Mrs. Else got up to make the pasta, and Will went off to take a shower. When he came back they all had dinner. That night he sat up in bed with Mrs. Else, both in their pajamas, and wished he was somewhere else, in a real hotel, with real strangers. “Isn’t it lovely?” she said, at last. “What isn’t?” “There’s going to be a baby.” Will felt the sweat covering him again, leaking out of his bones and up through his pores and follicles. “I thought you were protecting these girls,” he said, as if by pretending to be the father he could escape being the baby. “Oh yes,” she said with a smile. “From trouble. Bad influences, bad news, that sort of thing. But there’s going to be a baby! What greater miracle? You act like you haven’t heard. Have you heard? We’re miracle workers, aren’t we? Every time, we are blessed with a brand new blue-eyed blue sparkling baby boy!” All at once, he grabbed her neck, dog tired, shaking her to keep awake. He pushed her off the bed and into the carpet, and shoved his elbow in her mouth and tore her pajama top open and then pulled her pajama pants down around her knees. The look on her face was so scary that he could hardly see it. It was a face about to yawn down into a skull and then fall off its neck. He could feel his energy leaving him, his bones turning to milk and coming gently unjoined, the pulp seething again from his armpits. “Will, I was only saying… ” she gasped. He stopped, pulled his own pajama pants back up, and helped her with hers. If she had recognized the act, he knew, it would have shown. The motion was so sudden that the charade would have been broken, something in her eyes or mouth would have revealed itself, and Will would have been free. But it hadn’t and he wasn’t. No one had lied. He crawled back on the bed and began to sob, and Mrs. Else crawled next to him, rubbing his back and pushing the hair out of his eyes. Tears flowed from his head and drenched everything in sight, and inside it all he fell asleep, both boat and boatman in his own bathwater. So it was true. Two things became clear. First, Drifter Jim haunted this place, and his presence here would always be welcome, as long as he was polite and punctual. The generations of girls who had passed through, and the generations that had been born to them, filled a tremendous bleacher in Will’s mind, teeming and swarming in the wind, throwing their hats in the air. If Mrs. Else was untouched by sex it might mean that she herself had never been born, and had thus been called up out of nothing to brood in blessed blissful ignorant peace. There was no wasted space in this world, it seemed, no heat lost even in all of the night. The second thing was that all of this had to do with why she’d married him, and he her, and why their neighbor Deb, when she’d been around, had been so attractive, so welcome a change, until she’d taken off to roam the Dakotas, leaving him once again susceptible to the powers that be, that were, the hooks that had been dangling forever, waiting to snap up friendly, soft-spoken Will Strite and crank him bodily through the works. Claire’s pregnancy proceeded smoothly. Details and facts slipped away from Will, as he gestated inside her. He hardly made it to work anymore. The Harvard Advocate
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More and more names, people he had known, places he had worked, rivers he had crossed, would not be kept, returned to where they had come from. He knew he was very sick, that his insides were rotting, being sugared and spooned out like half a grapefruit. He spent more and more time in the shower, knowing that the sweat would never wash off, but he was safe in here, no one would catch him as long as the hot water held out. One day Ralph came up on the terrace with his master key and unlocked Deb’s old apartment, bringing out the pile of mail and dumping it behind the vending machine, with the cans and wrappers. When Deb came back, Will knew, he would be gone. He would like to ask her a few things, about her trip and tell her about his, but he wouldn’t be able to wait. One night, when he was sitting in his car, Claire’s belly now huge and cumbersome inside the house, he saw Drifter Jim pull into the lot, and somehow he managed to convince him to go out to the steakhouse for a late night meal, just the two of them, father and son, so to speak. So there they were at the steakhouse, eating the bucket of peanuts that came with the table, cracking open the shells and throwing them on the floor, as everyone did. “Used to be a busboy here,” said Jim. “Swept up my fair