Quarterly Journal, no. 28: Domestic Issue by lareviewofbooks

9 781940 660523 5 1 2 0 0 > ISBN 978-1-940660-52-3$12.00 LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS QUARTERLY JOURNAL : DOMESTIC no . 28

Books to Think With From Library Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China David Der-wei Wang “Wang illustrates that poetic allusion and ambiguity are ways of o ering alternative truths. In China, then, ﬁction matters as an alternative way of and a response to speaking truth—dark as it is, Chinese ﬁction begets hope and light.”

Off Limits New Writings on Fear and Sin Nawal El Saadawi Translated by Nariman Youssef “The leading spokeswoman on the status of women in the Arab World.”—Guardian “Nawal El Saadawi writes with directness and passion.”—New York Times Paper $19.95

—Barbara Mittler, Heidelberg University The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities at Brandeis University Paper $35.00

Christmas and the Qur’an Karl-Josef Kuschel Translated by Simon Pare “A passionate endeavor to understand the di erent narratives given around the Christmas story (or stories) and put these in context.”—New Arab Paper $19.95 Reynard the Fox Retold by Anne Louise Avery “Adding mischievous contemporary twists, Avery has wonderfully refreshed the medieval collection and shows how these traditional animal fables, with their large and lively cast of characters and their wicked and seductive protagonist, have lost none of their truth-telling power.”—Marina Warner Cloth $30.00 From the From

To place an ad in the LARB Quarterly Journal, email adsales@lareviewofbooks.org unpress.nevada.edu collectionlive-wirefull of characters who aren’t afraid to bare their souls.”

Sara NoviĆ, author of Girl at War “One of the systemcruelillogical,ourguidebooksstraightforwardmosttocomplicated,andoftenimmigrationI’veread.”RoquePlanas, HuffPost “Murray makes it reading.”essentialItfromsheltermaintainforimpossiblereaderstotheofdistancepolitics...isabsolutely “A significant and Branchliterature.”environmentalliterature,Montanaliterature,AmericanontocontributionwelcomescholarshipwesternandMichaelP. , author of Rants from the Hill

PUBLISHER: TOM LUTZ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: BORIS DRALYUK MANAGING EDITOR: MEDAYA OCHER CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: SARA DAVIS, MASHINKA FIRUNTS HAKOPIAN, ELIZABETH METZGER, CALLIE SISKEL ART DIRECTOR: PERWANA NAZIF DESIGN DIRECTOR: LAUREN HEMMING GRAPHIC DESIGNER: TOM COMITTA ART CONTRIBUTORS: JA'TOVIA GARY, ROSEMARY MAYER, REYNALDO RIVERA PRODUCTION AND COPY DESK CHIEF: CORD BROOKS AD SALES: BILL HARPER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: IRENE YOON MANAGING DIRECTOR: JESSICA KUBINEC BOARD OF DIRECTORS: ALBERT LITEWKA (CHAIR), JODY ARMOUR, REZA ASLAN, BILL BENENSON, LEO BRAUDY, EILEEN CHENG-YIN CHOW, MATT GALSOR, ANNE GERMANACOS, TAMERLIN GODLEY, SETH GREENLAND, GERARD GUILLEMOT, DARRYL HOLTER, STEVEN LAVINE, ERIC LAX, TOM LUTZ, SUSAN MORSE, MARY SWEENEY, LYNNE THOMPSON, BARBARA VORON, MATTHEW WEINER, JON WIENER, JAMIE WOLF COVER ART: ROSEMARY MAYER, UNTITLED, 1971, COLORED PENCIL AND GRAPHIC ON PAPER, 17 X 14 INCHES. COLLECTION OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, MODERN WOMEN’S FUND. COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF ROSEMARY MAYER. INTERNS & VOLUNTEERS: NICOLE LIU, ELLIOT SCHIFF

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS no . 28 QUARTERLY JOURNAL DOMESTIC ISSUE

Michael David-Fox, Georgetown University “Brooks introduces the reader to wondrous dimensions of Russian cultural creativity. By breaching the distinction between low and high culture, he reveals how popular themes and imagery permeated great works of literature and the arts, leavening their serious-minded discourse with doses of magical thinking and imagination.”

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essays 11 QUEEN OF REPS (ON SPACESHIP EARTH) by Elvia Wilk 32 AGAINST GRACE by Julian Randall 52 SANCTUARY UNMASKED: THE FIRST TIME LOS ANGELES (SORT OF) BECAME A CITY OF REFUGE by Paul A. Kramer 73 HIGH FEMME CAMP ANTICS by Jenny Fran Davis 104 EXCERPTS"MAGIC"&"MONUMENT",FROM LOVE IS AN EXCOUNTRY by Randa Jarrar 125 WHO DO YOU SERVE WHEN YOU SERVE YOURSELF? CONSUMER LABOR, AUTOMATION, AND A CENTURY OF DOMESTICSELF-SERVICELABOR by Mackenzie Weeks fiction 37 IN ANOTHER LIFE by Miki Arndt 89 MIDNIGHT DOUGH by Taisia Kitaiskaia 119 THE SANDBOX by Annette Weisser 130 THE COAST by Colin Winette poetry 31 VIKINGS by Carl Phillips 49 TWO POEMS by Sylvie Baumgartel 85 FALLING BODIES by Deborah Paredez 116 BLUE WILLOW by Armen Davoudian no . 28 QUARTERLY JOURNAL : DOMESTIC CONTENTS

346 pages | 32 b/w illustrations, 16 43073.indd124/02/202043073.indd1 Resource Radicals ofSenseTheMuñozEstebanJosé Edited

Richard Wortman, Columbia University 2019 ISBN: 9781108484466

The Firebird and the Fox Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks Jeffrey Brooks, Johns Hopkins University “Brooks brings a lifetime of learning to bear in his new interpretation of Russian and Soviet culture in its most creative century. He is able to suggest how a variety of cultural elds over time grappled with the same set of recurring Russian dilemmas, distilling the powerful motifs that writers, artists, and intellectuals repeatedly embroidered into their works. No one who studies or loves Russian culture can afford to ignore this book.”

December

dukeupress.edu FromPetro-NationalismtoPost-ExtractivisminEcuador TheaRiofrancos Resource Radicals PLAYTHEINTHESYSTEMANNAWATKINSFISHER ofSenseTheMuñozEstebanJoséBrown Edited and with an Introduction by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o Wld i ck dtheisorder dofesire PressUniversityDukefromBooksNew The Play in the System The Art of Parasitical Resistance ANNA WATKINS FISHER Wild Things The Disorder of Desire JACK HALBERSTAM Perverse Modernities Utopian Ruins A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era JIE LI Sinotheory The Sense of Brown JOSÉ ESTEBAN MUÑOZ JOSHUA CHAMBERS-LETSON and TAVIA NYONG'O, editors Perverse Modernities Resource Radicals From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador THEA RIOFRANCOS Radical Américas Utopian MEMORIALA MUSEUM OF MAOTHEERAJIELI Ruins Lesley Stern Diary of Lesley Stern a Detour Diary of a Detour LESLEY STERN Writing Matters! dukeupress.edu FromPetro-NationalismtoPost-ExtractivisminEcuador TheaRiofrancos Resource Radicals PLAYTHEINTHESYSTEMANNAWATKINSFISHER ofSenseTheMuñozEstebanJoséBrown Edited and with an Introduction by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o Wld Things J ck Halberstam dtheisorder dofesire PressUniversityDukefromBooksNew The Play in the System The Art of Parasitical Resistance ANNA WATKINS FISHER Wild Things The Disorder of Desire JACK HALBERSTAM Perverse Modernities Utopian Ruins A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era JIE LI Sinotheory The Sense of Brown JOSÉ ESTEBAN MUÑOZ JOSHUA CHAMBERS-LETSON and TAVIA NYONG'O, editors Perverse Modernities Resource Radicals From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador THEA RIOFRANCOS Radical Américas Utopian MEMORIALA MUSEUM OF MAOTHEERAJIELI Ruins Lesley Stern Diary of Lesley Stern a Detour Diary of a Detour LESLEY STERN Writing Matters! dukeupress.edu FromPetro-NationalismtoPost-ExtractivisminEcuador TheaRiofrancos Resource Radicals PLAYTHEINTHESYSTEMANNAWATKINSFISHER ofSenseTheMuñozEstebanJoséBrown Edited and with an Introduction by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o Wld Things J ck Halberstam dtheisorder dofesire PressUniversityDukefromBooksNew The Play in the System The Art of Parasitical Resistance ANNA WATKINS FISHER Wild Things The Disorder of Desire JACK HALBERSTAM Perverse Modernities Utopian Ruins A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era JIE LI Sinotheory The Sense of Brown JOSÉ ESTEBAN MUÑOZ JOSHUA CHAMBERS-LETSON and TAVIA NYONG'O, editors Perverse Modernities Resource Radicals From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador THEA RIOFRANCOS Radical Américas Utopian MEMORIALA MUSEUM OF MAOTHEERAJIELI Ruins Lesley Stern Diary of Lesley Stern a Detour Diary of a Detour LESLEY STERN Writing Matters!

The Domestic has also shifted in the larger sense of the word. We have just endured an exhausting election and the future of our nation is foremost in the news, our conversations, and our collective conscious. Our attention has been rapt by houses outside of our own: our chambers of government, and of course, the White House. This issue of the LARB Quarterly Journal grapples with Domesticity in all of its forms. In “Queen of Reps”, Elvia Wilk counts her way through quarantine, rethinking her own life and work. Poet Julian Randall remembers when President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” and wonders about the state of Black existence amid the brutal realities of the past year. Paul A. Kramer presents a deep investigation on the history of Los Angeles as a sanctuary city. In her short story, “In Another Life”, Miki Arndt explores the life of a grandmother-for-hire in contemporary WeJapan.hope this issue and these pieces offer a different perspective on domesticity. After a year like 2020, we might all be tired of the same old view. Medaya

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR cecile pineda entry without inspection a writer’s life in el norte UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS ugapress.org if we were electric Stories Patrick Earl Ryan isbn paperback9780820358079$19.95 • flannery o’connor award for short fiction • entryinspectionwithout A Writer’s Life in El Norte Cecile Pineda paperback $24.95 isbn 9780820358468 • crux: the georgia series in literary nonfiction • stories IF WE WERE ELECTRIC PATRICK EARL RYAN if Stories Patrick paperbackisbn for•

We had planned for a Domestic-themed issue long before there was any sign of a pandemic, when the prospect of millions of people staying inside for six straight months was something beyond impossibility. How strange then to put together an issue dedicated to domesticity in the midst of an enormous realignment of our domestic lives, which have suddenly become our work, social, and recreational lives.

| Translated by Joyce Zonana Winner of the Global Humanities Translation Prize “A long overdue translation of Jóusè d’Arbaud’s neglected Provençal masterpiece.”

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essay

An influencer I follow on Instagram posts female-focused self-help con tent about boundaries and expectations during quarantine. She says it’s okay not to be productive during this unprece dented time. She says we should be kind and forgiving to our bodies. She says we should be wary of wasting our energy. She posts up to 30 times a day. I look at every single upload, clinging to the reassurance even as I loathe the basicness. I eat it up like butter — butter, a formerly unhealthy ingredient that scientists recently deemed healthy after all. I’m jealous of this influ encer, this person who seems to have a definitive idea of what life’s healthy ingre dients are. OF REPS SPACESHIP EARTH)

THE QUEEN

(ON

ELVIA WILK

los angeles review of books 12 Day 50-something or 60-something of quarantine in Brooklyn. I wake up and look at Instagram. I hardly notice the sound of constant sirens outside any more. My partner, A, is probably in the kitchen chopping or cleaning, or may be he’s having coffee and reading a book on the fire escape. I roll out of bed and head straight to my command station: the computer, where I spend several hours trying to concentrate on pumping out words. Eventually there is lunch, after which there is the dishes, after which I do a workout video in front of my computer.

Remember your breath, yogis, the onscreen instructor with calves like onion bulbs says. He’s talking to the group of people doing the workout with him in the pre-recorded video but he’s also talking to me, implicitly. Which makes me a yogi too, implicitly. My fellow yogis in the video are a diverse bunch, “all shapes and sizes.” One of them is not thin, which is supposed to be inspiring. This isn’t really yoga. It’s some yoga postures as a preamble to three circuits of crunches and squats. As a grand finale we go through the asanas while holding five-pound weights. I watch the yogis in the video wincing and grunting. Just four more! You got this … I notice one of the yogis cheating, she’s only doing every other rep. I wonder when this video was recorded. It must have been in a time a place where people were allowed to be in the same room together. This makes me wistful, but then I remember that I pre fer to work out alone anyway. I don’t want anyone to see me wincing and grunting or skipping reps. I don’t want a witness to my work.Mywork ethic is a major problem. This is the big lesson of quarantine. I have no structuring principle for how to spend my time besides work. Sans any “life” events outside the domestic vacuum to outline my days, the work problem has become a problem. The issue is not simply that I’ve filled the hole left by social and professional routine with extreme work ing hours instead of something nice. It’s not even that work is the only way I know how to “cope.” It’s that my productivity it self has lost its telos. I can no longer figure out what I’m working toward. The future is a blank space; it always has been; once you understand this, your ordering princi ple falls apart. ¤ I have no muscles that have developed through play or manual labor — just countable reps. I write a certain number of words today; I answer a certain num ber of emails today; I do a certain num ber of lunges. I lunge — “a sudden thrust forward of the body,” as if to seize prey — and then I retract without grasping anything in my jaws. Just the lunge and the act of lunging. A certain number of lunges. A certain number of calories. A certain number of recreation hours. And then the day is over. A, for instance, is very productive too. He gets work done. Only he doesn’t seem to exalt it as his ordering principle for be ing alive. Taking a day off can be nice for him; the meaning of life does not disin tegrate as soon as the disciplinary struc ture is removed. He doesn’t panic like I do when interrupted at the desk, because you can’t interrupt something that isn’t sacred. Free time does not provoke an existential spiral. For me, anything that isn’t quanti fiable productivity can only be construed as procrastination. There’s no “life” that is not a means to an end of — ?

los angeles review of books 14 Over dinner, which we have tacitly decided is a meal I do not eat while sit ting at the computer, A and I have con versations about the meaning of work and why we do it. Lockdown has given us all this time to talk about how we spend our time. I maintain that there is work and then there is work — there is the thing capitalism makes me do to feed myself, and then there is the thing I do because it gives my life meaning. I’m a writer; my work is supposed to be meaning-making, so often these overlap. But I have to be lieve I’d do the latter kind of work no mat ter what. Of course, as soon as I say these things, the distinction between types of work dissolves into a sea of Right Reasons questions.I.e.,Would you truly work if you didn’t have to? How do you differentiate between the work that is sacred and the work that is profane? Is any work sacred under neoliberal capitalism? Is there such a thing as Labor of Love that has not been recuperated? Where did you get this Protestant work ethic; you’re a Jew? What’s really the driving factor, artistic expression or desperation for recognition? Couldn’t you find meaning in something less excruciating? What would happen if you took a day off? Why, and what, are you always counting? Where is pleasure? Are you squashing all the pleasure out of something that you really do want to do, just by dint of counting it in the form of reps? If it’s what you “want” to be doing, why does it feel and look so much like punishment?Onenight after dinner we watch my favorite childhood movie, The Princess Bride. In one scene, the princess’s true love, Westley, is being tortured by the princess’s evil husband in a dedicated underground chamber. Westley is laid out on a rack called “The Machine,” a device with special suction cups that suck out fu ture years of the victim’s life, causing ex cruciating pain. The machine whirrs and Westley writhes on the table, while the torturer observes his responses dispas sionately and takes notes. “I’ve just sucked one year of your life away,” the torturer in forms Westley after the first bout is over. “What did this do to you?” He asks ear nestly. “Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity.”I’vealways identified with the tortur er as much as Westley. The torturer is a sadist, but he is also a scientist who has spent his entire life inventing this evil device, and he genuinely wants to quan tify what it does. Posterity is an inside joke with myself: when I’m really strug gling to get something done, I tell myself, “Remember, this is for posterity.” So I take a quick look at Instagram and then I pros trate myself upon The Machine. ¤ One way to make sure I’ve done my reps for the day to keep lists of all my tasks. Everything goes on the same list because everything has to get done. Shower, eat, write a friend, write a colleague, talk about my feelings, call my dad, write an email, write an essay, write a diary, write a new list ofSomethingtasks. on my list that is not work, but that is on the same list and so has become ontologically flattened into work, is to record a video message for my friend’s birthday. Given the quarantine situation, her kind husband has invited almost 100 people to upload pictures and videos to an app where she’ll be able to

los angeles review of books 16 watch them on her birthday. It’s possible to see what other people have uploaded so far. Before recording a video, I watch some of the other video messages. One of our mutual friends has made a lovely one: she’s sitting in a bathtub and extolling the virtues of the birthday girl, whom she dubs “The Queen of Pleasure.” I smile. It’s true! This friend is wonderfully adept at enjoying life. She knows how to live in a body in time, how to maximize joy as its own end, and I dearly love this about her. I get emotional thinking about friends I haven’t seen in so long, who are all Queens of something. The Queen of Finding the Hilarious. The Queen of Even Keel. The Queen of Gathering Us Together. The Queen of Optimism and Ambition. I must be a Queen of some kind too, I think. What Queen am I? The Queen of Time Management. The Queen of Third Draft of an Essay. It is I, The Queen of Reps.Joy in a certain type of work must be a timeless thing. At least it was timeless, before work was stolen from us, so maybe it’s not timeless after all. That would have been the kind of work that is about the perpetuation of life. Reaping the hay, feed ing the family, reproducing ourselves and each other. Tending the garden. Taking care. That is not the kind of work that is easily countable as reps, although people — such as my influencer — have found many ways to commodify it. Women were made to do most of the labor-of-life for the last few centuries, so maybe there is a reason I dislike uncountable care work, fa voring the numerable kind with accolades. My mom, a professor at a big Midwestern university, says that her great est challenge is teaching undergraduates that learning doesn’t have to be a misera ble chore. She wants them to understand that work is not the opposite of entertain ment. She wants them to experience joy in reading, writing, and thinking instead of feeling like that’s what you have to get done so you can go to the movies or a kegger. But then, my mom also complains that she puts so much energy into teach ing, unlike her male colleagues, and that her teaching work is never fully appreciat ed. No one is counting her hours. ¤ I take a break from writing this to look at Instagram. My influencer has just made a video where she describes herself proudly as “really crushing it” during lockdown. She says we need to give ourselves credit when we’re doing well. I tap through to a series where she asks people to post their “smallest wins” of the day. Think of your smallest win today, then think of something even smaller. What does it mean to win? She doesn’t say. The implication, I assume, is that life might be a rat race but that we’re only truly in competition with ourselves. Winning at life is nothing glamorous — it’s just about getting better in small ways every day. Getting better means being healthier and less miserable? I can't help but think that the concept of winning seems to counter what it describes, since you can’t actually beat yourself unless you are also beaten. My small win today is my only win today, because I don’t know any other concept of winning: I worked and then I worked out, even though I didn’t want to. But then I see that lots of the small wins people are posting in response to the influencer’s story are things like taking a shower and eating a healthy bowl of or ganic grain. So winning, or at least small

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ELVIA WILK

¤ One of my friends used to have a shitty boyfriend who always insinuated that she was lazy for not working enough. “It’s true,” she told me, “it’s not like I work very much. But I’m making enough money to live on. So, what’s the problem? I don’t get it. I thought not working was what we were working for.” ¤ I’ve had an autoimmune issue for at least 10 years. It was finally (sort of) diagnosed a few weeks before quarantine. The ver dict: I have lazy lungs and I haven’t been getting enough oxygen this whole time. In January a doctor gave me an asthma inhaler, an allergy pill, and a few nasal sprays, and within weeks my debilitating pain and fatigue became, miraculously, infuriatingly, confusingly, suddenly, man ageable. Ironic: While the world is ailing and my city is dying, I have more energy than ever before. I marvel at the extent of my newfound ability, my changing limits. My max five reps become 10 become 20. I always wondered what I’d do if I were suddenly able, and here I am, #blessed with this energy and this privilege, this time … ¤ When I was in my final year of art school, depressed and trying to finish my thesis exhibition, I called my dad to complain about how everyone seemed to be do ing less work than me but making better art. I spent most of my time in my win dowless studio agonizing and doodling; outside, the Good Artists were chainsmoking and chatting. I’d make 100

19 winning, is about not working? It’s about self-care?Instagram-style

“self-care” is for the rich and white, even the influencer is woke enough to know that. Self-care is something you pay for. It’s reproduc tive labor you do for yourself, because you don’t have to do reproductive labor for anyone else instead. But if I stopped looking at Instagram I would have time to take a shower. I’m a well-off white wom an and my boyfriend is making me dinner in our nice apartment from the groceries we paid to have delivered. Maybe I could construe not taking care of myself as an act of resistance. I used to fantasize I was Kurt Vonnegut whenever I worked on fiction. He was my favorite author, whose strict writing schedule is well known. He took reps very seriously because he was con cerned with posterity. But then I read his biography and I had a hard time main taining the fantasy. Turns out the reason he was able to lock himself in the study and clack away on his typewriter for sev eral hours every morning is that his wife was making food and taking care of his children and answering his letters. During his sanctified writing hours, nobody, not his wife, not his three biological children, nor his three adopted children — whom he chose to adopt —were allowed to knock on the door. A often brings me snacks while I’m at the computer. He might kiss my cheek, but he doesn’t say anything because he knows I get agitated when interrupted. I reach blindly for the carrot stick he’s placed beside me. I realize he’s done the dishes and swept the house while I’ve been emailing. I worry that I’m winning at being Kurt Vonnegut.

I read a report about the climate. It says even now, in the midst of COVID-19, when travel is at a record low — when humans are doing probably the most we will ever be willing to do to — the results are not nearly enough to make a dent in the catastrophically upward-sloping tem perature trajectory graph. And in fact, in some freak turn of events, the global tem perature is maybe going to rise this year, because of a decrease in the layer of pol lution surrounding the planet, which, de spite its toxicity, has actually been helping Earth cool off.

A asks if I want to go with him to the community garden to drop off some com post. We have to take it to the garden now because the city has suspended organic waste collection in order to spend more money paying police to harass unhoused people sleeping on the subway. I shake my head and tell A I want to stay home and write. I tell him I’m writing in my diary, so it sounds like a healthy activity, but actual ly it’s an article about climate change that I hope gets published and paid for. After he leaves the house, I spend an hour won dering whether going to the community garden is a better use of time than sitting inside and writing about the importance of community gardens. My ordering prin ciple short-circuits. I take another shower

Some of my classmates were probably geniuses. Others managed to parlay the genius myth to their advantage. Others were just rich or from famous families, so it didn’t matter. Others were ahead of me in a different way: they understood that creative work also happens when your ass is not in the chair and they saw no pur pose in self-punishment. And others were probably working as hard as I was and just not making such a big deal out of it. They realized that artists are not supposed to look like we’re toiling this hard. Our labor is supposed to be mysterious exceptional labor, in service of making exceptional timeless objects, etc. In retrospect, I’m guessing we all felt bad about how much we were working or not working. In retrospect, it’s obvious that the 10,000 hours rule is just anoth er weapon for individualizing our pain. We’re millennials and artists; we've always known meritocracy is a farce. But we nev er figured out how to redeem ourselves beyond work, and we experience our feelings of failure in isolation. We don’t know how much we’re supposed to work, how much we’re supposed to seem like we work, how much we’re supposed to “enjoy” work. Do What You Love is an even more insidious farce. We experience our small wins and our big losses alone. Hoarding them, then belittling them. Nothing we can do is enough but trying this hard is both pointless and embarrassing.¤

One of my teachers required all her students to spend 40 hours in the studio each week. She’d clearly read that Malcolm Gladwell book. Just show up, she im pressed upon us, even if you don’t have any ideas, because that’s the only way some thing will happen. You have to be there when the inspiration hits. The more you sit there trying to work, the more you’ll eventually get done — a variant of the classic “ass-in-chair” writing advice. Or a variant of the motivational gym poster: “10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.”

los angeles review of books 20 drawings or whatever, but invariably their work would be cleverer and much cool er. “Well, honey,” my dad told me, “some people are geniuses, and the rest of us just have to work harder.”

21 and have a glass of wine. I win. ¤ The documentary Spaceship Earth comes out two months into quarantine. It’s about one of my favorite historical uto pias, Biosphere 2. In the 1960s, a group of performance artists and countercul ture enthusiasts got together and started the Theater of All Possibilities, an arttheater-business venture that would last decades. Funded by a billionaire oil mag nate, they first built a ship and traveled the world, buying land, constructing a hotel, holding theater performances, and docu menting themselves. Their collective work culminated in the 1987–1991 creation of Biosphere 2, a giant glass structure in the Arizona desert. The biosphere contained a closed-loop life-support system, which eight people lived inside for two years. Biosphere 2, resembling a Bucky dome crossed with a Victorian green house, was equal parts performance art, science fiction, and science project. To create its internal ecosystem, the bio sphereans first traveled the world collect ing plant and animal species they chose to populate their world in captivity. Once inside the biosphere they subsisted (al most) off farmed food and recycled air and water, a feat intended as the first ever dress rehearsal for a sustainable human habitat in space. They also intended it as a consciousness-raising stunt to spread awareness about the environmental dev astation that might someday force hu manity off-world — Biosphere 1 being the original planet Earth. I have been invited to guest-teach a masters class on Zoom about storytell ing in times of crisis. The students have seen Spaceship Earth, so we talk about Biosphere 2. I ask leading questions about whether the documentary gives a bal anced portrait of the project and its po litical flaws, for instance, its colonial and biblical undertones. I ask whether anyone feels nostalgic for an imaginary past when utopian thinking seemed possible, at least for some. One of the students points out that it’s hard to have nostalgia for a past where the future was eight white people in a dome filled with exotic species they stole from around the world. As an assignment, I’ve asked the stu dents to briefly describe a future scenario where the world is still in quarantine, but things are different. Not better or worse, just different. A basic science-fiction exer cise to think beyond the utopia/dystopia binary. It seems like most of them have not done the assignment. They have re acted negatively to its implications. The gist of the reaction is: How could you ask us to imagine a future? Who do you think has access to the future? You think we get to de cide what’s going to happen? Why should we lend our imaginations to the people in com mand? I can see their faces frowning in the little boxes on the screen. I can’t blame them. I have the same questions. I think about my yoga workout vid eos, about the pointedly diverse bunch of yogis selected to be in each class. I imag ine a yoga class in a Biosphere. I imagine my living room is full of the plant and an imal species of the world, ones I special ly handpicked for my quarantine zone. I imagine there are no plant or animal spe cies left in the world except for the ones I preserved. I wonder whether there could be an anticolonial/decolonial biosphere. I wonder whether imagination can be total ly uncoupled from prediction, and wheth er future thinking is always going to be in the service of power, or whether it’s ELVIA WILK

I laugh, because I know exactly what he means. But then as soon as we hang up, I pull out my phone and look up the

“I was treating my desk like a com mand center,” he says. “Every few hours I would feel the need to sit down, buckle in, and get all the news. Like I could get some control if I knew what was going on. But I’m not in command of anything.”

los angeles review of books 22 possible to imagine a future in a way that can’t be instrumentalized. Welcome, yogis. One student brings up her favorite moment from the Spaceship Earth doc umentary: when one of the biosphere ans calls her therapist from inside the dome. Frozen inside her insular, fakenatural world, she casts a line outside — she makes contact with Biosphere 1, to ask for psychiatric support. It’s funny, be cause I’ve also described that same scene to my own therapist. I’ve told my therapist that ever since she and I have had to stop meeting in person, I feel like we’re living in different biodomes. I’ve spent several sessions with her talking about pandemic and climate change and Biosphere 2. In one session, I ask her whether I talk about politics too much in therapy. She says that in classical psychology, too much talk of politics is supposed to be in terpreted as an avoidance tactic. But she has come to believe that not mentioning politics in therapy is the real avoidance tactic, especially right now. How could we pretend there is an inside without an outside? How could the global not be the personal, the geopolitical not be the psychological? How could the pandemic, which has changed time and the future, not change my time and my future? ¤ After they survived for two years, the bio sphereans left their habitat. Steve Bannon bought the whole complex in the interest of profit-driven research. The Theater of All Possibilities was never allowed back. ¤ Sometimes I take a tiny break from work and go into the other room, the only other room, and say hi to A, because he doesn’t mind me interrupting him. A little visit. One day I ask him if he’s sick of his room. Maybe he wants to switch rooms with me? Of course, I’m sick of this room, he says. Are you sick of your room too? Yes, I say, but I’m sick of both rooms. I’m sick of room We know we need to get out of the house. We rent a car and drive to the beach, to the Rockaways. The shore is cold and windy on the day we’ve chosen, but it’s gloriously empty. The sunlight is yellow in the early afternoon and the pale water dissolves into pale sky where there should be a horizon line. A reads a book and I sit a few feet away, scooping sand with my feet (even though I feel like I should be reading too, because reading a certain number of pages counts as a cer tain number of reps), and chatting on the phone with a friend in California. My friend in California tells me that he started quarantining even earlier than most of us, because he had a normal flu and didn’t want anyone else to catch it — a concept that seems like it should be the norm now that we know it’s possible to just stay home rather than go to work when sick — and he’s feeling pretty good about isolation. He attributes his decent mental health to the fact that he limits his computer time each day, holding back his urge for constant updates.

