LARB Quarterly, no. 34: Do you love me?

T H E L A R B Q UA RT E R LY SUMMER 2022

Do you love me?

$18.00 ISBN 978-1-940660-82-0

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No. 34 9 781940 660820

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GOOD NIGHT THE PLEASURE DAVID WAS GRUBBS OURS

With a ForeWord by

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SHOLA VON REINHOLD

MIN HYOUNG SONG

Good night the pleasure was ours

TV Snapshots

SCOTT BRANSON

DAVID GRUBBS

Gay Liberation after May '68 GUY HOCQUENGHEM

“Ingenious; irresistible; a dazzling first novel.”

An Archive of Everyday Life LYNN SPIGEL

Confidence Culture SHANI ORGAD and ROSALIND GILL

Theory Q

Naomi Booth, author of Sealed and The Lost Art of Sinking

Earworm and Event Min Hyoung Song

ELDRITCH PRIEST

TV Snapshots

Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains ELDRITCH PRIEST Thought in the Act

an archive of everyday life

Lynn Spigel

confidence culture

shani orgad + rosalind gill

dukeupress.edu MUSIC, DAYDREAMS, AND OTHER IMAGINARY REFRAINS

Publisher: Tom Lutz

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, Sharon Nazarian, Mary Sweeney, Lynne Thompson, Barbara Voron, Matthew Weiner, Jon Wiener, Jamie Wolf

Editor-In-Chief: Boris Dralyuk

Interns and Volunteers: Grace Novarr, Thuan Tran

THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 34 SUMMER 2022

Do you love me?

Managing Editor: Chloe Watlington Senior Editor: Sarah Chihaya Poetry Editors: Elizabeth Metzger, Callie Siskel Art Director: Perwana Nazif Design Director: J. Dakota Brown Production and Copy Desk Chief: Cord Brooks Executive Director: Irene Yoon Managing Director: Jessica Kubinec Marketing and Admin. Associate: Danielle Clough Ad Sales: Bill Harper Contributing Editors: Aaron Bady, Michelle Chihara, Maya Gonzalez, Summer Kim Lee, Juliana Spahr, Adriana Widdoes

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The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses is a brave and timely attempt to banish many of the fears that Joyce’s masterpiece causes for the ‘ordinary’ reader, if such a being exists--Joyce didn’t think so. Catherine Flynn and her team have done a welcome service of elucidation. And of course it’s a great pleasure to have the facsimile of the original text.

John Banville

THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 34 SUMMER 2022

Do you love me?

FICTION 102

INTERVIEW 9

Elaine Hsieh Chou

DEAD CATS

Andrea Long Chu in conversation with Brandy Jensen

106

114

120

THE SUBLIMITY OF DANIELLE STEEL

Dan Sinykin 49

POETRY 131

Brian Tierney 133

THIS BLUE

THE COUCH

83

98

135

PAIN IS THE BEAM THAT PENETRATES,

Rose DeMaris 137 SONNET OF THE BULL

Omotara James

WE LOST IT AT THE MOVIES

Martha Southgate

CERTIFICATE OF PRESENCE

Erika Meitner

FEELINGS

Irene Silt 88

134

AUTO-PORTRAITURE

Jonathan Alexander

FROM THE ASSEMBLAGE POEM LOOK AT

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

57 SEX POSITIVITY TAKES A TURN ON

Ricky Varghese

YOU CANNOT HOLD BACK THE PASSING

DAY / THE TUNNEL

IN THE MEMORY HOUSE

Stephanie Wong

64

TRYOUTS

Chelsea Bieker

LONG HALLWAY

Cyrus Dunham 40

DESIRE

Katherine Hill

Rona Lorimer 34

A RED BLIGHT

Juan Cárdenas, trans. Lizzie Davis

ESSAYS 27 YESTERDAY’S ANONYMOUS ADVICE

THE 100% SILICONE VIBRATING ASS

& PUSSY SPEAKS

PORTFOLIO

ON THE STUDY OF THE PASSIONS,

DIVINE INDICATIONS, AND THE MATERIAL WEALTH OF NATURE

Charles Fourier, trans. Eberick Hashvay

72

LLOYD FOSTER, YAYOI KUSAMA,

AND RON MIYASHIRO

Introduction by Perwana Nazif Response by Harmony Holiday

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Reader, I recently spent a weekend in the birthplace of techno falling in love without saying so. Techno was born in Detroit in the ’80s, and so, like me, it’s a millennial, carrying some of our most defining features. I had already fallen in love with techno in its foreign outpost, Berlin, where I spent the previous year falling out of love with a bet as safe as the city itself.

Love is a plot device, second only to death in its dependability for drama. Both make for excellent beginnings, middles, or ends. But its mirror image, the unloved and unlovability of humans, provokes every reader and watcher just as much. Doesn’t it? Didn’t something provoke you to pick up this issue, with its horrible question because you too wanted to know the answer?

Between unlove and love, there is a dangerous tightrope. Everything leading up to the admission of love is a moment of total exposure. High risk. That moment is where I hunkered down, techno rave after rave, in that airless, hopeful, despairing space.

We waited for our friends to arrive. Their car had hydroplaned on the way into town, done three 360-degree spins across traffic, hurtled toward two semi-trucks, and was stopped only by a randomly placed beam in the middle of the median. Each passenger, five in all, retold the story with a smile as they finally arrived, rain-soaked in a rental car, for the first dance.

Sonali is the kind of person who walks into a party like she was born there.

She hugs a few people on the dance floor even though her home is 14 hours away and takes over; her arms are out to her side, knees flying up to her chest. We all back up and watch. Yeah, we almost died, she shouts across the dance floor, but I just kept saying, it’s okay, okay, as I watched the semis heading toward us.

4

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LETTER

There’s a Vice article from 2019 that has since been stuck in my head, “Millennials Will Get Sick and Die Faster Than the Previous Generation.”

Above this title is a stock photo of a smiling, stylish woman my age relaxing in an armchair in front of a fiddle-leaf fig. Sylvia Plath was right, dying is an art. We get better and better, faster and faster, each generation, at our short high-risk moment.

On our last night in town we went from a ghettotech barbeque on the periphery of town to a club where the local legend Theo Parrish was billed to play continuously from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Theo has been spinning vinyl in the basements of Chicago and Detroit since house was born. The beat is in his shoulders as much as it is in the steel drums, the horns, the synth, the snares bouncing off opera that holds a molasses space between tracks. He thinks it’s funny, his own swagger, and I hear him in my head telling the promoters: I’ll play the whole night. The whole night? Till morning. And as the night drags on, we try to leave, try to head for home, but we can’t because there are endless hooks, and we are caught. Theo is a psychologist-archivist-conductor externalizing everything internal that is Detroit, which is to say Caribbean, Idlewild, Africa, Yemen, Syria, industrial scratches, motors — but not mechanical, not like Berlin tekkno, not computer love, not clean tracks on clean equipment. He plays no safe bets as he pulls worn vinyl record after record out of his crate.

The plot thickens at 7:00 a.m. Theo thinks it’s even funnier when the sun starts rising and he begins to mess with the crowd, bringing us up and down song by song, so that each finale is its own dawn and dusk at once, like Dante coming out of Purgatory into Earthly Paradise, where the streams flow in two directions, one to forget and one to clarify. Doctors will tell you that a disco track with a 100 bpm provides an ideal beat for performing the chest compressions needed to resuscitate someone. Detroit techno has layers, set erratically, some going as high as 130 bpm, played on broken equipment with errant, lustfully offbeat sounds. It’s repetitive, and possesses your heart, but one could not resuscitate to the beat and that’s why it pairs so well with this moment of risk between the question and the answer — it’s more verve than just surviving. By the next rave I still will not have dared ask it.

Love,

7

Alin, 10 years old from Mardin, Turkey, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books). Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM. The photos in this series were taken during the making of a 16mm film with the young people of Sirkhane DARKROOM in October of 2021

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INTERVIEW

DEAD CATS A conversation on romance and rejection Andrea Long Chu and Brandy Jensen

Gawker editor and “Ask A Fuck Up” columnist Brandy Jensen spoke with critic Andrea Long Chu about being ready (or not) for love.

ALC: I was reading through a number of the “Ask A Fuck Up” columns this morning, and a consistent theme is that you identify yourself as a romantic, as someone who believes in love. And so, I guess I want to start there: What is it? What does it mean to you when you say that?

BJ: I probably have a more anguished definition of it than most people. I was thinking about this conversation, like, “What am I going to say about love?” and it occurred to me that a bunch of girls I know are getting into religion lately. It’s been a huge trend.

And that is just completely foreclosed to me — I’ve just never 9

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

been able to conceive of God, ever. But I do think I have a kind of religious disposition in a certain way. And I was like, “Oh, no.” What if where that God-shaped hole is, I’ve just supplanted this infinitely demanding version of love that is this thing to which I submit and for which I suffer?

Like … Uh-oh.

ALC: How do I define love? Wow. I mean … Well, I probably do have a religious definition of it because I was raised in the Presbyterian church. And, you know, we have TULIP, which is “Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and Perseverance of the saints.”

ALC: Oh, wow.

BJ: Cute little Instagrammy acronym.

BJ: I think my version of love is something that kind of imbues suffering with meaning and something through which I maybe sanctify the world. I don’t know.

ALC: Total depravity — I can’t remember the exact definition, it’s slightly different than what I always think it is. But essentially, the idea is that you’re absolutely no good. You don’t meet God halfway in salvation. You’re completely at his mercy. And unconditional election, you know, means you haven’t done anything. But the way I think about love now, I think it is actually sort of less than — to me there’s a smallness to it that I find increasingly beautiful.

Like when you say that God loves creation, or when you say that God loves you or me, it’s redundant, right? Because we know that he does just by definition. Which means when you say that God loves someone, it just means that they exist.

ALC: How? What does love require of you, then, if it’s filling the God-shaped hole?

BJ: Well, I think — I don’t know, I’ve heard various definitions of it. I think what love requires of me is probably something more than I can give. The love that I’m interested in asks things of me that I am not necessarily capable of giving, but that I want to keep trying to provide longterm. People think, “Oh, you’re a romantic, that must be a kind of saccharine, happy thing; you must go around the world with these rose-tinted glasses.” And I’m like, no, that’s not my version of romance. My version of romance is much bleaker. Although at a certain point, I think you just pick your misery, and this is the thing that is going to make you miserable. And okay, I’ve got my thing. I know what it is. And maybe at some point the scales will balance and it will make me almost as happy as it has made me miserable. I don’t know, one lives in hope. What about you?

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BJ: Yeah, I think that there’s a sort of grubbiness to love that I find quite moving. That it’s just what we can do with and for each other. And that’s kind of the thing that makes being alive with other people kind of interesting to me — this capacity for love. And in its best form, I like being in love, because I think it makes me better.

I think I am improved by the experience of being in love. I think I am more open and I am more generous; it helps me better love the world. I’m more curious about things

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INTERVIEW

when I’m in love. And so, there’s a kind of elevating aspect to it. But also, yeah, I was being incredibly grandiose about it earlier.

I think it can be these small, kind of silly moments sometimes and that’s just as important as the kind of big ones.

ALC: Yeah. There’s love in terms of, you know, friendship. But — I was just reading this this morning — you say that you do want something more than that. That there’s something specific to romantic love that’s irreplaceable.

romantic love. And so, I often find myself a little bit adrift in this cultural moment when some of those definitions seem to be quite hazy.

ALC: Yeah. As a romantic, do you believe in the cheesy things, like — the cheesy tropes about love, which do have that kind of clarity? A lot of them are about finally having clarity about someone being the one, falling in love at first sight, the fantasy of it had to be you. Trying to endow it with necessity.

BJ: I think a lot of those are rooted in a knowingness, and I think what we would like is to know. Or what I would like is to know, because often I don’t. Another conversation I’ve had with a number of friends is that I think, often, you get to choose between dignity and certainty. When there’s somebody that you think you have feelings for and you hope that they have feelings for you, you can sort of hang on to a little bit of dignity and maybe never really get ALC: Is it just sex? to know, or you can abandon your sense of BJ: It’s not just sex, but you say “just sex” dignity and find out for sure. And I have never been one to cling to dignity; I allike sex is some kind of...? ways go with what I want to know.

ALC: I certainly believe that sex is more ALC: I remember one of the first pieces than just sex. of romantic advice that I ever gave — I BJ: I don’t think that that remainder is was not experiencing romance myself in completely exhausted by sex. It’s sex and middle school or even high school, really, other things. But I do think that sex is a but I would sit with people at lunch, and large part of it. One thing that often con- the girls would talk about boys. And the founds me is that sort of place between question was always, “I don’t know, does friendship and romantic love, which is he like me, does he not?” And the answer a place I have lived with various people that I found myself frequently giving was for a long time … I think I benefit from like, he doesn’t know. He also doesn’t know; clear definitions between friendship and he’s not holding all the cards. There’s this

BJ: Yes, my life is just unspeakably enriched by my friendships. And I certainly wouldn’t want to live without them. But all of that enormous amount of platonic love that I have in my life still comes up a little shy of something that I want for myself, which is, you know, romantic love. There are things that I want to do to people that I don’t want to do to my friends.

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Schrödinger’s cat thing, and you have to open the box. And the stakes of it are actually kind of low, because if you don’t open the box, then it’s simply not going to matter. You know? So, you have to just go in assuming that there’s a real possibility, because it’s the whole ballgame.

BJ: I keep finding dead cats though.

ALC: Okay, yeah. Tell me about you.

BJ: I’m just, like, constantly getting rejected in these humiliating ways.

ALC: Tell me about that. It doesn’t seem to have caused your commitment to the idea to waver. Or is it wavering?

BJ: Is it really a commitment if you get knocked down and you give up on the whole thing? When I was younger, I thought that it would get easier. I didn’t necessarily think that I would stop getting rejected. I thought that maybe it would start to get a little bit easier. And that, I’ve found, is not true. It still sucks just as much every single time. But I think one thing that does make it easier is that I’m always willing to turn it into a story or into a joke that I can milk for laughs at a bar in a few months.

ALC: I’ve been having conversations recently with friends of mine who are approaching 40 with dread — friends who don’t necessarily want to have kids, but who feel like their market value is about to drop precipitously. And who have, I think, great anxiety about that (these are straight women friends). And of course, what I tell 14

them is that they have not even yet entered the best years of being attractive to women.

Like, the 40s and 50s are really when lesbians hit their stride, and I think part of it is because of the diminished appeal to men.

There’s a freer space.

BJ: Yeah, that’s probably true. I don’t know whether “just don’t be straight” as how to solve being straight is necessarily … but I also sleep with both men and women.

ALC: Well, it’s obviously not good advice.

I do think what happens is that straight women hit a certain age when they realize that they are experiencing a form of social dishonor from men that they haven’t experienced before. And they don’t have a framework with which to understand it other than the old maid thing. What they don’t understand is that to an extent they sort of invent being gay. Because there are other people who’ve already been in the world, other women who’ve been walking around without male approval already.

But there’s not a good framework for, like — what do you do? How do you deal with that form of loss of a certain kind of social value, other than through the bad kind of romanticism, of just pining and despair?

BJ: There are all these books coming out about reconsidering sex as a site of political debate. And I think one of the problems is that it’s not really something that we can solve now, for us. If we wanted to change things for perhaps some future generation, that’s certainly a laudable goal, but desire is not necessarily something you can intellectualize yourself into or out of,

INTERVIEW

in a way that might be — or that people would like to think would be — helpful to us. And so, yeah, we’re just kind of stuck in some ways. And certainly, as somebody who is, you know, “redacted” age —

important for women to figure out how to be on their own. Okay. I did that. I’ve figured it out. I’ve got that shit locked down.

ALC: When you adopt that tone, you’re making fun of self-help, the long-standing institutions of media telling women how ALC: You’re in your late 20s, right? they’re supposedly trying to help them BJ: Yeah, exactly. The idea that love, and deal with being alone, deal with finding a romantic love in particular, no longer be- man, whatever. As opposed to, like, Amia comes completely a site of possibility, and Srinivasan, these more expansive considit often becomes a site of regrets or missed erations of sex — it doesn’t even matter opportunity — that, I think, can be in- whether they’re right or not, because they credibly disorienting. It can lead to some don’t actually have bearing on what it’s like on the streets or in the sheets in a present despair. way. I mean, you might read the book and have a certain reaction that changes how ALC: Are you feeling that? you see the world. But fundamentally, the BJ: I’ve often felt kind of late to my own nitty-gritty is actually spoken to better by life in certain ways. I didn’t really get Cosmopolitan than it is by The Right to Sex. around to things until after other people You know, even if the advice is not good, it did. I’d like to not still be on Hinge in five is meeting the reader on actually a more years, certainly. Although, I can imagine practical terrain.

25-year-olds also feeling that way, because that’s just depressing … Feeling my alone- BJ: Is this theory versus praxis? ness somewhat more acutely over the last couple of years has maybe accelerated that ALC: Well, this is me, saying that there’s process of — you know, it would be nice to something about love that has a relationlove someone and have them love me back. ship to advice. See what I’m doing? I’m circling back.

ALC: The aloneness is interesting. As you know, I went through a breakup last year, BJ: This is why you get paid the big bucks. and there was never a point where I was like, “Well, I don’t want to date.” I very ALC: It is. One of the things I have nomuch wanted to be with someone again. ticed as I have gotten older is that more But it did feel important to have a certain and more of my experience of friendship relationship to being alone, in order to be actually consists of advice, not just about love. It has sort of moved from being — or with someone else.