share of shells, let me tell you. You know Cal, works here? Swept her shells a fair share too.” “So you’ve lived here a long time then?” asked Will. “Born and raised,” said Jim, flicking at his lighter and using it to read the menu, as if they were out in a tent in a huge empty field. They each ordered a steak, and soon small dishes of cole slaw and potatoes and onion rings began to surround them. “So,” started Will, emboldened by the knowledge that he didn’t have many meals left in town, “in what way, then, are you a drifter?” Jim looked over at him, his eyes bigger and sadder than usual. “Just my nature, I guess you’d say. Also my line of work.” “Kind of roving the universe, looking for girls?” asked Will. “Could say that. We all get used in the way we’re supposed to. I do a fair bit of roving, for sure. Keep my eyes peeled. Side of the road, middle of the road, you name it. That’s why it’s best to live at a motel, you know, the roving sort of comes to you that way. Can be a drifter right from the safety of your own… ” he trailed off, catching himself. “Know what they call me in bed?” Will knew that they didn’t call him anything, just opened their mouth and shook like air wasn’t enough and never had been. Jim waited a second for Will to think. Then he said, “Jungle Jim. That’s what. That’s me.” In a moment, Will asked, “Are they… your children… is there something wrong with them?” The steaks arrived, and they paused and ate, Will’s milky teeth cracking as he bit down, knowing that the steak would cost him his mouth, but he kept trying. He could taste his teeth, rich as a steak. “Like demons or something?” Jim picked up where they’d left off. “Right, or… ” “I don’t know, to tell the truth. Don’t know where the kids come from, don’t know where they go. Not my business. The catching them from the air and planting them in the dirt, that’s me.” A pause, left over from an earlier time. And then, all at once, Jim’s eyes flared and he stood up and shouted for Cal and the whole rest of the steakhouse to hear, “Caught you though, in particular, you dishrag sweat-dripping God-begging fucking miniscule little pervertwillow, huh, didn’t I? You limp spineless sea cracker raven baiting raving shitshoveling fucking crowless dim limp dimpled fuck! I really had you going and got you good!” Drifter Jim burst out laughing so loudly that the busboy panicked and brought them two new buckets of peanuts, spilled in the shuffle. On one of his last days, Will went down to the reception office and, finding Ralph missing, crept to the back office door and knocked, softly at first, and then harder and harder until it opened up. “You got the book?” he asked. An obese man with a rattail was sitting behind a desk, the lights out like before. “What book?” 52
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“The one we were looking at.” “Who’s we?” the man’s face could hardly support its own weight. Will explained the full extent of his situation, and finally the man relented and took out the book. “So, what’s in it?” he asked. He was like a death row inmate now, his questions and requests all fraught with a certain desperate finality. Anything he was given to know now he would not know for long. “You know, a real bookie book, bets, wagers, stats, that sort of thing. Names, addresses, coming and going. We profit from the exchange.” “Exchange?” “Clearing house sort of business,” said the man. “Who’re you clearing? Whose house?” “People come in and out of play, that’s all,” he said. “In and out of where we can see them. They stop off here, and we keep their track.” “Like in and out of life?” “If you want,” the man said. “Sometimes they’re just showing up, and we can do a little bit to help them out, get them on their feet, right, and sometimes we can help them on their way out when they’re leaving, do a bit of a cashing in of whatever spare change there may happen to be.” “I’m going to be born any day now,” said Will. The man looked at his book and nodded, acting about as surprised as if Will had said “it’s Saturday” and he had looked down at a calendar and seen that it was. “Is that an arrival or a departure?” “That’s your business, traveler. Far as we’re concerned. Send us a postcard, know what I mean?” Will narrowed his eyes. “What can you do for me?” “Do?” “You know, help me out a little bit. Cash my change.” “You don’t need no help, traveler. Where you’re going, you’ll be taken care of.” “Yeah, I expect to be. But for now, let’s see what I can get.” The nearness of the birth was scrambling what was left of his mind. He talked and