ELVIA WILK most recent death statistics. I read about a person who is supposed to be in com mand telling the nation’s citizens to drink bleach.“Spaceship Earth” was a concept made popular in the 1960s by Buckminster Fuller. It encompasses the idea that Earth is our only survival system and that we are all its crew. We have to work together to pilot the thing — to stay alive. If the met aphor holds today, who is in the command center? It is certainly not I, the Queen of Reps. But if work is not my ordering prin ciple, how will I manage to stay in com mand of anything at all? Today, some of the Biosphereans still work together on a farm in New Mexico called Synergia Ranch. The last shot of the documentary Spaceship Earth shows them drinking wine together around a table on the ranch at twilight, laughing and maybe reminiscing. I’m jealous of their ability to reminisce about something. I wonder how they’re doing now, under quarantine. ¤ What a luxury it is to live in this apart ment and having all this time to toil with my mind. I wouldn’t be able to spend my time this way had I not had that costly education, the network based on privilege. Posterity is an incentive, but so is the ob ligation I feel to maximize this silly luck. I keep looking for “good” things to spend my work ethic on. Because of the autoimmune factor, less on the surface now but still “underly ing” as far as conditions go, I’m not sup posed to go places full of people or touch surfaces or breathe common air. That means that any work I can do with altru ism in mind involves more time on The Machine. I accept that the only way we’re going to abolish a system where people are forced to risk their lives to go to work is for people like me to do work, so here we go.Some evenings I join a Zoom meet ing run by an organization that assists asylum seekers in filling out immigration applications, and I spend a few hours do ing reps on behalf of someone else. I lis ten to the testimony of an asylum seeker who’s endured unspeakable things and I wonder what she thinks of the concept of the future.Another day I make a countable number of phone calls to elderly people in my neighborhood to ask if they need help and not a single person says yes; I donate $25 to a bail fund; I sign a petition for canceling rent. A and I volunteer to teach a Zoom class to kids who are stuck at home and need edu-tainment. We plan a 40-minute class about climate change, waste, and composting and teach it re peatedly to groups of K-5 kids, who turn out to have an impressive grasp of global warming. Most sessions are full of 10 or 15 students, but due to some glitch in the sign-up system, our final class is attended by only one student. She’s a six-year-old named Dorothy and she’s very shy. Dorothy’s dad keeps trying to get her to sit still in front of the screen, plying her with snacks and promises of playtime afterward, but he seems harried. While we’re teaching, we can see him in the background doing the dishes with anoth er small child slung around his hip. We feel like keeping Dorothy occupied for a little while is the least we can do. But when we get to the part of the lesson on composting, we ask Dorothy whether she knows what global warming is. She bursts into tears and ducks under the table. I can’t blame her.

Of course, from the perspective of posterity, Ingeborg Bachmann is not an unknown woman. She wrote that book. ¤ I try to take a rest when I start to feel overwhelmed. That’s what the influencer recommends: You don’t have to be burned out to take care of your body. But something strange happens lately when I pause the reps. I get incredibly drowsy and fall into a deep sleep. It feels like I have no choice, like I’m drugged and dragged under con sciousness level. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve slept the night before or how tired I feel. Whenever I decide to stop working, I pass out. My therapist says this sounds like a traumatic stress response. She suggests I listen to a radio interview with Laurie Anderson, in which Anderson talks about being in a terrible plane crash. I listen to the interview. Anderson says she didn’t stop flying after the crash, but when she gets on a plane now, she becomes cataton ic. She’ll get in her seat and be fine before takeoff, but as soon as the engine revs up her whole body goes slack and she sinks

los angeles review of books 24 ¤ A magazine asks me to write a short piece in response to Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a series of texts Calvino wrote in the 1980s about the qualities he believes are unique to litera ture and which will carry us through the next millennium. My assignment is to write about his first memo on Lightness, in which he says you can’t write about this heavy world with a heavy hand; you have to treat the gnarly stuff with delicacy and wit. I find this 600-word assignment ex cruciatingly difficult to write. I try to ex plain importance of lightness, but every word is an anvil. I want to learn this lesson from Calvino, I really do. But I’ve never known how to do anything besides to try harder, hit harder, keep lunging. I sit and stare at The Machine and tell myself to unclench my teeth. I used to live with a certified genius writer who would spend three days party ing and come home fucked up and sleep for 14 hours and then wake up and write an essay with flashes of brilliance that an editor would help get into shape over the course of a few weeks and that would be published to great acclaim on Twitter, all while I was working 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. in the next room on a single difficult text. We all know someone like this, but nobody thinks of themselves as that kind of person. Is that person “lightness”? Sometimes I get angry with myself for not being able to produce words and A gets frustrated with me too. He asks whether I really have to work until I have nothing left. He lists my accomplishments. He says he loves my writing but that I can’t be re duced to what I produce. He says I have intrinsic value as a human being. I nod, but I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I don’t have low selfworth, I’m just not sure I exist. I have to do some mark-making as evidence. But you have evidence, he tells me, and points to himself.Afriend sends me a quote from Ingeborg Bachmann’s book Malina. “I don’t think about growing old, just about one unknown woman who follows anoth er unknown woman. […] I don’t know myself any better at all, I have not grown any closer to myself. I have only watched one unknown woman slide further and further into another.”

My parents are competitive people. They have the same job as each other — they’re academics in similar fields — which means there is always a measuring stick handy. Work is undoubtedly the fami ly ordering principle and we do not give much credence to small wins. Technically my dad is retired now but he still writes an article or reads someone’s dissertation or gives a lecture every day. Once I asked him what is the meaning of life and he told me learning and curiosity, which I think is laudable and true but which I think is only part of the truth, given the family emphasis on recognition and ac complishments. Life is about the work of meaning-making itself but it’s also about someone noticing that we’re doing all this fucking work. Otherwise does it exist? Do we? When I call my mom at a given mo ment and ask how she’s doing, the first thing she usually says is a variant of “Oh, you know, buried under work.” Buried is how she’s doing. It’s the only way to do. She and my dad are often working top ics related to ethics and social justice, so there is a moral imperative justifying this work being done. But for my mom, there is an extra moral component because she’s a woman and it was a battle to get where she is, so her success is its own justifica tion. I inherited the embattled feeling of that second wave, even though the battle itself isn’t exactly mine. The belief that work will be there for me even if all else falls apart is also part of my inheritance. After every breakup or romantic rejection, I call my mom in tears in order to receive her reliable instruction to work through it. She tells me to write about my feelings and to channel my en ergy into other projects. I must not give up, I must process and parse the mess, I must harvest meaning from it, I must find my way back to myself through la boring by myself I must gain recognition elsewhere to remind me that I exist, even when there is no lover to assure me. And she’s right: work always works. Work will always take me back.¤

los angeles review of books 26 into a coma-like trance. “My mind shut down,” she says of the last time this hap pened. “My mind protected me from be ing there anymore.” After I listen to the radio interview, I ask my therapist what is the meaning of life. She says she is not going to give me an answer, not because she doesn’t have some ideas, but because I’m so desperate for someone to tell me that I’ll lunge at whatever she gives me and never let go. ¤ When I was sick I had an excuse for needing to rest; when I had a social life I had an excuse to take a break; without these premises I realize the flimsiness of those stopgaps, and the ridiculous impov erishment of a life in which everything not work is a procrastination tactic or an excuse.Ireturn to my influencer, who I need to believe really does want the best for me. She agrees that I have to put my ass in chair if I’m going to be really crushing it during quarantine. But if I really want to crush it, I also have to get my ass out of the chair and do 500 reps and then drink a liter of water, set healthy boundaries for my relationships, and forgive myself for everything I’ve ever done.¤

Why would they be, when Biosphere 3 is right here? ¤ One of my art teachers in college sympa thized with my inability to leave the stu dio until I made something good (with no criteria for what that would be). He said the problem was that I couldn’t get out of my own head enough to let things flow. He said I was too worried about what peo ple would think. He gave me some advice, which allegedly comes from Duchamp: When you first start making art, every time you look over your shoulder you see all your crit ics standing there and watching what you’re doing. Eventually, if you keep working, you look over your shoulder and find your friends standing there. Then one day you look behind you and find only yourself looking over your shoulder. But finally, one day, you look behind you and see nobody there at all. I have never been able to verify that Duchamp said this. But I get the lesson, which is that it takes a lot of time to learn to rid oneself of other people’s opinions and voices and create something that isn’t about pleasing anyone or getting attention. The lesson is that a true artist makes work for no one else but — no one? Posterity? The lesson is that good work comes from within. I used to find this a helpful image, but now it creeps me out. Who is this person with no body behind her? One unknown woman slides further and further into another … I don’t think the influencer has the same goal as Duchamp. She wants some one to be looking over her shoulder at all times. And here I am, anxiously looking. One day she posts a quote that says: “We don’t need to come out of quarantine skin ny, we just need to come out alive.” I nod. I’m grateful for this post. I really do not feel like doing any lunges or squats right now. I should rest and unplug … I should step away from the Machine … I should indulge in some organic grains … this is me, listening to my body and being kind to myself … this is what it must be like to know what the ingredients for a good life WILK

I write half a short story about a group of office workers living in outer space. There’s nothing glorious about their sit uation; they’re just working way more re motely than the rest of us remote workers.

Characters are supposed to have motives: “Give everyone something to want, even if it’s just a glass of water.” One person in the group says the story is an interesting take on quarantine, but that she doesn’t think millennials are interested in outer space.

They’re employed by a software company that has sent a portion of its workforce to space in perpetuity, basically as a public ity stunt. The employees-cum-astronauts have agreed to the arrangement just be cause having an office in space is more in teresting than a regular office. I send the story to my writing group, which meets weekly instead of monthly now, because we’re all stuck at home, so we have time to show up. The group seems unsure whether the premise of the story is sound. They are not convinced wheth er it’s plausible that people would sacri fice their whole lives to live in space with their colleagues without a very good rea son. The group has a point. There’s a rea son I haven’t been able to finish the story.

ELVIA

los angeles review of books 28 are … the right way to cope … Then I flip to her next post. It says: “There’s no right way to Whatcope.”is “cope”? Is it the same as “exist”? To exist, you need an ordering principle, similar to what the influencer calls “priorities.” Here are some priori ties — work, money, posterity, love, selfcare, saving the world, fun. However: If I don’t have time to do all these priorities before dinner, I’m going to have to figure out how to rank them, that is, how to pri oritize. But this is impossible because all of them are necessary to be a person who exists.Incredibly, some days I feel like I al most get the balance right. Giddy: I’ve done enough work of all kinds, real and recreational. I’ve attended to all the prior ities. This is what winning feels like! The healthy butter! On those days of success, I fantasize about going on vacation. Maybe I’ve “earned” a holiday! The allure of vacation is slightly dif ferent during the pandemic; it might also be a misplaced desire for “a time when everything around us wasn’t dying.” But when the fantasy hits, it hits hard. I just have to say the word “vacation” to A to get us going. Sunburn, he says. Fruit, I say. Hot, overripe, fruit. Fruit that we eat from each other’s hands. ReadingSwimming.all day and falling asleep in the sun Lemon trees. Sweat. We smile. Then one of us points out that we have everything we need and that missing vacation because of the pandemic is really a very pathetic thing to complain about.For me, the fantasy has always been the point anyway. The possibility of exit. In truth vacation scares me, because on vacation, time slides toward death with out any notches to help a person keep a grip. One feels a moral imperative to “not work” on vacation that can be very op pressive. What if one gets an idea? What if one feels the need to make a mark on life while everyone else is playing bocce? What if one wants to play bocce and real izes one never wants to go back to work? One gets so drowsy in the heat. ¤ An artist friend of mine is having diffi culty being productive in quarantine. We talk on the phone about how stagnated we feel, no matter how much time we put in. She also has the added distraction of motherhood, because she had a baby last year. Do you think you could ever be hap py if you stopped doing work completely to just be a mom? I ask her. Of course, she says, and I’d love it. But I’d have to kill myself. ¤ When I was very young, I believed that all my thoughts were being recorded some where in a giant book, and that when I died the book would be given to me to read in the afterlife. For this reason I tried to think in third person, past tense: She looked across the room and saw the dog ly ing under the tree … she didn’t want to eat dinner but dad said it was time to eat … she was sleepy that day … it seemed fun to her … so that it would read like a story when it was all put together someday. I don’t know where I got this idea, but I know I was very afraid of dying and that I could only imagine my own death if I knew my

29 whole life would be safely preserved in a book.At some point, I realized nobody was going to write this book for me, and that any evidence of my existence is going to be of my own making. I realized I have no choice but to try to make it, even though it is never going to be as sublime as the book of all thoughts.

I, the Queen of Reps, sit at my desk cranking out words, take a break to kneel on the floor next to my desk and lift my leg a hundred times, then back to the desk to eat some calories A lovingly puts within my reach. I take a shower and tell myself it is a Small Win. I walk from one room into the other room and back again. I search for a new ordering principle. I find none. I’m on a spaceship but I’m not in the command center. Is there a com mand center? Just another room. This very room. Luckily, when I entered the room, A was there, backlit by sunshine with a book in one hand, his uncut quarantine hair spiral ing into fresh curls, watering the plants …

ELVIA WILK

Rosemary Mayer, October Ghost, 1981, Wood and ribbons, dimensions unknown , installed in the artist's studio.

Courtesy of The Estate of Rosemary Mayer.

The Vikings thought the wind was a god, that the eyes were holes. A window meant a wind-eye, for the god to see with, and at the same time through. I used to hate etymology —

What’s the point, I’d whisper: I was quieter back then, less patient, though more easily pleased. I am pleased to have been of use, I used to say to myself, after sex with strangers. Leaning hard against the upstairs window, I’d watch them make their half proud half ashamed-looking way wherever, and if it was autumn — whether in fact, or only metaphorically — I’d watch the yard fill with leaves, then with what I at first thought was urgency, though it usually turned out just to be ambition. I’d leave the window open, as I do now — if closed, I open it — then pull the drapes shut across it, which of the many I’ve tried remains the best way I know, still, to catch a wind god breathing.

VIKINGS CARL PHILLIPS

essay 32

AGAINST GRACE JULIAN RANDALL

For those who don’t remember or chose to forget, there is a video of an ashhaired President Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” in a church in South Carolina. Everyone behind him is Black and draped in long church robes, deep purple like elegies. It is the summer, and everything is slick; it is the summer and a toll must be paid. From my room in Philly the wi-fi is shaky, and everyone behind Obama flits between tulips and bruises, depending on the lag. There is a funeral going on that seems to have been going on all year. Obama opens his mouth, he says a new version of what we always say about goodness, about possibility. Nobody says the word “assassination,” nobody says

33 “betrayal,” everyone sings along. The song stutters in like a wave and nobody says forgiveness but it’s implied and encour aged. I sink sweat into the mattress, I look at the window and think about mercy. I leave the clip on a loop and all along the internet some folks say it is one of the best speeches of Obama’s presidency. I rise to get a glass of water I have been thinking about for over an hour and I can see the outline of myself on the bed; it is June, I can see myself evaporating. More unites Black people than song, and less unites Black people than nonBlack people seem to believe. I, for in stance, am related to zero percent of the Black people I have been asked if I am related to, I don’t know most people’s Black co-workers or the “guy that used to date my cousin.” I know very few peo ple in the grand scheme of things, and I prefer it that way. What does unite every Black person I’ve ever known — whether they phrased it this way or not — is at least once in their life, being compelled to thank or forgive white people for some thing that a Black person could never do. If the roles were reversed, they would have killed us. Silence is not always silent, but it is always a form of gravity. Grace is also not always silent. Sometimes it is a tooth falling into a palm, and that palm never curdling into a fist. Let me backtrack: Once when I was seven, I was in the process of losing a tooth. Everyone knows that this process can take a while, and it had been weeks of this canine threatening to break its teth er once and for all from my small body. One day during recess, I was a seven and a white boy was seven and all the vio lence we had ever intended prior to that day was theoretical; fights were a sound we made with our mouths; we always won and never bled. Even when he did actu ally punch me, I don’t remember it as a fight. Rather, the fist arrived as a curiosity, a question asked in the eye of the storm that was the world. But maybe I misre member, maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. Regardless, the little tether snapped, and my mouth tasted like cop per and then like a mouth again. I caught the tooth; I didn’t swing back; I feigned thanks for relieving me of the burden of it. Thanks to him, I no longer had to won der when the tooth would fall out. This is not the youngest age I can remember things, but it’s maybe the oldest thing I have ever remembered: the moment when I realized that I could win this fight, but I also knew that I would lose in some larger and more irretrievable way. I told my fam ily what happened, I told them it was an accident and maybe believed it. Even as a child, I managed to reach into that well of goodness, I reached for the religion of be lieving the best of people who put blood in my mouth. I was Black, I was good, I got to stay where I was put. I placed the tooth beneath my pillow, in the morning there were two faded dollar bills, pulped and soft like feathers. The memory feels almost too cinematic — that tooth fall ing into my palm; a single slow hailstone that never melted, but disappeared all the Insame.the two most famous clips I know of, Obama has a tendency to start singing be fore he starts singing. Obama is measured, graceful, clearly hyper aware of what his voice can and cannot reasonably pull off. He doesn’t just start belting but kinda two steps his way into it like an Uncle wading into a soul train line. In the clip of him at the Charleston funeral he is shaking his JULIAN RANDALL

los angeles review of books 34 head, a mightcouldbe under his tongue, as he says “Grace” over and over again, like it’s pulling him toward something. The whole thing seems almost spontaneous, who am I to say it wasn’t? Those first notes come out flat if we’re being honest, but maybe the song is tired too. A storm can only rage in memory for so long, or so I’m told.The history of “Amazing Grace” as a song is a story of transformation, but it has been told out of order so many times that the bones of it have healed crooked ly and now the grace is less about healing than it is a history of manageable pain. Part of the mythos is true: John Newton, the writer of the song, did eventually be come an abolitionist, and he did write it as a result of being the captain of a slave ship passing through a storm that threat ened to drown him but through which he passed. He stayed in the slave trade for another five years after finding religion, convenient. He wrote the song rough ly 24 years after the storm, for him, had passed, convenient. In the version that me and some of my homies grew up with, everything is a bit more immediate, some of us even were brought up believing, as I did, that Newton wrote the song with the storm still rolling over him. Epiphany is funny like that; it can be made to look very spontaneous even with the dead lying at one’s feet. The summer that Obama sang was belligerently hot, death made it hotter. I remember what it was that summer — watching Obama call the names of those assassinated by the coward Dylann Roof, saying they “found that grace.” I remember wondering if this was the fate of Blackness to be shot by a stranger you prayed over. I remember learning the cops brought him some Burger King; I remember not even having the energy to perform surprise. Heat is a strange government, it can make you beg for rain, it can make you thank the storm.Forgiveness, or something like it, has always been prescribed as Black people’s superpower. whiteness necessarily has a parasitic relationship with that forgive ness. I’m done indulging it. If I am quiet it is only because I have spent my adult hood trying to pry the blood-thick leech of white folks wants out of my throat. I will be asked to forgive again and again. I will try. I will fail and fail because some times I want to survive. whiteness cannot sustain its allegiance to moral mediocrity, but I wish that wasn’t my problem; I de serve for it not to be. I do not doubt the grace of Black peo ple; it is in many ways the only reason I am still alive. I would like though, to divorce grace from what I feel compelled to, but cannot forgive. The ways that such com pulsion follow me and most of the people I love, the storm unending and eventually teaching nothing but the pedagogy of its own persistence. I feel compelled to say something: one of the great tragedies of whiteness is that it seems one goes to the grave without a true calculus for how of ten they have been spared. I have no such luxury. In a more perfect version of my self, I have Grace for so much less — or at least for something different — and am more alive for it. I reach for that other me, that version, I fail to reach him every time. I feel compelled to say this as well, there are perhaps no tragedies of whiteness it self. Tragedy implies a choice was with held, and whiteness always has a choice and it will always choose the path of my destruction. I pledge to respond in kind. I say it around the leech in my throat that throbs, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

JULIAN RANDALL

What I’m striving toward, failing toward, bleeding toward, is a practice of freedom that I don’t need to preface by saying, “It ain’t much but,”. I demand of myself and those around me a freedom where it is not dismissed as conspiracy theory when I name what I have abso lutely seen happening before me, around me, because of me. That last one is prov ing harder than it sounds, the arm of for getting is as long as a country, but narrow as a gaze, meager as the imagination of white folks who sit in police cars and state houses and restaurants and department meetings and classrooms united by their instinct to punish Black folks for living, loving, styling, flexing, imagining, and forgiving ourselves, and them too, most if not all of the time. When they can not punish us, they punish those we love, when they cannot punish them, and even when they can, they punish themselves.

In my mind, the grace that is made synonymous with the obligation to forgive the unforgivable is always pronounced with a lowercase “g”. Since 2015, I don’t know if I believe in true freedom anymore.

Some of us pass under storms and learn almost nothing truly, and resolve that this is miracle, and miracles happen to and are the rightful property of folk who we de cide every day deserve to be free.

white supremacy is a death cult, a religion for the feral and those taught to aspire to that feralness if only to pretend it will ease the jaws we were born in. I grow weary of epiphany, it’s nearly June again, I am tired of the rain, I am tired of waiting for it to be God enough.

It sounds like a destination rather than a constant process, and it sounds that way because we love destinations in America.

MIKI ARNDT

My name is Rimiyo and I’m a grand mother. I’ll be 65 in November.

37 fiction

In one life, I have a daughter. Kanae is 35 and a dental hygienist. Her husband Shota is 42 and he works with comput ers. He’s explained to me what he does, something about data, but I can never re member. My granddaughter Rika is seven. She calls me Obaachan. We watch music shows and she teaches me the dances. My joints don’t move the way they used to but we’re happy together when we dance. Kanae says the way Rika smiles with all of her teeth, reminds her of me.

IN ANOTHER LIFE

In another life, I have two sons. Their names are Kosuke and Kohei. They’re in their late 30s, one a lawyer and the other in real estate. It’s hard to tell them apart.

They have a father, Koichi. We’re about the same age. He is my husband. He has no sense of humor and murmurs his words, as if speaking with a mouth full of mouth wash. I get tired of asking him to repeat himself. I never would’ve picked such a man but I have no choice in this matter. My son Kohei has a wife, Chikako, who works as a receptionist at his agency. They have a son, Haruto. He is three, hyperac tive and obsessed with trains. He calls me Baaba. I sit with him and we create elabo rate scenes of accident and rescue togeth er, using his toy figures and speaking in funny voices that make him giggle. Koichi murmurs in the background toward us. I pretend not to hear him. In another life I have a far better hus band, Hiroaki. I see him twice a week. He texts me what he wants for dinner and I pick up the ingredients at the supermar ket. “Sukiyaki is not as enjoyable alone,” he would say, while he thanked me. He missed home-cooked meals after his wife died. He asked me about my other fam ilies and remembered my stories better than I did. He was curious to hear how Rika was doing, what Haruto was learn ing in school. He laughed heartily at my impressions, particularly of me mimicking soft-spoken Koichi. We don’t have any children, Hiroaki said he never wanted them but now he wondered whether he made the right choice. In another life, I have a daughter. Her name is Maya and she’s 43. I heard that she lives in London with her husband and their daughter. I don’t even know her daughter’s name. Maya doesn’t know about my other families, just like I don’t know about hers. Maya’s father left us when she was five, and Maya left me when she was 18. I don’t see myself in Maya, al though she alone shares my blood. I’m a far better grandmother than I ever was a mother. Maya hadn’t liked to be touched or held, and it still surprises me when Rika hugs me, or Haruto reaches for my hand when we go for our walks. Would they do that if they knew who I really was?

I talk to Hiroaki about my families. I apologize about using his time to talk about myself, but he reassures me that’s what couples do, it’s more natural this way. He asks if I have feelings for my fam ilies, and I say yes. I’ve always been honest, though you might think it funny from my line of Asidework.from the families, I have the occasional wedding or funeral to attend as a relative. I’ll do one-off meetings with younger women who want advice on rela tionships and how to deal with a trouble some mother-in-law. One of my clients is a hikokomori. His name is Kei and he’s 22. He’s confined himself to his studio apart ment that barely fits his futon and a coffee table. His clothes are in a box and his floor is littered with soda bottles, empty ramen containers, and cigarettes. He sleeps off his days and plays video games until the morning. His family said Kei had been close to his grandmother and was never the same after she died. When my agency told me Kei’s fam ily had loved my profile, I tried to turn down the job. I had heard of hikikomori, and found it creepy that these men hid from society. My supervisor, Takeda-san, reminded me that I had been reluctant to meet Hiroaki as well. I had only wanted grandmother roles and wasn’t interested in pretending to be a wife. Takeda-san had assured me that Hiroaki just wanted to talk. “He lost his wife two years ago, his high school sweetheart. You can meet him in our office. If you don’t like him, I’ll send him someone else.”

los angeles review of books 38

Now Takeda-san insisted. “I know this is unusual, but this boy needs guid ance. The family read through your re views, your profile, and said you reminded them of the grandmother he lost. His mother said she’ll go to his house with you, so you’ll be more comfortable. He’s agreed to a few sessions. Tell me yes?”

A few Septembers ago, I was sitting on a park bench eating my onigiri when I spot ted two boys fighting in the sandbox. One boy held the other boy’s toy plane high above his head, taunting him. A group of mothers gossiped nearby, engrossed in conversation and unaware of the escalat ing conflict. I walked over to the children. I can’t recall what I said to them but I made the bigger boy return the plane to his smaller friend and told them stories until they were both laughing and playing together again. I walked back to my bench satisfied. Then a man in a gray suit walked over and handed me his business card. “I’m Takeda. I saw how you handled those kids, and they’re not even your own. I know this might sound strange, but are you looking for work? We’re looking for grandmothers. A good one is hard to find.”

I became an expert in scheduling, so I could babysit my grandchildren, meet Hiroaki for dinner and attend events for the agency. These commitments were al ready a lot, with the names and histories, birthdays and occupations and favorite foods. I took notes on my phone to re member conversations. I taught Rika how to write and Haruto how to use chop sticks. We’re not supposed to develop at tachments to our families but it was hard not to.I’ve asked my least favorite husband Koichi about his other roles (he’s from a rival agency) but he doesn’t like to break character. He was tight-lipped about his commitments, saying he had to protect the family’s privacy. Kanae, my daughter, worked with a couple families and was a stand-in wife for corporate events. I met her years ago at her wedding. I was her aunt for the night and we bonded imme diately. She was the bride of a gay man who wanted to appease his parents with a traditional wedding. In our family, she was the wife of Shota, who lost his wife in a car accident when Rika was only two. When applying for her kindergarten, Shota rented Kanae for the interviews. Rika took to Kanae, and Shota start ed booking her more often. When they needed a babysitter, Kanae referred me to join their family as a grandmother. We’ve been a family since. Kei though, was another matter. He played video games silently while his mother attempted conversation. All he granted us was a nod, no eye contact. His mother apologized on our way out. “We would like you to come again,” she said, checking my face for my reaction. “I’m sure this is different from your usual work,

MIKI ARNDT

I didn’t realize that being a grand mother was something I had wanted until Takeda-san offered it to me. Maybe it was an experience I hadn’t earned, but I want ed to give it a try. I had never imagined anyone would want to rent me but I trust ed the density of his business card, printed on expensive paper. I followed him back to his office. Takeda-san regaled me with stories of the families he had worked for, other people’s children he had raised, widowed women he had comforted. By the time I left, I had taken my profile picture and signed a contract, officially a grandmother-for-hire.