I’ve moved from conceiving it as — a BJ: But — my longest-term relationship kind of addendum to a particular subject, is with my own aloneness. I agree, it’s very and more into its own domain, in just 15

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

specifically being friends with women. I mean, I don’t know any men.

BJ: That’s not true. I know men who know you.

ALC: Yes, they know me.

BJ: Okay. Wow. ALC: What I’m kind of coming around to is how you understand giving advice about love, as opposed to theory — whether you want to call it theory/praxis, whatever — but it’s different and to an extent, it’s a classically middlebrow activity, you know, for women to be giving advice.

BJ: There’s a difference between more philosophical questions, like How ought one live? and advice, which is like, What should I do? I’ve always said that a large portion of giving advice is actually just giving permission, or at least that’s what people are seeking. They want somebody to say, “My instincts are correct, what I want to do is correct.” And often you have to say, “No, it’s not, those instincts are bad, and you should not do that.” And then, I think a lot of times, and especially with women as we get older, it’s like, “All the shit I’ve been trying isn’t working. Do you have any other ideas?” That’s sort of where you get with advice among friends. It’s like reaching out for something that might work because what you’ve been trying has not.

And so, yeah, advice is a way of giving somebody your regard, of telling them that their problems are important to you,

16

and in terms of the currencies of friendship, that’s very important to say: I take your complaints, your problems, your troubles seriously. I will consider them and I will help you figure out what to do. And whether or not somebody takes the advice is the least important part of the exchange of advice, asking and giving. It really is the kind of sustained regard that matters.

ALC: I think about a Sex and the City kind of situation, the presence of all of these men — this revolving door of forgettable, extremely ugly men on Sex and the City, just startlingly ugly. Are they actually the substrate for what the women actually care about, even though they’re not often good at expressing it directly to each other, which is actually just talking to each other?

It’s like the thing that they would actually secretly rather be doing is having drinks or brunch with each other than going out with these horrible men who make them feel bad.

BJ: Well, yeah, like I said, I have come to appreciate when I can turn my humiliating rejections into a story that I can share with my friends.

ALC: Right? So okay, so humiliating rejections. Let’s do talk about — let’s do, that’s very Southern of me — let’s do talk about the apps.

BJ: Let’s do talk about them.

ALC: You were saying to me earlier that you think of yourself as being bad at flirting. Is that right?

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INTERVIEW

ALC: Wooing, courting, is what you have trouble with? Let’s do talk about goin’ courtin’.

in person and getting a sense of who they are. There’s a little bit of a black box feeling when you just match with somebody on an app, and you’re trying to figure out, what is your sense of humor? What do you find funny? What references are you going to get? And so that becomes kind of overwhelming, and I think is anathema to flirting well. It also is very stock, right?

Like, this is just like a form flirt. I think to be really effective, flirting needs to be personal; it needs to be a little bit tailored to the object of your flirtation.

BJ: I struggle with that somewhat.

ALC: Mm-hmm.

ALC: Why do you struggle with it? Or what’s an example?

BJ: You’re a good flirt.

BJ: I’m exceptionally good at flirting with people that I’m not particularly interested in. I spent 10 years as a bartender; like, I can flirt. But when it matters — when I really want the flirting to affect something in the world, if I want an outcome — then I tend to get flustered and corny, and I try to be too clever, which is the worst thing you can do.

BJ: I don’t know if I have an example. I just try too hard. I’m not very good at affecting a kind of effortlessness, which is often what people find appealing. I’m also not very good at coming across as in any way mysterious.

ALC: Is this the hopeless romantic actually sort of shooting you in the foot?

Because there’s an earnestness that you have trouble setting aside?

BJ: Possibly, yeah. I mean, the extent to which it all becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy is a question I don’t care to think about too much. But yeah — this might sound weird, but I am not very good at flirting in the messages on the apps; I’m much better at flirting when I have a sense of what kind of flirting is going to work for a person. That can either happen via sustained relationships online, or just meeting

ALC: I am a good flirt. I am a good flirt in person, but I am especially a good flirt over text. I mean, it’s writing. What the apps mean is that the first interaction tends to be written. Which is correlative to social media too; there’s a democratization of authorship that means, like, everyone is writing something. Everyone is writing.

BJ: And most people are bad writers.

ALC: Yeah, the first thing you find out is how good someone is at writing, and it’s often not that good.

BJ: Do you require someone to be good at writing to be interested in them?

ALC: To be interested in them? Yeah. To flirt with them on an app? No. BJ: So, you’re flirting with people on apps that you’re not interested in?

19

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INTERVIEW

ALC: Well, obviously I’m happily in a relationship now. But if I’m on the apps because I’m trying to get laid, or even more than get laid, the most important thing is not actually, is this person “the one”? The most important thing is just that we go out, you know? And so, it’s about being interesting enough to make sure that happens.

My basic philosophy of flirting is that when people are bad at flirting, it’s because they think that they need to be attractive to someone, and that the job is to conjure up something that will be attractive. This is wrong. It is wrong because regardless of whether it’s true — obviously, you do need to be attractive to the person in order for it to work — it does cause that kind of fluster, that, “Oh, no, what do I say? How do I present myself ?” So, this is wrong. The assumption that you must go into flirting with is that the goal of flirting is not to make someone be attracted to you, but to help them express the attraction they already have for you.

BJ: Damn!

ALC: So, you have to assume that they like you. If they don’t like you, that’s the whole ballgame. And so fine, whatever, right? You were going to fail anyway, it doesn’t matter. You can’t make people like you, and if you could, it wouldn’t be worth it. Right?

Because you want someone who just likes you. So there’s no point in approaching it with anything other than the assumption that they like you. Not in a megalomaniacal way, obviously. But you just have to be like, okay, we’re here. We’re doing this. And in case of the apps, you have at least some tiny proof of that, anyway.

BJ: Yeah, that’s right.

ALC: They matched with you, right?

BJ: At the very least, they did like the great pics that I posted.

ALC: Exactly. But even without that, it doesn’t matter. If you want to flirt with someone, you have to assume that they like you. The meat of it is understanding that people, as I said, are bad at expressing themselves — one, because they haven’t trained themselves to, and two, probably more importantly, because it’s scary.

Because it’s scary, as you say, to tell someone that you like them, and it’s scary to show someone that you like them, because it’s risky. And so flirting is trying to create an environment in which it becomes safer for them to show you that they like you. Whereas approaching it from the opposite, what you were talking about at the top — you were talking about being the one to ask, or being the one to be very forward, right? And that there’s the loss of dignity with that. For me, flirting is about providing a safe landing for that kind of expression.

BJ: Flirting is the safety net that encourages you to go out on the highwire or whatever.

ALC: Yeah — I want to give you the opportunity to be intimate with me, I want to give you the opportunity to be vulnerable with me. And to show me that you like me.

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BJ: Okay. See, I like that — although again, to return to the idea of writing, that also means that flirting is somewhat about reading, and I feel like I am a bad reader in some of these cases. I will read too much into this sort of thing.

ALC: Let me give you an example. When someone texts, or on an app when someone messages you something like, “You’re so hot,” there are women for whom the automatic response is gratitude, like, “Thank you.” But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s happening here. The person is not paying you a compliment.

They are telling you that they’re attracted to you. Right?

BJ: They’re disclosing something about themselves.

ALC: They’re not making an observation — right, they’re disclosing something.

For me, if someone messages me on an app and says, “Wow, you’re so hot,” my answer would be “Yes.”

BJ: I do the “lol, thanks,” which is kind of middling and awful.

ALC: I don’t know if it’s purely a science, but I feel confident in my ability to more or less always figure out how to respond in that way. You just have to think about why people are talking to each other. And in the case of the apps, we know because we’re on the apps, so it’s a question of trying to respond to what they’re actually saying. But that, to me, is not about reading into it too much. It’s about actually deciding to make a lot of assumptions.

BJ: I mean, I suppose the reading in too much doesn’t necessarily happen until later when you’re texting during the day and that sort of thing.

ALC: Ooh, day texting …

BJ: And that’s when I become a particularly bad reader.

ALC: Do you message first?

BJ: Oh, damn.

BJ: If they’re hot, yeah.

ALC: Which is an extremely sexy thing to say, if I do say so myself.

ALC: What about if people have feelings about messaging first versus being messaged first? I have a friend who was just asking me the other day, “How are people going on dates? I have friends who are going on all these dates.” And this is a friend who is beautiful — I know she gets matches, because I’ve been on Tinder with her and in 30 minutes, like three matches happen, which has never happened for me in my life and never will. And I was like, you’re matching with people all the time.

BJ: Yeah, I mean, that would certainly elicit an effect, certainly!

ALC: That’s the cushion, right? Your expression has landed. And I’m showing you that I’m reciprocating, as opposed to the weird impulse to be like, “Aww, you’re hot, too!” Or “Thank you,” or, you know, like …

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And she was like, well, they don’t message me. I’m like, well, that’s the answer to your question then. She wants to be messaged.

And none of these men are going to do it.

BJ: Oh, she’s only matching with men?

ALC: Oh, yeah. She’s very straight. She is famously my straightest friend, I think.

BJ: Okay, you have to tell me who this is, after.

ALC: It’s a problem, because she’s a very confident person, but she just doesn’t want — you know, she wants the man to message first.

BJ: Well, I guess part of the anguish and anxiety of the very early stages of any potential romance is that you do sort of feel like you are setting a tone that is going to be hard to alter later. So, it does take on a kind of outsize importance, like, am I going to be the one who’s having to do the work here? Am I going to be the one who’s having to initiate next steps? And I don’t mind being that person because I’m incredibly impatient. I can understand why other people might have some hesitation about it.

You, despite all your expertise of the apps, did not meet your girlfriend on the apps.

ALC: No, I did not. I met my girlfriend through the sheer power of will. But I mean … I do think that I made the apps work for me in the sense that it was about practicing a kind of openness and, like, being ready. The readiness is all.

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INTERVIEW

BJ: Can it make you ready? I feel like I’m too ready.

ALC: Obviously, when you’re on the subway platform and you’re just swiping through, it can be miserable — but it’s just kind of practicing being ready for it to happen. Because you don’t know, and you do need to be ready. I do think that in principle, it’s almost always better meeting not on the apps. But I think you can derive a certain kind of value from it. It was very helpful in practicing flirting.

Wait, okay. I want to see your Hinge profile to think of what I would message you.

BJ: I’m gonna take these lessons to heart. I am going to go forth into the world. And yeah, hopefully next time I come to New York, I will be bringing my girlfriend or boyfriend.

ALC: Amazing. Well, that feels like a perfect ending, so.

BJ: Stop recording now?

ALC: Stop recording.

BJ: Okay, who is your straightest friend?

BJ: Oh God, okay.

ALC: “Fact about me that surprises people” — right — “I’m Canadian.” I think if we matched, I would write, “You’re Canadian?????”

BJ: Okay …

ALC: What’s important about that — here, see, I’m gonna derive a principle — is the “fact about me that surprises people.”

Like, in order for it to surprise people, they have to already know you. And so, in pretending to be surprised, I’m talking to you like we already know each other.

BJ: You are assuming a level of intimacy for the sake of a joke.

ALC: Exactly. And I think that’s an important move. Again, I am treating you like we know each other. Like you know that. Like we have an intimacy already. I’m assuming the thing into existence.

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Rumeyse, 11 years old from Mardin, Turkey, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

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YESTERDAY’S ANONYMOUS ADVICE A profile on Agony Aunt, Irma Kurtz

by Rona Lorimer

I

rma Kurtz, who was, for 40 years, Cosmopolitan magazine’s “Agony Aunt,” a term used to describe an advice columnist, lives in London on the seventh floor of an early-20th-century apartment block that appeared in a 1980s neo-noir crime film about an ex-convict who gets caught up in the risky life of a highclass hooker. She is standing at the door as I come down the corridor. “Oh hello sweetie.” Irma has a smart beauty due to how she holds herself, her cheeks — what bone structure. She wears straight-leg jeans, a striped T-shirt with a worn cardigan over the 27

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top, and silver hoop earrings that pop out New Jersey where she was born, in 1935, and grew up. Her father always told her, from under her pixie cut.

Irma leads me into the corridor of her “Irma, you think too much.” And for this apartment, which is full of things on hooks. over-thinking, Irma was considered a The apartment is cozy, shelves teeming lesser investment than her younger brothwith books, photographs of her ancestors, er. “When they brought him home from and modern art. In her tiny galley kitchen the hospital. I swear they said, ‘Irma, meet hangs an apron with Mussolini on it that your brother, the doctor.’ He’s three days says, “Come into my ginormous kitchen.” old!” The diverted attention to the brothShe carries on the tour, ushering me into er allowed her a larger degree of freedom, the living room, to two chairs which are and she ran with it. She would tell her pararranged like we’re going to do a talk show ents she was studying at a friend’s house.

“And vroom, I’d go down under the river and offers me a cup of tea.

While she makes me the tea, I ask if to Greenwich Village. I would wander Americans really drink tea like this: strong around Greenwich Village looking wideblack tea with milk. She doesn’t think eyed at Bohemia. It was a great Bohemia so — “No, weak coffee, drip coffee”— but in those days.” This is how her life as a then admits that she has always felt quite travel writer began. From then on, Irma un-American. “When I first went back to loved to be surrounded by strangers whose America from Paris, I realized that I was stories would fall out onto the pages of her actually suffering from homesickness. Not notebook. I show her my own messy notefor France anymore, but for the world. I book, “Oh that’s it! Look at it! Good girl.” wanted to see the world desperately. I had Irma always wrote by hand, until recentwanderlust,” she recalls about the pivotal ly, when she switched to a computer, still time in her life right before she became printing out each draft to adapt by hand.

After studying English literature at Agony Aunt.

During her tenure at Cosmopolitan Columbia University, she became a waitreaders wrote in with their problems, and ress. “Sometimes I think I learned more Irma would try to give good, common- about how people work and function sense advice. This still exists in the lifestyle waitressing than I learned at university.” pages of many newspapers, but with the Her natural way with the agony of others disappearance of print media, people have comes from talking to people: “You know self-help apps or influencers that gener- how much I used to learn from strangalize individual problems into categories, ers when I’d catch an eye? And I’m not instead of trying to apprehend the general talking flirtatiously. I’d talk to strangers.”

She worked as a waitress just long enough problems individuals might have.

As is true for many of her generation, to make it from New Jersey to Paris, a city her story is the story of the 20th centu- she once visited on a school trip and evry. Her parents were Jewish commu- er-after felt destined to return to.

At 19, she moved into a hotel on the nists, their families had emigrated from Eastern Europe and eventually landed in left bank. “There was no bath, a shared 28

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toilet down in the basement. You had a magazine for the intellectual woman to go to public baths, which I managed, and the open-minded man. Gender crossabout three times a week. It was full of overs were (and are) rare for magazines, people, some singing, some talking, all and that’s why Nova ultimately failed: ad sorts of languages would come up and out space is easier to sell to gender-divided of the little enclosures.” During this time, audiences.

After Nova folded, she wrote for a she worked, briefly, as an English teacher for the Berlitz school. “I started disobey- men’s porno magazine owned by “a very ing the rules immediately and I began famous bad man” named Paul Raymond. to have real conversations [with the stu- Irma wrote under a man’s name, responddents].” Her boss was listening in on her ing to letters, many fake, asking him (her) for advice about sex. “I’d give dirty advice.” classroom and sacked her.

That’s when she began writing for mon- Irma said with a straight face, adding, ey, for the Army Times. She wrote English- “Well, not dirty, not filthy, but yeah, a little untidy, maybe needed a good scrubbing.” language stories to entertain the soldier’s One lesson I learned sitting with Irma wives stationed in Germany, as she put it “to find someone strange and interview is that the golden epoch of cultural jourthem,” like the lawyer-turned-beggar, ru- nalism, with all of its composite messiness, ined by war, who lived under one of the but where there was a reliable readership, bridges over the Seine. Irma would watch is dead. Irma had interviewed so many Coco Chanel parading back and forth by people she could barely remember it. She the offices of the Army Times, herself feel- interviewed Norman Mailer, Tennessee ing shabby in her blue jeans, until even- Williams, and the first female prime tually she landed a job with Givenchy minister of Sri Lanka, Sirima Ratwatte between Paris and New York, as a kind of Dias Bandaranaike. And when she listed these, I thought of all the articles I had publicist, making “a tenner a week.”

After falling out of love with Paris (“too wanted to write just last week: a take on many Nazi sympathizers”) and working as polyamory from a French perspective; a chef on a sailboat for two years, she re- an interview with the elusive Madame located to London. She kept writing for Virginie Despentes; a piece on the actress magazines, short stories for the American Béatrice Dalle, whose favorable opinions ones and interviews and think pieces for of the gilets jaunes and armed bank robber the European ones. Mostly, she wrote for Rédoine Faïd were pretty hot to me. I reNova, alongside a young Susan Sontag. alized the articles I’d like to write — since Irma hands me her last remaining copy they wouldn’t pay — will only ever assemof Nova, with her John Lennon and Yoko ble a “hobby” with a dysfunctional tempo, Ono cover story from March 1969 accom- and the hobbyists who are successful have panied by intimate photos from a month independent money.

In the early 1970s, Irma joined the after their marriage. Nova launched in 1965, grabbing hold of the momentum of brand-new Cosmopolitan magazine as it the women’s liberation movement. It was came to London. After years of working 29

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for male editors, Irma had her first ever woman editor, Helen Gurley Brown, whom she admired a great deal. It was Brown who suggested she write advice to the lovelorn. Irma accepted the pitch, but only if it could be called the ‘Agony Column’, rather than advice column, and she could be called the ‘Agony Aunt’.