talked, and then, when it was over, walked away with eight hundred dollars in his front shirt pocket. He knew that today was the day he’d have to leave. He packed his things, as much as he could fit into a single bag, and took a last shower, put on cologne and gel in his hair, and combed it as neatly as he could, fistfuls of it falling out as he towel-dried his head, and then drove his car out of the lot and onto the expressway into the city. He parked down by the river and walked into midtown, carrying his bag. He went behind a building, took his pants down, and tucked in his shirt. This act, he remembered, was still free, and good enough to make even a melting tag man look presentable. Soon, he found himself in the thickest stretch of the main avenue, where all the sidewalk bars and boutiques had congregated. He sat down at one of them, for maybe the first time ever, and ordered whatever he wanted, peeling the skin off his eight hundred dollars. He had a big lunch and then drinks and dessert and called for more when he wanted more, for seconds and thirds, or for new things just to taste them, whatever the chef had marked with a yellow star or a cartoon chili pepper. He could feel Claire’s hunger like the raspy breath of God, and did all that he could to feed her. All that day he lived like a king off the money he’d earned. After he was stuffed and tired of sitting, he took his bag and started walking again, right through the thick warm center of the city and out to the other side, where it once again began to taper into huts and litter. He had forgotten about his car, but when he took his windbreaker off the back of his chair and fitted it back over his shoulders, he felt a weight in one of the zip up pockets and reached inside and found the map, the one he’d used that day he drove Claire around the city. He took it out and unfolded it, holding it up in front of his nose while he walked, and gazed at the pen lines he had made. Yes, he now could see, that place had been a motel, a good one, but now he was moving out. He crumpled up the map and zipped it back into the pocket of his windbreaker. The skyline in front of him was broken by railroad bridges and then the roof of a tunnel, and once he had gone through enough of these, passing through one ring after another that girded the The Harvard Advocate
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city, he was back on the highway, walking through the tall grass on the sides and gazing way upward at the billboards towering overhead, reminding everyone of the state’s gun laws or all about the adventures of Jesus Christ, or simply advertising a fireworks depot or a strip of bedrooms that, for a night or two, would set you back hardly at all. Cars flew past him as the afternoon wore on, and then it was mostly trucks once the exit numbers dwindled and he approached the state line. Claire was probably in the hospital by now, calling out for morphine, Mrs. Else by her side, holding her hand even, but also, in another part of herself, looking forward to helping Claire pack her things and check the train schedule, and also, in yet another part of herself, a part she hardly knew about, a room all the way off down the hall, picturing the next girl who would arrive, preparing to do it all over again. He began to feel weak, in his joints and bones, and his vision got worse, his bag heavier and his back soft and chubby. He could taste the morphine in Claire’s veins, washing over him in a salty torrent. Any moment now he would collapse and be picked up by a doctor in a room and smacked on the bottom and commanded to breathe, to open his eyes and begin to breathe, and to breathe and look up, and to keep breathing even while looking up and all around, to keep breathing even then. He fingered the wad of cash in his jacket and fell to his knees, and then curled up in the highway grass that grew into a pine grove and smoothed his disappearance. He woke up again, groggy from the long nap, candy wrappers pressed into his pants, and walked down to the next exit and checked into a new motel. In his room he pulled down the shades, and decided to sleep it off and head to the bus station in the morning. When the maid came to pound on his door at noon the next day, and demand that he leave, he put his shoes back on and went back out the door and into the parking lot. For now, he took his shoes off, sat on the edge of the bed, and cranked the TV all the way around to the Spanish channels with the volume way down low. Almost blind, he sweated and waited there for the next thing to happen.