I owed Takeda-san for discovering me.

Ja'Tovia Gary, An Ecstatic Experience, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Womxn In Windows.

“Today we’re going to spend a good time together,” I announced, while Kei continued playing his game. “Did you hear anything I said during my last visit?” Kei ignored me. “Okay,” I said. “Show me what’s so good about this game,” I picked up a con troller. “Teach me how to play and I’ll beat you. If I do, talk to me, even if it’s for a minute.”Keilooked at me with surprise. I had made“I’vecontact.never used this before but I learn quickly,” I added. Kei’s voice was faint and raspy, like the creaking of an unoiled machine. He spoke in quick staccatos, and I pretend ed to hear everything he said. Then we spent the next three hours playing video games. We didn’t say another word. This was probably not what I was hired for but I had enjoyed the game and at least he opened his mouth. The following week, he asked about my zabuton. I brought my own cushion because his room looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. But I couldn’t say that.“It grounds me.” “I“How?”havea lot of lives, a lot of families. This zabuton is a constant. This is a re minder that I’m still the same person, no matter who I’m with or where I am.”

“Or maybe you just don’t want to sit on my floor,” he said. “That too,” I admitted. I cleared away the soda cans, making room for my cushion. I actually looked forward to playing video games with him. I was competitive and I might be able to beat him with more practice. Maybe I needed to visit him twice a week instead. “Maybe you can visit me twice a week,” he mumbled as I was leaving. “Are you starting to feel fond of me?”

I asked laughing, “My friends say I’m an acquired taste.” “I’ll tell my mom,” he said, his eyes still on the TV screen.¤ Hiroaki was amazed. “And you just play video games with him?” he laughed. “Why can’t I get a job like that? You just go to his house, eat his snacks, play video games, and get paid? You really figured out a good career for yourself.” “I’m trying to connect with him,” I reasoned, omitting that I really enjoyed the game. “He hasn’t left his house in two years. But I’ve heard of worse cases, of men not leaving their rooms for a de cade, or having to write them letters and slip it under their door to communicate. At least Kei manages a few words to me eachHiroakitime.” laughed a lot, perhaps because he had worked all his life in the service in dustry. He had the natural inclination to please people, to make them feel comfort able in his presence. The sides of his eyes

MIKI ARNDT

41 and it might be annoying. We think hav ing a grandmother again is good for him, and we would like you to consider seeing him Iagain.”agreed to go back, not because of any obligation toward him but because Takeda-san had been so sure that I was what this family needed, and I didn’t like disappointing him. On the next vis it, I brought my own zabuton to sit on. I rang his doorbell but he didn’t answer. His mother hadn’t been able to come with me today. I tried the door and it was un locked. He must have left it open so he wouldn’t have to talk to me.

los angeles review of books 42 crinkled when he laughed. This day was a rare occasion when we had gone out for dinner, to a casual yakitori place that he and his wife used to go to. It was new, us having dinner outside, especially at a place that he and his wife had frequented. He never touched me, not even a brush on the shoulders. He admitted he felt guilty going to places he used to go to with his wife, especially with another woman. I told him that revisiting these places didn’t lessen his memories. Coming here was important to him, and I was proud that he had invited me. ¤ I told Kei about my other families, wheth er he cared or not. I wanted to share my life with him, because work was all I had. I was upset because Koichi, my dull husband, had texted me to tell me that my family will replace me with anoth er grandmother. He hadn’t even both ered to call. “Since Haruto is three, our sons thought if they swap you out now, it wouldn’t take him long to forget you. Your rate was too high, so they found a Filipina woman with a better rate.”

“Are you a family member?” asked the ambulance worker when they finally ar rived, as I was getting onto the ambulance with“I’mKei. his grandmother,” I answered. “Please, he’s the only grandson I’ve got left.” This was technically true. It was a quick ride to the hospital, but I sat close to his pale body and gripped tightly onto his bony hand. He would’ve hated it, I know, but I was trying to give him whatever warmth I could emit. I wanted to let him know that I was here, that maybe even a rental grandmother was better than nothing at all.

“I haven’t cared about anything since my grandmother died. She was the only person who meant anything to me. I know I have an apartment, food, my health, and others have less. But it feels impossible to do anything. It’s easier to continue like this. I’m not hurting anyone. No one ex cept my mom cares whether I leave my house or not.” I had never imagined that his mouth was capable of forming so many words at one “Itime.guess it’s different between us,” he said. “I know you’re not actually my grandmother. So, you’re not lying to me.”

“How does that make sense?” I grum bled to Kei. “It’s like watching a movie and the actor suddenly changes for the same character. Why me and not Koichi? They probably get him for cheaper, but still.”“These children connect with you thinking that you’re their family. Do you feel bad about lying?” he asked. “I hate be ing lied “Notto.”if it helps you live a fuller life. Sometimes lies are closer to the truth than real life ever is.”

“You’re right,” I said, “It doesn’t al ways have to be a lie.”¤

Two weeks later, I found Kei collapsed on his kitchen floor. He was unconscious and didn’t respond to my cries. I put my forefinger under his nose but I couldn’t feel any breath, so I called an ambulance and then his mother. She had grown tired of watching us play video games and had long stopped coming with me to visit Kei. His mother repeatedly thanked me for staying with him and said she would meet us at the hospital.

¤ Rika and Shota moved away, and I would never see them again. I was dead to them, literally, and as unfair as it was that Shota killed me off so quickly, it was to be ex pected from this job. I was a professional. I would have other families. And I could complain to my husband Hiroaki. Usually he laughed at my impressions, but tonight he was distracted. Finally, he said, “I’m getting tired, I’ll go to sleep soon,” which was usually my cue to leave, except that it was only nine in the evening and I was still eating. Usually we drank un til midnight and he would pay for my taxi home. “I’ll be working late Friday so I have to cancel. I’m sorry, but see you next week.”

“But I thought we’re a set,” I said. “We’re mother and daughter.”

I sensed the stiffening of Kanae’s up per lip, the creasing in her temple when she has to say something she doesn’t want to. “They’re moving next week. He agreed to one last family dinner, and you can say bye to Rika. He hasn’t decided how to tell Rika about your death, but he’s made it clear that this is the last payment, so don’t con cern yourself with them further. I’m sorry, Rimiyo. You know Shota, he’s an awkward man. He’s just cutting costs, it’s nothing personal.”

Our days were Tuesdays and Fridays but he canceled the following Friday, and then the next Tuesday. Since he canceled last minute, he was still charged the full rate for my time. He didn’t seem to care.

MIKI ARNDT

Once his mother got to the hospital, I left to give them privacy. I didn’t know what had happened to Kei. Had he tried to harm himself? I couldn’t stop thinking that I was responsible. I thought I had been making progress with him. I stopped by the bookstore on the way home, pacing the aisles and rifling through pages mindlessly, not wanting to go back home. My cell phone rang. Kanae. Before I could tell her about what had happened with Kei, she blurted out, “I’m sorry. Shota can’t afford you anymore.”

“Then what happens to me?” I asked. I knew it wasn’t Kanae’s fault, she was just the messenger. Shota would never be man enough to tell me in person. “I tried to talk him out of it. But he wants you to die, in the story line of our family of course, not in real life,” she said, with a hollow laugh. “You know these things are never permanent. Clients change their minds. I enjoyed working with you. The next time we can be a family again, I’ll recommend you.” Like any job, they can terminate you when they want. But we get attached. They become more to us than just a paycheck. While you’re acting, a new part of you is born, a part who’s actually the person they paid you to be. And killing this person you’ve developed over years, it can be hard. “Can I see Rika again?”

“Yes, and we still are,” she said. “But Shota is transferring to the Nagoya office. I’m not moving, I have my life here. Shota still wants me to be in his life, with video calls and the occasional visit to Nagoya, or they can visit me here. But he said it’ll be too expensive to continue with you. He’s taking a pay cut. He wanted to hire you in the first place as a babysitter, and his par ents are in Nagoya and can watch Rika.”

It was a Friday when I walked by the yakitori restaurant that I went to once with Hiroaki and I felt like having dinner there. I missed him, even though he had canceled our meetings for the last three weeks. The hostess brought me to the counter seats and sat me next to a couple. They were a

“You should know that I didn’t try to kill myself,” Kei said. “I know that’s what

She looped her arm into his and they walked out of the restaurant and out of my life. I turned my phone off and continued my dinner. I read his messages the next morning. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her,” he wrote. “Thank you for helping me feel comfortable around women again. Because of you, I had the confidence to make a profile online and meet a wonder ful woman like Mayuko. I enjoyed being your husband and I wish you the greatest luck with your work. You’re like a sister to me, and I hope we can stay in touch.” He didn’t message me again. ¤ I visited Kei at the hospital. They told me that as soon as he regained consciousness, he had asked for me. “Why did you visit?” he asked. “You’re my only family member left,” I admitted. “And I was the one who found you. I felt guilty that I couldn’t help you. All I did was play video games. I was afraid you might have died under my care.” Seeing his face sent tears of relief down my “Whatface.about your husband?” he asked, “The one you like, the guy who al ways wanted to eat at home.” “He left me for another woman,” I laughed. “One he doesn’t have to pay by the hour, who he actually likes.”

“You have your grandchildren. Like Rika, the one you dance with.” So he had been listening to me while we played our videogames. I was never sure.“Her father took a job in Nagoya and they moved. They decided to kill me off so they don’t have to pay for video calls and visits. And my other family swapped in another grandmother who was cheaper. So now you’re all I have.”

los angeles review of books 44 few drinks in and seated close to each other, the woman’s hand lightly resting on his shoulder while she laughed at some thing he said. Of course, he was here with another woman. I should’ve known. I shielded my face with the menu but the server came to take my order, and recognized me. Her chipper voice got Hiroaki’s attention. “Rimiyo,” he said, and I looked over at my husband. The wom an with him was in her early 40s, dark eye makeup and more cleavage than was necessary at a yakitori eatery. Maybe she was paid too, and Hiroaki wanted variety, someone he could have a physical en counter with. Maybe he had grown tired of my complaints but was too kind to let me know.“This is my cousin, Rimiyo,” he said to the woman next to him, giving me a new character to play. “She’s like my sis ter, I was hoping to introduce you to her. Rimiyo, this is Mayuko.” Mayuko laughed. “He’s so mysterious, I hadn’t heard a thing about you. So nice to meet you. We’re heading out for a jazz performance now but enjoy your dinner. Hope to see you again.”

Kei started gasping for air. I was look ing for the button to call for help when I realized he was laughing, holding his stomach and crying too. “So all you’ve got is me,” he said, “People are like that. They use you and when you’re no longer necessary, it’s time to say“Whengoodbye.”one door closes, another door opens,” I said, “Someone famous said that. Or maybe it’s one of those Chinese prov erbs. I never know the source of quotes. But I thought I was a good grandmother. I thought they were happy with me.”

45 Ja’Tovia M. Gary, An Ecstatic Experience, 2015 Courtesy of the artist and Womxn In Windows.

“There’s time to change that,” I said, “There’s always time. We can work on it together.”“Guess since I’m still alive, you’re go ing to continue as my grandma,” Kei said. ¤ Kei was the only family member I saw regularly. We were making surprising ly quick progress. We had started with a reluctant walk around the block to move our legs, but now he came grocery shopping with me, and I was teaching him how to cook some easy dishes. The other day we even went to the beach, al though we both remained fully clothed and in the shade, complaining about how hot it was and deciding the only way to cool down was to have a midday beer. He borrowed books from the library and ex changed a few words with the librarians. I focused on him and didn’t take on other commitments.Onespring day, Takeda-san called me about a young woman from London who wanted to spend a few hours with a grandmother. “She can speak Japanese,” he assured me, because he knew my English was limited to a few basic phras es. “She’s here for a week, it’s her first time in Japan.”Imet Naomi at the south exit of the train station and she waved at me enthusi astically. A petite girl who smiled with her entire face, her hands gestured while she spoke. “I’m excited to be here,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to visit. My mom is from Japan, but she left to pursue her ca reer in London, she actually met my fa ther the first week in a city bus. She hasn’t been back, but she did teach me Japanese.”

Naomi wanted to see the cherry blos soms and had timed her trip to see them. Maybe she felt it was safer to hire me for her first day in a new country, not know ing anyone here. We grabbed a quick lunch at the convenience store to take with us, and I brought her to my favorite park bench, overlooking the river and the rows of dusty pink trees. “Why did you rent a grandmother?” I asked her once we sat down. “My mother doesn’t keep in touch with her family. When I asked for my grandmother’s contact information though, she gave it to me. But the number was disconnected. I couldn’t find her on line. I was disappointed but also relieved. My mom didn’t have a good relationship with her, and she might not want to meet

los angeles review of books 46 you thought when you found me. I had a severe allergic reaction to hazelnuts. My mom brought over some cakes from the new bakery and said to share them with you, and I tried a bite. You actually saved my life.”When I saw him collapsed on the ground, my immediate thought was that my negligence had killed him. If I had giv en him my undivided attention, I could’ve made a real connection and he wouldn’t have died. I had imagined the worst, like I always do. “I felt that my life had no meaning but I was still too disinterested to end it. So I did what’s easy. Playing video games, eating food from the convenience store. I don’t have plans for the future. I don’t go outside because I get everything I need online.”“But,” he said, “I forgot that when my throat closed up and I couldn’t breathe. I never knew I had allergies. My life was being extinguished by nature, and by ha zelnuts of all things. I didn’t want to die amid my food wrappers and the dust on my floor. For the first time, I felt shame.”

MIKI ARNDT

47 me either. Maybe it’s a burden to suddenly show up at her door. I thought it might be better to try to see her once I’m more familiar with the culture.”

I thought about my own daughter Maya. I moved after a decade of waiting in a house with our memories. It had been clear me then that she was never coming back.“If I don’t reach out to her, she can’t reject me,” she continued. “Meeting with you is “You’repractice.”doing well so far,” I said. A breeze made the branches above us rustle, and a shower of pink blossoms covered our heads and shoulders. When Maya’s father left us, I had taken her to see the cherry blossoms too. It was late in the season then and the ground was littered with pink tired snow that people had walked on. Maya stuck out her tongue to catch a delicate blossom. I didn’t know how to tell a five-year-old that her father was gone. The sky grew darker as she ran around picking up blossoms and throwing them in my direction like confetti. I would have to raise this child alone, I thought. Naomi continued talking about her life in London, her classes. “I write fiction and I care so much about my characters and get to know them deeply. Sometimes I feel closer to them than with my own friends and family. When I think about them, I don’t feel so alone.” It was getting dark but she had one more request before we parted ways. She wanted to visit the depachika, the bustling market in the department store basement. I took her to the cacophonous under ground of Takashimaya, shuffling past a myriad of delicious looking samples. We passed by the freshly fried korokke and the meticulously arranged salad and the gleaming fish and arrived in front of the glass cases of cakes and macarons. It was crowded in the aisles but I navigated while pointing out things she might be interest ed in trying. Busy ladies jostled around her, and when I saw her taking pictures of a chocolate cake, I remembered Maya, who had hated crowds and was always an gry when I dragged her here. One time I thought she was right behind me, but she had clung to the skirt of another woman who looked similar from the back. It took me 20 minutes to find her, crying incon solably, the salespeople repeatedly asking her for her name. We walked back to the train station. I wanted to ask her what she was doing tomorrow but she probably didn’t want a rental grandma for her entire trip. She was different from the other young girls who kept checking the time on their phones to make sure I answered all their questions within the hour that they had paid for me. She even hugged me when we said good bye. She passed through the ticket gate and turned around to wave. I waved back until my arm hurt, until I could no longer see her on the crowded platform.

Rosemary Mayer, Some Days in April, 1979, artist's book with pencil, colored pencil, pastel, ink, crayon, printed papers, transparentized paper, and chromogenic color prints, overall dimensions (closed): 15 7/16 x 13 x 13/16 inches (39.2 x 33 x 2 centimeters). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Modern Women's Fund. Courtesy of The Estate of Rosemary Mayer.

LOVE SONG SYLVIE BAUMGARTEL

That did not happen in my house. Oh yes, it did. I pace the house at night Talking in my sleep. Don’t blame me, I don’t know anything. Oh yes, you do. My grandmother’s teeth in a glass Of peppermint water By the sink at night. She beat my mother’s backside With a hairbrush for singing Dreidle dreidle dreidle, I made you out of clay. My grandmother sings: Bed is too small for my tiredness Give me a hill top with trees Tuck a cloud up under my chin Lord, blow the moon out, please.

50 I go through my grandmother’s Closet looking for things I want when she dies. I open a can of wax beans & find a preserved Black & MyGrasshopper.orangegrandmother tells me About when she & her Friends carried the coffin Of their dead six-year-old friend Who died of typhoid. They wore white dresses. The more you sweat in peace, The less you bleed in battle. We play house in our secrets. THE HOUSE ON HOLLY STREET SYLVIE BAUMGARTEL

A shard of broken glass did not Travel through her blood stream & pierce her heart like she Worried it would. & the Orange seeds I swallowed Are not growing trees inside me. Fear of death is fear of life. She grows orchids on the Kitchen windowsill. Their silver roots curl. She starves them, They thrive. She Feeds me, I starve. In the dark, I brushed out her hair. I pushed the veins in her hands. Stop playing with my body, she said. But I love how you feel.

SYLVIE BAUMGARTEL

Defying the administration, the L.A. City Council declared Los Angeles a sanctuary city in February 2019. Some dismissed the move as symbolic, but City Councilman Gilbert Cedillo, who was one of the proposers of the city’s sanctu ary resolution, stressed that the act was “extremely significant” in the face of in tensifying ICE raids that terrified local residents. The resolution “set the tone for the way we want our residents to be treat ed, with dignity and respect regardless of their immigration status,” he said.

Rivera decided to leave early in 1980. She was 21 years old. She had joined groups committed to Catholic social justice and had met Archbishop Óscar Romero. When a gunman aligned with the government shot him in the middle of a Sunday mass that March, she knew no one was safe. She made it to Los Angeles, where a cousin helped her get a job at Winchell Donuts, and she shared a crowded apart ment with friends from home. Los Angeles’s Pico-Union district and adjoin ing Alvarado corridor near MacArthur Park hummed with life, a vibrant Central America in exile. Vendors sold pupusas on the corners, and izote flowers out of their cars. Boomboxes pumped out cumbias and marimba music. Young men pulled televisions onto the stoops of cramped apartment buildings to watch soccer to gether on hot summer evenings. Trade union, student, and revolutionary activists from Central America carried their fight against authoritarianism across borders: gathering, remembering, and sustaining long-distance solidarities. Refugee relief agencies set up shop. Rivera found work translating for one of them and was soon at the center of a movement to transport and protect other refugees like herself: a movement for what activists were starting to call sanctuary. Since 2017, sanctuary cities have been on the receiving end of Donald Trump’s rage and persecution. His administration has threatened to withhold federal funding to them, to overwhelm them by busing in immigrants imprisoned at the border, and to dispatch SWAT-like Border Patrol teams to carry out raids. His reasons are not hard to make out. Punishing sanctu ary cities allows him, all at once, to un tether police, expel nonwhite immigrants, and spread culture-war disdain for pro gressive cities as sinks of crime and chaos.

Then, violence came. “The terror kept growing around us,” she recalls. Home to thousands of disinherited peasants, the region was a stronghold for guerrillas fighting the oligarchic Salvadoran state, and an epicenter of state brutality. A boy she knew, who had been involved with the guerrillas, went into hiding. He slipped home one evening, and found his moth er, father, and brother slaughtered at the dinner table. Rivera’s cousin disappeared. Her grandfather used his pull with a lieutenant-colonel, who let him search a truck loaded down with bodies. They found him, barely alive, and tangled in a wire that had cut nearly to his bones.

But the journey to the city’s statement had been long, and to some the announce ment, while welcome, had come too late to meaningfully dent Trump’s antiimmigrant machinery. After all, by this point, the state of California had already approved legislation preventing local law enforcement from providing resources to federal immigration authorities. The word “sanctuary” appeared nowhere in the law — called the California Values Act — but it was generally called California’s state

PAUL A. KRAMER

los angeles review of books 54 sanctuaryResistinglaw. pressure from activ ists, Mayor Eric Garcetti had said Los Angeles could protect immigrants’ rights and frustrate the administration’s antiimmigrant designs without waving a sanctuary flag. For one thing, he said, the term was legally amorphous. In pursuit of clarity, Garcetti and his advisors had asked the Trump administration for the technical, legal definition of the term that they would be using. But they were only told that sanctuary cities were wrong and would be sanctioned, and that the term’s official definition, not yet available, would be forthcoming.Andsomepeople thought that Los Angeles was already a sanctuary city. Some factions claimed that it was, citing the LAPD’s longstanding Special Order 40, which barred police officers from investigating matters relating strictly to immigration status, or reporting an un documented immigrant who had been the victim of a crime to federal law enforce ment. Under the order, officers would not initiate police actions with the goal of dis covering immigration status, nor arrest or book suspects solely for illegal entry into the country. Police officers would only report undocumented immigrants to the INS when they were booked for multiple misdemeanors, a high-grade misdemean or, or a felony; or if they’d been arrested for similar offenses before. To some ob servers, Special Order 40 amounted to sanctuary, but for others, it fell short, for better or worse. No one knew for sure, but many people had strong opinions. The uncertainty may have been, at least partly, the stubborn legacy of a strange, remarkable, buried episode. Los Angeles had indeed openly declared it self a sanctuary city, briefly, once before. In the mid-1980s, at the height of a ref ugee influx from Central America, sanc tuary activists had successfully pressured the Los Angeles City Council to affirm the separation of policing and immi gration enforcement, and apply it to all city employees. On November 23, 1985, the Council narrowly passed an ambi tious sanctuary resolution, the first of the United States’s largest cities to do so up to that point. Campaigners for refugee and immigrant rights across the country hailed the victory. But something unexpected happened. Anti-immigrant political leaders stoked a popular backlash, whipping up frenzied hostility against immigrants as compet itors and parasites, permanent outsiders and enemies of society itself. Sanctuary supporters on the Council, blindsided, had beaten a tactical retreat. They managed to preserve the resolution’s buffer between the INS, police officers, and other civil servants, but they undeclared sanctuary.

What remained after the storm cleared was like a sanctuary city, but less: a fog that, decades later, still shrouded Los Angeles’s exact location on the frag ile map of immigrant welcome and safety. Was a city still a sanctuary if it didn’t al low itself to say so? Los Angeles’s first sanctuary law grew out of the refugee wave that had brought Alicia Rivera to the city. By 1982, an esti mated two to three hundred thousand ref ugees from El Salvador — a country with fewer than five million people — and tens of thousands of Guatemalans had fled to the United States to escape murder, pov erty, and starvation. The 1980 Refugee Act codified a right to asylum for those with a “well-founded fear” of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Paquita and Reynaldo, Le Bar), 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

los angeles review of books 56 opinion, or group membership. Migrants from El Salvador and Guatemala discov ered their applications were almost al ways turned down, even as the doors were thrown open to refugees fleeing commu nist Theregimes.refusals had everything to do with US military and political interven tion in Central America. Since the end of the 1970s, a popular leftist insurgency had challenged El Salvador’s predatory oligar chy. American intelligence suggested that guerrillas had received training and arms from the Soviets and Cubans, although the extent of that assistance would later be disputed. The Carter and Reagan admin istrations viewed the civil war through a Cold War lens, casting Salvadoran insur gents as Soviet proxies. As the Salvadoran military and rightwing death squads terrorized the pop ulation, US military and economic aid poured into the country, bolstering the regime. The US Army trained three elite Salvadoran battalions at forts and bases in North Carolina, Georgia, Panama, and Honduras, then sent them home with Huey helicopters, 105mm artillery guns, and A-37 Dragonfly jets that dropped 500-pound bombs. At least one of the brigades, the Atlacatl Battalion, massa cred hundreds of Asylum-seekers’civilians.testimony about the violence could undermine political sup port for these authoritarian regimes: if US officials accepted migrants’ claims that they had well-founded fears of their own governments, it would undercut their rationales for arming and training those same governments, and their rosy asser tions that state-sponsored terror — if it had ever taken place — was steadily declining.Tominimize grants of asylum, INS and State Department officials set the bar impossibly high: Central American appli cants had to submit proof of direct, indi vidualized danger that far outstripped the usual asylum standards. Ricardo Ernandes, a young union organizer, had been shot at three times in El Salvador; when his cous in was killed by men carrying government guns, they had left a note on his chest say ing they had intended to kill Ernandes. It wasn’t enough. A US judge turned down his asylum Meanwhile,request.US officials ramped up deportation, pressuring migrants into signing “voluntary departure” forms, then expelling them. Sometimes the officials lied. A minister active in refugee work re ported that an INS official had told a girl she must sign the form if she didn’t have a lawyer. Another girl had been told she was signing a laundry ticket. The result was a ruthless deportation machine, at odds with US and interna tional law but well aligned with Cold War priorities. Of the more than 6,000 peti tions for asylum by Salvadorans in 1981, only 154 were considered, and only two granted. That same year, just over 1,000 Salvadorans were deported. By 1986, nearly 50,000 people had been forced to return.Some of them did not survive.

Refugees in Los Angeles kept alive the memory of Santana Chirino Amaya, a 24-year-old man from Amapulapa, San Vicente. He had been deported from the United States, then managed to re turn. But he’d been caught and deported a second time, in June 1981. Later that summer, his headless body was found in a shallow grave. Activists called it the second underground railroad. By the early 1980s, hundreds of

The movement’s signature tactic in volved refugees testifying in public about the violence they had escaped, and which threatened their families and communities. “The Sanctuary concept was to confront, PAUL A. KRAMER

57 religious, immigrant, and refugee aid organizations, initially along the USMexico border, then nationally, began taking a daring, controversial step. They built a network of shelters — “sanctuar ies,” they called them — through which refugees could be channeled away from the border and into busy, anonymous cit ies and small, interior towns with a thin INS presence. They’d be provided hous ing, food, clothing, and legal assistance as they searched for safety and navigated the complex, dismaying, discriminatory asylum process. By fall 1985, around 300 institutions, mostly churches and temples, had signed on, including ones affiliated with most mainline Protestant denomina tions, the Catholic Church, and conser vative and reform Judaism. Los Angeles’s First Unitarian Church in Pico-Union had been the first church in the city to publicly declare it was taking in Central American refugees under the sanctuary banner.Congregations debating whether to join the effort by providing potentially unlawful, church-based shelter and other supports were compelled to grapple with questions of law and civil disobedience, secrecy and advocacy, complicity and em pire, and to let these questions cross the borders of their everyday lives. In their deliberations, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish congregations invoked the “cities of refuge” established in the Old Testament, where those fleeing blood revenge for an unintentional killing could find protec tion, and cited the Catholic Church’s long history of sheltering fugitives escaping arrest.They turned to the Bible for guidance. There was Leviticus 19:33: “When a for eigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your na tive-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Christian con gregations made sense of their obligations to refugees with Matthew 25:35–36: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visitTheme.”movement sparked charged de bate from the outset. Its opponents ac cused it of organized law-breaking, and naïvely accepting and exaggerating mi grants’ accounts of political persecution at home. They said activists should dedi cate their energies to filing asylum claims through the system, which was fair and functioning. Some said there was no tra dition of “sanctuary” in American law. Sanctuary activists countered that the asylum system was patently biased along Cold War lines. A Polish merchant sea man who jumped ship fleeing commu nism could be given asylum within 48 hours, while Salvadorans like Rivera, flee ing a US-backed government, were im prisoned for months, then deported. When it came to historical precedent, they pointed to the sanctuary history most American children learned about in elementary school, the network of shelters that provided refuge to Black people es caping slavery, and “personal liberty laws” initiated by Northern states’ governments to protect them from recapture under the Fugitive Slave Acts.

Ja'Tovia Gary, The Giverny Document (Singe Channel), 2020, 40 mins, Black and white/ color, sound, dir. Ja'Tovia Gary. Courtesy of the artist.

At the center of the Los Angeles movement, seemingly everywhere, was Sister Jo’Ann De Quattro. She was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to an Irish-Italian family with an activist past, and raised in California, where she be came a nun. On sabbatical at a Mexican American cultural center in San Antonio, she learned that three North American nuns and another missionary had been murdered in El Salvador. The news trans formed her. “I cannot live my life as usual now,” she remembers thinking. De Quattro returned to Los Angeles and joined religious and secular activists as ever more refugees streamed into the city. Chairing the city’s Interfaith Task Force on Central America, she promoted public sanctuary: churches would open ly announce that they sheltered refugees, risking legal action and public outrage.