Irma, in many of her contributions for Nova, wrote under several pen names as well as her own name, depending on the subject. For the dirty magazine, she wrote as a man, because her male editor didn’t think her advice would be taken seriously unless the byline was masculine. And once she became the Agony Aunt, there was a degree of anonymity even though it was under her own name — the readers never really know anything about her, they simply spill all their wrenching personal material to a letterbox. Once the letters came into print or back to the inquirer, she got more: they did not know her credentials, but they came to that specific letterbox for good reasons.

In her book, My Life in Agony: Confessions of a Professional Agony Aunt, Irma writes “The genuine Agony Aunt is free from attachment to any ego-boosting faith or discipline: she has nothing to promote save her own commonsensical opinion of the case in hand.” She writes that in the heyday of agony columns, a significant number of aunts were Jews, “all of them heiresses of the ghetto, where women practised pragmatic Common Sense as their brothers practised the fiddle: two portable instruments that could be carried on the next dash to safety.” She traces a genealogy of the Agony Aunt, likening the position to the disinvested witch or 30

wise woman at the edge of the village. The employment of anonymity and focus on common sense makes Irma the antithesis of today’s influencer, even though she had the same job.

Cosmopolitan started in 1886 as a family magazine, running articles tailored to the domestic concerns of women, as imagined by the male editors. It went through several transformations, and a deep decline in the 1950s. Helen Gurley Brown arrived in 1965 as chief editor and revolutionized the magazine, rebranding it as a magazine for single career women. Cosmo set itself apart by giving frank advice on contraception and encouraging women to enjoy sex without guilt, for which Brown received a lot of criticism. Irma was one of her weapons of war.

There were ethical questions that went with the job. Apart from the obvious danger that someone was at risk of real harm and had no one to talk to, there was the question of how to respond adequately, in a way that the other readers would resonate with. Sometimes she had to be tough with people, and sometimes she didn’t know what to do at all. She would answer one letter at length, and then three or four short replies. “Sometimes I’d just say, ‘Tell them to get lost.’ When you give advice, you tell them something they recognize, you know?” In My Life in Agony, she calls this “ventriloquism.” An Agony Aunt is ventriloquizing someone’s inner voice, the one they cannot hear except through the mouth of someone else.

“When I first started writing the agony column, it was always: men, men, he, he.”

But over time, women have begun to assert themselves more on the public scene

E S SAY

usually see which words were crossed out, and everywhere in media. Their problems became more complex — a lot of the prob- and thus what’s really at stake. The sublems now have to do with work. I suppose conscious traces were missing from the this reflects who I suspect is the demo- work. “That took away a lot of the immegraphic of Cosmopolitan’s readers who diacy of the person.” With the pen and would dare to write in: formerly bound in paper choices, the style in which someone marriage, and now set free to be employed. wrote said a lot about their financial or It’s not surprising to me that the formal social position. With the backspace, evequality of the modern era doesn’t make eryone could delete their errors, their subfor real equality, but I would have thought conscious eruptions, the pressure of the it would make for an explosion of new pen, in essence the truth. “You cannot tear stain an email,” she says. neuroses about the self, desire, longing.

In her presence, as she talks about her Maybe this is what is at the heart of what we lost when Irma stopped her col- reader’s afflictions, I have an impulse to umn. Maybe there is an explosion of neu- move over to her fainting couch, to conroses, but there’s no currency in privately fess and bear witness to her common sense. asking a stranger for recognition. No more “I’ve always been interested in how we becatching the eyes of strangers and asking have and how we react and how we can them about their life. Everything is a post: change our emotional responses sometimes. You know, emotional responses are public, scrutinized, and awarded.

Irma wrote for the Japanese, American, not assigned to us. We are in charge of and British Cosmopolitan magazines. Each them, actually. To a degree anyway.”

In the ’70s, the Agony Aunt was there agony column had its own problems to pour out. “It was interesting how the to coax out these problems and present British women would say, What am I do- them in a way in which other readers could ing wrong? That was the slant.” But the make sense of something from them; the Americans asked about the other, always market we exist in now no longer works on ready to make it anyone else’s fault but this empathetic principle. Instead, the advice given must already respond to a northeir own. “Americans would be, Why is he mative subject. It’s cheaper, I guess. You doing what he’s doing?”

One of the most significant changes no longer have one or two problems you during Irma’s career was the heavy post- might want to check in with your Agony bag of problems transformed into an Aunt about, and it’s no longer a conversation in which someone could give you email inbox, and with that some clues about the underlying causes of the letter a bit of a roasting, you’re no longer one writer’s problems, which could be de- reader in a community of others — instead ciphered from their handwriting, were you’re on some hellish 12-step program to omitted. “If it’s backhand or forward, or if become a whole better person — god the things are crossed out by a woman when pressure! — and you’re on your own, babe.

The advice I read now often follows she is thinking, No, I shouldn’t say that.” If Irma held the letter up to a light, she could this, treading the line of some kind of 31

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immediacy or authentic truth that only the subject has access to — natural language processing (NLP) even tells you that it doesn’t matter what actually happened but just how you feel about it, which I’m sure is not healthy advice — “speak your truth,” “ground yourself,” “only you know.”

But wasn’t that the point of the 20th century? You might need someone to talk it out with.

I leave Irma’s hours after arriving and walk back out into the set of the neo-noir crime film and try to memorize the advice: talk to strangers, write by hand, detach from your ego, peek under the deletions for the truth, and promote little more than common sense. Irma is charming, witty, wise, and ageless, and I’m glad to have met her. Irmas are rare. I went to light a cigarette and remembered there was one more piece of advice she had given me, this time for quitting something you need to quit: eat carrots.

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Sultan, 14 years old from Nusaybin, Turkey, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

LONG HALLWAY

by Cyrus Dunham

I

lie flat on my back, on a metal shelf in a cavernous room. Synthetic white medical curtains hang from tracks in the ceiling.

One curtain is just beyond my head, another two are on either side of me, and the last curtain bisects me at the hips, like I’m giving birth. My torso and head are inside a square space created by the curtains, separate from my legs, and separate from an audience I know is there but can’t see. The palms of my hands face

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down. I keep my fingers spread, tips pressed against the metal. I am a test subject in an experiment. There are other subjects in the room, all in their own curtained-off compartments.

I know the other test subjects are people who have nerve sensation in parts of their bodies that don’t exist. Some of them feel arms and legs they lost; others, like me, feel extremities they never had. All of the subjects are sequestered by curtains which prevent them from seeing the parts of their bodies where they host a phantom presence. Doctors standing on the other side of the curtains give us directions: move it to the left, to the right; up and down, in a circle now. The stakes of the experiment are whether this fictitious motion will offer some relief from the constant, nagging itch of feeling a part of you that isn’t there. I know the big room is some sort of clinical dungeon, outfitted with claws, hooks, electric chairs, and microscopes. I know the doctors in charge of the experiment are wearing lab coats and directing the audience to stay quiet. But I hear them all breathing. They are scratching words on paper while they watch me.

Inside my compartment, I am struggling to pilot myself. It’s so bright in there, fluorescent and washed out. I can’t do what the doctor is asking of me. I can’t find what isn’t there.

The room with the metal shelf is through the first door on the right side of a hallway. The hallway is long, with wooden floorboards that run perpendicular to the walls. There are six simple white doorways off the hall, three on each side. There is a scene in each room. Some happened to me. Others I dreamt. And some take

place in the yearless expanse before my birth, half-imagined, half-built from fragments of things I’ve overheard and been told. Regardless of time, the rooms, and their scenes, are adjacent to one another.

There is a lot of movement in the hallway.

People leave one room and enter the next, like they are moving between exhibition halls in a museum. The hallway is too narrow for two bodies to pass by each other, walking straight on, so I turn parallel to the wall whenever someone comes toward me from the opposite direction. I open the doors and enter, right, left, right, left.

The second room, directly across the hall from the room with the metal shelf, is a gallery. It is 1971. A small audience is waiting for a performance. They don’t know what’s going to happen. I join the audience, though I remain invisible to everyone else in the room. A young white man, no older than 25, stands against the back wall, agitated, waiting for something. He is slight but a little stocky, with a grown-out crew-cut, wearing a tight white T-shirt and jeans. He has dark, wide-set eyebrows, thick lips. Another man, with shoulder-length hair, in a turtleneck sweater, steps forward, facing the first man.

He pulls out a long rifle, black metal and technological. He loads, clicks, holds it to his forehead, shoots. A slow bullet makes ripples across the room. People watch the bullet travel, drinking cups of red wine and smoking cigarettes. The bullet tunnels through the young man’s arm, precisely and delicately, then through the white wall, where its impact is much larger. It creates a cave in the back of the gallery.

Like a black hole, it grows, and one by one it sucks up applauding, smoking members 35

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

of the audience. The shooter tumbles in, gripping his massive gun. The man who got shot, who invited everyone to come watch, is the only one who remains in the room besides me. He just stands there, looking down at a hole in the sleeve of his white T-shirt no bigger than a pea, a thin trickle of blood down his bicep. I stare at him, study his body and his face. He barely has facial hair. He cradles his chest muscle with his right hand. He is dazed, pleased.

The second door on the right opens into another gallery. Inside, there is a wooden ramp, subtly curved up like a knoll, extending from the floor. It is 1972.

This is also a performance. Moaning, cursing, panting coming from above and below. The voice of a man, throaty and grumbling: “You’re pushing your cunt down on my mouth,” and, “You’re ramming your cock down into my ass.” Underneath the ramp is an artist, hidden somewhere in the beams supporting the curve. He’s been in there for weeks, holding a microphone up against his lips. He is balding, but has long, stringy hair. He is crammed between the wooden beams that hold up the ramp, in a shirt, no pants, cradling his junk with his hands. He’s from the Bronx, has an Italian name. On top of the ramp, a 23-year-old boy walks back and forth. He is the only person in the gallery. I watch him from the doorway. He’s preppy, from Connecticut.

He grew up in a white clapboard house near the marshes where the river meets the Sound. He drafts lines and angles for an older conceptual artist, a 50-year-old woman, whose practice is marking the measurements of rooms in white chalk.

He’s skinny like he’s sick. He’s my dad. He comes back to the gallery, again and again, 36

to try and understand exactly what is happening here, how and why this moaning man, hidden under a ramp, jerking off all day, every day, has such a hold on him.

Behind the next lefthand door is my dad’s studio. In the corner of the space is a low wooden table. On it is a small ceramic sculpture I made when I was 10 years old.

We were given an assignment in art class to make clay vessels. Cups, vases, bowls. I made a hollow cock, based on anatomical drawings I found in biology textbooks in the library. I made sure the ceramic skin was evenly thick throughout. I hollowed the life-sized penis with a long scooping tool and smoothed it with water. I went to check on it every day after school, like a hamster. I kept it moist under a wet paper towel so the clay didn’t crack or lose its shine. I took long floss-like strands of clay and laid them on the shaft. I smoothed them down with the balls of my fingers so they became the faint raised relief of veins.

I fired it and took it home in a brown paper bag. Outside our apartment building, standing with my mom in the rain, the clay cock fell through the bottom of the bag and broke on the pavement. I cried a lot. My mom tried to comfort me, but there was something off in how she said, “It’s alright.” My dad helped me pick up all the pieces. I came home from school the next day, and he had reassembled the vessel. The skin was rearranged. The edges of the shards jutted out over one another, tectonic and erratic.

In the studio, there are also paintings of formless, blobby, humanoid entities, not recognizable as people but clearly alive.

The men, the male characters, are notched and missing parts of themselves, abscessed

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caverns in their bodies. They all have one main protrusion growing out of their foreheads, cartoon dicks with tips like a peanut, urethras drawn as black lines, bullets spraying across the canvas instead of semen. I notice my dad, who wasn’t there before. He is working on one of the paintings, holding a long brush, standing next to a cart covered in takeout containers full of acqua, yellow, orange, red, lavender, and black liquid. There is a small metal desk in the other corner of the studio, facing out, where a young version of me sits watching him go over his lines in thick acrylic, making them darker. I am seven or eight. I do my own versions on paper, mimicking the outlines of his shapes with a wet marker. I study him, then draw, tracing. Eventually he leaves the canvas and pulls up a big chair to my small desk. We start drawing together. He is delighted by my mimicry of his lines, his shapes. We make our own versions of his paintings on colored paper, which we put together with Scotch tape in a long folding series, eight drawings long.

We call it a frieze, a word I learned in a book about Greek history. The frieze tells a story about other worlds, about a galaxy exploding, about yellow and red planets destroyed and conquered. Everyone in this world has cocks on their faces, holes in their bodies.

Diagonally across from the studio, the last door on the right side opens up to a big, bright space, a loft with patterned tin ceilings, and large arched windows facing out over an avenue. There is a bedroom with plywood walls in one corner of the loft, covered with wallpaper of pale pink roses. This is where my mom lives. She spread glue onto the plywood with a roller,

laid the wallpaper in big sheets. She has long brown hair, parted in the middle, a flat chest, a quarter-sized mole on her forearm. On the Avenue, it is summer, and a man named Sam — the same name as her father, who is a dentist — is stalking the city looking for women with dark hair like hers to shoot with a pistol. She sleeps in the plywood room, which has no windows, and dreams about catching Sam every night. She walks to Washington Square and back each evening to go get a hot dog and a frothy papaya juice. Though I am standing by the doorway of the big, bright space, I am also with her on the street, trailing her. I sense that Sam is nearby, coveting her, loving her, waiting to make his intervention. He never steps forward, never moves close enough that she knows he is there.

The last room off the hallway ends in a small, dark room that I share with my sister, in the late ’90s. We sleep together in a lofted bed, with one window facing onto an air shaft. The shaft is unreachable by any doorway, and so is its bottom, and its gray walls, streaked in decades of black and white pigeon shit. Against one wall, there is a huge blow-up picture, glowing like it’s on a lightbox. The photo is of John Walker Lindh, about to be locked in a cell at Camp Rhino. His pale, naked body is strapped to a black-green canvas gurney, a matching green-black band tying his wrists together, in front of his body, another strap around his shoulder and chest, one more around his eyes. He has long hair, a long beard, a triangle of chest hair beneath the shoulder strap. Except for his skin, everything in the picture is the same green-black, so that the edges of the straps 37

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blend into the murky background. His lips are slightly parted. He looks like the artist under the wooden platform, or the man in the turtleneck who shot the rifle. They may all be the same man. The straps, the bondage, the color palette, all of them look like another photograph by my mom’s friend, Jimmy, who dies in 1992, two years before I am born. That photo appears, on another light box, against another wall of the dark room. In this photo, a woman stands against a white wall and white radiators, a black plastic hood over her head, another black plastic loop around her stomach, and another around her legs. Her breasts and bush visible in the gaps between the coverings. Three latitudes of strap, the same two-tone palette, like John Walker Lindh, but reversed. She’s my mom.

I listen to myself and my sister sleeping in the lofted bed, in the glow of the lightbox photos and the airshaft. My sister lightly snores. I’m quiet. In the bed, I am realizing for the first time that when I lie on my back, facing up, with my arms by my side, there is a radiating presence, like a heat source, at the bottom of my torso.

I try and stay with the immediacy of the thing, focus on its feeling and tune out all other matter: moaning men, paint, bullets, glue, straps, my dad’s body. It gets hotter, bigger. I get better at finding it, controlling it. Everything and everyone off the hallway tumbles away, into the black hole in the second room. But then the hole coughs, spits the hallway back out, longer now, new doors appearing one after the other.

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Menal, 13 years old from Kobanî, Syria, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

THE SUBLIMITY OF DANIELLE STEEL For the love of supermarket shlock

by Dan Sinykin

I

n 1978, Bill Grose, editor-in-chief at Dell, decided to make a star of a young author from San Francisco. Grose was a thumper of novelizations from popular film and television, a fan of media tie-ins, a man with his finger in the air to feel the direction of the wind. Dell, a mass-market house, had recently been acquired by the trade giant Doubleday, which also owned radio and television stations and would in two years buy the New York Mets.

Grose and Dell were looking for the next big thing. This woman,

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Grose thought, was it. She had a made-formarketing name, too. Danielle Steel.

She wasn’t born with that name, exactly. She cut it from Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel. Her mother was a Catholic Portuguese-American and her father a Jewish German refugee who fled to New York City from Hitler’s Third Reich. They divorced when Steel was eight. She had a lonely childhood living with her father in Manhattan at 45th and Lexington, “a very adult kind of childhood,” she said attending dinner parties and watching adults flirt or talk politics.

She attended the elite Lycée Français de New York, fantasizing about becoming a nun. In her teens, she attended haute couture shows in Paris and fell for fashion. Her grandmother gave her her first couture suit when she was 17. She married a wealthy French banker, Claude-Eric Lazard, when she was 18 and studied at Parsons School of Design and NYU. In 1968, at 20, she gave birth to a daughter, Beatrix, but she wanted more than to be a mother. She saw two women on The Tonight Show talking about their PR firm, Supergirls. The next day she called to apply for a job.

Steel arrived at work looking like Audrey Hepburn: big eyes, short hair, outfitted in the season’s high fashion. She was quickly named director of public relations and vice president of marketing. She buzzed around the office with incredible energy, chain smoking, making needlepoint kitsch, and typing letters to prospective clients in French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese (if not always with perfect grammar). One of her clients, an editor at Ladies Home Journal, saw promise in Steel as a writer, and told her so.

She took him seriously and wrote her first novel in the summer of 1971. She hired an agent and sold the book to Pocket Books, which published it in 1973. The protagonist is a woman who works for advertising campaigns and women’s magazines, a young divorced single mother who moves to San Francisco from New York to restart her life. There she falls in love with a filmmaker who also works in advertising, a bad boy who gets her pregnant and, when she refuses an abortion, sends her back to New York. But she can’t quit him — until he dies in a freak accident on set. She has the baby, but the baby dies within the day.