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Morning Meets the Lodge For D.W. Abram Kaplan
Maui is across the finger of sea. Four birds Abandon their trees and bob. I woke them up. As I go to get my book I see a spiderweb marking each Room, and more besides. Mine wags and like a soap bubble is pastel. An empty hexagon marks where a fly was, At the top. The spider is exactly in the middle. Three other spiders are in sight. One wants To make his web where one’s web already is. Why don’t I see this more, one spider In another’s web? Why is it this way, that the webless Seek the most precarious? Twenty-seven lines hold the marked web up. *** This island rose up to receive the bird but it Received the palm. It was naked and Shallow and fish-shaped to mark its origin, Out of the sea. We swam in its mouth. The coconut, Readied by a reflex in seawater, settles, Converting its own flesh into a tree. A bobbing coconut, readied by its passion, refuses To open. No. It lands and it opens Canopies. It bursts and is still and frondlike is No spider. The trunk achieves the sky. Each frond Blackly breaks the light.
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Last Winter Cora Currier
There is no winter but she saved two pomegranates for me from the deer and the salt winds. They grew into the window. Each year there are more fields let go to seed. She cannot stop planting even as the green up and envelopes her. I must count each leaf, stroke each new moss and name each. I must sit in one place until I have named and kissed each thing and then I turn to the next in my orderly radius and they keep sprouting exuberant and I am weary of counting the wildness. I do not know the seasons any longer coming as they do endlessly or never: here I am left counting the small and kind.
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Envoy
Carriers Ben Cosgrove
There are only about 4,500 people living on the tiny island of Heimaey, and each summer they have the rather unique distinction of being outnumbered by puffins, nearly a thousand to one. The people know Heimaey as the home of Iceland’s most important harbor. They also know it to be the largest island in a volcanic archipelago called Vestmannaeyjær that lies about six miles off the mainland’s southwest coast, where Heimaey lies north of the smaller islands of Alfsey, Brandur, Suðurey, Surstsey. Puffins, who tend to be deaf to concerns of commerce and unintimidated by pronunciation, care only that Heimaey is an excellent spot to lay eggs. People have lived in the village on Heimaey for well over a thousand years, and puffins have almost certainly been coming here for longer than that. Puffins live at sea for most of the year and return annually to their burrows onshore for the warmer months. For whatever reason, the cliffs of Heimaey have long been prime real estate in the puffin world. The birds return to Vestmannaeyjær in enormous masses late each spring, whereupon they immediately set to the tasks of courting, mating, and tending to the resulting 58
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eggs. In mid-summer the eggs hatch, and the rest of the adult puffins’ season is spent attending to the shrill demands of the infant chicks—known, rather adorably, as pufflings. It should perhaps be pointed out that pufflings may in fact be the cutest living things in the world. They’re downy, wide-eyed, and almost perfectly round, and even when they’re finally large enough to toddle out into the world on their own, they are still only about the size of very young kittens. Their voices have not yet hardened into the groaning yawp of a full-grown puffin, and their audible communication consists almost entirely of a light, agreeable peeping. They mature quickly though, and during the last weeks of summer, the chirping balls of waddling fluff wander out of their burrows and amble clumsily off of the island’s cliffs to leave Heimaey in their first flight. It takes them straight into the ocean, where they’ll stay at sea for a year or two. They learn quickly to fish and to fend for themselves, and within two months of their freefall from the Heimaey cliffs, many will have flown over a thousand miles to the waters off the coast of Newfoundland. Some years later,
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they’ll return to Vestmannaeyjær, and will again and again after that: puffins mate annually, and tend to continue the practice throughout their thirty-year lifespan. This naturally results in a stupefying output of pufflings for one island. But that first step, getting off of Heimaey on one’s first try, is harder than it seems. When the pufflings emerge from the burrows, their parents have often left already, leaving their offspring’s fate to the centuries of preprogramming that ought to be guiding the baby birds instinctively into the ocean. They leave at night, and appear to use the moonlight’s reflection on the water to set their course. This, alas, does not always work out. Pufflings are sometimes not as savvy as Nature might have ideally had them, and each night, hundreds of the young birds become confused, disoriented by the lights of the village. They crash-land into the human settlement on Heimaey, whose innumerable dangers range from cars and trucks to predators and starvation. Furthermore, the pufflings are trapped and helpless on flat ground, unable to fly at their young age without the benefit of a cliffside drop to start from. And so, during the weeks in late summer when the pufflings are making their migration, the children of Heimaey come out every night in droves to rescue the wayward ones, the birds that spiral into town by the dozen every hour. They sweep the street corners with flashlights and load whatever befuddled pufflings they can find into cardboard boxes, in which they transport them home for a night of recuperation. The next morning, the rescued puffins are brought to the seashore, pointed vaguely westward, and thrown wildly, wings flapping, into the sheltering sea. This is by now a longstanding tradition on Heimaey, recently formalized and endowed with the endearingly clunky label “Psyjueftirlitið með Brúsi Bjargfasta.” This translates literally as “Puffling Patrol with Milk Jug the Rescuer,” but in fact refers to the author Bruce McMillan, to whose name the closest phonetic equivalent in the Icelandic vocabulary appears to have been “Brúsi” (“milk jug”).