“Even the more liberal of the male cler ics of different denominations were too chicken to do it,” she said. “And so I said, ‘I’ll do Deit.’”Quattro proved a skilled, unre lenting organizer. She gathered a broad coalition of Los Angeles faith commu nities whose members declared their churches and temples sanctuaries. She cultivated ties between Anglo and Central American activists, and helped organize

PAUL A. KRAMER

59 as well as to help,” Reverend Teresa Santillana, a sanctuary activist, put it later. When they spoke publicly, most refugee witnesses insisted on remaining anon ymous, usually tying bandanas or other coverings across their noses and mouths. Some wore masks. Refugee activists’ fam ilies back home faced violent reprisal, and everyone knew that agents of the Salvadoran state in the United States, and US government officials, were paying at tention. When refugee witnesses appeared on front pages and news broadcasts, the masks spoke, too: of danger and fear, the courage to speak out, and the need to re mainSomeveiled.activists embraced still more confrontational tactics. INS deportation flights left Los Angeles regularly, which is where the Women of Conscience came in. Just over a decade into a feminist revolution, many women in the sanctu ary movement rejected the presumption — evident in the behavior of some male leaders — that the campaign needed men in charge. That spring, a small group of devout, church-affiliated women — just six at first, then 22 by that fall — formed their own, independent, direct-action cadre: nuns, deacons, and religious social service workers, some of them new to the fight, some seasoned activists. Cynthia Anderson, a social worker who had in troduced Alicia Rivera to the sanctuary movement, was a ringleader. On September 16, 1981, 11 women — five nuns, and Episcopal and Roman Catholic laywomen — blocked the drive way of a federal building where immi grants were being detained, and refused to move. The police pushed the women aside, but they came back. Police officers arrested them, not for the last time. “It’s a very touchy situation, moving these church ladies around,” said one police man. The protestors had no illusions that they would prevent the deportations — the INS found a way — but the dis ruptions drew journalists. Sister Paulita Bernuy told a reporter that, as an oth erwise law-abiding woman of 52, civil disobedience had not come easily. “I was scared to death to even think of it,” she said. “But doing this bonds me a lot with people who live in fear — and with those who’ve moved beyond that.”

The group was barred from entering and flew on to Washington instead to “see if we could rattle some cages in Congress.”

On another occasion, a newscaster speaking with De Quattro called Central Americans “mere economic refugees.” She refused the term. She thought of women she’d watched in a displaced persons camp in Central America, as they struggled to feed their children, cooking whatever food they could gather over a fire. “I said, there is no such thing as a mere econom ic refugee,” she recalled. “When a mother cannot get food for her child, that’s not a mere economic refugee. She is trying to keep her child alive.” Most everyone agreed that Harold Ezell, the INS’s fervent Western region al director, was the West Coast sanctu ary movement’s nemesis. (“We had the most wonderful opponent,” De Quattro remembered, chuckling.) The son of an Assembly of God minister, Ezell had climbed the ranks to an executive post at Der Wienerschnitzel International, a hot-dog chain, and become a close ally of Governor Ronald Reagan. When Reagan was elected president, he was rewarded for his support. In 1983, having never held public office, he was appointed head of the INS’s 3,000-person Western division, which covered the heart of the Central American migration. Soon Ezell had managed to build a national platform for himself, opposing what, according to the Los Angeles Times, he considered “America’s most insidious enemy: the illegal alien.” Frustrated that Americans failed to recognize the dan ger, he spread moral panic. Immigrants, he insisted, were the root of crime, drugs, unemployment, and welfare abuse in the United States. In his zeal to rescue the nation from this neglected threat, Ezell issued nation al policy statements without permission from higher-level officials. He initiated covert investigations of sanctuary activ ists, hiring spies to wiretap public church services, an apparent first for the federal government. On threadbare evidence, he accused sanctuary activists — he called them “minority rights people” — of con spiring with immigrant-smuggling rings. (On this point, sanctuary leader Eugene Boutilier was incredulous. “Why would we recruit aliens to come here?” he asked.

Some activists were taken aback by her vocation. “The stereotype of a nun,” she said, was “not somebody who is necessari ly doing what we were doing.” She was also a forceful media pres ence. In June 1985, she spoke out at a press conference in defense of hunger-striking immigrant prisoners who fought horrif ic conditions at the prison at El Centro, about 200 miles southeast of the city, that held thousands of migrants awaiting pro cessing or deportation. The men charged that they had been forced to stand out side for up to 14 hours a day in scorching, 120-degree heat, and locked in solitary confinement if they refused to sign “vol untary departure” forms. Riot-equipped INS officers broke up the peaceful protest, beating the strikers with batons and, ac cording to Jose Ramirez Flores from El Salvador, tied their wrists “so tight they stopped circulation to our hands.” INS Commissioner Alan Nelson defended the officers’ actions, insisting that “[y]ou must remember this is a detention facili ty.” Speaking at the press conference, De Quattro was indignant. El Centro was “not a detention facility,” she shot back. It was a “concentration camp.”

los angeles review of books 60 an investigative trip to Honduras, the axis of US military power in Central America.

The sanctuary movement grew, and Alicia Rivera emerged as one of its most stirring speakers, first in Los Angeles, then on a national stage. “There was something that just told me that I had to speak up,” she recalled, “because I heard the people crying in my mind and being killed.” Despite searing memories, she spoke at hundreds of venues, from church pulpits to 60 Minutes. She appeared in televised debates with high-ranking fed eral officials, including Ezell. They once clashed on a Los Angeles public affairs program. Rivera’s husband at the time, Bruce Bowman, an immigration attorney, remembers Ezell saying, “Illegals are all over. This young lady might be one!”

Rivera also faced off against the State Department’s point person on Central American refugee policy, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams, in an interview with Charlie Rose in 1983. Abrams was in the

“Life is no bed of roses here for anyone from Central America.”) As INS regional director, Ezell required that detained im migrant children be released only to their parents or legal guardians, a move that activists criticized as the INS’s use of chil dren as Andbait.he advertised his efforts through savvy media campaigns. He toured the border with reporters, and staged dramat ic press conferences, where he launched bold, headline-grabbing claims unbur dened by facts, raged about immigrants’ corrosive impact on society, and con demned the sanctuary movement’s ac tivities as criminal and un-American. He wildly exaggerated immigrants’ numbers and, when called on it, seemed unboth ered. Recounting one such incident, the Los Angeles Times noted that Ezell was “not known for his precision.” Ezell anchored his crusade in Americanism and Christianity, but not without an uneasy defensiveness. “A lot of people accuse us of being kind of flagwavers in the INS,” he told 4,000 newly naturalized citizens at a mass ceremony at the Los Angeles Convention Center in late 1983. “But a flag represents thousands of people. Don’t ever be ashamed of be ing a flag-waver!” He labored to take back patriotic images not usually associated with deportation, brandishing a miniature Statue of Liberty at the ceremony and wearing an electric lapel pin of the icon with a diamond torch that lit up when you touched it. People had asked Ezell how a minister’s son like himself could be so hardline against immigrants enough times that he’d developed what for him counted as a quip. “The Bible tells you to obey laws,” he would say. What most characterized Ezell’s ap proach — striking in light of US military and economic power — was his unwaver ing sense of the United States as besieged and victimized, especially by immigrants. It was true that the US had once encour aged some in-migration, he admitted, but times had changed. “We’re not out re cruiting people to develop our resources anymore,” he said. “Instead, our resources are being depleted…”

The bumper stick er he had posted in his office said it all: “The Indians had bad immigration laws.” Illegal immigration would “destroy what we know as a free society” within the decade unless the people took action. “Someday the citizenry is going to be fed up,” he said, near-quoting Peter Finch’s raging, desperate news anchor from the movie Network, who had urged viewers to stick their heads out of their windows and shout: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

PAUL A. KRAMER

los angeles review of books 62 middle of delivering the agency’s standardissue defense of US policy — that El Salvador was overpopulated, that nearly all those fleeing to the United States were “economic migrants,” not refugees, and that the Department was granting asylum in those few cases where political “tar geting” could be demonstrated — when Rivera cut him off.

Rivera continued. If US officials granted asylum to Salvadorans, “they would be contradicting themselves.”

The policies and paths to them var ied, and so did the names they were giv en, where they were named at all. Cities of refuge, they were called, cities of sanc tuary, sanctuary cities. Designating them in this way made them something more than mere regulations. It elevated the pol icies to a level of principle (a somewhat open-ended principle) and fastened them to a city’s moral and political identity. A sanctuary city wasn’t just something that you did as a city; it was a part of who

Abrams objected. Rivera kept going. “We cannot get that kind of proof in El Salvador,” she said. Reading or clipping a newspaper, or “even having a Bible,” was considered subversive by the Salvadoran state, and could get you killed. Abrams protested that written proof wasn’t required, especially from the Salvadoran government. When it came to Rivera’s charge of widespread, brutal, political repression, he replied that there were many more people in El Salvador who were not being repressed. “We’ve had cases where someone says, ‘My brother was killed,’” he said. “Now that sounds very persuasive. You go back and find out there are seven more brothers, they are liv ing in El Salvador, and they’re not being persecuted.”Riverawasn’t giving up. “We don’t qualify for asylum,” she said, “only because the repression and the massacres that are being carried on in El Salvador are sup ported by the US government.”

Abrams parried that the State Department provided asylum to people from “dozens and dozens of friendly gov ernments, including El Salvador —” “Friendly governments,” she deadpanned.Rivera conveyed intense calm during these conflicts, but her face masked inner terror, she recalled later. She could suc cessfully counter top officials’ false claims that El Salvador was safe, that migrants’ fears were groundless, and that US asy lum decisions were fair — in a language she was still making her own — and they could still just deport her. The campaign to force American cities to separate immigration enforcement from policing and other public functions began small. Beginning in early 1985, advocates championed a handful of municipal ordi nances that promised refugees and some immigrants freedom from status checks by public officials and, especially, police non-compliance with the INS in dis cretionary immigration and deportation matters. The effort took off first in pro gressive, college-town enclaves with net works of antiwar and solidarity activism. But that same year also saw big-city may ors issue executive orders that distanced municipal governments from the INS.

Now Abrams interrupted. “Well, we don’t support repression and we don’t sup port massacres,” he said.

“You want written proof that I’ve been persecuted?” she asked. “You want a signed thing from the government that says that I have been persecuted and that they killed my priest?”

Ja'Tovia Gary, The Giverny Document (Singe Channel), 2020, 40 mins, Black and white/ color, sound, dir. Ja'Tovia Gary. Courtesy of the artist.

los angeles review of books 64 you were. Reverend Gustav Schultz, a Lutheran minister and sanctuary leader, hoped that sanctuary cities might remind the United States what it ought to be. They might “move toward pushing the country back to being a sanctuary as a whole.”

Passing a City Council resolution in Los Angeles — by far the largest US city in the United States to do so by that point — would boost the movement nationally.

If Los Angeles could make itself a sanctuary, maybe any place could.

In the summer of 1985, activists reached out to Michael Woo, a young, newly elected city councilman. The me thodical, idealistic 33-year-old politician had just defeated the incumbent in a run-off election, becoming the first Asian American to make it onto the Council, in a city that was six percent Asian American. Woo’s father, Wilbur Woo, a found er of the city’s first Chinese American bank and a force in Chinese American Republican circles, had instilled a sense of civic responsibility in him. But Mike Woo had taken a different path politically. Inspired by antiwar activism, he had gone to UC Santa Cruz, grown his hair long, and written left-leaning columns in the student newspaper as “Citizen Woo.”

During the campaign, sanctuary ac tivists had approached Woo through an intermediary, asking if he’d sponsor a sanctuary city resolution. The decision had not been difficult. His own family had a complex immigrant background. His fa ther had been born in China with US cit izenship, as his grandfather had been born in the United States. His mother Beth,

Beginning in the summer of 1985, sanctuary activists pressured lawmak ers to declare Los Angeles a sanctuary, and to guarantee city officials would not participate in immigration enforcement.

In his run for the L.A. City Council, Woo had reached out to a range of ethnic communities, activist organizations, and interest groups. His advisors concluded he had won by positioning himself as a pragmatic technocrat and representative of Los Angeles’s young, growing, multi cultural middle class, with a vision for ur ban revitalization and cultural inclusion.

The term “sanctuary city,” by rhetori cally linking municipal resolutions to the sanctuary movement, conveyed approv al for activists’ work. And, for better and worse, it gave the policies greater promi nence. It helped refugees navigate toward pockets of relative safety. It also made these policies and the cities that embraced them big, visible targets.

“Every proclamation, especially by an of ficial entity, was an amazing and uplifting success,” Rivera recalled. Los Angeles was not just anywhere. It was the country’s second largest city by population, home to its largest Latinx community, and a central hub of both the sanctuary movement and the INS. After El Salvador’s capital, it was home to more Salvadorans than any other city in the world. Los Angeles was where the forces struggling over what kind of nation the United States was and should be, and what the United States owed the people uprooted by the violence it supported, confronted each other with the greatest intensity.ForSister Darlene Nicgorski, a sanc tuary activist who had witnessed the bru tality of US-backed Central American governments firsthand — and who would face conviction for sheltering refugees in violation of US immigration laws — the successful passage of sanctuary city res olution in Los Angeles “would send a sweeping message to both sides in the controversy.”

Woo, his staff and sanctuary activ ists drew up a coherent, workable plan that happened to be one of the boldest sanctuary city resolutions to that time. It placed Council backing behind Special Order 40. And it went further, directing all city employees, not just police officers, “to exclude refugee status as a consider ation in their daily activities and routine dealings with the public,” with the proviso that this “should not be construed as sanc tioning the violation of any law or encour aging interference in law enforcement efforts.”The resolution also condemned the Reagan administration’s biased approach to refugee admissions and insisted that asylum be granted or denied “without consideration of the relationship between the current Administration in this coun try and the current government in the refugee’s country of origin.” And it em phasized the resolution’s intent to make it safer and easier for refugees to report crime and violations of building and

65 also Chinese American, had been born in the United States and educated in China, where his parents had met. Mike Woo also knew something about refugees. During World War II, Beth and two children — Wilbur was in the United States attending UCLA — had fled Hong Kong as the Japanese army advanced. They lost everything. Woo, born in the United States after their reunion, had a stable, prosperous upbringing in 1950s Los Angeles, but his mother shared intimate, harrowing stories of violent up rooting and narrow escapes. In taking up the cause, Woo felt as sured that a sanctuary city resolution would build on established policies initi ated by the LAPD itself. Six years earlier, on November 27, 1979, Chief of Police Daryl Gates had signed the department’s Special Order 40, which held that that “undocumented alien status in itself” was “not a matter for police action.” As its text explained, the order was practical. Law enforcement required “a high degree of cooperation” with a public that was be coming “more diverse,” with “substantial numbers of people from different ethnic and sociological backgrounds migrating to this City.” The order advanced the con stitutional principle of equal protection for all. And because of their status, undoc umented immigrants were “often more vulnerable to victimization,” and needed their access to the police defended. Sanctuary activists did not think the matter should be left in the hands of the LAPD. Special Order 40 could be re scinded by the department at any point. And they charged, according to the Times, that the order had been “unevenly en forced” and that some refugees had been detained and turned over to the INS mere ly because of their immigration status. A sanctuary city resolution would codify Special Order 40 and remind other city departments that refugees, whether pres ent legally or not, were entitled to city ser vices without harassment. Backstopping the order was especially urgent in light of the LAPD’s heavy policing of the Central American neighborhoods of Pico-Union and MacArthur Park. As for Woo, he thought a sanctuary city measure, grounded in existing LAPD policy, offering what he took to be an all-American pledge of protection for the oppressed, would be an unobjectionable way to embark on his fledgling council man career. “A resolution that I thought could’ve been perceived as motherhood and apple pie,” he told me, “turned out to be much more controversial.”

PAUL A. KRAMER

Public officials spoke passionately on both sides, revealing, as Woo antici pated, just how tight the margins would be. Speaking in favor, Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, the son of Jewish immigrants, invoked the immigrant backgrounds of his Council colleagues by reciting their last names. There was no difference be tween the sanctuary that Los Angeles was offering refugees, he said, and earlier poli cies that had made immigrant-descended councilmembers a possibility. “This is a deeply emotional issue with me,” he told the chamber. His own parents had fled Russia in the 1920s, and his mother had arrived in the United States just months before the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, which severely restricted immigra tion, had gone into force.

Robert Farrell was among the reso lution’s firmest backers. He’d been on the committee that had drafted the sanctuary resolution, and he thought it had not gone far enough. When Farrell was a child, he and his family had left Louisiana for boom ing, postwar Los Angeles, along with tens of thousands of other Black Southerners seeking freedom, safety, and jobs. “I felt myself to be an immigrant to the Los Angeles area,” he told me, “moving out of a segregated environment to a less segregated environment to improve your quality of life and the life of your family.”

Speaking in favor of the resolution, Manuel Marroquin, a Salvadoran refugee, submitted a pro-sanctuary petition signed by a thousand people. He testified that he had been denied asylum and would be killed if sent back. According to the Times, another speaker insisted that pass ing a sanctuary resolution meant “con doning terrorism” because “safe-houses where illegal aliens are harbored could be used to hide a cache of weapons.”

If there had been a national border be tween Louisiana and Los Angeles in the late 1940s, he said, his family’s situation would have been indistinguishable from that of the Central Americans currently fleeing to the city. Farrell was deeply in volved in Black international politics, and noted that many Black migrants arriving to Los Angeles from Jamaica, Trinidad,

The next day, the Council convened in its august, marble-columned chamber, and deliberated for three charged hours. The hall that day was packed with over 400 sanctuary activists and a bank of tele vision cameras, reflecting, for the Times, “the emotional atmosphere surrounding the sanctuary issue.” Citizens were invited to testify, and it all poured out. What ex actly did the resolution, and its sanctuary designation, actually mean? What kind of city did Los Angeles want to be, and who had a right to live there? What did the city — and the nation — owe the dispos sessed from other countries?

los angeles review of books 66 safety codes, without fear of deportation.

While Special Order 40 applied to all im migrants in the city, the resolution made clear that the sanctuary city policy applied only to refugees, and not to the city’s larg er immigrant population. On November 23, just over two months after taking office, Woo presented the resolution to the Council. Sanctuary activists rose in a standing ovation, but Woo was cautious. He had counted the votes. Things looked favorable. But he sensed the issue was more contentious than he’d supposed, and he knew the po sitions of key players could change with out warning. City Council aides had told activists “we’re with you,” but De Quattro remained wary. “We don’t want ‘proba bly,’” she said. “What would be disastrous would be a defeat of this proposal.”

The vote was taken, and it was close: 8-6 in favor. The vote tally was announced, and hundreds of sanctuary activists who had jammed the Council chambers shouted, cheered, and hugged. “I’m utterly amazed and elated,” said De Quattro. The resolution was “a signal to the refugees who are here among us that the LA City Council will be supportive of them and their presence here in order to try to elim inate their fear of deportation.” Ezell was furious, telling a reporter that the resolu tion was a “real turkey,” and an “absolute insult to federal officials.” The decision made national news. “City Council Vote Gives Boost to National Movement,” read a headline in the Washington Post, which called it a “major victory.”

The backlash was immediate. Councilmembers who had supported the resolution got inundated with hostile calls and letters. Woo received a death threat. Ezell took to the airwaves. The resolution was an affront to federal power, he said, and would summon a flood of menacing immigrants into the city and the nation. Within minutes of the Council vote, he was threatening federal retaliation. Within days, he had instructed an INS at torney to look into the possibility of a fed eral lawsuit against the city. In December, he traveled to Washington to lobby con gressional lawmakers who might sponsor legislation penalizing sanctuary cities by cutting off federal funds. “I think it’s ri diculous to thumb your nose at the federal government with one hand and then put your other hand out for a check,” he said. “That’s not the American way.”

Looking back, Woo recalled his sur prise at his opponents’ tactics. “I think it was an eye-opener for me in terms of see ing how it would be easy to demagogue an issue like this,” he said. But he pushed back. Five days after the vote, he took his case directly to the city in a reasoned, pas sionate editorial in the Times, headlined “‘City of Refuge’ is All-American.”

67 and Belize were also being swept up in INS raids. “These folks are here,” he re called thinking at the time. “What can we do toThehelp?”resolution also faced vocal oppo nents, especially Ernani Bernardi, an older councilmember who represented a subur ban area in the San Fernando Valley and often questioned the Council’s spending decisions. Bernardi said sanctuary would require the city to violate federal law, a claim his opponents refuted. And apart from the sanctuary label, he said, there was nothing in the resolution the city wasn’t already doing.

Ezell, seated at the central council ta ble, blasted the proposal. Council minutes paraphrased him as saying that declaring Los Angeles a sanctuary, “regardless of the resolution’s purpose or content,” would “be received as an open invitation by the rest of the world to seek a better way of life in Los Angeles as a safe haven from the INS.” The resolution would “intrude into a foreign policy issue” that could lead to a “massive influx of immigrants into Los Angeles, de pletion of resources, and increased crime.” Woo corrected him, stating the resolution’s actual contents. Councilman Joel Wachs criticized Ezell for “fanning the flames of prejudice and hysteria.”

A. KRAMER

Woo’s article highlighted law and American values in an effort to capture to kinds of arguments that Ezell had trum peted. Far from encouraging illegality, the resolution upheld the law. It opposed the deportation of “law-abiding” refugees, re quired city officials to comply with (rath er than break) federal law, called on the INS to implement the 1980 Refugee Act

PAUL

Woo felt the resolution could not sur vive the petition campaign which, he not ed, was devolving into a “racially divisive” referendum on immigrants and refugees he feared would deepen the divisions he had hoped to bridge. “It would be disas trous for the city to have an initiative go on the ballot which would pit one ethnic group against another ethnic group and would exacerbate the tensions that are already out there in the community,” he said, even as he made clear he was not ac cusing Bernardi of racism.

69 as intended, and reinforced the LAPD’s Special Order 40.

The resolution, he wrote, also ex pressed traditional American values. The Pilgrims had been “the original boat peo ple,” refugees who “fled their homeland in fear of losing their lives because of their be liefs.” The generations of immigrants that followed them had created a society that stood as “a beacon of freedom and ethnic diversity for people around the world.”

Woo tackled the Reagan adminis tration’s Cold War bias in asylum cases, insisting that “the traditional American ideal of providing refuge for those who fear persecution in their native lands” must apply to Salvadorans fleeing vio lence, as much as it did to “a Lithuanian sailor trying to jump ship in a US harbor” to escape communism. The sanctuary res olution was a “rational and compassionate response to a desperate situation.” Its pro ponents “did not challenge the system,” he wrote, but “reaffirmed the humane values upon which our country was founded.”

PAUL A. KRAMER

The letter did not slow the sanctu ary movement’s adversaries, who were gaining momentum. On January 7, 1986, Bernardi announced a petition drive that would give voters the chance to revoke the sanctuary resolution on the fall ballot. The idea had come from individuals and orga nizations he declined to name, although he said he had conferred with Ezell. He also said that, based on the letters and phone calls he’d received, “there’d be no question of it passing.”

On February 4, Woo approached Bernardi in the hallway and suggested a compromise. Bernardi made clear that “sanctuary” terminology was unaccept able. Woo fought hard to preserve the res olution’s substance.

A deal took shape. The Council would repeal the first resolution and pass anoth er in its place. The new resolution would preserve the policy of non-interference by police and public officials in immigration matters. But Bernardi won the removal of the sanctuary label, and a new task force to report on immigrants’ fiscal impact on city Fourservices.days later — and two months after the passage of the Council’s initial resolution — a resolution to undeclare Los Angeles a sanctuary city passed 11 to 1. (Robert Farrell held out.) A new res olution — protections without a name — was voted up unanimously. Woo was practical, calling the new law a “fair com promise” that preserved “the gist of what was contained in the original resolution.” He was not, he said, “willing to prolong the battle over that one word.”

Here Bernardi cited the results of a telephone poll he’d commissioned. But the poll itself appears to have been mislead ing when it came to the actual contents of the resolution, asking citizens how they felt about Los Angeles declaring itself “a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants,” which the resolution, quite explicitly, did not do. Rather than accurately gather public opinion, the poll had intervened, falsely, in shaping it.

he felt pleased, but he had not escaped the episode unscathed. When he had barnstormed Washington, policy makers had mostly balked at his idea that the federal government should punish sanctuary cities. Speaking to a reporter, Ezell’s boss, national INS Commissioner Alan Nelson, treaded carefully. Ezell was doing a fine job, he said, but “we obvious ly don’t want to be guilty of doing what we’ve criticized other people of doing: acting irrationally.”

The small but sym bolically powerful church, raised in 1814 on the plaza at the city’s heart, drew more than 10,000 worshippers to Sunday mass, primarily Mexican Americans, but with growing numbers of Central Americans, many of them refugees. “We had people whose bodies were covered with scars,” recounted Father Mike Kennedy, who coordinated refugee work. The church’s activist pastor, Father Luis A. Olivares, had long been a passionate advocate of sanctuary, and under his leadership, the Old Plaza Church — known affection ately as La Placita — had offered thou sands of refugees food, shelter, and legal aid. Olivares himself had testified be fore the City Council in favor of Woo’s resolution.Butinitially, La Placita had offered sanctuary behind a mask. The Catholic hi erarchy allowed churches to provide relief to refugees, but was leery of the legal and political ramifications of openly declaring its intent to protect and transport undoc umented immigrants. By 1985, Olivares was preparing to declare the church a public sanctuary, hoping for support from the Archdiocese but not waiting for it. To Olivares’s delight, the City Council’s pas sage of the first resolution had given the archbishop the political cover he need ed to convey his backing (although, in a last-minute switch, he did not attend the ceremonies himself). On the Virgin’s Day, La Placita joined the fight out in the open. A Salvadoran couple and a Guatemalan mother and her three children stood before a full sanctu ary (a literal one), dressed in black, their faces covered by scarves. The Salvadoran woman, her voice quivering, spoke of murdered family, and the pain of having to leave her children with friends and escape the country. “Imagine how I feel away from them,” she said. “Yet, the pres ident of this country continues sending arms and bombs to destroy our homes and our country.”Someparishioners expressed mixed feelings about the church’s decision, but most supported it. A woman from Mexico, who had offered to shelter a refugee fam ily, reflected on her own trials. “When we first arrived in this country, we suffered

Los Angeles’s sanctuary city resolution had risen, fallen, and come halfway back, unnamed. But it did not leave the city the same. Just a week after the passage of the first resolution, word had gone out that one of the city’s most prominent Catholic churches, the historic Iglesia de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, would at last publicly declare itself a sanctuary, on December 12, the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe.Itwasatriumph.

los angeles review of books 70 De Quattro was disappointed. She’d hoped the movement could use the peti tion fight to raise awareness. Five refugee organizations issued a statement saying the Council had “acted to withdraw the word sanctuary from its resolution out of concern for the racist hysteria which was being provoked by critics of the resolution.”Ezellsaid

PAUL A. KRAMER

71 a lot and there was no one to give us a hand,” she said. “We’re not rich but we are offering to share what little we have.”

In the years that followed, La Placita broadened its protections, defending im migrant day laborers who were illegal to hire, then street vendors barred from selling flowers and fruits by rigid city codes. Even with their sanctuary work concealed, church members had shown courage, and now they were unmasked, no longer hiding. Alicia Rivera is still raising sanctuaries at a moment of danger. She’s become an organizer for Communities for a Better Environment in Wilmington, California, near the Port of Los Angeles. The area’s massive oil drilling and refining oper ations lead to asthma, emphysema and cancer in the community, which is 90 per cent Latinx. It’s hard enough combating the oil industry, she says, but her neigh bors are terrified to attend meetings; their relatives have vanished, been detained, or been deported. “I think it’s more extreme now then it was then,” she tells me. ICE agents don’t remind her of the INS she knew back in the 1980s. They remind her of the Salvadoran state she fled. She knows there’s a big difference, but she says ICE reminds her of the death squads, “just taking everyone they can, and target ing them, and instilling fear.” She’s proud of California’s new sanc tuary laws, and says they flow from earlier struggles. A generation of Anglo politi cians and voters grew up in schoolrooms with refugee and immigrant children that Harold Ezell could not keep away. I ask her if the word “sanctuary” — the name Los Angeles once, fleeting ly, called itself, and does again today — makes a difference. She insists it does. Anti-immigrant politicians are out in public, in force. Communities need to fight back without fear, shame, or apology. They need to be willing to tell the federal government “you are wrong, and we are going to take a stand,” she says. She thinks about what she would tell the United States’s leaders, past and pres ent. “You have made it difficult for me to live in my country. I have left because of your intervention,” she says. “I am here, now, in your face.”