In the end, our heroine runs off with the art director of the woman’s mag where she now works.

It’s a bawdy post-feminist romance, closer to Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which came out that same year, than Katherine Woodiwiss’s chaste The Flame and the Flower from the year before, which helped build a massive audience for historical romance. Steel’s debut bears traces of literary ambition, expressed by her avatar-protagonist who brings a short story anthology with her to set just in case she has time to read and is thrilled by a dinner party where the discussion rushes from “Japanese literature” to “the political implications of American literature vs Russian literature at the turn of the century.” But the novel was primly panned in Publishers Weekly; its protagonist, “for all her beauty, sophistication, and use of the proper four-letter words, is not very interesting, and neither is her story,” read the verdict. The book sold modestly.

Steel, like her protagonist, moved to San Francisco. She had separated from 41

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There, on a small table, sat a typewriter, Claude-Eric and lived for a spell in a commune with a band of street musicians. She a bowl of grapes, and a copy of Steel’s novoften visited a friend in the hospital who el Daddy. On learning that Steel writes on was imprisoned as a conscientious objector a 1946 Olympia, he rebuilt the closest he to the war in Vietnam but who had nego- could acquire, a 1954 Smith Corona Silent tiated an early release to participate in a Super, and used it to type her a very long medical study for NASA. The patient in letter with a strange request. He wanted the next room, Danny Zugelder, an invet- her to collaborate with him on a photoerate bank robber, developed a crush on graphic project about the original sugar Steel, and the two began corresponding, daddy.

In 1990, Steel bought the Spreckels which continued after he was sent back to Lompoc Correctional Institute. He says Mansion, a French Baroque chateau in that they consummated the relationship San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, built in the prison’s women’s bathroom. She in 1913 by Adolph Spreckels for his wife, rented a flat in Pacific Heights and took Alma. Spreckels inherited a Hawaiian a job as a copywriter for an ad agency and sugar plantation staffed by Japanese imwrote fiction at night. Zugelder was re- migrants and the largest sugar refinery leased in 1973 but was arrested again and on the West Coast. Fader wrote to Steel, sent to the state penitentiary in Vacaville “Since he was 24 years older than her and in 1975 for robbery and sexual assault. He his money came from sugar, she called and Steel married in the prison canteen him her ‘sugar daddy.’” (Fader acknowlthat year. She published her second novel, edges that the couple didn’t popularize a romance about a socialite and her ex-con, the phrase: that happened a few years later prison abolitionist lover, in 1977, and her with a serialized story in a Syracuse paper third, about a man falsely accused of rape, and then the still-extant candy, which rein 1978. Both did decently well for Dell, branded after trying “Papa Sucker.”) Alma chose the site for the chateau because of selling several hundred thousand copies.

That’s about when Bill Grose decided its views of the San Francisco Bay. “Is it still true that you can see six counties from it was time to make her famous. the circular observatory?” Fader asks Steel.

• “Did you know that she put the pool in When I met Sean Fader, he was wearing her/your backyard to swim naked while a pink T-shirt that said, “Ask Me About drinking pitchers of martinis in order to Danielle Steel.” His beard was auburn, piss off the neighbors?”

After seven typed pages, including a thick, well trimmed, and flecked with gray.

His eyes were cobalt and intensely present. description of how he worked with a milliFader is a conceptual artist working with ner to build a replica of a flamboyant wool photography and performance and at the and ostrich feather hat of Alma’s, Fader moment he — like I — was obsessed with comes to his request. “I want to take a picSteel. “Please,” he said, “come into my ture in your home with me as Adolph and a twinky boy 24 years younger than me as studio.”

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Something unsettling has happened Alma. I want to model the photograph after several Rodin sculptures and a few ear- to Steel. For the first couple decades, she ly 20th-century paintings that Alma had published one or two novels most years. in her collection.” And he wanted Steel in From 1997 through 2014, she plateaued at a steady three. In 2015, she ticked up to four. the background.

Trying flattery, he wrote, regarding her Then, in 2016, an alarming six. She’s done Instagram, “If you find you are getting a six or seven annually since. That’s a novel lot of followers in the Southeast, it may every 50 days or so for a woman now 74 be because of me.” To be candid, reader, it years old.

“I’ve reacted with amazement, shock, may also be because of me. and outrage when people have asked me in • my fan mail, who writes my books,” Steel wrote in a blog post in 2012, when she was It was unexpected. She used to be like muzak to me, or JonBenét Ramsey: super- working at a much more reasonable pace. market schlock. I have no memories be- “WHO writes my BOOKS??? Are you fore she was there, so I assumed she always kidding? Who do you think writes my had been, ageless, outside of time, a brand books, as I hover over my typewriter for like little Debbie from Little Debbie is a weeks at a time, working on a first draft, with unbrushed hair, in an ancient nightbrand.

But then I started studying the pub- gown, with every inch of my body aching lishing industry. Why, of all possible after typing 20 or 22 hours a day.” She book worlds, had we ended up with ours? enumerates the bodily horrors of such a Once I posed that question, I could see regimen: bleeding fingers, popped veins in that Danielle Steel was a cosmic accident her hands, and, of course, an aching back. whose story revealed the hidden logic of Nevertheless, she “would never just hand contemporary publishing, what I call the off an outline for someone else to write.”

More than an insane sleep schedule conglomerate era for reasons I will explain in a moment. This is to say, at first makes her productivity possible. As of my interest was professional. How long 2012, she employed three assistants — could it stay that way, though, given the Heather, Allee, and Alex — who protectlife she’s led and the books she’s written? ed her from paparazzi, fielded her phone The more I learned about her, the more calls, and talked with “lawyers, bankers, obsessed I became. Soon she was the only plumbers,” handling all her business. They topic I wanted to talk or tweet about. I fed her, too, given that she doesn’t want “to went out with friends and harangued stop and eat anything complicated” when them for hours: Claude-Eric, Supergirls, she’s writing. (“I have terrible eating habthe Vacaville wedding; the vault into su- its, and in my early days for some reason perstardom; novels with titles such as lived on a writing diet of liverwurst and Message from Nam, The Klone and I, and Oreo Cookies, which became the subToxic Bachelors. Eventually we’d arrive at ject of many jokes.”) I presume this setup persists. She has a researcher on retainer, the difficult present.

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Nancy Eisenbarth, who supplies specific- factory made possible by a familiar formuity, past and present. “I drive her insane, la? These questions take us to the heart of calling her at 3 am, or sending her emails, Danielle Steel, or perhaps her industrial needing to know what floor something is core, and illuminate much more beside: on, how many people died in a famous the logic of publishing under conglomfire, what is the decor of a certain restau- eration that was activated in part by the rant, or a detail about a unit of the French invention of Danielle Steel.

Resistance in WW2.” One of their most • ambitious endeavors resulted in the 500page historical romance set during the In Steel’s The Klone and I, the clone, Paul Russian Revolution, Zoya.

Klone, is a sex machine. Much of the Steel’s editor, Carole Baron, gives her plot revolves around the irresistible pleathe standard editorial treatment. “She sure the protagonist, Stephanie, gets from sends me encouraging comments about Paul’s signature sex act: what begins as a what she does like, and then she sends the double flip, which, with practice, becomes manuscript back to me, with comments on a triple, then a quadruple. There’s nothing every page, whole sections torn apart or more than what it seems. They flip through rejected, things she wants changed.” Steel’s the air while having sex. response is relatable: “I have to brace myStephanie is a wealthy middle age diself and try to be brave about it,” she writes, vorcée who falls in love with Peter, the admitting, “I must say Shit a thousand head of a Silicon Valley start-up that spetimes” while reading Baron’s notes. cializes in bionics, “some kind of combiThis whole operation enables a robust nation of biology and electronics.” She churn. Still: What happened in 2016? Six, lives in New York City and he’s bicoastal seven novels each year is ludicrous, even so when he leaves on a business trip, he for Steel. She would have us believe that tells her he will send her a surprise: Paul her life has always only been about her Klone, of course. Paul looks identical to children and her books and now that her Peter, but — the Klone has a mind of his children are grown up, she devotes all her own. Peter dresses conservatively in blue time to writing — though she managed Oxford shirts, khakis, and Gucci shoes. to binge the latest season of Bridgerton. Paul only wears Versace. He first arrives in Could anyone love to write this much? Or “fluorescent green satin pants” and “black is this a Harper Lee situation? Is she being satin cowboy boots” with “rhinestone preyed on by her minders? Or has she be- buckles.” Paul charms Stephanie’s kids, come cynical, cashing in on the full value buys her outrageous jewelry, and busts up of her brand by getting yet a bit more help Peter’s silver Jaguar, repainting it yellow with the new books? with red rims.

Is her overproduction a matter of pasPaul Klone occasions the novel’s crisis. sion, the perfervid devotion of one wom- “It was impossible to sort out who was who an? Or is it a matter of profit, leaning into and what was what, and whom I was dothe mechanical reproduction of the Steel ing what with, and why,” thinks Stephanie.

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“It was all so damnably confusing. It was Dell acquired rights to novelize a screenlike sleeping with two men, all rolled into play called The Promise, flagrantly derivone, and I was never quite sure where one ative of Erich Segal’s Love Story. Segal, a man ended and the other began.” professor of Classics at Yale who translated The novel expresses anxiety about un- ancient Greek drama, had become a celebcontrollable replicability. It was published rity thanks to the outrageous popularity of in 1998, as Steel settled into what would his novel about the doomed love between become a long, steady run of three novels a wealthy Harvard hockey jock and an each year. Would readers worry that her en- artsy Radcliffe girl from a modest backhanced output was the result of some kind ground. (Segal used a couple of Harvard of combination of biology and electronics? roommates, whom he met while there Would they confuse Danielle Steel the on sabbatical, as the basis for the guy: Al conglomerate brand with Danielle Steel Gore and Tommy Lee Jones.) Love Story of flesh-and-blood, who banged out the set a record for largest initial mass-market book not on a computer but a typewrit- printing with 4,350,000 copies in 1970. er? Would she be able to persuade them Naturally, others caught the scent of that her work remained the real thing? The lucre — not least in novelization. Segal Klone and I is Frankenstein or Strange Case had penned Love Story as a screenplay first, of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — both of which then wrote it as a novel at Paramount’s Steel shouts out in the book — rewritten prompting. Subsequently, publishing to address concerns about contemporary went hard for novelizations. Bill Grose authorship and branding. When a team had a thin imitation on his hands with is required to maintain productivity, who The Promise. Like in Love Story, a wealthy really is responsible for the text? In the Harvard boy and an artsy girl — in this end, Stephanie and Peter banish Paul to case a poor orphan — fall in love but are the factory — where for some reason they prohibited from marrying by the boy’s parinsist his head will be removed — endors- ent. Plots diverge from there, and splening monogamy and reasserting the force didly. In Love Story, the couple marry anyof the real, the authentic, against the se- way but the girl dies of leukemia. In The duction of mechanical reproduction.

Promise, the couple flees to elope, getting This contest is what most of Steel’s into a car accident in which the boy ends writing is about: it is generated from the up in a coma and the girl has her face torn tension between the expressive individual off. With the boy in the coma, his mothand mechanical reproduction; it is the nov- er offers the girl a deal: she will leave for elistic equivalent of the defensive all-caps San Francisco and never contact her son and multiple question marks in “WHO again; in exchange, she will send the girl writes my BOOKS???” The ur-text, which to the best plastic surgeon in the country reveals the foundational trauma that Steel to reconstruct her face. The girl accepts, is compelled to repeat, is 1978’s The Promise. and leaves, and when the boy wakens from his coma his mother tells him his lover is • dead. Nevertheless, they find each other 45

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techniques. Editors had once been the and declare their undying love.

Grose assigned the project to Danielle uncontested suzerains of title acquisition.

Steel. It was time to make her a brand, a In the 1970s, they watched their power writer readers could trust to be as reliable wane. Aggressive literary agents staged as Pepsi. His investment grabbed the at- high-pressure auctions and came for subtention of Ray Walters, publishing indus- sidiary rights. Houses brought in directors try reporter for The New York Times. “To dedicated to selling those rights — for make every American woman aware of reprinting, translation, and film and TV Danielle Steel,” wrote Walters, “Dell will adaptation. Marketing departments grew spend $300,000 on every promotion gim- and gathered influence, producing bamick known to the book trade, from tele- roque campaigns of total saturation for vision, radio, and newspaper advertising to top titles. It was the decade of book proshopping bags and spectacular bookstore motion, the blockbuster auction, fiction factories, the purported death of the middisplays.”

Romance was on its way up. Avon had list. It was Bill Grose’s decade.

Steel was being forged as an emblem developed huge audiences for Johanna Lindsey, Rosemary Rogers, and Katherine of the conglomerate era. What could she Woodiwiss in the 1970s. Harlequin, too, do about it? That was the question she made its name selling romance. By 1979, brought to The Promise. Nancy, the female Harlequin, which had begun the decade protagonist, arrives in San Francisco as a as an obscure Canadian press, was second “faceless” aspiring artist. (She literally lacks in mass-market sales, behind only Bantam, a face.) Much of the novel is dedicated to but with a far greater profit margin. Why? her relationship with her plastic surgeon It paid small advances for formulaic genre who is going to remake her. Nancy tells books with built-in audiences. Harlequin’s him how, growing up, she found the nuns success was engineered by W. Lawrence in her orphanage wonderful: “so much so Heisey, a Harvard MBA and “self-de- that,” like Steel herself, “I wanted to be scribed ‘soap salesman’ for Proctor and one.” But he makes her promise not to Gamble.” Other houses would learn from become a nun now because he has ambitious plans for her: he is “going to make Harlequin — they would have to.

From 1960 to 1973, book sales climbed her someone very special.”

And he does. She reveals her new face, 70 percent, but between 1973 and 1979 they added less than another six percent, and her new self, at an art opening that showdeclined in 1980. Meanwhile, global me- cases photographs she has taken during dia conglomerates had consolidated the the 18-month reconstruction. “Your work industry. What had been small publishers is going to be very important, darling,” the typically owned by the founders or their plastic surgeon tells her. “You’re a star. […] heirs were now subsidiaries of CBS, Gulf You’ll have every photographer’s agent in + Western (later Paramount), MCA, RCA, the country calling you by next week.”

What we have here is an allegory. Like or Time, Inc. The new owners demanded growth, implementing novel management the surgeon takes the effectively parentless, 46

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faceless, but artistic and ambitious Nancy who has come to San Francisco from New York, repackages her, and presents her to the world, so does Bill Grose do the same for Danielle Steel. She came to him after the failure of her first novel, a nobody. He published her next two, but truly introduced her to the world with The Promise.

So far so little agency for Steel. How could she prove that she was not another bionic San Francisco product, that she was the real thing?

The surgeon remakes Nancy almost beyond recognition. She has a new face, a new name. But the novel’s desideratum is to bring the star-crossed lovers, separated by a traumatic car crash, back together.

Michael, the male protagonist, who fell into a coma and was told Nancy had died, recognizes the unique signature of her art.

He sees her photographs and, despite the fact that she used to paint, knows she is the author: a testimony to her authenticity.

Even if her appearance has changed, her heart remains the same. Likewise, much of the old Steel remains in The Promise and beyond — her breezy style, the cross-coast romance, the middlebrow unity of art and commerce — at the cost of whatever edge she might have had. Her previous books were adult novels that dealt with adult problems, like abortions and affairs, death and divorce. But here the protagonists, while nominally adults, are infantilized on every page: “kiddos” behaving like “third graders” who want to return to the moral simplicity of childhood.

Fader’s, which you’ll see if you watch the video in which a voice actor reads his letter to her. The closer one comes to Steel, the clearer it becomes that the madness of her being is the madness of our times: working 20 hours each day, she has become vertiginous sublimity itself.

At bottom, that sublimity emerges from a refusal. It is as if the compulsion to prove that she is the author, the one who writes the books, has made her regress and arrested her development — remember the Klone’s sexual flips — at around age 12. There is a childishness to her insistence on the myth of the Romantic author, a willed ignorance of the compromises of adulthood, covering her eyes so as not to see the industry of which she is a product.

With a childlike seriousness, she wants to be the inspired creator solely responsible for her art, but everything about her art — its formulaic plots, its women’s mag prose style, its mass production — betrays its mechanicity.

To be Danielle Steel the human is to be forever obscured by Danielle Steel the brand. Her response is to make every novel a plea for recognition as a real person with real feelings. She writes romances where the couple’s meet-cute and happy ending are less important than the courtship between her and her reader. Her oeuvre asks a single question, over and over and over: do you love me?

•

My passion for Danielle Steel is funny, but it’s not, in the end, a joke. Neither is 47

Sozdar, 12 years old from Mardin, Turkey, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

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IN THE MEMORY HOUSE A labor of love in a place that hates you

by Stephanie Wong

T

his is not a love story, but this is how it goes. Girl wins fellowship, girl moves to Mexico, girl finds out that her office is a Foucauldian fever dream. Girl is surrounded by ghosts. Girl can think of any feeling other than love to describe what she feels in this place. This is a story not from an archive, but about one.

Mexico’s national archive, known as the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), is housed in a Mexico City complex formerly known as the “Palacio de Lecumberri” or the “Palacio Negro,” the country’s national penitentiary from 1900 to 1976. Based on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a system of control that allows a central guard to watch prisoners without their knowledge, the 49

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building once held political enemies of authoritarian president Porfirio Díaz and held left-wing prisoners during the 1968 student protests and the Dirty War. Researchers used to enter the reading rooms through the central guard tower to peruse folios in former cell galleries where archival documents were stored until 2016.