In 1995 McMillan published a photo essay for children called “Nights of the Pufflings,” which brought international attention to the young puffin rescuers on Heimaey. In addition, the Psyjueftirlitið is partially intended as a way to gather information about the birds so that they might be better served in years to come. Rescuers are asked to register and weigh each bird they find, to note the animal’s condition and the date, time, and location of its discovery. The last photos in McMillan’s book are of some small, cherubic Icelandic children releasing pufflings into the ocean. In the first, one of the birds is cradled in a girl’s arms and looking around contentedly. In the second, a young boy on a beach is crouched like the center on a football team, holding between his legs not a ball but a confused and yet strikingly unperturbed puffling. The final image is of a girl on the release of this same motion. Her hands are over her head and in the distance ahead of her a recentlyflung puffling is twisting, rearranging itself some twenty feet above the ocean. The bird may not look very confident at the moment of the shutter click, but its wings have awkwardly unfolded and it’s looking straight ahead and it’s angling down into the vast blue expanses of where it meant to go in the first place. *** On Cape Cod, baby sea turtles hatch from eggs buried on the beaches and skitter down into the water at the mid-summer moment when they finally sense it’s warm enough to do so. The distance from the nests to the surf can be a long trek for a tiny turtle, but in most places, scores of helpful volunteers manage to arrive just in time to help the hatchlings along to the ocean, watching as the young reptiles paddle cheerfully off into the sea. For a while, it’s a great place to be, and the turtles grow quickly while feeding in Cape Cod Bay over the next few months. But their lives are very quickly complicated by the fact of New England seasonality. The waters off Wellfleet in December are nowhere anyone wants to be, particularly if you The Harvard Advocate
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are cold-blooded. As such, it is common practice among the turtles to migrate south each fall with as much haste as their species can muster. But each year, a surprising number of the juvenile reptiles either forgets to migrate or just can’t figure out how. Their body rapidly assumes the temperature of the water around them, they go hypothermic, and many die. Others drift to shore, where they lay helplessly, running the risk of being eaten or worse. Luckily, Cape Cod is home to many who care deeply about this sort of thing. The hypothermic turtles are scooped lovingly up from where they lie on the beach, or are swept up from the frigid waters of a Massachusetts winter into rowboats and Boston Whalers to be ferried ashore. The volunteers spirit the turtles away to rehabilitation centers running all the way from Woods Hole to Maine, where they are treated for their symptoms and slowly warmed back to life. After the winter has softened into spring and then summer, the turtles are discharged and brought back to the outer Cape, where they are returned to the water in the hope they can get it right this time. In the winter of 2008, five Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles, members of the most endangered species of sea turtle in the world, were beneficiaries of this practice. And on a cloudless day in late July, 60
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they were ceremoniously released back into the water in an event attended by throngs of cheering onlookers. Two had been equipped with alien-looking, antennaed satellite tags that would allow their post-release wanderings to be monitored by the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. The affair was covered by media ranging from the Cape Cod Times to Smithsonian Magazine, on whose website one can watch a video that sets the turtle’s release to some of the most soaring, triumphant orchestral music ever heard. In it volunteers, their arms clamped around the wriggling Kemp’s Ridley’s, emerge one by one from a crowd of board shorts, sunglasses, and straw hats, and carry their charges down to the lapping water. They lay them on the beach and the turtles lift their hoary heads to the shoreline and crawl purposefully toward the ocean. This takes a while. Their unhurried walk home goes off more or less without a hitch. In one case, one of the turtles gets knocked back by a few waves, gives up, and opts instead to sit stubbornly on the beach to the certain frustration of the assembled crowd; it has to be picked up and manually tossed into the surf by an embarrassed volunteer. The others are more resilient, however, and as violins fly skyward and cymbals burst joyously on the soundtrack, they trudge into the churning ocean like tanks into battle. And the crowd, unexpectedly