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Mugi’s), 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

JENNY FRAN DAVIS

High Femme Camp Antics (HFCA) of the 20th and 21st centuries in clude: Jennifer Tilly in Bound slipping out of her negligée while hoarsely informing butch Gina Gershon, “Isn’t it obvious? I’m trying to seduce you.” Cleo’s sexy, mute girlfriend, Ursula, in the 1996 bankrobber movie Set It Off, who performs a lap dance to thank Cleo (Queen Latifah) for buying her lingerie with stolen cash.

Lorna Morello in Orange Is the New Black wearing makeup in prison and making up a fake husband to toy with Nikki’s butch emotions. Alice B. Toklas replacing the word “may” with “can” every time it ap peared while copyediting Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation because Stein’s ex-lover was named May. The top-bitch essay

HIGH FEMME CAMP ANTICS

I don’t remember exactly what I did to make Amy say it: Watch out for Jenny’s High Femme Camp Antics

los angeles review of books 74 attitude of Glee’s Santana, played by the late Naya Rivera, along with her smirky catchphrase, “wanky.” And pretty little Ann Walker, in HBO’s Gentleman Jack, suffering a nervous breakdown — com plete with hemming and hawing, hyster ics, her heaving bosom — when choosing between going off with butch Anne Lister, her true love, or marrying a man.

. But I bristled at the accusation that there was something both scheming and malicious about my antics, whose charm I’d always suspected lay in their impulsive girlishness. To my mind, no one had ever been damaged by my HFCA. Annoyed, maybe, but never wounded. But Amy was telling Tess that my antics might hurt her; she was telling Tess that my antics were powerful pre cisely because Tess was both enraptured and repulsed by them. The winter we started dating, I was waylaid by a walnut-sized cyst on my tailbone. The cyst became infected, then it abscessed, and then it was removed in an operating room under general anesthe sia. When I came to, I had a walnut-sized hole to the immediate left of my tailbone. To stop the bleeding, the doctors stuffed the hole with packing gauze, and so twice a day I climbed into a bath filled with Epsom salt and gingerly pulled a rope of packing gauze out of the wound. After the bath, I lay prone on my bed while my mother forced packing gauze back into the hole with a pair of tweezers.

Things I have done to make my lesbi an boyfriend’s therapist call my behavior High Femme Camp Antics: asking Tess questions like, “Would you have left your ex for me?” at three or four in the morning; calling Tess my boyfriend and using “he” pronouns to discuss him with my friends; making Tess play a sex game I invented called Can I Come Inside? in which Tess would have to say, Can I Come Inside? Can I Come Inside? to which I’d reply, No, No, No, until she was meant to finally thrust her fingers inside me anyway, be cause I wanted her to want me in a way that was out of her control; being cruel about other women’s looks if I was threat ened by them, calling them potato-faced, log-like, animatronic; accusing Tess of deceit after she slept with someone else in the pre-monogamous month of our courtship; seeing Tess’s ex, R., at a Friday night screening of Booksmart in Cobble Hill, taking a series of covert pictures of R. in the row behind us, and firing off a picture to Tess — R.’s face foregrounded by a pretty sliver of my own — as I walked back from the subway that night, taking care to send the crop that most distended R.’s Tess’sfeatures.therapist was a shaggy blonde with an office just north of Union Square and a specialty in feminist psychoanalysis. Tess had shopped around for therapists all autumn (her requirements were few — gay, woman-identified, and not too much like her mother), and she’d settled on Amy, decidedly femme and a sexpot at 5’7”. Tess thought Amy would be perfect for her transference.

The baths gave me a lot of time to practice my script for when I could see Tess again. Soon you’ll be able to do whatever you want to me, but in the meantime, I want you to ask me over and over again if you can Come Inside. Each time you ask, I’m going to say No. When you can’t stand it anymore, and you absolutely must Come Inside, you’re going to force your way inside anyway. Okay, go.

75 JENNY FRAN DAVIS Can I Come Inside? No. Can I Come Inside? No. Can I please Come Inside? No! Can I Come Inside? Tell me why you want to Come Inside. I want to Come Inside. Let me Come Inside. No. Can I Come Inside? Can I Come Inside? No! No! I took hold of the tip of the bandage, which floated in the salty water. I pulled gently, but nothing happened. I pulled harder. The rope, when it emerged, was coated in bits of debris that resembled white asphalt. The coil was long, at least two feet, and had been stuffed so tight ly into me that it was wrinkled and mis shapen, like a shirt that had been lost in a drawer for years. In 1925, the psychologist Winifred Richmond declared that feminine lesbi ans seek mother love, crave affection and attention, and are obsessed with beau ty. “Where’s the lie?” I joked to a friend when I read that description. I know that lesbians, particularly femmes, have long defended themselves against charges of immaturity, childishness, and narcissism, and I know we’ve been long pathologized as stunted, inverted, and backward. I also know that Richmond’s statement does sort of describe me, as much as I wish it didn’t. Recently, I described my Amelia Bedelia ditz trick — that thing I do where I pretend I can’t hang my curtains or find my way to an event or light a match on my own — to a small crowd of queers at a friend’s birthday party in Bushwick.

Tess once described camp to me as a way of resolving the question of what to do with the iconic. Camp often deals with problems of representation and authentic ity via “disidentification”— José Esteban Muñoz’s term — with mainstream cul tural symbols. HFCA is a mode of dis identification, an embrace of feminine performance that negotiates its inclusion in mainstream representations of women and of lesbians by neither assimilation nor absolute opposition. It opts instead, at least to a certain extent, to play along with mainstream representations that have persisted at least since the Hays Era of television (1934–1968), when all queer characters were mandated to be unsympa thetic to Contemporaryviewers. girl-on-girl porn, for example, often exploits the ingrained trope of female queerness as not just divergent, wrong, and wayward, but also scheming, wily, and calculating: good little school girls don’t do their homework but do each other instead. In the show Glee, for a san itized example, Britney and Santana are lesbian cheerleaders on especially bad be havior. Britney’s hyper-feminized dumb ness and Santana’s racialized cruelty are both versions of the same HFCA — the HFCA of a teenaged femme trying to survive high school. The L Word presents us with a network of lesbians who lust

My attraction to vintage methods of seduction — performing weakness, prey ing on tropes of midcentury femininity by acting and dressing like it’s the 1950s — is twisted, of course, and it’s central to the aesthetic performance of HFCA, whose mode of camp relies on old, ingrained ico nography of what it means to be female.

los angeles review of books 76 after and lie to one another almost com pulsively, as though they have no other choice. Television shows us girls-on-girls being girlie, but in a lesbian way, which is to say that these girls don’t just fuck each other, but more so fuck with each other.

“Your fingernails are full of frisson,” Tess said as morning light began to stream in through the window above her bed. “I know,” I said. I recently read a collection of funny stories by Lesléa Newman, high-femme chroni cler of dyke life in the 1990s (the mate rialistic, shopping-addicted Golden Age of HFCA). In one story, a butch named Flash arrives to pick Lesléa up and take her out to dinner. Flash politely tells Lesléa that she looks nice. “The average femme would have tak en that to be a compliment,” Lesléa dishes. “But this high-maintenance femme hadn’t spent the last two weeks shopping for the perfect outfit and the last seven hours bathing, shaving, bleaching, filing, polish ing, combing, brushing, drying, mouss ing, spritzing, spraying, and applying five pounds of makeup to have all her efforts summed up in one little four-letter word.”

“It makes them feel strong,” I giggled at the Bushwick birthday party, referring to my antics’ effect on butches. I cast a sidelong glance at Tess, who jokingly flexed a bicep. A few partygoers eyed each other, startled. Someone later described me to a mutual friend as a “piece of work.”Igot that it was really meant as a compliment, but I’m a student of being over-the-top, unnecessary, too much. That is, after all, the name of the game. In those early days of winter, Tess begged to change my wound’s packing. This meant she also offered me a salt bath in her tub, and to lie prone on her bed while she knelt above me with a rope of packing gauze. I wouldn’t let her, worried that the smell and the look of my wound would disgustTessher.was a performance artist and part-time jewelry maker who now worked as a set designer. I had long pegged her as a subterranean bachelor. She lived in a basement apartment in Bushwick and smiled with only half her mouth. She was broad-shouldered and stocky and had short, thick hair and a stick-and-poke tattoo that spelled out DYKEBALL over her left Theribcage.firstnight we spent together, I taught her to knit — my classic seduction technique (HFCA) — and about frisson, that carbonated feeling that accompanies a crush. We stared at each other for a long time, unblinking. Because I knew that this otherwise might take forever (lesbi ans!), I finally asked Tess point-blank if she felt a frisson for me (HFCA). In re sponse, Tess kissed me hard, with teeth. I knew she wanted to fuck, but I pushed her hands away dramatically when they crept under my skirt (HFCA). I told her that I didn’t typically sleep with people so soon (HFCA), which was true not for any real reason but because I was privately humiliated by my body (HFCA). Instead of letting her fuck me, I scratched Tess’s entire torso with my long, pink fingernails (HFCA).“Her fingernails drifted down my neck, across my shoulders,” Jess Goldberg, the butch narrator of Stone Butch Blues, says of a high femme whose camp antics thrill her. “I’d forgotten the sheer pleasure of a high femme tease.”

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Tommy Chiffon, Hollywood), 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

los angeles review of books 78 Flash’s flimsy compliment doesn’t satisfy Lesléa’s desires to be seen, appre ciated, and worshipped, and so Lesléa starts from the bottom and works her way up, prompting Flash to compliment her shoes, her miniskirt, and finally her hair in a grand, shimmering pyramid of HFCA. But even as she performs satia tion, Lesléa is insatiable. Her antics fail at getting her precisely what she wants from Flash, because there’s always something unsatisfying about getting what you want by asking for it. Lesléa’s desire glows from within the frame of her HFCA, distilled and exposed and unmet. Can I Come Inside, my high-femme sex game, deals primarily with unmet, outsourced, and circumnavigated desire. In Females (2019), trans lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu argues that femaleness is a universal, existential condition rather than a gender or a sex — a condition of being and of consciousness that involves letting others do our desiring for us. At stake in Can I Come Inside, as well as in HFCA at large, is a femaleness that both craves and rebels against its tendency to outsource desire. In playing Can I Come Inside, I, like Lesléa, ask Tess to do my desiring for me, and Tess in turn defers her desire to me: The game is strictly my desire, one that she insists she does not share. Even though it mandates a per formance of aggressive desire from Tess, there’s no doubt that Can I Come Inside is about my desire; it’s my game; I make the rules.Butlanguage, the currency of HFCA, fails to satiate my wish to be wanted; Can I Come Inside reveals a wish to be desired, a wish that wishes so hard that it fails. Like all antics, the game flops be cause of its own unwieldiness, its own ex cess of desire, its own desire so big and raw and exposed that it can’t be satiated, but instead must get performed. When I sent Tess the photo of Tess’s ex, R., from that night at Booksmart, I felt giddy, shaking with gleeful impulse. I thought Tess might be thrilled by my description of the standoff I’d had with R. when the movie ended. But I knew I was in trouble as soon as Tess requested a phone call to discuss what I’d done. On the phone, I resorted again to HFCA: when Tess called my behavior childish and embarrassing, I said that she didn’t understand … drama!; which was to say didn’t understand … me!; that I sent the photo of R. for no reason other than to show Tess what I’d seen — R.’s face burnt by the glow of the big screen, the orange glasses Tess used to dream about, shining like yellow coins — and to show her who I’d been: a sweet girl in a movie theater. I sent the photo to show her what I wanted: Tess, and R., burning together, to conjure that union, which I was still mad about; for the night to be scarred by my antics, like a big rip in the putrid sky; because these are my dykette powers, and no they’re not supposed to work; that has never been the point. While monologuing, I felt like a psy cho playing the role of a psycho. I knew that my implied disavowal of my behavior — Oh, I don’t mean it, I’m just being crazy — actually signified, actually performed, something true: a real lack in me that I couldn’t yet articulate. I knew I was being ridiculous, knew that this was just HFCA, knew that HFCA is always a stupidly ob vious overstatement, a theater designed to expose me. To say that all antics fail at sating de sire invokes recent queer scholarship on

JENNY FRAN DAVIS

79 failure that both acknowledges same-sex desire’s association with “failure, impossi bility, and loss,” as Heather Love puts it in Feeling Backward, and offers up failure as a subversive, if counterintuitive, form of resistance. In the case of the Booksmart incident, our failure to speak to each oth er was obvious. HFCA often figures as a failure of language and a refusal to speak, to say things outright, a wink or a dance rather than a streamlined missive. It’s a queer mode of communication, but it’s also an anti-communication, a reticence; think of Ursula’s resolute silence in the movie Set It Off. Think of the simultane ous over- and under-announcement of these gestures, their loudness, the matter their excesses displace. At issue in HFCA is being seen, being recognized, the long-documented strug gle of the femme lesbian. In Andrea Lawlor’s novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2018), gender-shifting Paul has a high-femme best friend, Jane, whose antics include a penchant for flirting with every butch she sees in town. At one point, Jane bemoans her invis ibility in Iowa City’s lesbian scene. “Do I have to stomp around town in a three-piece suit?” she asks Paul. “I will do it. I will. Who do I have to fuck to get seen around here?” I will do it. I will. Jane’s HFCA dia tribe doesn’t just express desire in words, but also performs it by way of sugges tive disavowal. Her hyperbolic fantasy of prancing around in a three-piece suit (butch attire) ironizes femme invisibility, and her insistence that she will do it — I will do it. I will — is funny precisely be cause she won’t do it, in fact has no inten tion of doing it. Performances of HFCA negotiate invisibility by going way over the top, often in speech rather than action. I am your spaniel, begins Helena’s plea to Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Feminine antics, feminine ploys for attention, and feminine performances of desire — such as what scholar Bruce Boehrer refers to as Helena’s “orgy of de basement” (The more you beat me, the more I will fawn on you) — that aren’t partic ularly gay abound. Besides those campfemme early modern women, there is, for example, every contemporary pop song in America proclaiming Baby it’s okay as long as I’m still the best you’ve ever had and If you want to keep me, you’ve got to love me, love me, love me, harder, harder, harder, harder. We might think of these antics as femi nine wiles — games that girls play to en snareThismen.is all some form of feminine ex cess, of course. HFCA is not really about being something but, as femme studies scholar Rhea Ashley Hoskin writes, man ifests as “a radical invocation of queer femininity” and is, at its heart, “an aes thetic, an erotic, and a politic” rather than an identity. There’s an HFCA sensibility, in other words, in Elle Woods, in Cher Horowitz, in Naomi Campbell, in Lucy Liu, in Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez and Lana Del Rey, all of whom draw from and contribute to the queer canon. But the difference between HFCA and straight feminine manipulation is ul timately a difference of stakes, orientation, and alignment. We might locate straight feminine antics at their most obvious, and their most sinister, in “white-women tears” — the insidious weaponization of whiteness that happens when white women prosecute racialized evil in

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (La Plaza backstage), 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

HFCA is the work of a really good stu dent, one who earns 101 percent on all the tests.I often tell Tess that I want to have her babies, that I want her to impregnate me, that I want her to marry me, that I want her to be my husband. Queer crit ic Juana María Rodríguez notes that a femme “performs insatiability” as she in terprets and digests tropes of straightness such as these. HFCA makes even hetero sexuality hot. That spring, Tess sent me the lyrics to the Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up,” guessing I’d identify with just wanting some infor mation, please. The question implied in all my tests for Tess throughout the winter was simple: Is she loyal? And it was true — information was all I wanted, please, but I didn’t want it straight up at all. “She’s loyal,” I joked when Tess as sured me that I was much hotter than my ex’s new girlfriend (HFCA) or that I was hotter than any of her exes (HFCA).

Wark, facetiously: “I’ve only had one superfemme in life, actually. She had to teach me how to be butch. But unlike the really butch guys she usually hangs out with I’ve never hit her or tortured her emotionally, and when I got her pregnant I tried to be responsible for that.”

HFCA is that extra one percent af ter 100 percent has been reached. The expression “101% femme” is so HFCA.

Tess went to the Russian baths with her dyke mentor, a performance artist. They sweat onto the wooden benches, wore men’s swim trunks and towels that swung down around their shoulders and covered their pecs. Later that night, Tess participated in HBCA, texting me: dyke mentor asked me if i’m loyal. I never asked how she’d replied. Tess had of course told Amy, her thera pist, about Can I Come Inside, and Amy had of course said to Tess, “You poor thing,” which of course made me seethe. But when I worked up the nerve to confess the game to my own gay thera pist, Charlotte, she disagreed. “You felt empowered to ask for what you wanted

81 order to maintain heterosexual desirabil ity. Straight, white women cry because they think, however naïvely and desper ately, that their antics might work for them, win them something, punish some one else, yield morality. The femme is un der no such illusions. In I’m Very into You (2015), for exam ple, Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark’s email correspondence following a brief fling in Australia in the ’90s, Acker and Wark — both women, Acker cis and Wark trans — take on a vibrantly butch-femme dynamic that epitomizes HFCA’s irony. Acker’s HFCA throughout the exchange (manifest in her overstated anxiety about whether or not Wark is into her) gets high lighted by Wark’s put-upon butchness.

JENNY FRAN DAVIS

I gave Tess my copy of I’m Very into You, and she marked it up before giving it back to me. In one instance, Acker writes about a friend who is “so 101% femme.”

Wark’s missive performs the butch eye’s response to the superfemme’s HFCA, a butchered HFCA that we could refer to as Hard Butch Camp Antics (HBCA). Wark’s campy machismo spoofs 1950s butch-femme bar culture, in which butches used aggression to be taken seri ously, and her quasi-stone emotional per sona reads as funny precisely because it satirizes a butch-femme tradition that is always already camping itself.

Tess had underlined “so 101% femme” and written Jenny! underneath.

Sometimes the elasticity of HFCA is part of the pleasure, of course, and some times it contributes to a crisis. This has to do with communication. When the fail ure of communication is a queer language game — failure of communication mim icking the failure of desire itself — when the failure begets a real, unresolvable lack, a lack it cannot begin to touch: crisis.

I told Tess that in fourth grade, a bul ly had taunted me for my close friendship with another girl, calling me a lesbian. “You’re a lesbian, and lesbians are ugly, so that means you’re an ugly lesbian,” my bully had reasoned. “Not all lesbians are ugly,” my mother hastened to reassure me when I told her that night. “You could be a pretty lesbian.”

The pretty lesbian’s antics are orna mental — frilly, full of excess — but also full of vulnerability — the vulnerability of being seen, looked at, scrutinized. Femme “makes esthetics [sic] political,” Hoskin contends. Lesbian writer Cherríe Moraga represents the femme body as a turtle without its shell, flipped on its back, wait ing to be penetrated. The penetrability — the potential to be punctured — of the femme is explicit and literal, just like the

As a remedy, Charlotte suggested that instead of saying, No, No, No, I should say More, More, More. But I desired saying No, not More, and I continue to desire it. I’m still insatiable, still unsatisfied. I’m unsatisfied when Tess agrees to play Can I Come Inside with me, and I’m unsatisfied whenever Tess scores 101 percent on my tests.“One is often dissatisfied in pro portion to the specificity of your desire,” Andrea Long Chu said in a recent inter view, remarking on the “murderous exac titude” of desire. This dissatisfaction is surely at the heart of what HFCA performs: a femi nized insatiability that is designed to fail, because it is pure desire exposed, and because desire cannot be sated, it must get performed.InJordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, Professor Voth, a trans man, dates a woman who lies on her back and shows Voth her breasts first thing in the morn ing (HFCA). He knows how to play this game: the gesture means she needs to be fucked. But on those mornings, Voth, tak en by a strange quasi-cult, must first wash his hands in both boiling and freezing wa ter; the girlfriend does not get what she wants, what she needs, from Voth, and time stretches endlessly; and she does not get fucked; and she does not get fucked.

los angeles review of books 82 from Tess,” Charlotte said. “Maybe she feels unable to do that very thing with you.”I much preferred Charlotte’s explana tion, which exonerated me, but I couldn’t separate Tess’s shame and discomfort at having been asked to play Can I Come Inside from how badly I wanted her to play it with me. We were using our thera pists as performed figures of the self, fig ures who might validate either our deepest shame or our deepest desire. “How did you feel,” I prompted Tess, “how did you feel about it.”

“It made me feel like I was taunting a sweet, hot baby girl,” she said, laugh ing with half her mouth, “a girl who just wanted to be relieved of her perfor mance, who was going so hard into her performance of No, No, No but it was all because she wanted to burst out of that performance, and the only way she could was by me going inside and fucking her and making her make other noises, it’s like breaking a horse, really, it’s like tam ing a minxy angel.”

In early summer, finally sure that Tess loved me, I showed up to the basement apartment in Bushwick with the ultimate HFCA gesture. I carried in my pink satin purse a FINAL TEST for her, a spoof on the many tests I’d administered over the course of our relationship. Tess, of course, got the joke. She filled out the test, laugh ing at the questions. But a few weeks lat er, I was mad at Tess, and so I resorted to HFCA, telling her again that she had DECEIVED me. Tess, getting it, asked, Can I Come Inside? No. Can I Come Inside? No. Can I Come Inside? Ask me again. Can I Come Inside? Can I Come Inside? You know how to play this game. I know how to play this game. You know how to play this game. I know how to play this game. I know how to play this game. You know how to play this game. I know how to play this game. I know how to play this game. I know how to play this game.

JENNY FRAN DAVIS

83 vulnerability of a femme body always is. Can I Come Inside is played on the back, just like Moraga’s turtle. It is also played in bed; it is also about the endless space between wanting and getting. Here is one last pathetic tale of HFCA: My butch friend E.’s girlfriend, S. lied about having a brain tumor. S. made E. meet her every outside of SloanKettering and escort her uptown. She wrapped her hair, divulged other patients’ prognoses; and, when E. eventually found out that there was no tumor and no ter minal cancer, threatened to throw herself out the window of her apartment if E. left. E. — exasperated, manipulated, gaslit, be trayed — did leave the apartment, saying S. could kill herself if she wanted. E. let herself out, rushed into the silver elevator, plowed through the silver lobby. As she walked quickly down the street, a body pounced on her from behind, slapping and sobbing. It was S., barefoot. Instead of jumping off her balcony, she had run down 14 flights of stairs, in a desper ate quest to demonstrate her anger and her pain, which to her felt like bare feet against a freezing sidewalk, the furious heart shattering in her chest. It was only when I heard about E.’s case that I could see the label of HFCA breaking down, becoming the diagnosis that couldn’t, and couldn’t, and couldn’t. I don’t know what E.’s girlfriend was so angry and sad about, or why she lied about having a brain tumor. I guess the name of the game for E.’s girlfriend was probably to secure E.’s love, or to somehow prolong it. But I also think that it was simply to show E. her pain in a way that was as visi ble as a mass on a radiologist’s screen. Is desire a lack or a mass? a friend once asked me. The answer, I’m sure, is that it is both. ¤

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Ou, Laveta Terrace), 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

85 I am breasts,tojobtaintitsmyalonenotinwatchingbodygivinguptruths,thedarkofthedyegivingwaythegray,thefallentheslopeand folds of my mother-marked belly mound. I’m not yet fifty and already I’ve outlived some I’ve seen naked, the lovers I left, the children I watched die. I’ve long known how to look for the bullet left lodged in the chamber when unloading the gun. My aim isn’t so good nor my vision. It’s getting harder and harder to read without pushing the page farther from my eyes. I haven’t seen Tía since before FALLING BODIES DEBORAH PAREDEZ

los angeles review of books 86 the outbreak, only the sign outside the nursing home proclaiming its name: Buena Vida In another time of plague, Galileo observed the speed of falling bodies, how, no matter the differing weight of two objects, falling is an equalizing force. Imagine them, he wrote, joining together while falling. Sometimes when you watch someone die the only sound you hear is your own shredded breath. Other times only their ragged gasps rending the garment of this realm. I watch the circling hand touch every number, hear the seconds stacking themselves into minutes hours days weeks months, the teetering years collapsing behind me, before me. I’ve had to give up running since I tore something in my hip the same one where years ago I rested the baby and years before that I dipped and flared on the dancefloor. My back now gives way when I bend over to pull the load of soaked clothes from the machine. The doctor

87 says only resistance and movement will begin to repair what’s torn. At the end of the march I bend toward the ground with the others kneeling in silence for eight minutes forty-six seconds, spinning hover of helicopter blades and my daughter’s fidgeting hands the only sounds I hear. At the end of his life, halfblinded by cataracts, Galileo still found a way to measure the distance between bodies scattered across the sky, observed the ways the moon rocked itself back and forth as if saying no against the night. My daughter watches her dancing body on the video she’s made in the living room. Another brown girl has filmed us all kneeling. Another woman’s daughter has taken a cell phone video of a man as he is murdered in the street. All the girls watching. When we watch, we watch someone, someone maybe we love or someone maybe we don’t even know, someone who is someone’s grown child dying under the knee of another, the sound we hear is his muddled breath, his crying out for his mother, long gone and risen and rocking and rocking and rocking him still. DEBORAH PAREDEZ

Pages from the Journal of Rosemary Mayer, 1969–1971. Courtesy of The Estate of Rosemary Mayer.

I. Babushka’s When my grandmother created the sourdough starter, she knew that it was good. She made it from wild yeast at our dachya. Yeast that traveled over the blackberry patches in the yard of our sum mer house, and the wooden cupboards in the kitchen and the warped planks of the floor, the wild strawberries and their white flowers running alongside the cab in. Babushka fed the sourdough as she fed her yogurt and sauerkraut and all her children, and when the sourdough threat ened to escape its jar, she put it in the cool cellar next to the potatoes growing eyes, and patted its head. The sourdough was wild from the chickens she beheaded and her swims with her husband and son

MIDNIGHT DOUGH

TAISIA KITAISKAIA

89 fiction

“Ah, your mother never told you.”

. My mother knew the many tragedies in our family well, but she first heard of the curse shortly before our family left the Soviet Union, when she visited my greataunt to say Babushka’sgoodbye.sister, Auntie Klara, said her stomach had been talking to her for weeks. By day, she was staggered by stomach pains. At night, she would hear a low voice in her belly. “I heard the voice, Elena,” Auntie Klara said. “It told me to repent.”

And so, my Auntie Klara told the story. ¤ Babushka’s father, a clergyman from Ukraine, was sent to a Siberian labor camp during the revolution. Oleg was fortunate to keep his wife and children in a little house nearby, spending nights at home and working in the camp during the day. Famine everywhere. The potatoes, cabbage, and radishes in their little garden plot were not enough to feed the family.

Oleg was harvesting his potatoes one fall evening when a camp officer rode by

los angeles review of books 90 and daughter — my mother — in the vast lake. Their dog, moppy and tough, rode in a basket on their motorcycle; one family on one motorcycle. This yeast circled the fresh jams from those blackberries, the yeast of armpits and the banya, where they all slapped each other with birch branch es to wake the skin. Yeast from the hairy domovoi, the house spirit that looks after every Russian home. After her husband died young and Babushka sold the dachya, the sourdough lived on in her apartment. The starter ate the asbestos in the walls and the lead in the water, the throat clearings of the man upstairs and the sounds of children playing against the wall with the build ing’s sole basketball. My grandmother put the jar out overnight to ferment for the next day’s bread, and the sourdough heaved and ate the sound of the city and the dreams of the scurvied pines along the streets. When my mother and sister and I came to visit and slept in Babushka’s bed (she took the couch), Babushka made us blini — buttery crepes — in the mornings, and then sent us home with a hearty loaf of sourdough rye. My babushka never questioned the sourdough, because she was good, and the family curse had passed her over. She was a cheerful and innocent woman all her life, and though the curse had ruined her childhood and killed her husband with a heart attack at 40, it would never touch her

“The doctor told me to see the zna harka. The znaharka did something with her teeth, something with a knot. She said I needed to apologize to the voice.” The znaharka, a woman-who-knows, said that the voice was the spirit of Auntie Klara’s daughter-in-law. Klara’s son was a prom ising young pilot who had been killed by the secret police a decade ago, and his wife felt that Auntie Klara had neither loved nor grieved him. Auntie Klara apologized to her stom ach, to the wife of her son. “I no longer hear her voice,” she said. “But of course, it’s all to do with what happened in the laborMama’scamp.”eyes were blank.