The metaphor writes itself.

The bloody history of the AGN does not escape me. Founded in 1790 by Viceroy Juan Vicente de Güemes Pacheco y Padilla to taxonomize the documentary quagmire of the viceroyalty, the archive was an imperial enterprise from its founding. The centuries passed and the archive moved from Chapultepec Castle to the Viceregal Palace, to a cave in Matamoros where Benito Juárez once hid, to a church of the Guadalupe called Casa Amarilla, to numerous other places besides. When the archive finally found its current home in the Palacio Negro, innumerable lives had already been lost to maintain it. Out of all the AGN’s physical residences, the Lecumberri takes the sanguinary cake: countless people who were incarcerated there had been imprisoned, tortured, and executed because of their political beliefs.

This is my experience as a historian of the early modern period, presently living in Mexico City, steeling myself to enter a place that has actively oppressed people with interests opposite to those of the state, just so I can write my stupid little dissertation and get my stupid little credentials. Don’t worry, my colleagues said with a wink. If you go into the courtyards, you can see feral cats!

I first learned about the AGN in Zeb Tortorici’s book, Sins Against Nature, 50

which I read in a graduate history methodology seminar. At the time, I had never been to an archive before. I viewed the mythical Archive as the place where I would open a legajo, blinking the dust out of my eyes. I’d flawlessly decipher its 17th-century palaeography, and make a discovery about Latin America for which the world over would laud me at my commemorative Festschrift, whose inaugural occasion would take place the spring after I died in my university office, aged 89.

Whenever I listed the AGN as one of my project’s principal archives, I felt a combination of raw terror and nervous excitement to travel there, to plumb the depths of its 52 kilometers of documents. There, I would be a genius.

If I were a genius, I would have been able to navigate archival bureaucracy without a hiccup. I would have been able to sail past the guards and not rush back and forth with my passport in hand and request my documents with ease and see them immediately. I would have posed like a normal person in my research credential mugshot. I would have been able to smoothly and passionately explain my dissertation on the relationship between early modern Asia and the Americas without fumbling every other word in Spanish.

I wouldn’t have needed an appointment. I would have been able to blend in with my nonchalant colleagues, and not freaked out because I was in a literal prison. I wouldn’t have cried. Would I have?

Upon returning from my first visit to the archive, I texted several friends about it. Was I having an overreaction? Everyone else there seemed so chill. For them, it was another day at work. My friend Thamy, a

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fellow historian, reassured me: There’s no way historians who work in those spaces and don’t feel a chill down to their bones write histories with empathy.

I hope you can take care of yourself, my friend Nicole said.

I hope you’ll find something good, said my professors and colleagues.

•

In January 2021, I began a pen pal correspondence with Justus. Justus was an inmate at Shawnee Correctional Center, a men’s penitentiary in southern Illinois.

We had found each other through the nonprofit Black and Pink, an organization dedicated to connecting queer incarcerated people with queer free people. Because I was living in Rhode Island at the time, I wanted to have a connection to someone in my home state, and reached out to Justus as a result. We maintained a steady stream of letters, mostly about my life. I’m living through you, he wrote. Subsequently, Justus learned all about my arduous move that summer to Chicago. He cheered me on through the arc of a crush on a rowing teammate that blossomed into serious romance. I sent him CVS photo prints of my art projects, of my outings with friends.

Eventually, I connected him to my brother and my partner, who began sending cards and writing letters, too; I signed up to email Justus on his iPad so we could keep in regular contact while I was out of the country.

The reason why we never really talked about his life was because, since the start of the pandemic, Justus had been (and still is) on a 23.5-hour lockdown: he had to spend the majority of his day shut up

alone in his cell. Horrified, I wrote, What do you do in the half hour that you have free?

Take a shower, he replied. Call a friend.

But tell me more about your life.

•

For the first five years of his sentence, Justus lived much in the same way he had before he was incarcerated: not caring whether he survived prison, maybe going out in a blaze of glory. At year five, he met a man on death row whose sentence was eventually commuted, who told Justus that he was just glad to be alive. In that moment, Justus told me, he chose to live. He renamed himself Justus — “Just Us”— to symbolize the collective struggle of people of color.

Justus says that prison is his reality, but not his excuse. After my first visit to the AGN, I couldn’t tell whether my colleagues considered the Palacio de Lecumberri a historical reality or a glib excuse — an excuse to bring up Andreas Huyssen or a reference to Discipline and Punish. My profession obligates me to love “the archive,” but how could I be a good historian and love something without critically knowing its history? Someone who sees the past out of context is a shoddy historian. I knew that even though my official work ostensibly had nothing to do with 20th-century archival politics, and my dissertation committee might accuse me of dilly-dallying, I had to know more.

According to the AGN’s website, the place where I work serves as “the house of Mexico’s historical memory and the leading advisory body in document management and archival administration.” The kind people who work at the AGN take 51

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their responsibilities seriously and firmly enforce the rules; one of my colleagues once saw another scholar get escorted out of the consultation room because he was handling the legajos too roughly. Justus and I talked about how the historical memory of the plantation in the United States remained in the presence of prisons and the oppressors therein: the correctional officers, for the most part. But what about the historians hunched over the tables at archives around the world? Who was holding them accountable?

When I first became a professional historian, I had a fuzzy image in my head of what going to the archive would be like.

I had imagined myself wielding a magnifying glass and a sweater loosely draped over my shoulders. I would have a eureka moment every week or so. And I would eventually leave the archive with a germ planted in my brain: the inspiration for a new dissertation chapter, journal article, or maybe even the holy grail — a trade book.

I hadn’t imagined the discomfort, sitting in the stagnant soundbath of amplified point-and-shoot clicks and shuffling running shoes, surrounded by silent people wearing AirPods and flipping gingerly through legajos. I stared blankly into the middle distance, palms sticking wetly to the inside of my archive-mandated latex gloves, swallowing periodically to stave off my thirst, which remained unslaked for the hours I spent in the consultation room. I couldn’t get my water bottle unless I passed through the three security checks on the way to the locker room and back.

There was no wi-fi and often no signal.

In the consultation room, I passed a colleague I knew. “How are you?” I asked.

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“Just hoping to find something,” she said. “Trying to get through as much as I can.” I stared, wondering how it was possible to overturn every stone, read every document, spend every day there without hating herself.

“Maybe,” I finally said.

“Fingers crossed,” she replied, smiling sadly and turning back to a massive leather-bound legajo. Her devotion to the Archive was almost obsessive. She had told me that she spent all her spare time outside the AGN updating her notes and photographs.

My advisor had warned me that the AGN archivists were notoriously cagey about who got to see which documents, because so many of them were ostensibly digitized. After wheedling unsuccessfully, I slunk off to the reference center, where all the digitized documents were saved within the AGN’s database, which is inaccessible from any computer that does not belong to the archive. I sat down at the world’s slowest computer and waited for the JPEGs to load, one at a time.

Periodically, one of the reference center’s elderly archivists would check on me, and we would chat. He would swig from his Styrofoam liter of agua de jamaica, occasionally forgetting to pull up his surgical mask, while I periodically refreshed the database and looked out at Lecumberri’s towering iron fence. Gazing at the archive staff and researchers milling around this overtly carceral environment, I thought about how Justus had told me how some correctional officers provoke inmates to hit them so they could get a new truck or some days off.

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•

When the Palacio de Lecumberri shuttered in 1976, bureaucrats debated whether it should be preserved because of its history, or destroyed — also because of its history. Prominent Mexican academics fiercely campaigned for its preservation, among them the writer Edmundo O’Gorman, who later became the AGN’s director. The building was big enough to house Mexico’s national patrimony, they argued. Plus, the Palacio was itself a part of said patrimony. President Luis Echeverría signed off on the project, and renovations began shortly after.

Conveniently or not, AGN houses its own archive. Curious, I dedicated hours to a deep dive of the archive’s fototeca, a room with light tables and three windows off of Sala B, for photographs of the building’s history.

Pre-gutting, much of the penitentiary was open to the elements. None of the cell galleries had roofs, and the iconic domed atrium of the AGN used to be a shabby central guard tower with a big paved yard surrounding it. In the fototeca, I found images of hulking piles of volcanic stone and busted-up concrete, an avalanche of prison toilets, with the signature smog layer of Mexico City looming in the background. The meters-high wrought-iron fence surrounding the perimeter of the building, which I had always thought of as original to the Lecumberri, was erected during the renovation period. And they built the archival consultation rooms with mezzanine levels built for patrolling security guards, who are armed.

On a tour of the AGN, I asked the chipper guide why security remained so

high for researchers. “We’re worried that people will steal documents,” she told me.

I asked why. She said it was because not everything in the AGN was cataloged, so if something was stolen, they wouldn’t even know it was gone. I remembered something: the Ley General de Archivos stipulates that every document at the AGN is subject to review every two years, which means that archivists may choose to destroy it, and nobody would know.

Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us scholars that “selective operations” structure the formation of archives.

One thing is recorded; another is silenced.

The tour dead-ended at the very back wall of the AGN, where we stood on a grassy plot next to a big plaque. Behind this wall, said the guide, President Francisco Madero and his vice president, José María Pino Suárez, were assassinated by military officials after being told that they would be transferred to another prison during the Ten Tragic Days of 1913.

There had been only two entrances to the Palacio de Lecumberri: the front door, where most entered, and a back door, now bricked up. Sometimes it felt like all my archival efforts were not just dead ends, but once a way through in the past, now completely obstructed.

After I left the archive for the day, walking past several large Mexican flags and security guards, I wrote to Justus and wondered why everybody I had seen at the AGN seemed ignorant of or even oblivious to the archive’s macabre history, even though they walked through a literal Panopticon every day. Justus had a more pragmatic read: it wasn’t like they were oblivious, they were desensitized to violence.

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A penitentiary like the Palacio de Lecumberri is built for silencing, especially considering the many political dissidents who lost their lives there. I wasn’t satisfied by the cleanly organized timeline of the AGN’s history, propped up in the central atrium, accentuated with photographs of political officials and a snapshot or two of men behind bars. If the archive had indeed archived itself, I wanted more proof.

In addition to what I could find on my own, the photo archivists directed me to the Hermanos Mayo collection, a group of five million film negatives sold to the AGN in 1994. Two sets of Gallegan brother-photographers came to Mexico to shoot scenes of political and quotidian life in the midcentury, including two rolls of film at the Palacio de Lecumberri.

Squinting at the negatives through a magnification loupe, my body making a 90-degree angle at the light table, I wondered what I was looking for. Specific people? Signs of emotion — joy, maybe … love or resilience? — in a place that was meant to crush the human spirit? This was a different kind of labor from attempting to transcribe 17th-century palaeography.

When I got home, I edited the photographs and negatives, “developing” the old tiras by reversing the tone curve. I saw faces emerge: inmates chatting with guards through iron bars, standing with their comrades in the lunch line, working in the myriad talleres that spotted the complex.

I felt something like sorrow, but also like wiping a dirty window clean.

•

A Mexican slur for a gay man is “joto.”

It is derived from what the incarcerated 54

homosexuals were called at Palacio de Lecumberri, because they lived in corridor J. The corridors at the AGN are no longer marked.

Once, a history professor told our seminar, “We are not novelists.” But neither are we robots; we are still human beings. In an email, I asked Justus how he felt about queer incarcerated people from history.

He wrote back, “The issues of the past are the issues of the present. […] I believe that imbalances will continue as long as [society fails] to take proper recognition of our humanity, regardless of how we identify.”

Most of my exchanges with Justus are light. Now that I am in Mexico, I write about my life here and what it’s like, how it’s different from life at home in Chicago, the things I see and hear and eat, how work is going. Once, Justus wrote, I hope we stay in touch. I still have eight years left of my sentence. Justus has been incarcerated for the past 15 years.

If I could, for a second, forget about any of the deaths that had occurred at the Palacio Negro, if I could let the tortures slip my mind, maybe this would be a love story. Maybe I could look at the sunny stone patios filled with immaculately manicured succulents, and maybe I could gaze upon the domed central atrium as a tranquil space full of natural light and the shush of footsteps. I could go for lunch at the archive comedor and admire the stray cats dozing in afternoon sunbeams.

My dissertation’s bibliography depends on the AGN for primary source documents, about which I feel at best ambivalent and at worst disgusted. Many other historians — even Latin Americanists who work exclusively at the AGN — feel

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a fetishistic love for the capital-A Archive that I have never experienced. For them and for many outsiders looking in, the Archive is seen as a romantic place, a neutral font overflowing with knowledge where a scholar might neocolonially discover a hidden gem of history to market as their critical “intervention.” But by nature, the Archive refuses all objectivity. Literal prison or otherwise, no archive is neutral: the arbitrary, monstrous forms which archives take are almost always in service of past and present violence. I have felt obligated to love the Archive as a romantic idyll bursting with untapped scholarly potential throughout my professional training, but I cannot and will not love it because of what it is. I’m not here to love.

I’m here to be a human being.

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Meryem, 14 years old from Nusaybin, Turkey, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

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SEX POSITIVITY TAKES A TURN ON THE COUCH Pleasure confronts us with our contradictions

by Ricky Varghese

L

ike so many things that have been increasingly politicized in recent years, sex often gets reduced to a two-sided debate. There’s the sex-positive (and liberated) side and there’s the sex-negative (prudish, even conservative) side, with no middle ground. And yet is anything as simple as that? Are people so straightforward about anything, much less sex?

As a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, my interest is in what is uncanny — something frightening that is also intimately familiar to us (or even frightening because it’s so familiar) — about sex, about how it evades easy categorization into the simple binaries our politics demand. What might it be like to have an ambivalence toward sex, to be unsure of how to relate to it or know what to make of it? What might it mean to be uncertain about 57

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how to feel about sex, to feel both a love and a loathing for it? In asking these questions, I am not dissimilar from those who came before me, or those who may come after me. Sigmund Freud may have conceived psychoanalysis as the most significant therapeutic modality to examine the centrality of sex and aggression within our mental states and emotional lives, but as Adam Phillips has said, psychoanalysis is “what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.” There is an ambivalent tension here: sex is what cannot happen between two people in order for psychoanalysis to prevail, and yet, one might argue, it’s almost idiomatic that psychoanalysis is all about sex. Freud described ambivalence as the coexistence of conflicting or contradictory feelings toward a thing. It means to feel both love and hate for it, sometimes in equal measure, oftentimes fluctuating. In what follows, I take a detour from the reductively political to think of sex more ambivalently, as a thing (among other things in the world) that it’s okay to have mixed feelings about.

•

One Friday afternoon, I logged on to Skype for a regularly scheduled appointment — psychoanalysis moved online during the pandemic, like most other forms of therapy — with a patient who I will call “Fred.” (For obvious reasons, I will keep details brief and altered: he’s a white, cisgender male who identifies as queer, despite admitting to having only ever dated women, and only women of color, at that.

For my part, I’m a queer-identified therapist, South Asian, and so, visibly racialized.

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We had worked with one another for several years.)

Fred liked to push boundaries, to see how others (including me) would react to him. At the time, I assessed this to be a response to the severity of his strict upbringing: expressions of sexuality were punished from an early age, as he put it, and often punitively. And yet, in our sessions, he would talk so freely and often about sex — and about his numerous, according to him, sexual conquests — that it had become more than a commonplace subject. It had come to feel as though he wanted to see how far he could push his preoccupation, to see what I might say or do. There was an aggression that felt precisely intentional.

On this particular Friday afternoon, I logged on and waited for him to join me.

Ten minutes went by, which was unusual. He was very particular about always showing up on time, whether our sessions were online or in person, and his discipline around timing had never wavered or faltered. It was even a way, I came to understand, that he exerted control in our sessions. In this case, I could feel this delay had an effect on me: I became concerned, at first, but my concern quickly turned to a mild sort of annoyance, which then precipitated into a full-blown sense of irritation. And when he finally did log on, his first words were neither an apology, nor even an acknowledgment. “I just masturbated before logging on,” he said. “I had to relieve myself.”

Sex had always been a part of our sessions, but this disclosure was different. I found his statement arresting; I found myself taken aback, surprised, even

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shocked into silence. In that moment, sex stopped becoming an external event that would form part of Fred’s narrative. Sex became a thing, and a thing about us, a sharp object that he used to break the seal of the therapeutic frame. And sex became a thing not merely about us, but also between us. All things can be uttered in the near-sacred space shared by and between a therapist and their patient — things, perhaps, that you would never utter anywhere else — but the aggression with which Fred had arrived and declared what he had just done exceeded the bounds of debates over consent. It is not that we had sex, nor that there was even a suggestion that we have sex; it is also not that I felt particularly violated or assaulted by his declaration. But it did feel obscene.

Fred quickly moved on to other things.

The remainder of the session was consumed by a game of therapeutic catch-up, as he filled me in on what had happened since our last session. But my feeling of uneasiness didn’t abate, and I found myself wanting to understand where Fred’s masturbatory statement came from. And thinking about it closely, I realized that in the prior session, I had challenged Fred — gently, yet firmly — on what I had considered his unfair treatment of his current romantic interest, a challenge he had not received particularly well. In fact, I remember him actively resisting my interpretation of why he was behaving the way he was toward this woman. Was arriving late to our session, not acknowledging his lateness, and then stating what felt like an eroticized disclosure his mode of telling me something? Was it hostility directed squarely at me, a transference of aggressive

sexuality from this woman on to me, his therapist?