attentive, watches admiringly until the last turtle, the radio antenna on its back slicing neatly through the gentle waves, has disappeared once again into the sea. *** The Trans-Canada Highway plows straight through Alberta’s Banff National Park. In the beginning, it wasn’t a very serious concern: this section of the highway was designed as a quiet two-laner, a means for a leisurely drive through one of the most scenic places in North America. But as Canada grew, so did the highway, which has since become a vital link between the country’s east and west. Over the last thirty years, parts of the road strung through Banff have out of necessity been pumped up into a very serious, four-lane, divided highway. In a National Park,
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the road now looks somewhat out of place. Canada approached the highway-twinning matter delicately. Recognizing the importance of keeping important habitats connected, they poured money into developing ways for animals to continue going about their lives with minimal impact from the human construction. As a result, there is now no other location in the world with as many or as many different types of wildlife crossings as Banff. The crossings range widely, from fifty-meter wide overpasses to tiny concrete tunnels, and they can accommodate everything from insects to grizzly bears. As part of the highway project, the park also developed a groundbreaking system of video-monitoring the crossings around the clock, which has collected a record amount of data about the animals’ migration habits. Since the full-time monitoring program started in 1996, Banff has counted hundreds of thousands of times that eleven species of large mammals have used the crossings. The animal crossings have been a resounding success by virtually every measure. To promote the projects, a page was set up where a visitor to the Parks Canada website can peruse a series of photos, taken with the remote sensing cameras, of various animals utilizing the crossings. In one, a family of grizzlies clambers over an earth-covered overpass; in another, a wolf slinks through a concrete tunnel. A third shows a pair of deer at the entrance to the Redearth Creek Underpass, an elliptical, metal culvert. Behind them is the large rock bed and three-meter-high ungulate-proof fence that the park installed to corral them into the tunnel and protect them from the screaming four lanes that here fall just out of frame. One deer is beginning to proceed on through the tunnel, but her partner has paused. She is looking quizzically off to the side, to the fence, to the boulders, almost as if she is wondering what else she could possibly be expected to do under the circumstances. *** The British Hedgehog Preservation Society is headquartered in Shropshire, England, whence
it issues leaflets about hedgehog awareness, newsletters illuminating recent hedgehog-related research and news articles, and the occasional catalog of hedgehog paraphernalia (the “Hogalogue” perennially features themed neckties, cookie cutters, and stationery, among other hedgehog must-haves). The BHPS is far from being a passive, everyday fan club, however, and when a systemic threat to the well-being of their beloved erinaceids is perceived, they have been known to leap into serious action. Such was the case in 2006, when the society went to war with the McDonalds Corporation over the treacherous shape— that is, one misleadingly inviting to a hedgehog, who stands a chance of being trapped inside after venturing in for residual ice cream—of the restaurant’s McFlurry dessert containers. Society members searched roadways for the containers and carried many captive hogs back into the wild where they released them by hand. But, as the newsletter lamented that summer, “it will never be known how many were never found at all.” The petitioning went right up to September of 2006, when McDonald’s made the following announcement: “In consultation with the BHPS [British Hedgehog Preservation Society], we have undertaken significant research and testing to develop new packaging for our McFlurry dessert that addresses this issue. We are delighted to announce that we have now introduced a new lid with a smaller aperture for our McFlurry dessert. The smaller aperture of the lid has been designed to prevent hedgehogs from entering the McFlurry container in the unfortunate incidence that a lid is littered and is then accessible to wildlife.” The new McFlurry containers hit British McDonald’s locations within days of the press reThe Harvard Advocate
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***
sighs. “Every single night, literally hundreds of animals get run over, just in the space of about eight-tenths of a mile. A couple of years ago, I’d estimate we found one thousand dead animals in that spot over the course of two nights. It’s just unbelievable.”