Mama’s aunt looked small and with ered in her armchair. The Persian rugs mounted on the walls turned the house dark, and Mama could barely see her aunt. Klara was not a spiritual woman. She had raised her children to have practical jobs, and she did not believe in nonsense.

TAISIA KITAISKAIA

II. Mama’s Our father was settling into his doctor al program when my mother arrived in Los Angeles. Thirty years old, in a leath er jacket and with incredible hair, Mama brought the two children, some clothes, and a bit of Babushka’s sourdough start er. The sourdough was the one living re minder she would have of her mother for years to Overcome.days of international flights, trapped in a glass jar inside a sweater

91 on his horse. “Bring those potatoes to my house tonight,” the officer ordered. Oleg could not obey, his own family would starve.The next day, Oleg reported to camp empty-handed. The officer shot him on the spot.Mygreat-grandmother Maria — tal ented with roots and herbs, words mut tered at a doorstep — put a curse on the officer and his family. The curse worked: all four of the offi cer’s sons died in the war, and the officer died too, a painful and mysterious death. But the curse came back to my family. Both of Maria’s sons died also. Only her two girls survived — my babushka and AuntieSoonKlara.Maria herself grew ill. She called my babushka to her deathbed. Maria had always seen the potential in her daughter, an openWhenvessel.Maria began to whisper strange words into her daughter’s ear, my grandmother ran away. She knew that her mother wished to pass on a writhing thing, like a knot of snakes, to her. My grandmother ran out of the house in her cotton dress and her bare feet, all the way up the hill. She hid in the weeds and saw a green vapor rise from the chimney of her mother’s house. Her mother was gone. That’s how it was: my greatgrandmother Maria, a rigid figure sketched in charcoal: straight lines, black eyebrows, rage and power inside. My in nocent great-grandfather Oleg digging out his potatoes, greenish from the black soil. The sound of horse’s hooves, and the sky greenish with gray around the green, like a hard-boiled egg. A storm that did not break but pressed down, flattening the earth and the sad government houses and the deserted grass. My grandmother, the little girl in the cotton dress and bare feet, never did inher it her mother’s gift, those writhing snakes. But the curse had already done its work. For hadn’t my grandfather, Babushka’s husband, died so young? And hadn’t Auntie Klara’s son, the young pilot, been murdered? And wouldn’t Auntie’s daugh ter, with the cold eyes and the mathemat ics degree, soon die of cancer at 37? And hadn’t Auntie’s husband spent his last days struggling with a brain tumor? “And Sveta, too,” Auntie Klara said, speaking of my sister. “Hasn’t she always been a strange child?” Auntie Klara re called how as a six-year-old, my sister — with the help of a neglected boy in our apartment building — dismembered a frog in the nearby creek. My mother left her aunt’s house in anger, but she took Sveta to see a shaman before we left for America. As soon as they walked into the shaman’s cramped room, all the candles went out.

The curse was stitching itself through the generations, like an aging woman with failing eyesight embroidering the family cloth. Who knew where the blind woman would next stab the needle, and pull the thread taut?

los angeles review of books 92 inside another sweater, the sourdough was feelingWhenfeisty.we got to our new apartment, a clean beige place with no personal effects, my mother stirred the starter to calm it down, then put the jar in the refrigera tor. The starter burbled next to the clean nice American foods, the milk, plastic bag of grapes, butter. As if making an altar, Mama arranged the little red wax cheeses from the plane, saved in her purse, around the feet of the jar. The fridge hummed with menace and then peace, like an old dog.Mama did not make bread that first year, and the sourdough languished be hind the weird wax cheeses no one liked. She thought it would make her too sad to smell that old smell, and she was so sad al ready. For a while the starter burbled and made bubbles and holes in itself, trying to grow. Then it went flat and quiet. Instead of making bread, my moth er ate ice cream sandwiches and looked out the window at the clipped green lawn behind the graduate student hous ing, constantly worked over by sprinklers. She worked for minimum wage at a lab, treating vials of cancerous cells with dif ferent chemicals. When the researchers tried to make her clean the vials, she used her painful English to remind them of her biochemistry degree. No one would tell her what to do. She picked us up from daycare and lugged our laundry down to the basement and folded our nice clean socks.On nights when she couldn’t sleep, my father snoring in bed besides her, Mama wondered when she would meet the do movoi, the gruff hairy man taking care of the house (or making mischief, depending on his mood). She’d seen him many times in her mother’s apartment and dachya. A bit like a sasquatch, but more squat. She had not heard any stomping in the mid dle of the night and wondered if they even had domovoi in America. She missed her mother, remembering her silhouette in the snowy street as the taxi pulled away. She read bedtime stories to her children, practicing her English, and worried about what her aunt had said. Now Mama knew for sure what was wrong with Sveta. As a baby, she had cried and cried, she hated being dressed, she hated being naked. She hated being touched. In Russia, Sveta had locked our cousin up in the bathroom for hours, and in America, she didn’t get along with anyone.So Sveta was cursed, and the other daughter — she wriggled out of my moth er’s arms and out of the curse and sped down the streets on her bicycle, and never came back, not really. The girl had been so shy back in Russia, what happened to her? Here, she was so easy with the new language, her skin tan and her hair blonde in the playground sun. Lost to my mother already, loosed to America. No, my mother did not want to make bread. She let the sourdough starter get all flat in the fridge, and it took her a year to feed it again. Instead she made khvo rost, sweet dough cut into strips, fried, and sprinkled with powdered sugar. She made savory meat and cabbage pies, or fish and potato pies, with beautiful cutouts in the crust like the carvings of medieval Rus. She made kisel, a sour jelly drink, for hot days. But she did not make bread. After a year, doubting that the start er could live again, my mother began to feed the sourdough. As the creamy mass came alive and gave off its odor, my moth er remembered all of it, her whole child hood: the dachya, the wood planks, the

Rosemary Mayer, Untitled, 8.25.71, colored pencil and colored marker on paper, 12 x 9 inches. Courtesy of The Estate of Rosemary Mayer.

My sister wanted to be a fashion de signer, so my parents sent her to design school. She got into cocaine and was sent back home. She was hot in a way that made people want to ruin her, and even in Alaska, where there are no peo ple, she found a way to sleep around with the worst men imaginable. From the age of 20, she lived permanently in my par ents’ basement, smoking weed and watch ing TV or going manic and writing bad poetry. She wore leggings with explod ing suns on them, and whenever I visited home, she would gnash her teeth and hide in the basement. Right before I was about to fall asleep, she would come in, turn on all the lights, and rifle through my bags. What was she looking for? “It’s like she sees the goodness in you, and it makes her seethe,” said my mother.

The demon theory. My mother and sister watched horror movies deep into winter nights. The movies corroborated what they felt to be true about evil. I didn’t know what was true, but I didn’t spend a lot of time at home, just in case. But there was always hope, and the hope grew like sourdough. Sometimes going flat and quiet and untouched, and sometimes massaged, worked through, given something to eat. It seemed the thread of the curse had emerged in our family, made its one stitch, and moved on. III. Mine One winter when I was old enough to care about bread, my mother gave me some of her starter. I swaddled the jar into my lug gage. Like my mother’s starter, the sour dough flew with me into the cold of the sky and the clouds and then into the heat of baggage claim. My girlfriend, Teresa, and I took it home. And like my mother, I put the jar in the fridge, though for me, it was among old pickles and dried-out Swiss cheese and spilled soy sauce. One day, I said to myself, one day, I will clean the fridge.Unlike my mother, I was excited about the starter. In my bland little American life, I wanted to be close to something rich and yeasty and strange and, yes, sour. I wanted to eat meaningful, ancestral bread. I was in Texas and I did not know

los angeles review of books 94 wild strawberries, their white flowers, the birch twigs, the smell of pines from her mother’s apartment balcony. She wept and made bread, and when she was done weeping and the bread was baked, she was pleased by the golden color and the hol low sound when she thumped the loaf on its back.She fed the sourdough regularly now, worrying a bit that the starter somehow carried the curse, or maybe that exposure to Sveta would taint the yeast. But the bread was delicious. My family moved away from California and up further north, close to the latitude of Siberia. Like coming home, but at a distance. Eventually Mama left the days of khvorost and fish pies behind, she was done hosting and entertaining my father’s graduate students and working in labs. She was going to grow her hair out as long as it would go, and she would have dogs and she would make bread and she wouldSvetaread.stayed strange as she got older, but that was to be expected. This truth was a difficult one to eat, but Mama got used to it. The curse had done its work, and now all Mama could do was tend to the goodness of the daughter around the de mon. Even when the demon strolled and paced back and forth across the house, or sat in her daughter’s stomach, indigestible.

95 my neighbors and I did not have family nearby and I just couldn’t wait. The bread was delicious from the beginning, even though my first dough was too wet, and the loaf barely rose. But I kept going, and my loaves were emerging golden from the oven.That’s what life felt like then: warm, golden loaves that would keep on com ing. Nothing evil would ever happen to me. Someone once told me I looked like a trophy wife. Can a trophy wife be the recipient of a Siberian labor camp curse? I didn’t think so. Strife and famine be longed to the old country. I had gone to college, and grad school. For a while I hadn’t had enough money, but now I did. My friends and family were healthy; no one died. Teresa was wonderful. My par ents were okay with her, and I was grateful that I wasn’t in Russia, where I could be jailed — or worse — for dating a woman. I was moving along the track of life, my retirement account and savings growing, my debt decreasing. I was young, I had nothing to worry about. I would go on meeting friends for drinks and having my little moments of elation, my pockets of unevil magic. So I reasoned with my belly and my Andbrain.then, two months after I’d flown home with the sourdough, Teresa left me, and pain pressed in on my house. It came in through the windows, it came in through the doors and the cracks in the old house. It came in such a way that I knew it had always been there, and always would be. Like everyone else, I would eventually lose every precious thing in my life. When I turned over the blind wom an’s embroidery, I saw that the back was thick with thread. The neat stitches on the other side were an illusion. In reality, the whole cloth was covered. There was no place that was not cursed.¤ Teresa wore her hair in a French braid, and her mother was from Spain. We un derstood long childhood plane rides and speaking another language. She had note books covered in glittery butterflies like a child, and her eyebrows were almost always furrowed, leaving a permanent crease. The rest of her skin was smooth, almost transparent — you wouldn’t think she was nearly 32. She looked like a wise 12-year-old. She was a bit pigeon-toed, and I would joke to the doves that roost ed outside our bedroom, “She’s here! She’s here, your very own cousin!” Teresa’s face was either laughing or not laugh ing, perfectly serious or perfectly play ful. She drank two cups of coffee every morning, getting very caffeinated and excited about her projects, then crash ing out on the couch for the afternoon. I liked holding her lightly around the wrist when we went on walks, kicking up leaves.Oh, Teresa of the many charms! Of course someone would fall in love with your butterfly notebooks and pigeon toes and bony wrists. It only took three weeks for her, at a winter artist residency. When Teresa picked me up from my holiday visit in Alaska, she had just gotten back from New England. I thought we were being progressive and interesting, spend ing the holidays apart: me with my fami ly, and her making art in the woods. That was very foolish of me. That place was romantic. A handful of artists and writ ers, candlelit dinners, snow and cabins. Of course, Teresa would leave me for some one she’d met there. “How predictable,” I TAISIA KITAISKAIA

Moon Tent , October 2, 6:45 p.m – October 3, 5:27 a.m., 1972. Courtesy

The

Rosemary Mayer, of Estate of Rosemary Mayer.

97 told her, in a bitter moment during our breakup, which was spread out over sev eral days like a soiled garment spread out on aWhenrailing.I first met Teresa, she remind ed me of a young woman who played the upright bass in my middle school orches tra. This creature had the small, compact body of a gymnast, the square face and fingers of a man, and a blonde horsey po nytail. She had to stand up on a stool to play the bass, and she did it expertly and with great expression. Teresa was like that. She had a magi cal, nerdy quality that made you sure she’d ridden horses as a girl, and an intellec tual rigor that blew away any notions of quaintness. She read queer theory in bed long after I’d fallen asleep, and she was successful, having received an NEA grant for her sculptures made from twigs and other natural flotsam and jetsam. “Is that how you think of it?” she’d say in her Spanish accent, shaking her head. “Flotsam and jetsam?”

And she would throw me to the bed with her surprising strength, bite the fat part of my arm, and leave me there. Maybe I wasn’t the best at describing her work; maybe that was one of my fail ures, or a symptom of a larger failure.

What was my largest failure? I was, perhaps, her dull corporate bride. But I had been proud to support Teresa. I liked that my steady paycheck meant she could clear her slate of freelance gigs and go to residencies or conferences or a weeklong trip to New York City when she wanted. It gave meaning to my hours at the office, to think of her at home, reading under the yellow light of a table lamp, while the sky darkened in my office. Teresa made fun of me here, too, saying I was trying to recreate the patriarchy, but I was forget ting that she actually had her own mon ey. “Generational wealth, baby,” she said, kissing me under the ear. She liked my nascent“Yeah,jowls.but you don’t pay rent.” “That’s because you insist on me not payingAndrent.”Teresa would get up, taking her book of incomprehensible and formidable theory, and go make couscous to appease me. I knew Teresa, and I knew she would not be back. She was a quick, decisive per son, and she had made her decision. One early February morning, she rolled her suitcase out of our door and gate. With her French braid she looked like a child going off to school. Only her expensive boots gave her away as a grown, beautiful woman, about to get on a plane, about to meet a new lover. Back inside the house, the dough I’d made the night before was pushing past its plastic wrap. And so I made my grief bread, and as soon as it was done went on the first of many long, desperate walks around the neighborhood, determined to spend as little time as possible in the house, with the mugs Teresa had left be hind. I was an unwanted bit among other unwanted bits, and the sourdough starter.

I had a nightmare that Teresa came back as a weird grub-baby creeping along the living room floor toward me. I slept poorly, not used to being alone. I lured people, platonic and otherwise, to my bed so I could sleep. And ran out of the house first thing in the morning, almost gasping for air. ¤

TAISIA KITAISKAIA

“The most charming and profound flotsam and jetsam!”

I appreciated that the demon kept his mangled hand under the table. When I fi nally looked at him, it took all the bravery I had.He had those black eyes, but some times the ink would drain from them and I’d see blue eyes with red vessels, wrinkles. His gray hair hung down straight down

It was March, past midnight, and I had stayed up late. When I turned off all the lights and got into bed, I remembered that I had to knead the dough again and let the starter belch. I did not like going into the dark kitchen alone. I did not like turning on the light and anticipating the dashes of cockroaches on the floor, in the sink, creeping over the clean, drying dishes with their disgusting feet, depositing their egg sacs on our countertops, ducking into the food disposal for wet scraps. But I was not ready for what was to come, which was so much worse. When I had kneaded the dough and took the lid off the starter jar, I saw a face straining in the sourdough, a suffering face, not unlike an anthropomorphized moon in a children’s book. I quickly put the lid back on, but it was too late, because the demon was already standing next to me: a middle-aged man with long gray greasy hair, one side of his mouth mal formed, revealing his black rotting teeth. His small eyes were all black with no whites, just like in the horror movies my Mama and sister love. The demon smiled at me with his evil mouth.Then he put his hand in the food dis posal, flicked the switch to On, and made me watch.Istaggered over to the dining table where my dough was rising again in its bowl, and sat down. Why didn’t I run back to bed? Somehow I couldn’t. There was a paw on my shoulder. Not the demon’s mangled hand, but the heavy warm hand of the house dweller, the spirit of the house, the domovoi. I’d never seen a domovoi before, but I recognized him immediately: a little stooped in the shoul ders, a little depressed. A sensitive man with no one to talk to.

The domovoi sat down in the chair across from me at the table and folded his arms in front of him, like a man waiting for his beer at a bar. Or a chaperone. He had appeared so that I would not be alone with the demon, and that was kind of him. But it was a little much to be meet ing both of them at once.

I had assumed that my house did not have a domovoi, due to my culturally impoverished American life. No mythi cal Slavic being would want to inhabit it. Maybe the domovoi had arrived with the starter? Had a bit of domovoi been collect ed wild from the air of my parents’ house, along with the yeast? Or maybe this was my grandmother’s domovoi, the one from the dachya. The domovoi was gentle as an animal, and I took a deep breath. I could hear the demon’s hand dripping blood on the kitchen floor, and I stared at the patient, hairy arms of the domovoi. Patient as grass, patient as death itself, as a relative sitting with a little crying girl at a birthday party. So I remembered what the Buddhists say, how you must have tea with your de mons. And I said to the demon, without looking at “Okay.him:Come over. Please have a seat.”

And he sat next to the domovoi, so that I was facing him, and the domovoi was between us like a couples counselor. I put the kettle on to boil, set out three cups and three bags of green tea.

los angeles review of books 98

Rosemary Mayer, Mooring Knot, 1978, olored pencil and graphite on paper, 15 1/8 x 12 inches.

Courtesy of The Estate of Rosemary Mayer.

los angeles review of books 100 his torso, and he wore a flannel shirt and light blue jeans. The evil one and the good one stared at each other, and at me, but there was no animosity, only kinship between them.

The domovoi raised his eyebrows and shuffled off into the dark part of the house. In bed, my breathing slowed. I had outsmarted the demon, maybe even the

The domovoi reached over and patted me on the back. The three of us blew on our tea and looked at each other.

The comfort of childhood friends. They both laughed when I offered them tea, the domovoi through his hairy hand and the demon behind his mangled one, which he politely put away after dripping blood on the table.Aswe drank our tea, I had an eerie feeling, the color of my great-grandfather’s potatoes and my great-grandmother’s soul rising from the chimney. A raw color, wild and uneasy. When my grandmother made her starter, had she caught this uneasiness along with the yeast from the air? She had mixed it in with her hands, and it had fed us. It was ours. The curse, blind as a potato. The curse, hard as a turnip. All things buried in the earth, wanting to come out when they’ve been nourished.

The domovoi reminded me of a mournful dog my family had once had, be fore we really understood dogs. Mournful but quiet. Muffled. He was wearing a fad ed olive green T-shirt with a small hole near the collar. He had the face of a bearlike creature and the air of a gentle uncle, the kind who mopes around the house when he visits, doesn’t know how to talk about his feelings, and helps you put up a bookshelf.Thedemon had the air of a demon. Even quietly drinking tea, the demon was relentless. He stared and grinned at me with his broken face. He dribbled blood on the floor. In the demon’s tattered hand, in his inky eyes were all the visits he would make for the rest of my days, all the deaths to come. Again and again I would have that cold feeling in my belly as I made my midnight dough. At least the domovoi was easy to love. I wanted to go out in a boat with the do movoi, eat crackers with him by a lake, wanted to watch movies with the domovoi and have him wordlessly explain algebra, his hairy fingers drawing figures in the air. I could imagine us clipping our nails together in the tub. He would be a good bather; he’d know how to bathe himself and Iothers.didnot much care for the demon. The closer I looked, the more the demon looked like a punk farmer, with his flannel shirt and jeans and irreverent long hair. What was he, German? Wisconsinonian? A thespian? A dilettante? I thought these things as I looked harder into his face. “Oh, Jesus,” I said, and his eyes filled up with ink again, and he grinned and I saw his rotten teeth which seemed to be movingAndlarvally.thenIknew what I needed to do. “Breathe into my face,” I said to the demon. “Get close.” And he did. He put his face into my face, his face of rot and pain, and in his exhale his face seemed to dissolve around me. I smelled decay and old wells and dead grass, I smelled stone and asphalt and dirt. I smelled rain in a village, an old pail. Loam. Lakewater, and a boat with the water sloshing through it. And then nothing. It was like a cloud had passed. When I opened my eyes the demon was gone, it was just me and the domovoi.

101 curse. For the rest of that night I slept well, proud of myself.¤ But the demon did not go away. The do movoi stuck around, too. I threw the starter away after that first night, but later I dug it out of the trash. It was too precious a connection to my mother and grandmother, to the dachya. So I kept making bread, and as I kneaded, the demon and the domovoi wouldSometimeslurk. I played classical music to keep us company. The demon seemed to like it, especially Chopin. He danced with the domovoi, a slow dance at a middle school party. The demon’s mangled hand dangling from the domovoi’s shoulder, the domovoi with his hands around the de mon’sTheywaist.danced sweatily; I had turned off the AC. I yawned and went back to bed. ¤ “I wish you all would stop rustling around in the middle of the night,” I said with some malice later that spring, when I woke up to another night of their carous ing. The demon and the domovoi were drinking mezcal. The mezcal had been made by a woman from Mexico, a friend of a friend, and I hadn’t even tried it yet — but they had almost emptied out the bottle. Laughing, slapping each other on the shoulders. The demon’s hand looked like a withered octopus, but it no longer bled.“I am ready to sleep,” I told them. “In general. Like, I am ready for you to be gone.”They tried to focus their drunk, little eyes on “Canme.you please, please go away for a littleTheywhile?”burst into laughter. “Okay, enough of this,” I said. “Let’s go on a walk.”

TAISIA KITAISKAIA

We headed outside in the dark. I’m not sure what I was thinking — maybe I was hoping to lose them out there.

The demon and the domovoi con tinued to carouse on the sidewalks. The domovoi pointed at the moon with rever ence; the demon slapped his hairy hand away and leered and laughed at the moon. He thought the moon was hilarious. The demon scampered on his feet and good hand down the street, picking up leaves. He brought the leaves back in his good hand and scattered them over the head of the domovoi, trying to make it pretty.We wandered around for a while, stumbling into each other. After a few loops around the park they started to get tired and droopy, and the demon even started whimpering, from the cold I “There,guess.there.”

I pet the demon awk wardly on his flannel shoulder, using the back of my hand, and led them back to the house.Ileftthem in the guest bathroom to sleepily comb each other’s hair with their fingernails, picking out insects and eating them, perhaps. ¤ Soon it was summer, I couldn’t host those two anymore. The demon, at least, needed to go.“I know you will come back,” I told the demon. “And when you do, you will be welcome,” I added with gritted teeth.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Two Girls, Los Angeles), Courtesy of the artist.

1994.

103

TAISIA KITAISKAIA

I left the two beings to say their good byes. In the nights to come, I heard the domovoi knocking around, a little melan choly to be alone again. He busied him self with the sink faucet, making it leaky and then making it unleaky, turning the ice maker on and off, reorganizing my tea selection to his liking (the faces of the tea boxes pressed together, as if kiss ing). He sampled little bits of my bread loaves approvingly. I thought of him hav ing his midnight tea alone, missing his demon friend, like a sasquatch in a lonely diner.I went to work and schemed for the future and made bread loaves, each more beautiful than the last, each design cut into the top more intricate. I felt the promise I had felt before — growth, mastery, life yielding to me like dough. The feeling of knowing how to handle it, when to let the dough rest and when to approach. Drinking from the goblet of metaphor again, the golden liquid in my veins, mak ing sense of things. Often, I was appalled to think about a conversation I’d had with my mother that winter, before Teresa left. “Life is very difficult,” she’d said one night after dinner. And I had said: “In what way?”

¤ My ancestors had wondered about the meaning of life. They were philosophers, holy men, authors. Before Siberia, before the labor camp and the potatoes and the curse, my great-grandfather Oleg sat at a rough wood table, like the one I had shared with the demon and the domovoi, and thought about his sermon. Oleg barely notices the plate of blini and the pitcher of cream his wife places in front of him. Small windows of the log house letting in some dappled light. An icon in one of the corners. Children play ing outside, making the sounds children alwaysMymake.great-grandfather, deep in thought. Revolution coming for them, and then famine, but not yet. Maria pour ing tea from the samovar, her intelligent and sturdy movements, her hard shoes on the wooden floor. Stomping out the shad ows under her shoes with every step. Maria asks Oleg a question about his tea. He stares at her with a benign, cloudy look. She shakes her head, pours cream into his tea from the pitcher. “Ah, the cream,” he says, “thank you.” She smiles to herself, and a fat fly follows her back to the stove.(Acentury later, Teresa would bring me tea and I’d register the cup min utes later. Was that why she left me? Oh Teresa, how had we even come to know each other? Your family from one end of Europe, mine from a place where the fields smelled bitter and hot with tram pled grass. How could you have left me, when you knew how alone and strange I was, under the corporate bride exterior?) Cottonwoods and birches by the wooden fence, a horse snorting in the neighbor’s yard. Handsome horse, Oleg thinks. Irritable though. The sermon would begin with an image of horses … But not the white horse and the black horse, like in Plato. Too simple. Such morality disgusts me. The sermon must be about the beauty of the horse.

excerpt 104

TWO CHAPTERS FROM

"MAGIC"

Iguess most people newly freed from responsibilities take naps. But not me. What I did was, I drove 14 hours to Arizona, which I realized was a huge mis take as soon as I arrived in Flagstaff. My dog and I slept in a motel room that inex plicably had four beds of varying sizes. We were Goldilocks. My dog, who has thick cataracts and is blind, sniffed at the walls. The next morning I tried to drive us to Sedona, but I realized halfway there that the terrain and view were replicas of Kings Canyon, which was 40 minutes from my house in Fresno. But by then it was too late. I was behind a row of cars whose LOVE IS AN EX-COUNTRY JARAR

RANDA

105 drivers were elderly, their feet fluttering constantly against their brakes. When we pulled into the resort area, I found a way to turn around and began making my way to New Mexico. An hour in, I stopped at the gas sta tion; my dog hates the car so I took her with me to the restroom after I pumped gas. We squeezed into the restroom, which was busy with a matriarch and her daughter and her daughter’s daughter, all Native women, all instantly kind to me and my dog. The stalls were full except one, and when I got out, the women were gone. Instead a white woman in a uniform was washing her hands. I stood by her and washed my hands, too. This place is a shithole, she said. I think it’s rather nice, I said. The bathrooms across the street are like a four-star hotel, but I can’t go there, she said, because I’m a truck driver, and we don’t get to decide where we stop. She was wearing a pair of wraparound metallic blue trucker shades. Some people just shit in their trucks and throw the bag out the window, she said.They do? I said, amused. Yes, well the people they got driving now, they’re not from here. They’re not American. They’re Syrians. Might as well hire monkeys to drive trucks now. I’m glad they got out of Syria, I said, now that I understood that this woman had waited for all the Brown people to leave the bathroom, and that as soon as she saw me, a light-skinned woman who she assumed was white, she was able to be comfortable and vocal in her racism. Are ya? she said, vaguely disgusted. Yes, I said. They’ve been through hell. I’m Palestinian, I said, and for the first time, I realized I was taller than her. She walked away and said, Well I hope you’re okay with spending your tax dollars on them. I am, I said. My tax dollars pay for my son’s school, for the roads I drive on, and for bombs that kill Arabs, by the way. She didn’t say anything. I could have left, but I went after her. She had hidden in the convenience store’s aisles. When I saw her, I said, I’m not a monkey. You’re a racist. You have no idea what it’s like to be a Itrefugee.hashappened before: a person thinks I’m cool with their racism, or, more confusingly, when they find out I’m queer, with their sexism. I got back to the car and held my dog and shook. ¤ Children get their first taste of invisibili ty before they can even remember. Then, they thrill in magic tricks. A parent can hide and then surprise them with their sudden return. Birthday clowns make coins disappear. Children watch cartoons where a mouse takes a dip in a paint pot that holds invisibility ink. Harry Potter wears a cloak, women in Canada and America and Afghanistan and Lebanon and France wear niqabs, humans are sur veilled through closed-caption video cam eras, drones can spy activities from high above and can also strike men dead, or hit a wedding party. Once the wedding party is gone, so are the children. If you kill all the children in one family, you have made invisible all the more Arabs, because now the entire lineage has been erased. Death becomes, as my mother says, a return to that amniotic nothingness.¤ RANDA JARRAR

los angeles review of books 106 To be Arab in America is to be a mouse unwittingly dunked into a paint pot of invisibility ink. It’s not that Arabs don’t exist. It’s that you prefer that they remain invisible unless you can trot out a good one or an especially bad one. It’s against your best interests — I almost wrote “our best interests”! You’ve convinced me that my own erasure is good for me — to allow other Arabs to appear. You say, Arabs are only 1.5 percent of the American popula tion. Why must you hear from them or see them more than 1.5 percent of the time? ¤

The first magic trick: we are nothing. In the womb, we are invisible to everyone, even to our mothers. Women report in tense dreams for weeks before they give birth. For months we carry them, not knowing what they look like, and within them, worlds are already forming, more worlds that we can’t see. Here, I am em ploying the royal we. For what are moth ers if not sovereign? ¤ A short, incomplete list of ways to make it so that when anyone in America pictures an Arab, that Arab is dead: Ensure that their governments do nothing to help them. These governments disappear people; they imprison, torture, and kill. There are many ways they kill — I won’t bore you. You already know all of them.Leave gaping vacuums of power in their homelands so that any violent group can plant itself in those vacuums and take over. When this happens, it’s wonderful, because this group then kills the locals for you. When they start killing your own, you now have the perfect excuse to go in and kill them and even more Arabs. If Arabs make their way outside of their native lands, it’s imperative that they remain erased. This is done by hoping they’ll stay home. Segregation in housing and land works perfectly this way. When Arabs live next to white people, some times they get killed. The men who kill them are wolves, but they are not alone. Not at Createall. a trope of what an Arab is. That image is the only one people can see when they think of an Arab that’s alive. Make sure that image is as wildly inaccu rate as possible. Make sure it’s someone who is not an Arab, dressed in a costume you create to signal Arabness. Give them eyebrows. A nose you can hang a coat on. Hair everywhere. Culturally inaccurate gowns and headdresses, plus weapons you built or sold to them hanging from their waists. If they don’t use those acces sible weapons and instead use what they can source — swords, knives, bombs, air planes, rocks from the land itself — they are the savage ones. Once the trope is created, it func tions as a giant subconscious eraser. (For example: An Arab goes on a date with a white American. The Arab tells the white American, “I’m Arab.” The white American says, “Well. You don’t look like an Arab.”)Thenext step is to make it so that Arabs themselves begin saying this to each other. The authentic Arab in their minds is the Arab trope you created. Now, Arabs in Detroit, Paris, Toronto, Palestine, London, Lebanon, Egypt, and many oth er places will say, “Well. You don’t look like an Arab,” when they see an Arab that doesn’t fit in with what the Arab trope looks like. There is then an enormous

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Gabi, La Plaza), 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

I drove through Bricktown. There was a Flaming Lips Lane. I drove past bars shut down because it was morning, and the fanciest Sonic I have ever seen—a brick building, no drive-through.