For all his little protestations and garden-variety resistance during our work together — as is common in psychoanalysis — I knew that he valued me and my opinion of him. When my opinion of him differed from his own self-image, he felt judged and rejected, despite my intention to do neither. Sex, in this instance, was not just sex. It was personal, with both psychic implications — appearing both unconsciously and so aggressively within the therapeutic frame between us — and also political, in the ways that he, a white patient, interacted with me, his visibly racialized therapist, a transferential stand-in for his love interests.

This ambivalence, it seems to me, is more typical than we might realize.

Outside of contemporary polemics over sex-positivity and sex-negativity, sex is a place of attachments to things we didn’t even know we were attached to, nor want to admit, anything from the approval of a therapist, or a lover, to the desire to be seen. If psychoanalysis is what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex, then our relationship to sex has a great deal to say about us.

•

In Toronto, I am part of an email list for queer- and trans-identified therapists.

More than just an online community to support each other and to share information with one another on upcoming conferences or professional opportunities, the list also serves as a space for therapists to make referrals. Every so often a call goes out by one of my colleagues in search of a 59

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therapist for someone they know, searches which often come with the addendum that the referral is looking for a therapist who is “sex-positive,” “kink-affirming,” “poly-affirming,” “BDSM-friendly,” or “supportive of open relationships.”

I find these earnest searches intriguing.

I am not being coy when I wonder what it means to be a sex-positive therapist. Of course, I wouldn’t want to know a therapist who was explicitly sex-negative. I couldn’t imagine a practice where I didn’t put my patient’s desires and fantasies, whatever these may be, at the forefront of our joint efforts at exploring their emotional worlds. I couldn’t imagine creating a therapeutic space that wasn’t supportive, or that felt moralizing in any way, even if my patient’s desires and fantasies were matters on which I differed from them or found disagreeable. Even a masturbatory declaration, as obscene as it may appear, needs the space to be uttered in order to be examined. The long history of therapeutic modalities is littered with deeply troubling ways in which sexuality has been addressed, of course, as though it was a thing that always needed to be “dealt with.” But is it naïve to presume that anyone on a listserv devoted solely and particularly to queer and trans therapists could be anything but always, already sex-positive?

In moments like these, I am reminded of how Leo Bersani once wrote, in his now canonical 1987 essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.” I don’t have any stats to back it up, but these kinds of requests from my colleagues certainly make it appear that sex is a source of profound discomfort or, at the very least, of acute 60

ambivalence, a thing we both love and love to hate.

During a particularly sweltering June in Toronto, a friend asked me if I would accompany him to the local STI clinic to get tested for HIV. In a show of solidarity, I decided to get tested as well, thinking, as one does, that it is our civic duty as queer-identified men who are sexually active to get tested routinely. This was back in the era when rapid tests were not yet entirely reliable or available, when we would have to wait for a week or so for our results, and on leaving the clinic, my friend was clearly anxious. To lighten the mood, he cracked what, to him, may have felt like a joke, posing a question, in all convivial seriousness: “Wouldn’t it be funny if I was the one who tested positive when you’re the one who’s having all the sex?”

As Freud reminds us, every joke buries a kernel of truth deep beneath seemingly innocent surfaces. This kernel of revealed truth is often something uncanny. In this case, sex was uncanny for my friend, and because it inspired both fear and anxiety, it had to be “dealt with” with a joke. Making presumptions about my apparent sex life, reducing it to a game of numbers — how many, how often — the joke relieved him of feeling responsibility for the sex that he was, himself, choosing to have. In his estimation, I, his friend, was presumably always already going to be having too much sex — have too many partners and/ or have sex too often — presumably more than him. So much sex was I having that it would be, for him, surprising if he had tested positive and I tested negative.

In the early days of the AIDS crisis, Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” was a

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response to a similar conflation of sex with illness when it came to same-sex desire, in a remark made by one Dr. Opendra Narayan, one of the earliest researchers to study HIV, though a veterinarian by training: These people have sex twenty or thirty times a night. […] A man comes along and goes from anus to anus and in a single night will act as a mosquito transferring infected cells on his penis. When this is practiced for a year, with a man having three thousand sexual intercourses, one can readily understand this massive epidemic that is currently upon us.

Context is everything. This statement

by Dr. Narayan, as ignorant and as illfounded as it is, was made in the ’80s. But my friend’s joke was made nearly three decades later in 2011, and in a too-hot June in 2011, right in the middle of Pride Month. For all of our years of activism, aimed at becoming apparently more free and liberated, there was still such a thing as having “too much” sex — too many partners, too often. And in the kernel buried in the joke, there was the anxiety that illness would be the outcome.

Unsurprising, then, that so many people look for therapists who are explicitly “sex-positive,” “kink-affirming,” “poly-affirming,” “BDSM-friendly,” or “supportive of open relationships.” For my friend, like many I know, the great casualty of the AIDS crisis, beyond the many lives that were lost, was and is our relationship to sex itself. For all our insistence on sex-positivity, this uncanny correlation between sex and illness illustrates what Bersani

suggested about sex: that most people don’t like it. Or at least, not enough to relieve it of the meanings we attach to it.

•

Of love, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan famously said: “[It] is giving something you don’t have, to someone who doesn’t want it.” Could the same be said about sex or friendship? What if these, too, are the giving of something one doesn’t have, to someone who doesn’t want it? But when talking about “the someone who doesn’t want it,” we enter the murky terrain of consent. Did I consent to my patient’s masturbatory self-declaration?

Did I, in the other occasion, consent to my friend’s disconcerting joke about sex, a joke made at my expense? What might consent look like here in these moments?

Does my consent make me any more sex-positive? What might it look like here to talk, then, about the giving of “something you don’t have”?

So much of the discourse surrounding sex-positivity aims at inclusivity and openness regarding sexual practices, expressions, and preferences. Unasked is what happens when those preferences are offensive. Take sexual racism, for instance: is it sex-positive to be okay with sexual racism, or to “deal with it” by making it into an ahistorical “personal preference”? Anyone is within their rights to choose who they sleep with (provided that the “who” can consent to it). But is anyone within their rights to be racist? There is so much rampant sexual racism online that a common complaint made by visibly racialized men about gay dating apps is that their white counterparts refuse to sleep with them.

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But why would you want to sleep with a racist in the first place? What does it make you, if you’re among a myriad of visibly racialized men who will spend your time bemoaning the painful knowledge that racists won’t sleep with you? What if you, yourself, would not sleep with other racialized men? Is this a contradiction in terms?

Who consents to any of this?

In their recent book, Hatred of Sex, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean suggest that sex has the capacity to undo identity, by which they mean it forces us to tolerate our own self-dividedness. Sexual pleasure threatens our sense of ourselves as coherent beings with secure boundaries; it confronts us with our contradictions, making us sit with them and bear who we become in relation. There may be part of us, an undoubtedly deplorable part, that may long to have certain boundaries breached.

On the matter of boundaries being breached and the strange pleasure this affords, I am reminded of a past patient I will refer to as Will, a young, racialized gay man. He refers to himself as an activist and a political agitator. For a while now he had been dating a white man, and in one of our sessions, Will recounted a sexual encounter that left him unsettled. In the final moments, as his partner was about to climax, he used a racial expletive. But what unsettled my patient was less the racial expletive per se, than the way he found it to be a wildly exciting turn-on. He couldn’t make sense of his reaction to what would, under other circumstances, be a breach of a social contract; he could not reconcile his politics with what gave him pleasure.

In narrating this scene in our session, he recoiled from his own pleasure.

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Had he consented to what had taken place? Since he gained pleasure from the exchange, he assumed he had consented to it. I attempted to trouble this assumption, by asking if he had consented to being the object of a racist encounter. Did he consent to the breaching of a boundary, of a social contract?

But social contracts don’t sit well alongside the question of pleasure or desire. Some of us may want to sleep with racists and may enjoy doing so; might we be racists nowhere else but in the privacy of our sex lives? Will’s experience of a contradiction between his politics and his pleasure made him reckon with what Davis and Dean referred to as an “unbinding” of the self. Sex provoked an extraordinary ambivalence for Will because it entailed consenting to his own violation.

Between Will and his partner, it became a case of the latter giving something he didn’t have (Will’s consent to be violated) to someone who didn’t want it.

•

By being messy, causing us to have mixed feelings about it, sex exceeds the scope of political binaries. We can’t simply experience it as either a positive or negative thing, in need of either being exalted or rebuked. Fred turned sex into a weapon against me because he could not tolerate being challenged. My friend turned sexual freedom into a joke, assigning sex a moral value in a direct relationship with illness. Will’s ambivalence toward being the object of a violation turned him inward, leading him to ask a set of existential questions about the conflict between his political affinities and his pleasure.

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Perhaps we make sex political to deal with it, precisely to make sense of our ambivalence. Perhaps this is our attempt at rationalizing our uncertainty, our self-dividedness, in relation to it. However we cut it, sex can be shattering, as Bersani so aptly put. We can’t help but be undone by our own ambivalence on the subject.

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AUTOPORTRAITURE Learning to recover the glory of Hervé Guibert

by Jonathan Alexander

H

ervé Guibert’s cock is beautiful. As soon as I say that, I feel I need to start making caveats and qualifications. I have, of course, never seen Hervé Guibert’s cock in real life. He died many years ago, in 1991, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the Western world. I was probably 22, 23, and while I had seen cocks not my own by that point, and while I had even had another boy’s cock in my mouth by then, my experience was limited. I have since seen many cocks. Few have propelled me toward activity with them. Few have even simply

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held my attention. But Guibert’s cock — that’s different. It holds my attention, and that surprises me.

I admit now that I am a particular kind of gay man. I do not adore penises.

I do not worship at phallic altars. In fact, I will go so far as to say that I think genitalia are rather unattractive. I worry over whether this is a form of self-hatred. At the very least it seems a form of sex-hatred, a real discomfort with sex. But perhaps it is also just a preference. After all, I adore a good-looking male butt. I’m constantly checking out guys’ rears. But their penises are frankly of less interest. Not no interest.

I have seen good-looking cocks. But I am not drawn to them like I am to a man’s ass.

But Hervé Guibert’s cock is an exception. It is beautiful. Guibert took a few different pictures of it, but I’m thinking in particular of one photograph, what he called one of his autoportraits, in which he stands in front of a mirror, without pants but charmingly wearing socks, holding a camera about chest height and snapping a photograph of his member. His tousled hair frames a face only slightly lost in the concentration on getting the shot right.

The penis, of quite respectable length, flaccid, is cut and points down, obscuring a view of his balls, surrounded by what appears to be trimmed pubic hair. This is a black-and-white photo, but the gradations of gray outline the shadows of this organ.

I won’t say I can’t take my eyes off this cock, but I have clearly studied it. I declare it to myself an object worthy of study.

I have been thinking about this one particular picture of Guibert’s cock because there has been renewed interest in the Frenchman’s writing and photography,

with more of his voluminous body of work being translated into English and with a recent exhibition of his photographs in France, particularly one at Les Douches la Galerie that marks the 30th anniversary of the artist’s death. You can easily find online a wealth of past exhibitions with an equal wealth of images, including many “autoportraits,” including a few of Guibert’s member.

Today, we would call such an autoportrait a “selfie” and a “dick pic.” I have received dick pics. I have also taken nude and partially nude selfies, but I have rarely taken a selfie of my own cock. So, for me at least, questions emerge. Why would one photograph one’s member, and then why would one send such photographs to other people? Some answers are perhaps obvious. Any dick pic I have received has been an attempt to excite me, to arouse my interest. Such attempts do not really work on me. I even find them somewhat distasteful.

This is not what I’m into. And this is perhaps why I do not take many pictures of my own penis. And even of the few I have, I do not intend to send them anywhere. I do not imagine a teleology of phallic selfies for myself, though I do not judge those who indulge such an imaginary. (An ass pic might be a different story.)

But Guibert’s picture of his cock isn’t exactly a selfie, having been taken long before the wide availability of smart phones.

He took this picture not with a cell phone but with a camera, and the film on which this image was imprinted had to be developed. This was not an image made for instant gratification. With that said, I can’t help but ask, though, was it made then to circulate after development? Could, and 65

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did, Guibert upload this image in some form onto the pre-Web internet? I think it highly unlikely, but I can imagine friends and lovers getting a gander of the image.

I am not phallically insensate enough to fail to imagine it causing some arousal among the Frenchman’s acquaintances.

(Did Michel Foucault see this image? Did it excite the philosopher?)

My parenthetical questions are attempts at self-deflection. Am I aroused by this photograph of Guibert’s cock? I am going to say no. And by that “no” I mean that I have not masturbated to this image.

I have not shown it to others and invited them to wonder at it as an object of erotic interest. You will likely not believe that my interest in this image of Guibert’s cock is more, we shall say, aesthetic than erotic.

But, in my defense, I think that I would find Guibert’s loose T-shirt and tube socks more erotically interesting than the flaccid but still rather impressive member. It’s the boyishness of the picture which is fetching, charming, sensual, gesturing toward the erotic. Perhaps, too, what is exciting to me is what we (and by “we” I mean “I”) might read into this image, a reading of a possible reason for its existence: the young photographer’s interest in his own body, his wonder at himself, and then too perhaps his desire to titillate, him imagining who will see this photograph. T? Vincent?

Michel? Roland, even? So many possibilities stem from one image.

I do not know what Guibert was thinking when he took this picture. But I can imagine that taking it was exciting.

(We see no physical arousal, but I wonder if there was a slight clear drip of pre-cum when Guibert put his camera down. Did he feel a tingling in his hips, a stirring, as 66

we say, in the groin?) My speculation is not unwarranted in Guibert’s case. Such excitation, if not explicit sexual arousal, would have been embedded in historical and political realities that Guibert spent much of his short life calling attention to, battling, struggling with, refuting, and fucking over — before they eventually fucked him over.

Perhaps I am not being completely honest here about my fascination (or expressed lack thereof ) with cocks. It’s hard to be honest about such things. We do not make it easy for each other to be honest, much less explicit, about such things.

So, in the interest of honesty, I admit some fascination with excessive cumming, with the “large load,” with fully erect cocks straining to spew forth geysers of semen, lacing a boy’s body with sticky thick strings of spooge, the cock throbbing to release yet more and more cum, then a further after-shot of jizm as the cock quivers one last time. But wait, another throb, an aftershock, the boy’s head rolling back, panting with the effort, the mess made. I download one video after another of such cocks spewing forth, the bigger the load the better. Is it the cock I’m interested in?

Or its performance? Its capacity to produce so much seed, seed that will lie fallow on the boy’s stomach, his chest, his legs, his face, only to be wiped away with a paper towel, washed down a drain? It is the exertion of such effort in the pure pursuit of pleasure that seems so right.

And then afterward, the letdown, the inevitable anti-climax. Even a bit of shame? What a waste, perhaps. Do we begrudge ourselves such pleasure, such solitary delight? By this point, I’m projecting. As with Guibert’s autoportrait, I don’t

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know what these boys are thinking. And to be fair, after I once shot a load over my shoulder I felt no shame, but instead some actual pride. Yes, I was proud. I’m bragging even now. I remember sitting in my chair at my desk at home, the desk where I wrote my books, graded my students’ papers, corresponded through email with my colleagues and collaborators. I paused in my work to jack off and must have been particularly aroused that day because, my pants slightly lowered, my head lolling back, I jerked and jerked until my cock exploded in a string of cum whose upper reaches landed on the back of my chair over my left shoulder. The left shoulder seems an important detail, if only to me. I felt no shame in that moment, or after, but rather, wonder — I felt wonder. This is not a daily occurrence. For me, this is a rare occurrence, and at my age it’s likely never to happen again.

If you haven’t grown up with self-hatred, with a queer self-loathing of your queer self, then I’m not entirely sure you can understand the wonder I am talking about. To experience one’s body make such pleasure … Already I have to stop because I realize how my language betrays me, how when I talk about this pleasure I slip into abstraction: “to experience one’s body…” Whose body is that if not mine?

So why do I say “one” and not “my”? My body? Our (no, my) self-hatred manifests at the level of the language we (and I) default to in talking about ourselves (myself ).

Photographing oneself, delighting in the excesses of one’s body — of our bodies — seems, in this context, a political act. I have a hard time believing that I am overstating that. It feels political. David Halperin has suggested that there is no

orgasm without ideology, by which he means that the pleasures we take are so often, if not indeed always, shaped by the social and cultural scripts that normalize and license desire, so that, even if you are engaging in nonnormative erotic practices, you are still in a sociocultural and hence broadly political relation. Your desires are political. So, photographing our cocks, and delighting in the spewing of cocks, can be, for queer people in this political context, a political act. I don’t feel this is all that controversial.

•

With that said, I can’t help but feel that photographing one’s cock takes a particular form of self-hatred. You set yourself up for the most vicious forms of critique, first from yourself and then from others if you make the picture public. What is that? Is that all you’ve got?

But in Guibert’s case, at least for me, I’m willing to forgive a lot. Objectively, I suppose, there’s not much to forgive. He’s got a good-looking cock. And he wasn’t shy about photographing it, or himself.

Indeed, Guibert took a lot of photos of himself, these autoportraits — a word, which, we must admit, sounds so much better than “selfie,” so much more sophisticated. So French. The related term, photobiography, seems clumsy and ham-fisted, although the term apparently appeared first in French. (Ah, the irony.) Nonetheless, engaging in such autoportraiture raise the question of why. Why photograph oneself ? The contemporary penchant for selfies speaks to a kind of narcissism that wants to stage the self in the best possible life, circulating these narcissistic images through social media as a form of 67

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cultural and material capital. Look where I am! Look at how glorious my life is!