“One night, there were so many woodfrogs coming down the hill that I could hear it,” Steve Parren says, and even over the phone you can tell his eyes are widening in memory of the experience. “It was cool and freaky at the same time, you know, hundreds if not thousands of animals bounding down that hill at once.” Parren is the state biologist for Vermont, and the hill he describes is near his home in Monkton. It’s wooded and undeveloped and it folds down into a marshy wetland. The adjacency of these two environments amounts to some sort of utopia for salamanders, frogs, and their kin. An unbelievable number of species are now in the eons-old habit of spending the colder part of the year upland and summering in the marsh. The Monkton-Vergennes Road cuts directly through this habitat. On nights in early spring when the rains come, thousands of animals, having finished their winter term up on the hill, skitter down en masse to the wetlands to breed. And they just get massacred. There’s a curve in the road as it rounds the hill, making it hard for motorists to see the parade of creatures making for the wetlands (especially on the damp nights that the animals favor for traveling). And the recent uptick in traffic along the Monkton-Vergennes Road from cars avoiding the construction on nearby Route 7 doesn’t help the body count either. “You always see dead things by the side of the road there,” a younger Monkton native notes when it’s brought up. “Not just the amphibians—and there are a ton of those, to be sure—but coyotes, raccoons, I saw a fox once. There’s a lot of emotionally salient death that happens there.” The state biologist obviously loves these animals, and you can tell it pains him to deliver the statistics he’s been collecting about the site for the last two decades. “We have well over a 30 percent death rate at that one site,” Parren
And so for more than twenty years, Parren and a motley band of like-minded conservationists have assembled on wet spring nights to carry all of the frogs, salamanders, and other wetlandbound fauna safely across the road by hand. For years it was just him, but these days there are a few others with an interest in the creatures’ safety. Now, for about three or four weeks every spring, a group of between three and six volunteers assembles in the mist or fog at around ten at night. Defying their own safety, they crouch in the dark and the mud alongside the MonktonVergennes Road, picking up spotted salamanders, peepers, newts, and frogs, and carrying them over to where it is safe. After years of fighting for it, Parren and his fellow conservationists finally won a grant from the Federal Highway Administration to go toward the construction of a box culvert (not unlike the ones in Banff) under the road, a setup that would corral the animals through an appealingly dark and damp underground passage to the wetlands on the other side. It’s a contentious project: not all Vermonters are thrilled to see the transportation funds go toward salamander safety, but the volunteers are delighted. “Even with upwards of eight or nine people out there, a lot of amphibians are getting hit,” one of them told Vermont Public Radio shortly after the grant was awarded. “So they definitely need some other help. The hand-carry method is not sustainable.” There are still a lot more funds to be tracked down though, and Parren doesn’t expect that they’ll be able to break ground on the new culvert (he’s ultimately hoping for many of them, maybe even like ten) until the fall of 2011 at the earliest. While building something like this into the design of a new road would be pretty simple, trying to retrofit a two-lane state highway running through central Vermont (not an area known for an abundance of convenient alternate
lease. In the time since, the Society, arguably the local authority on such matters, has not reported a single hedgehog found trapped inside an ice cream container.