I went north and wound my way to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, to the site of the Oklahoma City bomb ing of 1995. It was no longer a bombedout building at all. Years of living in the Middle East, of growing up around sites of trauma and war, made it difficult for me to process memorial sites. The serenity, cleanliness, sterile slate gray tile, water, life replacing horror. This site had all of that. It is across

los angeles review of books 108 deficit of authentic Arabs. In this way, you get Arabs to erase other Arabs. Well.No?See? That’s the point "MONUMENT".

From Texas, I drove on to Oklahoma City and checked into an old hotel. In my white-walled cavernous hotel room, I heard the news about Alton Sterling, a Black man shot point blank in the head by police. I watched the video knowing that it would make me rageful.

White men with money sat across the hotel lobby from me in red velvet chairs and sofas, under a painting of white men sitting on sofas. The real white men talk ed about Donald Trump, and the longer I looked at them, the longer their bodies seemed to be surrounded with red blood. My hotel was built in the 1800s by enslaved Black people. Now a white bartender was complaining to another bartender, a woman, who had to emotion ally massage his pain: he said he’d been captured on film by a news crew and that they’d asked his permission to use his likeness and he’d said yes. But when he watched the news that night he’d been cut out of the segment. He was very upset telling the other bartender about this. I thought I was going to be on the news, he said, but they cut me out. I got cut out of the news. They cut me. Out of the news. Alton Sterling dying, being murdered, every minute on the news. Over and over again. Palestinian children in white buri al cloth. Black and brown bodies wishing they weren’t on the news. Mothers wish ing they didn’t live in an empire or under the thumb of one, an empire that depends on the myth of their ¤resilience. Before breakfast I walked outside the hotel with my dog, and the valet parker wanted to talk to us. He liked my dog. He reached over to pet her, and I noticed a tattoo on his wrist. I asked him if it was a tattoo in Arabic. He said yes and showed it to me. It said I love. I told him, “It says, ‘I love.’” He said, “It says, ‘my love.’” It said I love. But I nodded. He said an Iraqi friend wrote it for him. An Iraqi guy, he said. He used to work here. I asked him if he heard of the bombing in Baghdad a few days ago. He nodded, sadly. I said the Global North was fucked-up for living in comfort at the expense of the Global South. He said, yes, and we acted like our lives were so hard. He shook his head. I wanted to embrace him.

109 the street from a church. There is a small painting of a Jesus who appears bira cial, Indigenous and white. He embraces the nineteen children who died in the bombing.Thesite was an outdoor memori al, with an artificial and shallow reflec tive pool where the building once stood. Visitors were encouraged to sit near the field of empty chairs, which were a phys ical representation of the chairs of the dead. Near this, there was a small section of the original building left. Salvaged granite. It was beautiful. The top of it was devastated, cracked, burned, and bombed. It reached up toward a tree, which was la beled “survivor tree” by the memorial, and up to the sky. The bombing was the deadliest act of “domestic” terrorism at the time. One hundred and sixty-eight people died; hun dreds were injured. The white perpetrators were sentenced to death (McVeigh) and prison (Terry Nichols). McVeigh was ex ecuted three months before 9/11. He re mains the only terrorist who received an official execution sentence by U.S. courts. ¤ In the shower that morning, I started my period. When I looked down at my feet on the ceramic bathtub, I saw a small blood clot between them, dark brown, a long Y: the shape of the Nile. ¤ From Oklahoma City, I drove to St. Louis. As I wound through Missouri, I heard on the radio that there was a city nearby, in the Midwest, whose electricity ran on the skin of women. The city power plant was almost shut down, but strippers in the district kept it on with their dona tions. When the lights were on at night you could gaze out at the place and under stand how women’s bodies literally made the city shimmer.

RANDA JARRAR

Leaving LeavingReservationKiowa-Comanche-ApacheSacandFoxNation

¤ In Springfield, every billboard screamed, “This is a country fair.” One said, “visit the Uranus fudge factory.” There was a series of Dixie Stampede billboards, and a se ries of Fantastic Caverns billboards that feature weird Okie people, in strange and obvious costume getups. Basically, peo ple performing whiteness. Then miles of grass. The only representation of a person of color I saw for two hundred miles was a giant Cherokee statue outside a trav el center back in Eastern Oklahoma. It felt as if I was in a temporary place, the way a carnival sets up and then leaves. That’s what I was getting from this part of America. Outwardly not committed, temporary. There were no homes. I drove past huge trailer-home lots. Nothing was here to stay. ¤ Signs along the way:

No sign welcoming drivers to the na tions and reservations, which I loved. You are not welcome here. We’ll let you know when you’re wanted, which is never. As I drove I remembered the story inside Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 clas sic, Ceremony, about a Native man who returns from World War II, and the ways

los angeles review of books 110 his trauma was healed by Native history and folklore. In one section of the book, a group of Indigenous American witch es hold a contest hundreds of years ago about who can cast the best spell or cre ate the best ceremony. And the one that does is the one that calls the white people over, the one that predicts Signs along the way: colonizers. It’s always been such a hair-raising and terrifying idea, one that places power back in the hands of the op pressed, as if to say to the colonizer, “We sent for you.”

I was pulled over by a Missouri po lice officer for speeding. There was a larg er SUV going the same exact speed as I was, but I was the one who got pulled over and my hair was extra frizzy and big this day. The cop approached my car very gin gerly—he was slim, pale, and short, and wore a wide-brim hat. As soon as he saw my face, his body language changed. If I seemed like a light-skinned woman of color from behind, I seemed like a white woman from the front. My dog climbed up on the window frame, and the cop asked if she was friendly. I said she was very friendly. He asked for my license and registration. I reached into my bag. I brought out my wallet. I leaned over and gave him my license. At no point did he seem threatened or pull a gun on me or kill me. I even asked if he could give me a warning. I was going 86 in a 70. I understood my privilege and actually re quested a warning. He said I was receiving a citation because 86 was too high for a warning, but his inflection was apologetic. He gave me my ticket, which said I was going 85. I went along my way, alive. In one piece ¤ From my notes the next morning: Philando Castile was shot dead yesterday in a routine traffic stop. He’d been stopped forty-six times up until that point. He paid off every single citation. The police officer shot him anyway. I walk around Soulard and go to the farmer’s market. An elder ly man wants me to sit with him to talk about my dog, so I do. On the way into St. Louis there were signs: PASS WITH CARE. My fat Arab body continues to pass for white.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Judy, Echo Park), 1990. Courtesy of the artist.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Little Joy), 1994. Courtesy of the artist.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Olga and Melissa, La Plaza), 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Michael and Bianco, Los Angeles), 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Melissa, La Plaza), 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

I grabbed the knife and pointed at my father. DAVOUDIAN

BLUE WILLOW ARMEN

The jellied seeds quivered like dragon spawn.

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A dragon inked in blue, fat as a goose, shone through their pale translucent flesh. We ate the puckering slices, my brother and I, then dared each other to drain the juice. I wasn’t scared.

Glazed with acid yellow, their mother glared and I glared back, startled by my own eyes on the plate. And then it was as though when I tipped up the dish and sucked the brew, the thick spawn burned my throat all the way through and, hatching there, made my whole body shudder.

My mother sliced the cucumbers on a plate and sprinkled them with salt and lemon juice.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Olga, Silverlake Lounge), 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Goddess Bunny, Mugi’s), 1994. Courtesy of the artist.

THE SANDBOX ANNETTE

119

When Aron was beginning to walk, Nora took him to the playgrounds around Echo Park and Silver Lake. On weekday mornings, these playgrounds were usually populated by pale pink toddlers and their nannies, most of whom were Latina. Nora noticed how they ar rived, one by one, pushing the kids in expensive strollers, settling down at the picnic tables. It wasn’t the same group every time, but after a while Nora recog nized many of them, especially two old er women with long gray hair that they wore sometimes in tight braids down their backs, sometimes clipped around their heads Frida Kahlo–style. The nan nies presided over the younger, chattier kids who could have been their daughters. WEISSER

fiction

los angeles review of books 120

They laughed in Spanish and shared huge amounts of Salvadoran and Mexican food that they brought for themselves in plastic bags while occasionally feeding the kids healthy snacks from colorful Tupperware boxes. They showed each other cell phone images of their own children and grand children, catching up on what was hap pening in their lives, while their charges played more or less unsupervised in the sandbox. They clearly coordinated these outings, stealing some private time from their employers, making good on the long hours on public transport that they weren’t usually paid for. Sometimes a kid got in trouble, for ex ample, by falling down the concrete steps that lead down into the sandbox. The kid would start to cry, inspiring others to cry, too. Aron would usually take advantage of the distraction and grab whatever toy he had laid eyes on, making the other kids even more upset. Nora would watch these scenes from afar and wait for one of the nannies to sort out the situation. Every time this happened, she noticed an un willingness, a slight hesitation, before one of the nannies got up. But as soon as the nanny would pick up the distressed tod dler, all that went away immediately, and she would comfort the child with profes sionalThatamenability.wouldbe the moment when Nora came in, chiding Aron for taking the other kid’s toy, prying it from his little brown hand, shooting him a glance that was meant to say: I know this isn’t a big deal, and I’m only doing this because this is what’s expected of me, I hope you understand. The symmetry of the situation — the woman shushing the red-faced toddler on her arm, his blue eyes overflowing with tears, and Nora wrangling Aron, his black eyes angry over the loss of the toy — made her wonder every time if the other woman was aware of it as well. The easy legibility of it, the way it renders race and class relations in this city com pletely obvious. Nora would smile at the nanny, trying to convey a vague sense of complicity. They would both return to their positions across the playground, the nanny to the others at the picnic table, Nora to her corner in the shade and her iPhone. ¤ It’s a late September morning and already the sun has lain siege on the city for many hours. The heat has penetrated every cor ner, even the shadiest ones. Nora takes Aron to the playground because she can’t stand the heat inside their apartment, and from here she plans to head to the air-conditioned public library for a cou ple of hours. At the playground, the usual gathering of nannies, but apart from them and Nora, no other parents show up on this sweltering Friday morning. As soon as the nannies arrive, they diligently put sunscreen and hats on the kids before releasing them into the sandbox. Would they do the same for their own children, Nora“Mexicanswonders. don’t use sunscreen,” is what a Mexican American social worker once told her, before the adoption, when she was a caregiver and the Department of Children and Family Services was re sponsible for Aron’s well-being. “Because we’re stupid. Make sure you do.” But Nora doesn’t use sunscreen ei ther, out of a vague indifference for her own, and now, by extension, Aron’s wellbeing. Why she rarely flosses, protects herself against UV-radiation, or still

121 smokes when basically all her friends quit years ago? Working-class fatalism, she ex plains to herself. But that’s not the only reason. “You don’t have any sense of the fu ture,” an old boyfriend told her more than once. And it’s true. To Nora, the future is a grayish fog, into which all the little ar rows that the people of the present send off simply disappear. If a meteorite hit the Earth, or a nuclear power plant implod ed, or war broke out, or climate change rendered life on earth into a drawn-out agony, a sunburn — even a bad one — would be of no concern anymore. All her life, Nora found it hard to negotiate these apocalyptic scenarios with the petty nui sances of everyday life. She brought a book but not enough water for herself and Aron. They would need to move on to the public library very soon. She can’t wait to get out of this vi cious heat. But Aron looks happy; he’s busy building volcanoes in the sandbox and trying to get the other kids interest ed in his project. Two of them use their hats as buckets to move sand around. Nora recedes further into the shade of the recreation center right next to the playground.She’snow almost out of Aron’s sight. She stretches out on a concrete bench that had retained a tiny bit of its ear ly morning cool. She can feel the cool through her summer dress, and her body relaxes into it. She takes off her sunglasses to read, but even in the shade the whitehot light irritates her eyes. She slips them back on. The heat around her turns from viscous to solid, inescapable. She longs for the cool, quiet reading room of the library, or simply the next Starbucks. Fragments from last night’s dream return: a tiny baby bobs on top of very regular waves. Nora’s in a row boat, and the baby drifts further and further away. Nora rows frantically to rescue the baby, but the boat doesn’t move an inch. Then she realizes that the waves are made of plywood, and the boat is fixed on a metal contraption at the center of a stage. From out of the darkness, an audi ence watches her futile attempts to save her baby, now disappearing behind the painted horizon … ¤ Nora wakes up from an eerie, growling sound and immediately notices that the light has changed. Is it already that late? How long had she been sleeping? Startled and guilty, she jumps up to check on Aron. She sees him standing in the mid dle of the sandbox, mortified, looking up the jungle gym. The nannies crouch on top of it. Two squat on top of the plastic roofs at both ends. Two more lurk on top of the monkey bars. The older woman stands at the top of the slide, very straight, arms outstretched. They all face the same di rection: toward the sandbox, where their employers’ children run in a dense group from one end to the other and back again, like performers in a Modern Dance piece. Tiny performers eager to get it right. Aron sees his mother reappear from out of the shade and turns toward her, but Nora cannot move. She cannot take her eyes off the spectacle of the crouching nannies. Now she can see that the nan nies’ mouths are wide open, and that the growling sound is emanating from these … cavities in long, unison waves. They look like fierce, angry goddesses. The children continue their choreo graphed movement while Aron looks at Nora, his big eyes filled with horror, ANNETTE WEISSER

“What happened,” Nora asks Aron as she picks him up and carries him toward the concrete bench. “I don’t know,” he says, “suddenly the sun was gone. And you were gone, “Wheretoo.”were you,” he says in a neu tral tone, and instead of answering Nora hands him the water bottle. They both take deep sips from the bottle until it’s empty. Then Nora gathers Aron’s toys from the sandbox, straps him into the stroller and leaves the playground.

“Want one? It’s a hot day today!” He plucks a bottle from an open crate and throws it at her. Nora tries to catch it, but her hands grasp nothing, and the bottle rolls away from her on the tiled floor.

WEISSER

Little by little, the bright daylight returns.Nora feels Aron’s gaze on her, and his expectation for her to do something, any thing, but she is mortified. Then there’s a loud bang behind her back. She swirls around and sees that the office door of the recreation center has flung wide open. An employee pushes a wheelbarrow, piled high with crates of water bottles, out of the office and toward the basketball court.

123 or amazement. Nora can’t tell from the distance.Then, the growling abruptly stops. The women close their mouths, and af ter a short while they reopen them again simultaneously. Now light emerges from within. The light climbs up and then out of their mouths, dripping from their chins, and dissolves into the air.

ANNETTE

“Sorry for that,” the guy says over his shoulder and pushes the wheelbarrow through the open door of the basketball court.Nora bends down to grab the bottle. When she looks up again, the nannies are gone. Or rather, they’re back at the pic nic table, and a heartbeat later they storm down the steps and into the sandbox be cause one of the kids has a bloody nose. The girl cries hysterically, and the other kids chime in, driving each other into a screaming frenzy. Now their nannies are all over them, wiping wet faces, blowing noses, providing water and snacks, calm ing the kids in their care. The screaming ebbs away.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Performers, La Plaza), 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

125 essay We rarely need to ask what “selfservice” means. When you fill up your gas tank on the way to work, or sur reptitiously mix Coke with horchata at the soda fountain, or withdraw $40 from an ATM, you understand the procedure. The logic and technologies of self-service ap pear almost everywhere in the industrial ized world — at car washes, grocery stores, airport terminals, movie theaters, and even computerized voting booths. Most frequently, they appear in the form of ap plications on our computers and phones: personal banking apps like Chase Mobile and budgeting apps like Mint, match making apps like Tinder and Bumble, or WHO DO YOU SERVE WHEN YOU SERVE YOURSELF? CONSUMER CENTURYAUTOMATION,LABOR,ANDAOFSELF-SERVICE MACKENZIE WEEKS

los angeles review of books 126 real estate apps like Zillow and Renter. In each of these contexts, you intuitively know the structure of the encounter, even if you’re not aware of how it is executed. You know to “help yourself.” Even if you don’t, most self-service technologies will teach you what to do without relying on assistance from another person. As behemoths of retail, banking, and logistics increasingly automate and outsource their services, the act of con sumption in the United States and most of the world now relies almost wholly on technology, be it online interfaces, com puterized terminals, or behind-the-scenes infrastructure. To point, Amazon’s cur rent global dominance in retail and cloud computing services would be unthink able without the logic and technology of self-service.Although much of our economy runs on the consumer labor that self-service extracts from us, we still don’t have a clear sense of what it really is. Self-service, whatever else it might be, is neither self-explanatory nor self-sufficient; con ceptually — and quite literally — it makes us do the work. In the US, self-service began as a Progressive Era rebranding of a Victorian mechanical gimmick — the first modern vending machines dispensed postcards to British consumers as early as the 1880s. The idea gained traction in the early 20th century, not as a descriptor of specif ic technologies but as a prescription for specific consumer contexts. Its prominent presence in today’s technologies illumi nates how the meeting of fin-de-siècle management practices and technical in novation over a century ago would gen erate some of the most distinctive features of our current cultures of consumption and production. As a slogan, “self-service” appealed distinctly to the American ethos of indi vidualism and self-reliance. In the early 1900s, grocers and store owners pitched self-service shopping to women with the promise that less service would mean bet ter service, providing the customer with freedom and privacy in their consump tion. This new approach to consumer ex perience appeared to cut out the services once provided by human laborers like store clerks and department store girls, giving customers (namely, the wives and mothers of America) more control over their shopping experience.

M. M. Zimmerman, an early food retail titan whose New York Times obitu ary referred to him as “an expert in super markets,” wrote in his authoritative his tory of the industry, The Super Market: A Revolution in Distribution, that the stores’ innovations impacted not just consumers but retailers. Describing the 1934 opening of Big Bear stores, one of the earliest su permarket chains, Zimmerman marveled at the novelty of people seemingly “con tent to wait on themselves.” By encourag ing shoppers to navigate large warehouses to procure and then transport their own goods, supermarkets handily reduced costs, transferring the labor of distribu tion over to their willing customers.

The idea of self-service as an ex emplary site of independence and selfdetermination quickly gained a foothold in the American cultural consciousness, not only to the benefit of retailers but ul timately to political agendas. Self-service practices claimed to offer something more like social equality and democracy in con sumption in comparison to older forms of exchange. Piggly Wiggly advertised its early version of the self-service grocery store as a place that “fosters the spirit of

The selling of self-service in the com mercial sphere also shares a historical tra jectory with the selling of self-help in the cultural sphere, a fact noted by scholars like Micki McGee and Tracey Deutsch. As men endured a reshaping of the pro fessional personality with the rise of the white-collar workplace, modern women experienced a reshaping of the domestic personality. Propped up in large part by popular self-help, ladies’ magazines, and television programs, new expectations for and attitudes toward consumption would leave their mark long past the expiration date of the rigid gender dichotomy that produced them. Self-help functioned on the same beliefs that undergirded self-service: those in power can give you all the tools you need but at the end of the day only you are responsible for your self. McGee, in her account of a centu ry of self-help, writes, “the literatures of self-improvement, and self-creations of other kinds, reliant as they are on the lib eral notion of an autonomous self, require their adherents to engage in a denial of the importance of — even the existence of — the labors of others and the forces of history.” The spread of self-service trained women — and eventually men and chil dren — to self-create its best consumers while it disciplined us to overlook the pre carious, feminized service economy that its widespread adoption helped shape.

As the century progressed into the ’70s and ’80s and the retail industry at tempted to innovate against the threat of flagging profits, firms began to implement hybridized models featuring full-service experiences marketed to attract more af fluent customers alongside the efficient familiarities of self-service shopping. Despite its seeming retreat from the fore front of commercial culture, the logic of self-service spread even more widely, al though less visibly, in the design of new sites and scenes of consumption — partic ularly in malls, television shopping chan nels, and transportation hubs — and new computerized technologies. The general aim of these designs continued to mini mize a consumer’s required interactions with both employees and other consum ers, rendering the new and diverse spaces of consumption deserts of a single psyche. Through the logic of self-service, and even more so than when paying for the clois tered experience ensured by full service, consumers could feel secure in their au thority, their solitude, and their autonomy.

127 MACKENZIE WEEKS independence — the soul of democratic institutions, teaching men, women, and children to do it for themselves.” Marketed successfully as a patriotic approach to any consumer choice and action, self-service became shorthand for freedom and respect of privacy. Against the backdrop of the Cold War in the 1950s and ’60s, industry and government officials alike touted the American supermarket as a model of capi talist democratization and abundance, and its lowered prices, attractive marketing, and logistical convenience seemed to of fer a persuasive example of US capitalism against the imagined threat of commu nism. Nikita Khrushchev, in a momentary Cold War thaw, toured a San Francisco supermarket during his first diplomatic trip to the United States in 1959.

From its very beginning, self-service deceived us into growing closer and open ing ourselves more nakedly to the corpo rations that would exploit us through the mirage of immediacy, privacy, and selfdetermination. With the advent of the digital age, online technology has been incorporated into almost all aspects of the now ubiquitous forms of self-service. This

In a widely circulated 2010 report pub lished by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation think tank, Daniel Castro, Robert Atkinson, and Stephen Ezell provide a helpful working definition of self-service that we can use to grapple with its contemporary appli cations. They describe self-service as “the process by which consumers engage in all or a portion of the provision of a service or product.” While this definition remains exceedingly broad, it highlights the two most crucial components underlying the popular conception of self-service today: the presence of a “consumer” and the per formance of a “service.” Part of the everincreasing need to boost productivity un der late capitalism, this emphasis on the consumer differentiates self-service from another rising trend: automation.

While the idea of automation has re ceived critical and popular attention (many a webinar has been launched in response to the fear-laden question: Will machines take our jobs?), our lack of understanding about the implications of self-service has led us to see it as a marketing or consum er-based problem rather than a matter of labor. But both self-service and automa tion effectively diminish workers’ direct roles in performing a service or provid ing a thing, redistributing and redefin ing existing labor. Both are instituted as a result of top-down managerial deci sions, and although self-service relies on garnering voluntary (unpaid) consumer involvement, both require investment in fixed capital of technology. The introduc tion of self-service supermarkets led to reductions in distribution employment; self-service checkout lanes cut positions once held by checkout clerks. Together with automation, self-service technolo gies have eliminated some labor entire ly and rendered other labors — those of service workers and consumers — almost whollyIntroducedinvisible. to the American public over a century ago, self-service’s keen, early advertisement of its forward-think ing novelty and democratizing impulse, alongside the apparent privacy and free dom it could afford consumers, fueled its widespread adoption first in retail and then eventually everywhere, fully integrat ing into so many strands of contemporary life while its ideological roots extended deeply into Western accounts of virtuous labor. With the implements of self-service so fully metabolized into so many streams of commercial and social life, the implicit assumptions we make about self-service technology warrant more precise atten tion and Untilexplication.then,you should take care to remember that when you engage in selfservice — whether by telephone, online portal, bank ATM, or in the checkout aisle — you engage in an exchange achieved through the extraction of your consumer labor for the multivalent benefit of corpo rations, and often at the expense of other invisible service work performed by lowwaged, increasingly marginalized workers. Whether you’re banking on your phone, learning Italian with Duolingo, or buying a novel from Amazon, your choices serve someone — and not only yourself. Originally published in PubLab, the journal of the LARB Publishing Workshop.

los angeles review of books 128 has led to new and lucrative opportunities for massive, unchecked harvesting of con sumer data alongside self-service’s already effective obfuscation of labor and the ways it short-circuits the production of value. Our lack of a clear definition or crit ical understanding of self-service has worked immensely in corporations’ favor.

Mihau and Lee drove to the coast several months after it was too cold to go in the water. They did not own a house and they were not renters. They ar gued over which turns to take.

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THE COAST COLIN WINNETTE

“To the left there’s an opening in the trees.”“To the right the sun’s setting.” For heat, Lee sat on her hands. Mihau drove with his left hand, blowing hot air into his right fist. “The road’s less narrow to the left,” said “TheLee. beach is to the right,” said Mihau. “The beach is where the houses will Mihaube.” turned right, and the road nar rowed. Banks rose up on either side. Roots

131 dangled. Rocks punctuated the earth like broken teeth. It was getting dark. After 40 minutes or so the narrow road emptied onto a sandy path. At the end of the path was a tall, white beach house. There was nowhere to hide the car, so they pulled it into the carport. Mihau walked back to the road and confirmed the car was not visible.

Lee was shivering, so Mihau built a fire in the fireplace. The house was quiet except for the sound of the ocean. “I’m going to build a bigger fire to morrow,” said Mihau, “on the beach.”

Lee considered Mihau’s position: supine, arms crossed at his waist. It was possible he’d shifted, and in doing so had knocked the headboard. Lee settled back into the bed. The comforter was natural down, but she couldn’t feel the needle of its feathers poking through. It was a nice house.

COLIN WINNETTE

After the heat from the fire filled the house, they lay together upstairs, listening to the ocean. They fell asleep on top of the sheets.There was a knock in the middle of the night and Lee woke in a state of alarm. She listened for a second knock but there was nothing. She watched Mihau’s sleeping face, and that calmed her a little.

“If someone pulls into the driveway,” said Lee, “we’ll be trapped.”

“These are vacation homes,” said Mihau. “People don’t come here this time of year.”“We’re here,” said Lee. “I wouldn’t mind meeting more of us,” said TheMihau.door under the carport was locked, so they circled the house. The front door was locked; same with the door by the spigot on the house’s left side. They climbed the stairs to the deck where there was a sliding glass door. Little bars slid into raised notches at the top and bottom. Each was threaded with a padlock. The key to the padlocks was under the doormat. Inside, the house was clean and or derly. Mihau flipped the light switch, but nothing came on. “Power’s off,” he said. There was an hour or so of light left, so they spread out to explore the house. Mihau’s phone had died in the car. The bat tery on Lee’s was running low. She turned it off in case there was an emergency. Lee examined the only family photo in the house, on a table in the front hall. To her, they did not look like a real family. They all smiled the same way. She found Mihau and attached herself to him. She loved him, and felt what they had was something no one else in the entire world had ever experienced in exactly the same way. There was nothing in the fridge or the cabinets, but they had groceries and some beer in the car. There were three bedrooms in the house: two upstairs and a guestroom on the ground floor. Mihau and Lee took the largest one. When the sun was down, they un packed in the light of the carport and brought everything in through the door, which they had unlocked from the inside.