But for Guibert? No, the same charge of narcissism seems anachronistic when levied at Guibert. Photographing himself and his lovers in the ’80s has a completely different historical valence. Given the homophobia of the time, such photographs are complex acts of self-love. They are declarations of beauty, not just of acknowledging but asserting one’s beauty when much of the rest of the world was intent on derogating, actively erasing, one’s very existence. To see Guibert’s autoportraits as just selfies, even early forms of selfies, is to view them without an historical consciousness, to engage in the erasure of the press of history on bodies and minds and spirits.

In this critical context, my love of Guibert’s cock photo is the love that we queers have fought to have for ourselves despite the hatred spewed at us. If I opened this section by saying that “photographing one’s cock takes a particular form of self-hatred,” I maintain that that statement is just as true as saying that such photographs are a form of self-love — because to assert one’s self-love in a homophobic context, one actively lethal to queers, is to nonetheless, despite the odds, take a chance that one’s love will overcome the hatred, that one will survive the hatred that one is practically calling on oneself by making such images, much less putting them into circulation.

•

But let’s get to the point. The political context is even thicker than overcoming simple internalized homophobia, although there’s nothing simple about that, let me 68

tell you. Indeed, I cannot look at Guibert’s cock in this picture and not think of AIDS. I’m not sure I can look at any cock and not think of AIDS, at some level however backgrounded or distant from overt consciousness. I turned 18 in 1985, in the Deep South of the United States, watching Rock Hudson die on national television. I will never not be aware of AIDS, of the possibility of transmission of HIV through a cock. The erect phallus stands at attention to death.

Overstated? Not if you lived through it.

Not if your coming into awareness of your interest in other men is contemporaneous with your awareness that certain kinds of sexual activity between men is deadly.

Things may have changed. HIV may be a manageable condition (for some, with the right access to the right health care).

Undetectable might now mean untransmittable. God I hope so. But I will never not wonder. This is the mark of those who grew up under the sign of AIDS. Guibert did not grow up under it, but he was victimized by AIDS, and served as a warning for the rest of us. We might think of all of his prodigious output, particularly after his diagnosis, as a warning, a call to wake the fuck up. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, The Compassion Protocol, Cytomegalovirus — the books that chronicle his deterioration from AIDS, a warning.

So, I look at this picture of Guibert with his substantial member and wonder: Did he know he was HIV positive when he took this autoportrait, this selfie? Is he showing off his penis to us, perhaps even to himself, still in the flush of youth, still looking healthy, the harbinger of his death

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lurking invisibly within, hidden behind this impressive cock? Or did he not know?

Did he look back at this image on the other side of a diagnosis and wonder if he were already infected but just didn’t know it yet when he snapped that image? I’m resisting the urge to find out, to investigate, to give in to the scholarly impulse to find out. I bet I could. But staying in this moment of unknowing is more generative.

Staying in this moment allows me to experience yet again the kind of unknowing that characterized so much of my youth.

Did I get it? Do I have it? Did he give it to me? Did that seemingly innocent playing around set in motion the particular trajectory of my demise? Should I have kept that cock out of my mouth?

I love Guibert’s cock because I see in it all of the cocks that have been the locus of such questions for so many young people.

I love Guibert’s cock because the alternative is too awful — hating it, hating myself, hating others like me, giving in to the hatred of gay and queer men that still to this day circulates like a virus in our culture, a virus just as deadly as any immune-deficiency-causing virus. I’m so fucking tired of hating myself, of continuing to swallow the bitter spunk of self-loathing forced down my throat, the psychic raping that started in my childhood, that ruined my adolescence, that perverted my adulthood, that taught me to despise myself all the more because I myself am a pervert, bent, wrong, turned, like something sour that should be thrown out, filled with diseased semen, impregnating others with nothing but death. The words fly across this keyboard, a frenzy of self-hatred spewing forth from my fingertips because these

are the words and phrases and mantras that still pulse beneath my skin, itching to come out. They are still so easy to write.

I can only meet them with the love of Guibert’s cock, with loving this dead man’s cock, with coming to adore something that, most of the time, I do not adore. After all, the imprinting is too deep: sex = death. I learned the lesson too well.

This is not just an ontology, a death drive pushing itself to the surface, but a history, a genealogy, a perverse inheritance from a sex-hating culture, a queer sex–hating culture. This is the negativity I live with, the self-hatred that’s intertwined in the marrow of my bones.

So I embrace my perversion. I work against my own inclinations not to love this cock, I work instead toward the desire to love any cock, because I have come to believe that this mild distaste for the male genitalia is something itself unnatural, an unnatural inclination given to me, fed to me with heaping spoonfuls of self-hatred served alongside my daily bread. Fuck them, O Lord, for fucking me over with this disinclination to the cock. Give me today my daily cock, my own and that of my brothers, my many brothers, my trans brothers, some dead, many more yet alive, with their beautiful cocks. Give me Guibert’s cock, as he offered it up in this selfie, this autoportrait, this autoerotic adoration of self and member, given so that all men might glory and wonder.

I have no illusion that sharing this adoration will save me, or “liberate” me from my internalized oppression. But still, I allow myself, finally, to wonder. And, more importantly, to glory in it. I am learning to recover the glory of the cock.

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Sultan, 14 years old from Nusaybin, Turkey, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

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Omar, 11 years old from Al Hasakah, Syria, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

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INTRODUCTION DO YOU LOVE ME?

by Perwana Nazif

Hands support through varying gestures in Foster’s works: embracing hands, carried by abstracted wings, or mirrored hands holding a sacred object, such as the two boys holding onto a basketball with eyes closed in Dreaming V, 2019. Hand holding and hand bearing genuflect.

Many of Foster’s works in his installation include a definitive front and back, yet despite access to such delineated dimensions, the distance remains. Images function as memories here. The distance between functioning as devotion expe-

The devotional aesthetics in the works present-

rienced, whether as kinship, ritualistic, romantic,

ed in this issue’s portfolio reiterate loss and

or otherwise, as its memory, with all its gaps and

alienation, as concurrent with the devotional and

liminalities. The journey from the hand to the

reparative aspects of love. The loss and potential

wing, hand to other hand, hand on the leather

of loss born from a Janus-faced devotion are

of the basketball, hand to me and hand to my

conceivably its binding agent and (non-quan-

younger palms touching each other for the sake

tifiably) its expansive factor. The suggestive

of a prayer I can’t recall, produces such devotion

laceration in Ron Miyashiro’s assemblages, the

precisely in the interval in its accelerating or

angel-winged hands in Lloyd Foster’s installa-

decelerating movement.

tion, and the flowers clinging to Yayoi Kusama’s umbrella as she walks around New York City cry-

In one of the many stills from Walking Piece,

ing in her pink kimono. Each cut, each wing, and

1966, Kusama sums up in one glance all that is

each flower bears the weight, holding together

behind her: the woman in white looking back, a

what we call love while simultaneously risking

group of friends laughing, the green bus in mo-

total collapse — as if perpetually in supplication.

tion, pink and yellow flowers desperately holding onto a black umbrella, and the sun’s exposure

The crux in Miyashiro’s works — realized in an

that disappears the brown building into a spec-

explicit crucifixion within an abstracted struc-

ter. She is divergent and convergent here — the

ture in Concord No. 8, 1963 — radiates violence,

flowers that will eventually fall onto her separate

penetration, and the transcendental. The sado-

her body from the laughing group, the bus that

masochistic appeal to his minimal, small-scale

moves away from her and the woman that looks

assemblages is not understated. Neither is it

back toward the other. That fall naturalized with

self-contained. Contradictions live comfortably

the flowers on her pink kimono also blends in

within this space. The cut and its potential of

with the building in threat of the effacing sun,

penetration and extravasation through eccle-

the object of the woman in white’s staring back

siastical and war machine imagery are unified

as if she has seen something out of the ordinary.

through conflict, yet there is a resistance toward

Kusama’s glance appears ambivalent, slowly

the glorification of the dialectic. Instead of a

assuming melancholy and then towards an inex-

drive toward clean synthesis, we are left with

plicable desire. This is a space where belonging

more and more ambiguous openings. The natu-

is pulled and stretched to invoke a pliancy that

ralized entanglement of pleasure and violence

can embrace such discrepancies. Love’s absolut-

proffers such openings: openings to slip into,

ism is referenced in these pages through its very

openings to come out of, openings to reproduce

fragility — the very genesis of these beseeches.

and expand, and openings to withhold.

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Lloyd Foster Saspo, 2021 Styrofoam, oil stick, coarse black magnum, acrylic paint and inkjet print 37.25 x 43 x 1.5 in.

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Lloyd Foster Daddy's girls, 2022 Styrofoam, coarse calcium carbonate, acrylic paint and inkjet print 6 x 4 x 1 in.

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Lloyd Foster, Dreaming V, 2019 from the series "Two Worlds Same Energy"

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Ronald Miyashiro Back in Time #29, 2002 Mixed-media on black paper panel Image courtesy Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

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Ron Miyashiro Concord No. 8, 1963 Wood, cardboard and enamel 6 x 11 x 6 inches Image courtesy Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

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PORTFOLIO

Yayoi Kusama, Walking Piece, c. 1966 © YAYOI KUSAMA Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, Ota Fine Arts, and Victoria Miro

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Yayoi Kusama, Walking Piece, c. 1966 © YAYOI KUSAMA Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, Ota Fine Arts, and Victoria Miro

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THE SOUND OF LOVE A RESPONSE

neighbors for eternity, an acoustic soul tribe.

They are in love. Miles played the sound of a scene that is so beautiful it’s tragic because we know it is doomed to vanish. Beauty is always a

by Harmony Holiday

desperate pursuit of a best self which is always, also, a ruin. Billie Holiday’s ruined voice entreats love and justice to mend the crackle of

It’s a little pathetic, asking those whose love or

despair. Stevie Wonder’s panicked satisfaction is

approval you seek if you are loved by them, to

the sound of love retracing itself back to the

request that impossible reassurance. And as the

first “maybe”, if it’s magic, then why can’t it be

adage goes if you have to ask, you’ll never know.

everlasting? The childlike innocence of Stevie’s

Once you pose the question, affections fold in-

writing turns a simple song into an inquisition

to suspicion and criminalized ambivalence.

forcing it to ask do you still love me? John

Seductive ambiguity gives way to neediness. The

Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” says if I can see

question is a confession that you don’t always

God in you, I will always love you, Allah supreme,

love or respect yourself enough to let love in

a love supreme. D’Angelo expands on the vanish-

through its own momentum, to be as gradual

ing nature of love by introducing raw sex appeal

and endless as it is, that you can’t detect its

into devotional love, making worship erotic

absence or its arrival without validation, and that

and then luring it to the side of romantic love

you are in the habit of being so secretive about

to intensify its bonds with god.

your own passions that they deflate unless announced by the others onto whom they are

Nancy Wilson sings about love when it’s domes-

projected. If you refuse to ask, you become

ticated into forever, Guess who I saw today?

a better listener, so that the sound, tone, and

She sees the haunted loyalty of the terminally

texture of real love becomes as recognizable

married. Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage”

as the vibration of your own voice saying yes, I do

lures that forever into improvised loops of secu-

love you, into the void of unconfessed emotions.

lar prayer, wherein the sound of love is distracted by defiance to its own logic. Too florid,

What are we listening for when listening in

too agile, the love in the sound of love turns to

hopes of noticing love? In Charles Mingus’ “Duke

habit. The songs begin to mimic the sound

Ellington’s Sound of Love,” he strums his bass

of love they invented and ask us if we love them,

until the tips of his fingers bleed beneath the

testing our commitment to song. Black music,

skin, their blushing flesh announcing Duke’s

born desperation to communicate with the lucid

chivalry, his ability to induce swoon with his

confidence of black aliveness and black being,

compositions even when he might have wanted

becomes the bait that allows listeners to

to be more defiant of his own romanticism. Miles

condone black life in the west. And if the music’s

Davis also demanded swoon. Perhaps it was this

central concern is being loved, its sound will

sacrificial charisma that inspired Miles to ask

pander to chivalry and militancy and struggle

to be buried beside Duke Ellington. Now they are

and in doing so, it will alienate its makers, just

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to fulfill the wish unequivocally. Sade reminds us in her dangerously sultry monotone: love is stronger than pride. For those who are too proud or too modest to inquire directly, music becomes a weapon of interrogation. If you love my rhythms you must love me. If you crave my sound, whether you love me or not, you love on my terms. We would risk every alienation to reinstate love’s sound before it became a commodity, a radio dream. The initial question is bottomless, abysmal, restorative, and still submerged in pathos — do you love me, do you love the way I sound before I became what I sound like, my first inaudible scream, which is the part of all of us that needs the most love. Love, here, is the willingness to find out why someone is crying out in song or form, and why they sound how they do when they speak, cry, or retreat into the hush that will never quite amount to silence.

Do you love me is code for do you listen to my music, do you love my sound, and when you turn the volume all the way down, can you hear the quiet tension between yearning to be loved and learning to be left alone with the sound of love?

That is love’s truest fantasy.

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FEELINGS An excerpt from Tricking Hour, forthcoming from Deluge Press

by Irene Silt

I

invoke others to feel what I resist in my own life. Right now I feel, all at once, everything I put aside in service of survival. I have met disgust and love with a blank face. I allow nothing to pass through me, in and out. These feelings cling to my body. I wash them off my skin in the shower, but the drain clogs and I am staring down at gray water.

When one is possessed by anger, there are distinct signs — a stern stare, red face, hurried walk, hair standing on end, unintelligible speech. Self-perversion of the distraught mind makes the air itself menacing, gloom falls over everything. Anger is demanding, meant to be seen. The repulsion others feel in the face of my anger is palpable. I have so much.

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But when I work, I am powered by a different energy. I arouse defensive behaviors. I am calm and slow, disarming and gentle. I guide and comfort, present myself, wet. With masterful suppression I am unaffected by all that is presented to me.

I collect my cash prize as a soft agent of attunement.

Sex workers deal in the proprioception of attunement and emotional sensing of others. This is the source of our power, knowing rhythm, affect and experience by close contact with others. To reach further than empathy to create a dyadic experience of unbroken connectedness by providing a reciprocal affect. The other source of our power is doing this outside of social norms or recognition.

I store my anger in my hair, long. I let it down, it does some of the work for me.

Silent, to be admired. I would like to cut it off, but it has not worn out its use.

Mostly, when I wanted to lash out, I didn’t. We will make the mistake to continue with the unbearable so that we can avoid reflection, work more as a way to not think about working. I visit man I hate after man I hate. I am here because I have worked too much. I have allowed my disavowal of limits to be mixed into the accumulation of wealth. The deterioration of my mind concurrent with that of the earth.

I am debased at the same rate life itself is debased, and by the same conditions.

I have pressed my heel into a man’s neck, dug my fingers into a sternum, openhandedly struck a face in the darkness of a lap dance booth. Afterward I had no satisfaction, weighed down with fear the club manager would hear of what I had done.

Nauseated as a jilted client comes back the 84

next night, trailing me in silence, texting me threats. My violence met with more violence. I may be justified and righteous in revenge, but it does not alleviate the fight-or-flight drive. I return to the feeling of inhibition, losing authentic experience with the world.

My madness shows itself to me when I cannot see anything. I look at a painting, the sea, my lover, and my anger betrays me.

All that is alive reminds me that I am a ghost. Madness shows that I am not what I used to be. I am disgusted with my anger, it cannot go anywhere it is meant to go.

Living requires criminal activity, with life being so crushed by power. Whoring came to me when I failed background checks. I know how to move through this terrain, make gains, shape it to my own choices. But how do I reckon with the concessions I have made for money? The work pervades my life, I can smell it on me. See it in the things I do, how I transport myself, where I sleep, what I eat, how I look.

•

I am exhausted. I have done this long enough to know that he will be waiting for my moment of weakness. When I put his name into the blacklist search, I saw no results. Really, he had so many entries, so many aliases in so many cities, that I mistook what I saw for the whole list, which in the twisted nature of industry, meant nothing for all it omitted. The list is not information until its stakes are registered as specific.

When I opened the door to his gaunt face and eyes, completely clear, I experienced the confusion of seeing nothing in

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the face of everything. I kissed him. The motion I am so well trained in.

Feelings have become something intolerable. My heart is in my mouth and I grow tired of myself. I must be ill. We know that fear produces flight, anger a rush. My decision to stay in the same embrace has planted a pit at my core, in defiance of regulated response patterns. I hate myself for every time I stayed, knowing that I stayed for the most rotten thing on earth. There has to be more than putting money to use.

I have had a man inside of me, inches from my face, putrid smell or expensive cologne, and wanted to scream in his face.

Wanted after the deep sound you emit into a canyon or at the ground after collapsing in despair. I’ve had pain radiate from my cunt all the way to my throat, raw skin and tight hips. Wanted to choke and knee him, say no. But I didn’t, I took the money.

There is of course an erotic pretense for violent ideation during sex. The hate fuck.

The insane explosivity fueled by rage. Rage against him, rage for our sake. He comes to me corrupted by work, and I continue the pattern with mine. Workaholics are always the most deranged. They pay for resonance, needing the structure of the work relation and mediation of money to create a place of hiding. Proximity to this drains my power. I feel his deadness in my mouth in the cab home alone, I drink in the bath to forget his misery. Sensation titrates an experience, I am not ready for a full-on catharsis.

In my work I have illuminated a path, offered expertise that adapts to each moment we are in. To pull emotions down from the ether, into now. To play with

those emotions and elicit bodily reactions I can’t summon for myself. Paleness, bursting into tears, lust, deep sighs, sudden flashes of the eyes. To relinquish. Underneath identity, the impulses of my body.

•

I use my body to transform another person’s relationship to their social identity.

This is a step out of empire and into life.

Off the rock and into the water. To hold their insides in your palm, feel them explore whether or not they are you, you are them. To change a power dynamic before the determination of a subject and sense, a temporality starting up again in the midst.