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routes) is “a bit harder,” he admits. “It’s really just a tragedy, the fact that something as arbitrary as a change in how humans get around can so dramatically upset the way that these animals have lived for thousands of years. Now it’s just the changes in human traffic patterns that are putting all of these countless species in severe danger of local extinction.” It’s this sympathy and understanding that brings him back again and again to the roadside on rainy nights in March and April. Parren and his fellow volunteers have carried amphibians for decades now. All of it has been to protect a way of life, one now critically endangered by environmental changes that fell well beyond any of those creatures’ control or even comprehension. *** While the oldest part of Heimaey has been around for 12,000 years, most of its northeastern corner has only existed since 1973. In that year, Eldfell, a innocuous hill to the east of the village, surprised everybody by blowing tons upon tons of ash across the island and setting in motion a lava flow that would very nearly necessitate Heimaey’s permanent evacuation.
For months, the lava seeped over and around the island, swallowing Heimaey’s built and natural landscape and throwing the fate of its all-important harbor into serious peril. Five thousand people fled the island in fishing boats and several small propeller planes sent from the mainland; an extensive arsenal of water pumps was assembled and deployed by the Icelandic government in a desperate effort to hold back the advancing lava. Within five months, the island had grown in size by one-fifth. Over 400 homes had been destroyed. Their owners, faced with the choice to stay or go, had emptied their houses, swept the floors, and in some cases even watched helplessly as the shells of the places where they had so recently lived were crushed and consumed by ash and molten rock. But even as the lava came, the prop planes and fishing boats carried the evacuees safely to the mainland. And the pumps did hold back the lava, at least enough to preserve most of the village and commercial access to the harbor. And after it was all over, the boats and the airplanes reassembled on the south coast of Iceland and loaded up the people who had been forced to leave and carried them all back home.
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Special Thanks The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2009-2010 academic year. They have made it possible for The Advocate to remain committed to publishing the best literature and art that the Harvard campus has to offer, four times each year. The contributions of the following individuals have not only supported the printing of our magazine, but have also made it possible for The Advocate to further our mission of promoting the arts on campus. Last year, our building at 21 South Street was home to a host of literary and artistic events, including visits from Jeffrey Eugenides, Denis Johnson, Robert Pinsky, and Forrest Gander to name only a few, as well as several concerts featuring local artists. We have expanded the Advocate’s presence in the neighborhood with a Community Outreach Program, offering a creative writing workshop run by our own members in a local homeless shelter. Our last issue, The Harvard Advocate Bestiary brought together several exceptionally talented members of the Harvard community as well as creative minds like Jay McInerny, Amy Hempel, Mark Strand, and Louise Bourgeois under one publication. PATRONS David L. Klein Foundation, Anonymous BENEFACTORS Glenn Schwetz, Anonymous DONORS Bruce Boucher, Anonymous FRIENDS Daphne Abel, Jamie and Bobbie Gates, Nancy Hannaford Greer, Jessica Henderson, Walt Hunter, Robert Johnston, Taro Kuriyama,Anthony Pino, Gregory Scruggs, Emery Younger Your contributions have supported the creation our new website (www.theharvardadvocate.com), including features like video hosting and online subscribing. We are dedicated to improving and extending our web presence by expanding the breadth of the back catalog of issues available for purchasing and viewing online. However, digital development can be costly and, as we pursue this project of digital expansion, your contributions to The Harvard Advocate are more valuable than ever. Please consider supporting The Harvard Advocate! All gifts to The Harvard Advocate endowment fund are fully tax deductible according to 501(c)(3) non-profit donation guidelines. Gifts will be acknowledged in the four issues following receipt according to the giving categories of Patron ($1000 and over), Benefactor ($500 and over), Donor ($200 and over), and Friend ($50-$199). Contributors will receive a complimentary year’s subscription to the magazine. Checks should be made out to “Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.” Envelopes may be mailed to 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Please email contact@theharvardadvocate.com with any inquiries regarding gifts to The Harvard Advocate. Thank you for helping to support Mother Advocate.
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