Lee couldn’t sleep, so she lay awake listen ing to the ocean, which was constant but uneven. There was another knock. It was over so quickly, she thought she might have dreamed it. She could have fallen asleep without noticing. Or it was possible she hadn’t heard it at all, but only imag ined it. Lee felt her heart pumping blood into the far reaches of her body. She tried to hold her hand still, but it trembled with each pump.

los angeles review of books 132 Lee knew the knock was real. She knew it wasn’t a dream, but that didn’t mean she knew what it was. She made a list in her head of the things it might have been:-

Mihau would say it does no good to wonder. Mihau would say why didn’t you wake me? Lee didn’t know why she hadn’t. She didn’t want to need to wake him. She didn’t want there to be any reason for him to be awake. She listened and moved and heard nothing but her own breath, which was as loud as the bellow of an approach ing train. She could not keep quiet. She moved slowly down the stairs, careful not to touch the banister or the wall, fearing the sounds the wood would make. Soon, she was on the ground floor again, only a few feet from the front door. There was no peephole, but narrow win dows ran the height of the door on either side. Thick white curtains blocked the view. She slid her hand around a cur tain’s edge and held her face to the trim. Slowly, she lifted the curtain, centimeter by centimeter.Itwaslighter outside, but not by much. Snow was falling, which they had not expected. There was a knock then, but not from outside. She turned to meet the sound and saw nothing. Her eyes were no longer adjusted to the dark. She could have been inches from a man or a woman in a mask, and she wouldn’t have known it. She made another list: - Something that would hurt her - Something she could get away from - Something she would need to get away from She bolted through the darkness, to ward and past the sound then upstairs to

A knotted rope blown in the wind - A flag they hadn’t noticed, batting against the sliding glass door

- The heat from the fire swelling the wood of the house - A man or a woman in a mask - A nut falling onto the roof of the house - A neighbor who’d seen the headlights - A drifter looking for a fire - The police - The living deadMihau’sHail sleeping face no longer com forted Lee. She slipped out from under the covers and moved across the room. The house did not creak or groan beneath her socks. She put an ear to the door and listened. She heard nothing. She cracked the door and found the hallway dark. There was light from the stars coming through the open blinds above the bed, but it didn’t reach the hallway. The hall way was a dark void. An open mouth. She stepped into it. Lee knew the stairs were only a few feet from the bedroom. She inched her feet in that direction, trying to anticipate where the carpet bent to cover the edge of the first stair. This generated heat at the tips of her toes, on the balls of her feet. She built static electricity, pushing each foot slowly forward. The moment her mind wandered from the stair, she felt her toe slip its edge. Her eyes were beginning to adjust, and she could make out the plain white paint of the banister, the soft glow of the carpet beneath her.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (La Plaza), 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

los angeles review of books 134 Mihau, who was still sleeping peacefully. She shook him awake, and he startled up right, out of sleep. “What? What’s happened?” “I don’t know,” she said. “Are you hurt?” he said. “No,” she said. “I heard a noise.” He lifted himself out of bed and pulled his jeans from the floor. He went downstairs without minding his volume. He went to the door, turned the knob, and pulled.The wood groaned faintly but it did not move. He rattled the door in its frame. He twisted the lock on the knob from hor izontal to vertical and tried again. After that, he twisted the lock on the knob from vertical to horizontal and gave it another pull.“It wasn’t from there,” said Lee. She stood on the stairs, and started to feel “Whereembarrassed.then?” he said. “I did hear something,” she said. “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “I’ll check out back.”Shefollowed him to the back of the house, where the sliding door opened onto the deck. He pulled at that. It didn’t budge.“Did you fuck with these?” he said. She shook her head. He left the sliding door and passed through the living room and back into the hall. He tried the door that led to the carport.“None of the doors work,” he said. “They worked before,” she said. “They all worked.”“Before what?” he said. “I don’t know,” she said. “What did you hear?” “A “Likeknock.”aknock on the door?” “I think so.” “Which door?” “I don’t know,” said Lee. “I tried the front and there was no one there.” “And“And?”I heard it again.” “At the front door?” “At“No.”the back?” “Here?”“No.” he said, giving the door that led down to the carport another tug. “No,” she said. “From somewhere else.”They went to the kitchen. The sun would be up in an hour or so. The ocean was still “Whatchurning.wasthe knock like? Like a bump? Something falling?” he asked. “Like a knuckle against wood. Like a knock,” she said. “It’s possible the front door has a se curity lock on it. And that the locks on the sliding door slipped into place after we shut it.” “It’s possible,” she said. “I want to ask you something,” he said, “without freaking you out.” “Okay,” she said. “Do you think someone locked us in?” “I don’t know,” she said, freaking out. “Because it doesn’t make sense, does it?” “No,” she said. “Because why would someone do that,“So,Sheright?”nodded.we’rejust having a problem with the doors,” he said. “That’s all it is.” Again, she nodded. “And that seems like a normal enough thing and nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “It’s a problem with the doors,” she said.

Lee was uneasy, but she was happy Mihau felt comfortable enough to take a bath. It was calming to think of each strange occurrence as a problem they could solve together. She imagined them finding a brass key on top of a door frame, then using the key to open all the doors in the house. She imagined the two of them digging a hammer into the crack between the door and its frame and prying apart the wood. She imagined the breeze mov ing through the house like a net. She imagined that same hammer shattering the glass of the back door, and she imag ined herself nursing a wound on Mihau’s hand. He’d once cut his palm on a bro ken light bulb, pushing down the trash in the bathroom. Within a few weeks there was nothing to show for it other than a thin pink line, like he’d drawn it on with a crayon. Lee was surprised to feel let down by how insignificant the wound was, when there’d been so much blood.

135 ¤ They walked into the living room and Mihau stirred the coals, reigniting the fire. Lee was nervous it would attract at tention, but she was cold and the house was too dark. Mihau added a fresh log and flames snapped around it. For a while, there were no sounds but the ocean and the fire. Then the sun came up, and Mihau went looking for a fuse box. He found one in a cabinet in the kitchen. He flipped the breakers, and nothing“We’rehappened.having a problem with the doors,” he said, “and we’re having a prob lem with the fuse box.”

They had oranges and apples in the grocery bag, so Lee peeled and sliced them up. They ate from flowery plates she found in the dishwasher. “This is the way life goes,” said Mihau. “It’s not always easy.” They found cards in a kitchen drawer, soft and blue with use. They sat in heavy metal chairs and played a card game at the kitchen table. When they were done, Mihau searched the house. Lee followed closely as he moved from door to door. Outside, grains of sand shifted in the wind. Lee looked through the windows in each room. Brown birds with thin legs darted along the edge of the surf. They plunged their long beaks into the sand where the water retreated.Bynoon the following day, Lee and Mihau had still accomplished very little. From what he could tell, they were alone. The house was empty. They were as they had been. Mihau tried the doors again, then gave up and ran a bath. “It’ll be cold,” she said. “I just want to relax,” he said.

COLIN WINNETTE

Lee sat in the kitchen listening to the dead thumps of Mihau’s body shift ing in the tub. She went to the bottom of the stairs and set her knuckle against the wall. She knocked. It was nothing like the knock she’d heard the night before. Or it was a little like the knock she’d heard the night before. She listened and heard nothing more than the ocean and Mihau Theyshifting.spent hours trying to come up with distractions. They kept a small fire going. They ate a good deal of the food they’d brought with them. If these were prob lems they could solve, if there was noth ing to worry about, there was no reason to ration food.

los angeles review of books 136 They decided to go to sleep shortly after sunset, having no idea what time it was. There were two battery-operated clocks in the house, and they were out of sync. Lee felt disoriented, but Mihau ex plained that clocks in vacation homes are rarely“We’resynched.having a problem with batter ies,” said “We’reMihau.having a problem with time,” said TheyLee. were on the floor in the living room, where they could hear the ocean and the “Thisfire.isnew,” said Mihau. “We are ex plorers, pressing into unfamiliar territory.”

“Don’t let me sleep,” said Lee, and the next moment, she was dreaming. In her dream, Lee was seated in a chair in a stranger’s room. She was propped against the wall, petting a small animal just out of view. Occasionally, the animal licked her hand. Her nose was bleeding, and she used her free hand to wipe away the blood when the tickle of it was too much. She woke to the sound of glass shattering and realized she was alone on the floor. Mihau was not beside her. Mihau was not in the living room. She listened and held her breath until she could not hold it any longer. She let it slowly out, opening her mouth so the air could escape directly from the back of her throat. She waited but heard nothing more. Lee was having a fear problem. She counted down from 10, then rose and faced the room. It was empty in the firelight. There was no light from outside, and the glass of the sliding doors acted as a mirror, reflecting Lee back into the room. She couldn’t bear to see it, how vul nerable and alone she looked. The house creaked with her as she moved through it. She heard someone whispering, or the wind outside lifting the beach grass. She listened. The sound rose and fell. It rose and fell like the wind. As she moved, her eyes adjusted. She moved slowly, afraid of bumping a low table or a lamp she’d forgotten. She did not know this house. It was not theirs. They should not have “Mihau,”come.she whispered. “Where are you?”She headed for the kitchen, and the heavy metal “Mihau,”chairs.shesaid, “if you are okay, please tell me you’re okay.” She heard the whispering again, clos er this time. Or the wind. She pictured the beach grass tilting. It was quiet as quick ly as there’d been a sound. She examined the darkness for shapes and saw none. She moved her hands in small circles until she reached one of the metal chairs. With both hands, she lifted it. She carried it to her reflection in the sliding glass. Before she hurled the chair, Lee heard a knock from somewhere in the house. She felt encouraged by it. She felt inspired to act. She was doing the right thing. Lee swung the chair into the glass and cracked it, a jagged white line shot from her shoulder to the deck. Her reflection was shocked and exhilarated. She situated the chair and brought it over her shoul der again, hitting roughly the same spot in the glass. This time, the glass shattered. The house filled with a shrieking squeal, and Mihau called to her from somewhere in the“I’mdark.going!” she yelled. Lee used her elbow to push what was left of the glass from its frame, and a moment later, she was outside. She was free. The ocean was there, and the beach grass tilted and bounced. She ran down the deck stairs, around the side of the

“You said that,” said Lee. They drove for hours and did not stop until they needed gas. Lee pumped while Mihau writhed in the passenger’s seat, scratching. His energy had not returned. They drove until nightfall, and Lee lazi ly tilted the wheel, rolling the tires over the rivets in the shoulder, rattling Mihau awake.“Pull over,” he said. “I’m not sleeping in the car,” she said. “A motel,” he said. “You need to sleep.” “I don’t want to sleep,” she said. She pulled at the short hairs on her forearm. She pinched her earlobe as hard as she could.“You still need to,” he said. The second time she fell asleep at the wheel, she agreed to a Motel 6 a few yards from the access road. She requested a room with a view of the highway and a door onto the parking lot. The room hummed with the activity of a thousand strangers. Lee sat by the window, trying to make everything quiet. Mihau was in bed, scratching his arms and legs. “Stop it,” she said. “You’re going to break the skin.” He crossed his arms, squirming. “Use the ice,” she said. He leaned to the floor and drew a cube from the ice bucket she’d left there. He ran it along his arms and legs. “It’s not better,” he said. “It’ll keep your hands busy,” she said. She didn’t sleep. Mihau might have, but he scratched through the night, and in the morning, he was bleeding.

137 house. She slipped on a sandy slope and screamed several times as she righted her self. Nothing came and no one responded. She ran to the front door, and it opened without“Mihau,”trouble.she said. “Mihau, let’s go!” He appeared from behind the stairs, leaning against the wall. “The door,” he said. “Hurry,” she said. “I can’t,” he said. “What happened?” she said. “I’m sick,” he said. “I’ve been throwing up.”

The car started without a problem, and Lee dipped the back tires into the sand, turning the vehicle around. “Is that snow?” said Mihau, pointing out. Lee said nothing. She drove unsafely for an hour, taking corners too quickly and going as fast as she possibly could without crashing. Although they did come close. She drove and drove, slowing but never slowly. Mihau did not speak. She blindly navigated the back roads until they finally spilled onto a paved one, which they were able to follow to a highway. Eventually, the sun came up. Mihau was already scratching. “What are you doing?” said Lee. There were red bumps rising on his arms and legs like earthen huts. “Something on the comforter,” he said. “Or in the sand. I was throwing up.”

COLIN WINNETTE

The house was full of sharp noise. Shaking, Lee hurried to Mihau and took on his weight. She led him out the front door and down the few steps there. They circled to the carport. Lee reached for her phone, but she hadn’t brought it with her. She’d left it somewhere inside to be discovered. She worked in the dark, getting Mihau into the car before climbing into the driver’s seat.“Mihau,” she said. “The keys. Please.” “Yes.” He reached into his pockets one by one until he found them.

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Lisa and Gabby, La Plaza), 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

COLIN WINNETTE

“You ruined the sheets,” she said. “It’s a Motel 6 on the access road,” he said. “They’re used to it.” Lee drove them farther and farther from the coast, while Mihau dug into his limbs. He turned the huts to canoes, to trenches, then to wounds. When they were nearly out of money, they slept in the car in the parking lot of roadside motels. Mihau talked about finding work. “Like what?” Lee asked. “I can do things,” he said. He wrapped his wounds in old T-shirts, and sat on his hands when he Theycould.lived out of their car for weeks, and Mihau mingled with day laborers, when he could find them. He got picked up a few more times than Lee would have ex pected. He was young and people liked him. He spoke a little Spanish too, which Lee had never known. Recently they’d been circling a town outside of Oklahoma City where Mihau was having more luck than usual. They were stretching their legs alongside a de funct stretch of train track when he told her about a joke of his that had made a man named Eddie laugh. Lee had never thought of Mihau as funny. “Who’s Eddie?” Lee said. “He’s Eddie,” said Mihau. Eddie hired Mihau to help install the stones in a stone facade Eddie and his wife were building around the front of their home. Eddie only needed one man, and it was a week’s worth of work. Over the course of that week, Eddie and Mihau formed a friendship. Mihau listened to Eddie’s stories about his childhood and recounted them to Lee in the car each night; how Eddie had built a house with his father the year after his mother died. “They lost it,” Mihau told her. “Couldn’t keep up with other debts. So Eddie learned to pay for things with cash. A temporary solution’s only that. Temporary.”“Nicefor Eddie,” said Lee, who was starting to wonder where all this was Somethingheaded. had changed between Mihau and Lee, and it made her feel like she was not remembering her life correctly. She remembered feeling carefree, but not what that had felt like, which made her won der if she had ever actually known it, or if she was just remembering feeling close the wrong way. Lately, she could only re call worries she’d had in the past, and that she had not considered herself a worried person.She spent most days smoking and eat ing Takis, uncertain if they were leaving or staying another night. She took walks back and forth through the heart of town just to be near people, though she did not like talking to them. That made it hard for her to find work. People thought she was odd. Most of the time she spent conversations watching the other person’s face, repeating back whatever it was they’d said to her.

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Within a year, Eddie bought a com pany that transported custom-made furniture.“Wedon’t make the furniture,” Eddie explained to Mihau, who later told Lee, “that’s a Chinese company the next state over. We move it when it’s purchased and ready.”Eddie offered Mihau work in a dis tribution center. It came with a salary and

Mihau and Lee moved into an apart ment on the edge of town, and Eddie gave them a couch as a housewarming gift. It was used, but not worn. A floor model. When Lee looked at it, she remembered a house she had not thought about in years. It had the same quality, the same air. A vacant space soiled with absence. “You don’t want a child?” said Mihau, as if they’d been talking about it. “No,” said Lee. “Eddie has a son,” he said, pick ing brown hair from the couch cushion. “If we’re going to live here,” he said, “we could start a family.” Lee wanted desperately to use the internet.When Lee was seven months preg nant, she started having severe abdominal pains. She sat on the couch to weather them, and her water broke. The child survived, but he was very small. Nurses put him in a device that baked Lee’s blood from his veins. They ex plained it all to Lee, but the moment they stopped talking most of the information left her. Mihau sat in traffic throughout the short delivery, and when he arrived, a machine was breathing for his son. The doctors were optimistic, and eight weeks later, Mihau and Lee brought Milo home. When he was seven, Milo fell out of a treehouse Mihau was building in the backyard. He was making more money now, managing truck routes for Eddie’s company, and he’d been able to afford a down payment on Eddie’s house, once Eddie decided to move into a new one. It was a nine-foot fall from the tree house, and when Milo rose from it with out a broken bone, he became convinced of his own invincibility. So much so that he went straight into the kitchen and brought one of the butcher knives down on his index finger. When Mihau was driving his son home from the emergency room, Milo explained what had happened. “It’s not all of me,” he said. “It’s just the bones.”Leehad a friend in her son. He could be demanding, but he had a way of asking for things that left her feeling charmed and eager to please. She worried she was too indulgent, and sometimes she said no just to prove to herself she still could.

los angeles review of books 140 potential benefits. It was a good job for Mihau, and he would be able to afford a small apartment, if he wanted to stay in town and keep at it.

Since starting middle school, Milo had become obsessed with divorce.

“No,” said Lee. She was sitting in a rocking chair, a few feet from the televi sion. Behind her, Max, the golden retriev er, chewed on a couch cushion. “Your father and I love each other very much,” said Lee. When Milo left for school, Lee drew herself a bath. She wept while the water was running and when the tub filled up, she pulled the plug on the drain so she could keep it going until she was done. Milo was driving himself to school now, taking the old Subaru, which ev eryone was surprised was still running.

Mihau started dressing up for work, though he didn’t need to. He liked to stand out, and when he felt someone wasn’t keeping up their end, it made him angry.“Are you and Dad getting a divorce?”

They’d changed the tires a dozen times since their trip to the ocean, but almost every part of the car was still the same. Milo would never know how many nights they’d spent in it, or that whenever Lee saw it, she was overwhelmed with a feel ing of grief for a life she wasn’t even sure she’d ever had.

“You said that,” said Milo. “I know.” Lee was losing her thoughts. She forgot new information the moment she learned it, and older memories were start ing to slip as well. There were gaps she recognized, which made her wonder how much she’d already forgotten, what she couldn’t remember forgetting. She sat up some nights, writing things down, itemizing what was left of the day, hoping the repetition would bring her a little further along into the next. But it was getting harder and harder to trust her self, which made her irritable. Mihau was patient, but she could tell it was a chore listening to her cycle through something they’d already settled, or forgetting for a moment who he was, what it was they were doing. The only place she ever want ed to be anymore was a house with all the doors locked. Nothing out and nothing in. It was the safest place she could imag ine, and she pictured it whenever a door closed. Whenever someone knocked.

COLIN WINNETTE

“After this, you’ll be nearly half plas tic,” said InsuranceMihau.helped with the first two surgeries, but they had to pay for most of the third with a credit card. They would be in debt for the rest of their lives as a result. Mihau didn’t mention it to Eddie. The doctors had Lee count backward from 1,000, and she was out before 997.

A man approached her in an airport terminal, a stranger. He tried to touch her, so she punched him in the chest.

141

Milo was always on his way some where when he called; walking to the store, headed to a dinner. Never a date, but always eating, eating with friends. She liked hearing from him, even in snatches. Milo’s wife was still sick. His son wasn’t speaking to him. “He hates it in Tucson,” said Milo of his son. “He spends all his time online.”

“Can you blame him?” said Lee. “So far from his grandmother, it’s a wonder you can keep him in the state.”

Lee watched the window over the toi let fog up, then the mirror over the sink. She rose from the tub and set her hand against the glass. When she withdrew it, there was a handprint. The water in the tub was still running, but it was running cold by now. She watched the handprint fade.When Lee’s shoulder went, they had it replaced. Same with her knees.

Beneath them, the ocean was churn ing. Lee could hear the whispering voices

Mihau leaned on the wheelchair to balance himself, pushing Lee up the ramp and onto the airplane. All that surgery, and she was still in a wheelchair most of the time. She couldn’t remember Milo’s voice, but she could remember counting back ward from 1,000 and the doctor leaning over her, his shadow being swallowed by the light, instead of the other way around. They were taking a trip. Mihau buckled her in, and Milo was on the television. There was an article about him in the in-flight magazine, and she showed it to Mihau until he took away the magazine and read it to her as the plane took off.

She could picture the window shat tering. The whole plane getting swallowed by flame. She picked at the little balls of fabric on her skirt, twisting them between her fingers until they snapped off. She stared through her knees, dropping the pills into the darkness of the floor. It was a shadow; it wasn’t infinite. She stamped her feet, confirming it was solid ground. “That’s right,” said Lee. “I see you.”

los angeles review of books 142 of everyone else on the airplane, though not what they were saying. Mihau flipped the pages of the inflight“Theymagazine.could have chosen a better picture,” she said, pushing the magazine down into his lap. Mihau set a hand over hers and set tled “Don’tthem. let me sleep,” she said. “I’d like to go back to California.”

“We’re going to California,” he said. “We’re going to the beach.”

Reynaldo Rivera, Untitled (Performers, La Plaza), 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

CONTRIBUTORS

Mackenzie Weeks is a writer and graduate student living in southern California, where she teaches and researches the intersections of labor, literature, technology, and culture.

Deborah Paredez is the author of the poetry vol umes, Year of the Dog and This Side of Skin, and the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. She is a Co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets. She lives in New York City where she teach es creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University.

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Armen Davoudian’s poems and translations appear in AGNI, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

Randa Jarrar is the author of the novel A Map of Home and the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award and an American Book Award, as well as awards and fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Hedgebrook, PEN, and others. A professor of creative writing and a performer, Jarrar lives in Los Angeles. Taisia Kitaiskaia is the author of four books: The Nightgown and Other Poems; Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers, a collabo ration with artist Katy Horan and an NPR Best Book of 2017; and Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles as well as its follow-up, Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times: From Ask Baba Yaga. She is the recipient of fellowships from the James A. Michener Center for Writers and The Corporation of Yaddo.

Miki Arndt is from Kobe, Japan. She lives in New York and has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in the Colorado Review and Redivider and she was the recipient of a fellowship from the Center for Fiction in New York. Sylvie Baumgartel is a poet living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books, Subtropics, Raritan and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from “The Paris Review.” Her first poetry book, Song of Songs, is out now with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who will also publish her second poetry book, Pink, forthcoming. Jenny Fran Davis is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She is the winner of the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award in nonfiction and the au thor of the novel Everything Must Go. Her work is forthcoming in the Washington Square Review, and she is at work on a book about femme lesbian performance.

Paul A. Kramer writes and teaches US history from transnational, imperial, and global perspec tives as an associate professor at Vanderbilt Uni versity, with an emphasis on race, colonialism, and migration, and has written for The New Yorker, Slate, and other publications on these themes. He is the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines and is currently writing books on the practice of transnational history, and on connections between empire and immigration policy in modern US history. His website is https://www.paulkrameronline.com/

Carl Phillips is the author of 15 books of poems, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020). He teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis. Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. A recipient of multiple fellowships, Julian is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Ole Miss. Julian is the author of Refuse (Pitt, 2018), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, and Pilar Ramirez and the Prison of Zafa (Holt Books for Young Readers, Winter 2022). He can be found at @JulianThePoet and on his website JulianDavidRandall.com.

Elvia Wilk is a writer living in New York. She is author of the novel Oval (Soft Skull press, 2019) and her work has appeared in publica tions including Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, Granta, n+1, The White Review, BOMB, Mousse, Flash Art, and Ssense. She is a contributing editor at e-flux Journal and a 2020 fellow at the Berggruen Institute. Colin Winnette is a screenwriter and the author of several books, including The Job of The Wasp (Soft Skull Press), Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio), and Coyote (Les Figues). He’s online at colinwinnette. net. Ja’Tovia M. Gary (b. Dallas, TX. 1984) is an artist and filmmaker. Gary’s work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is of ten viewed while fleshing out a nuanced and mul tivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film, experimental video art, and installation, Gary charts the ways structures of power shape our per ceptions around representation, race, gender, sexu ality, and violence. The artist earned her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2017 Gary was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking. Her award-winning films, An Ecstatic Experience and Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) have screened at festivals, cinemas, and institutions worldwide including Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Atlanta Film Festival, the Schomburg Center, MoMa PS1, MoCA Los Angeles, Harvard Film Archives, New Orleans Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and elsewhere.

contributors FEATURED ARTISTS

Annette Weisser is a visual artist and writer based in Berlin. She is currently teaching at Kunsthoch schule Kassel. From 2006 to 2019 she lived in Los Angeles and taught at ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena. Recurrent themes in her work of recent years are historical trauma and collective vs. individual identity construction. She is found ing member of Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop. Her first novel, Mycelium, has been published by semiotext(e), Los Angeles, in 2019.

Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) was a prolific art ist involved in the New York art scene beginning in the late 1960s. Best known for her large-scale sculptures using fabric as the primary material, she also created works on paper, artist books, and out door installations, exploring themes of temporality, history, and biography. She was also a writer, art critic, and translator. She was initially involved in conceptual art and writing, collaborating with her sister, poet Bernadette Mayer, and ex-husband, Vito Acconci, on the journal 0 TO 9. A pioneer of the feminist art movement, she was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first cooperative gal lery for women in the U.S. and had one of the ear liest shows there. During the 1970s and 1980s, her work was also shown at many New York alternative art spaces, including The Clocktower, Sculpture Center, and Franklin Furnace, and in university galleries throughout the country. In 2016, Southfirst Gallery in Brooklyn ex hibited a selection of Mayer’s work from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first major exhibit of her work in over thirty years, it was reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, and artforum.com. A version of this show was exhibited at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in 2017. Her work has also been included in several group ex hibitions including at Nichelle Beauchene Gallery, Murray Guy Gallery, and Bridget Donahue. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art acquired some of Mayer’s drawings and artist books from the 1970s. In 2020, her work was introduced to European audiences through Nick Mauss’s ex hibition, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.,” at Kunsthalle Basel and “Rods Bent Into Bows,” at Chert Lüdde in Berlin. The show in Berlin was Mayer’s first solo show in Europe; it won the prestigious VBKI Prize for Berlin galleries and included in Frieze maga zine’s list of the best shows in Europe. Exhibitions upcoming in 2021 include a solo show at Gordon Robichaux and the Swiss Institute in New York. Mayer was also a writer who worked as an art critic and incorporated text in much of her artwork. She submitted essays to a variety of contemporary journals of artists’ writing, in cluding White Walls and Heresies, and she pro duced an issue of the avant-garde magazine Art Rite Pontormo’s Diary, her translation of the dia ry of Mannerist artist Jacopo da Pontormo, which

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contributors 146 was accompanied by essays and a catalog of her work, was published in 1982. More recent publi cations include: Beware of All Definitions (2017), which accompanied her show at the Lamar Dodd School of Art; Temporary Monuments: Selected Work by Rosemary Mayer, 1977–1982, which focuses on her ephemeral installations of the late ‘70s and ear ly ‘80s (Soberscove Press, 2018); and Excerpts from the 1971 Journal of Rosemary Mayer (Soberscove Press, 2020). Reynaldo Rivera (b. Mexicali, Mexico 1964) is an artist now living in Los Angeles. He grew up trav eling throughout Mexico and the United States— mostly between San Diego de la Unión, Mexico, and Los Angeles and Stockton, California. His large (and largely unseen) body of work captures queer clubs and house parties in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s. Part of Rivera’s project and his archive is remembering and lending visibility to a whole community of vibrant trans women and drag performers who often died young. The project is also a representation of a Los Angeles that has all but disappeared: Echo Park as a predominant ly Latinx neighborhood rife with artists, writers, and performers full of flare and queer glamour, re minding us that L.A. is a place with a deep histo ry and a short memory. Rivera has been immersed in a community of interdisciplinary practitioners: In 1996 he was one of two photographers at the Chance Event, a sprawling three-day festival at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in the Nevada desert con ceived and produced by Chris Kraus, which also in cluded DJ Spooky, Sandy Stone, Jean Baudrillard, Butoh dancers, and a Wall Street trader. Rivera has exhibited his work at Reena Spaulings, Los Angeles (2019) and the Hammer Museum’s 2020 exhibition Made in LA. A monograph of his work has been published recently by Semiotext(e). The monograph includes nearly 200 images spanning over two decades in both Los Angeles and Mexico as well as an essay on Rivera’s work by Chris Kraus; and a conversation between Rivera and his friend and contemporary Vaginal Davis.

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Quarterly Journal, no. 28: Domestic Issue

Articles inside

THE COAST

WHO DO YOU SERVE

"MAGIC"&"MONUMENT" EXCERPTS FROM

THE SANDBOX

BLUE WILLOW

MIDNIGHT DOUGH

VIKINGS

IN ANOTHER LIFE

FALLING BODIES

HIGH FEMME CAMP

SANCTUARY UNMASKED

AGAINST GRACE

QUEEN OF REPS (ON SPACESHIP EARTH)

TWO POEMS