A relation arrives that is not based on identification or recognition but encounter and new compositions. I look for this association in sex, abstract concepts, new techniques, ambitious dreams, in the river, with all that is oriented toward the need for revolution. To experience again, everywhere, when the police were the ones running from us. Here is love, a life-making activity.

I experience these impulses in writing, through which I began remediating my relationship to want. The inability to act in the moment has made me, at times, unable to rouse anything to action. I desire unclouded and distinct action. My love and devotion to sex workers has shown me that this is our nature. I did not know gentleness until receiving the affection of a whore. Nothing has been more vicious to me than my own anger. I extend my hand from an arm of ambivalence, I do not invite the burden of hiding, I am relieved to have this out in the open. Take it, onward.

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ON THE STUDY OF THE PASSIONS, DIVINE INDICATIONS, AND THE MATERIAL WEALTH OF NATURE From the first-ever translation of The New Amorous World

by Charles Fourier, trans. Eberick Hashvay

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A

modern orateur rightly stated that simple common sense is oftentimes a more reliable guide than all the subtleties of science. Common sense tells us there is a God, whereas our savants, after 25 centuries of scientific subtleties, pretend either that God does not exist, or preach to us an apathetic and insufficient deity, wholly indifferent to our worldly fate. I, for my part, prefer to follow the impulse of common sense, which tells us that God has provided for our needs and that he must have furnished us with the means by which to discover everything necessary for their satisfaction. The delays we experience in this respect are not a cause for despair. The nautical compass, the need for which was so urgent, remained undiscovered for five thousand years. Its belated discovery demonstrates that God is not behind in point of providence, but that it is rather the human intellect which is delayed and at cross-purposes in its methods of exploration. Common sense once again tells us that if God has supplied pathways leading to salvation and collective happiness, he must also have taken care to provide indications by which to guide our investigations, particularly in the most important of these, which is that of the passional code. Until now the study of the Passions and their destinies has been a veritable region of darkness, and the human mind, after 25 centuries of failure in the field, will no doubt be terrified at the prospect of returning to combat.

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When the courage of both commanders and subordinates begins to falter, the intervention of a mere child is sometimes sufficient to revive their spirits. The 10-year-old David restored the confidence of all Israel when he slew Goliath. Joan of Arc, a simple shepherdess, electrified the French army and led it to victory. Our scholarly legions have fallen into a state of discouragement in which the established commanders no longer excite the least confidence, they too require that a simple child or a person of scientific instinct place himself at their head. It is my very obscurity which authorizes me to seize the reins at the moment when all hands begin to falter, when the human spirit is reduced to the most impotent whimpering, crying out with Voltaire: “How dense a night still veils all Nature’s face!”

Lost within the gloomy pit of shades, amid the moral and philosophical systems, let us begin by seeking out a beacon more secure than this so-called reason which has led us so utterly astray; let us rally to God and seek out his trace in the labyrinth. Where among our passions do we find some semblance of the divine spirit?

Is it in the furors of ambition, in our administrative and commercial treacheries, in the venality of friendships, or in the discords of the family? No, so much cupidity, deceitfulness, and greed attest to the absence of the divine spirit. But there remains a passion which preserves its primitive nobility, which maintains the sacred fire, and which imparts certain characteristics of the Divinity to the mortals of the Earth. This, of course, is the passion of love, divine flame, and veritable spirit of God, who is the quintessence of love. Is it not in 88

the transports of this passion that we are lifted to the heavens and identified with God? What pair of lovers fails to deify the object of their affections or to believe that together they partake in the happiness of the creator? Indeed, love is the most powerful agent of passional rapprochement, even between antipathetic characters; it is by virtue of love that the proud Diana comes to humanize with the shepherd Endymion; the other passions possess but very little of this influence conferred upon love for the bringing together of persons of disparate condition.

What are the other passions compared with love? Has it a single rival among them? Without it, there should be no more flowers on life’s way. Humanity, after the season of its loves, is condemned to merely vegetate, to numb itself with a host of illusions in order to divert its attention from the emptiness of the soul. Women, too little distracted, feel this truth in all its bitterness, and in their waning years seek in religion some shadow of the God which seems to have departed from them, along with their most cherished passion; they exist only in the hope of another life in which they shall be reborn into the happiness of loving and being loved.

Such too is the opinion of God; he thinks that man is an incomplete being without the passion of love; thus he has taken innumerable precautions to ensure to the aged of either sex the illusions and amorous recreations of the Harmonic Order, the theory of which we shall soon read. Our civilized elders are able to forget love, but not replace it; the passions of ambition and paternity are but paths strewn with brambles and briars; every

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sexagenarian exalts and laments the lost pleasures of their youth, and no stripling lad would ever consent to exchange his loves for the distractions of an old man.

It is thus love which holds the first rank among the passions; it is the king of public opinion, the ideal center. And it is in this passion, more than any other, that we must search out the trace of the divine spirit, the mark by which we may interpret God’s designs.

Yet for all of this, love remains the passion the most doggedly proscribed by the usages of Civilization, where the unique development allowed to it is a corrective bond known as marriage, the miseries of which should alone suffice to demonstrate that Civilization is in every way antithetical to the designs of God. And how could this scurrilous Civilization have failed to banish love, after having concluded so many centuries of study by banishing God himself, renouncing the divinity with their metaphysical subtleties and their atheists’ dictionaries? We shall pursue an entirely opposite course, allowing the passion of love and its possible developments to guide the theory of attraction in its researches into the passional mechanism intended by God. Our preliminary task is accomplished, we have discovered an indication which might serve to guide us in the passional labyrinth, a beacon around which to rally ourselves to the divine essence.

Rigorists who would banish the passion of love, philosophers who ridicule the religious spirit, do not read this treatise on attraction or the divine code; you will find in it nothing but the art of leading all humankind to a condition of shared happiness by

the paths of love and religion. However, if you wish to understand this happiness, so different from that of Civilization, a happiness which, I repeat, shall prove applicable to young and old alike, it should be recalled that there can be no rose without a thorn, and that I cannot, even on the subject of love and voluptuousness, present a science so absolutely new as that of attraction without occasionally exposing the reader to calculations bristling with difficulties. The harmony of 800 million individuals is certainly no small matter, but if 30 centuries of study may be dedicated to a science which leaves humanity groaning in a sinkhole of indigence, knavery, massacres, and oppression, may we not devote at least 30 days to the study of a new science which will raise these same 800 million individuals to a condition of opulence, truthfulness, liberty, and universal harmony?

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Cane, 8 years old from Ras al-Ayn, Syria, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

Neda, 10 years old from Al Hasakah, Syria, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

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Refai, 12 years old from Al Hasakah, Syria, Untitled from i saw the air fly (MACK Books) Image courtesy of Sirkhane DARKROOM

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WE LOST IT AT THE MOVIES Giving in to altered states

by Martha Southgate

T

he day after William Hurt died, I dug out my battered script of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July. Prior to launching his movie career, Hurt played wounded Vietnam vet Kenneth Talley in the 1978 off-Broadway production. I was a high school senior in Cleveland that year. I’ve never seen the play. The cover is a black-and-white photo of the cast, which features not only Hurt but a very young Jeff Daniels. I own it because, in my 93

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senior year Smith College acting class production of Fifth of July, I played Kenneth Talley, and I’ve kept it because I fell for Hurt — the man on the screen — after I saw Altered States in 1980 and have carried a tender place for him ever since. When I wistfully opened the book, to my surprise, I found a small, penciled note: “M.S. + W.H. Forever.” I was 21 when I wrote that.

Let’s get this out of the way first — Altered States is a completely insane film that’s also pretty sexist (though I didn’t recognize that part at the time). I think its absolute unhingedness has much to recommend it, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who disagrees. In a crucial scene, Hurt’s character, Edward Jessup, shouts the wild monologue below at his wife and friends in a Boston bar. The tirade ends when he looks away from them all, a sweaty, mad mystic gazing up fervently at the ceiling and the heavens beyond. At that moment, I was sucked into the vortex with him.

I’m a man in search of his true self.

How archetypically American can you get? Everybody’s looking for their true selves. We’re all trying to fulfill ourselves, understand ourselves, get in touch with ourselves, face the reality of ourselves, explore ourselves, expand ourselves. Ever since we dispensed with God, we’ve got nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life. […] Well, I think that that true self, that original self, that first self is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing, tangible and incarnate. And I’m going to find the fucker.

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After this night out, Jessup becomes increasingly obsessed with alternate states of consciousness, using a sensory-deprivation tank and hallucinogenic drugs to the point where — wait for it — his body disappears completely, reduced to the primordial seed of the universe, only to be brought back to human form by the embrace of his loving wife Emily, played by Blair Brown.

You had to be there.

Which is kind of the point. It’s a movie.

If I hadn’t been enveloped by those cheesy, yet compelling, images, swallowed up in the darkness along with those characters as they shouted their way through the strangely stilted dialogue, the overwhelming weird visions, and the nonstop flash, there’s no way that the film would have wormed its way under my skin. Watching it at home after Hurt’s death, I glimpsed how the repeated images of Hurt vulnerable and naked (spiritually and often literally), being protected by mother/ wife Brown, spoke to sensitive young me at a level operating somewhere beyond language, a level unreachable when you haven’t had to leave your brightly lit living room to go sit in the unfamiliar dark, when you know you can stop the movie at any point to go to the bathroom or get a snack. The movie itself — any movie experienced in a theater — is both an isolation tank and the thing that brings you back from it, a dark retreat that can cure a kind of loneliness, the kind that my vision of William Hurt comforted in me.

I’m 61, a Black woman, a writer. Hurt was a white man successful in a business well known for abusing and neglecting people like me. I know now that he was

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accused of physical and sexual abuse by two women he was involved with; I don’t dismiss the seriousness of those charges, nor do I disbelieve them. But I can’t undo who I was or what his presence as an actor — as a movie star — meant to me. In the 1980s, the ways in which those stories would have been widely disseminated (or the culture in which they would be believed) didn’t exist. It’s not just that there wasn’t an internet to instantaneously spread word about everything; it was a time when the walls were eroding but they weren’t yet down; where rumors of abuse were ignored or glossed over, even when they were common knowledge in the industry; when fans didn’t have to wrestle with what was behind the facade, because they didn’t know. So, I’m gonna leave that fangirl with her pure, uninformed heart, not chastise or disavow her. I wouldn’t take her love for the movie version of William Hurt away for all the world. That face — and his movies, and the movie culture his films were a part of — helped her get through some really hard times and for that, she … yes, I … will always be grateful.

Hurt died on March 13, 2022, a week before his 72nd birthday and two weeks to the day before the 94th Annual Academy Awards ceremony, the first to be held maskless and in a large venue since the 92nd Academy Awards, held in February 2020. At the 2022 ceremony, as has been endlessly discussed, parsed, essayed, memed, etc, a different guy named Will (full name: Willard Carroll Smith II), provoked by a joke about his wife’s shaved head, strode up onto the stage, hauled off and “smacked the shit out of ” Chris Rock. That blow did not only stun Rock.

It emptied the isolation tank. It smacked the shit out of the Hollywood-loving girl I was — in some ways — right until that minute.

•

For much of my adolescence, I hoped to become a filmmaker. I read Donald Bogle’s seminal history of Blacks in cinema, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, over and over. I took American Cinematographer and Film Comment out from the high school library. The words of Andrew Sarris and other New York film critics were my gospel. I went with my mother to see classics at the Case Western Reserve film society screenings — I’ll never forget the shock of the beginning of Harold and Maude (I won’t tell you what happens). I went to see what was then simply called Star Wars (it’ll never be Episode IV: A New Hope, as far as I’m concerned) 10 times in a month. The Turning Point, 10 times or more. The Breakfast Club at least eight, once sitting in the theater for back-to-back screenings. The poster for Days of Heaven graced my dorm wall for my whole college career. I was heartbroken when I applied for a film fellowship at Columbia Pictures and didn’t get it.

The time of my formative passion for the movies came after the 1960s and ’70s, the period that transitioned from the liberal earnestness of Sidney Poitier’s heyday through so-called “blaxploitation” movies, but before Spike Lee’s arrival on the scene in 1986, with She’s Gotta Have It. Lee’s determination and the success of his film opened the doors for a rush of Black filmmakers and a range of Black stories to finally get greenlit. From the late 1970s 95

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through the late 1980s, loving popular mo- released in 1978. I saw it at the Paris Theater, vies meant loving a lot of movies full of the grand arthouse near the legendary Plaza Hotel. It was a glamorous spot when white people. And I did, without reserve.

A lot of the ones I love most are what it opened in 1948. Marlene Dietrich cut you might call “regular” ones — some the inaugural ribbon. In the years to come, might say mainstream, others middlebrow. the theater became known for premiering Sure, of course, hats off to the makers of iconic foreign films such as Belle de Jour as masterworks — Scorsese, Coppola, and the well as arty English-language films like like. But in my heart, there’s also Broadcast Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. As the years News, The Big Chill. Terms of Endearment. went on, faced with declining audiences Ordinary People (though I have no prob- and decreasing demand for a large movie lem conceding that it shouldn’t have theater, it closed in 2019.

But wait, there’s more! In 2020, just beaten out Raging Bull for the Oscar for Best Picture of 1980). The most skillful like in the movies, an unlikely, if self-incommercial films sometimes connect- terested, savior rode into town to renovate ed as intended and, other times, grabbed the theater and save it from certain deme in surprising ways. When I saw Fatal struction — Netflix. The company known Attraction, I felt seen. Not long before I for providing us with an overwhelming saw it, I went through a bad breakup with amount of stuff to watch at home decida guy I Could. Not. Get. Over. Granted, ed that they needed a big screen venue I didn’t stalk him. I didn’t boil his kid’s as a prestige outlet for their Oscar hoperabbit. But when Glenn Close sat on the fuls. They renovated the space and profloor listening to Madame Butterfly, her grammed thematically related classics in eyes staring into the void as she switched repertory with their original films. Days of that lamp off and on, I shared the agony of Heaven appeared for one day only because thinking — of knowing — you are going to Jane Campion cited it as an influence on go crazy without this person, even though The Power of the Dog. I don’t remember whether I ever saw it makes no sense at all nor that the relationship is a disaster. As with Altered Days of Heaven on a screen as big as the States, I was once again in the isolation one at The Paris. My moviegoing life tank, connecting with a universe that was overlapped with the birth of the multiboth mine and not-mine. In the darkness, plex, which began the process of screen we make a compact with the screen to sur- shrinking that has brought us to watching render until it’s over. Even if you walk out, our phones; Days of Heaven is the antiththe movie continues. Surrender can be esis of a phone-watch, from the exquisite beautiful. Surrendering to Glenn Close’s photo montage scored to “Carnival of the despair helped me connect more deeply Animals” that opens the film through the with mine and began to heal it. That’s a late Linda Manz’s final words, “Maybe she’d meet up with a character. I was hopin’ beautiful thing.

I recently had a chance to surrender things would work out for her. She was a again to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, good friend of mine.” Seeing this movie 96

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at its intended scale was staggering. The and resumed in 2022, movie screenings majesty that Malick and his cinematog- returned, once again courtesy of an unraphers Nestor Almendros and Haskell expected (and, in this case, non-corpoWexler captured can’t be described in rate) savior — the Miranda Family Fund, words or seen as it should be on even the a foundation created from the millions biggest television screen — you’re just that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s epic success kind of getting the drift, a half-image has brought to him and, from him, to the of what’s happening. It’s not just a visu- places and people he loves. One of the al experience but a physical one — there places he loves is the Washington Heights were moments where I had goosebumps. neighborhood where he has lived most his The gorgeousness extends to the leading life, not too far from the United Palace. In players; Richard Gere, Sam Shepard, and collaboration with the efforts of executive Brooke Adams are so radiant that it’s al- producer Mike Fitelson, the fund paid for most blinding. And Manz’s idiosyncratic extensive renovations to the theater invoice and phrasing present one aural as- cluding installing state-of-the-art screentonishment after another. The immensity ing equipment. And once a month, they of ambition and execution reminded me show movies — really big ones.

All About Eve isn’t so much visuals as of why I wanted to be a filmmaker in a it is about language — movie language — way I hadn’t been reminded of in years.

About a month or so later, I saw All at its shiniest, most unrealistic, but ohAbout Eve at the United Palace, a lav- so-fabulous peak. Even so, seeing it the ish vaudeville-era venue built in 1930, in way it would have been seen in 1950, the which nearly every surface is covered with year of its release, allowed me to closely ornate filigree. When you enter, you are observe the rhythms — the long shots greeted by a carpeted staircase so grand held on the women’s faces (but not the that you expect a golden-era movie star men’s), the open necklines that create softto come sweeping down, even on a rainy ness on the female figure even as their lanSaturday morning as you stand there in guage is brittle, the richness of the blacks your jeans and T-shirt. The Loew’s movie and whites. I found myself gazing closely chain owned the theater until 1969, but it at the scalloped neckline of Anne Baxter’s became less and less financially viable as dress in one scene, more touched by the both the movie business and the neigh- whirl of Bette Davis’s hair as she flung borhood changed around it. Ultimately, herself on a bed in another. I didn’t know it was purchased by the legendary Black what I was missing in the millions of times evangelical preacher Reverend Ike as a I’ve seen that movie on television. I feel place for his church to gather. A version blessed to have had the opportunity to see of that community, The United Palace of the full picture.

Spiritual Arts, meets there still on Sundays.

• As far as movies go, that was the end of the story for many years. But wait, there’s The last movie I saw before the pandemic more! Starting in 2019, paused in 2020, shutdown was The Photograph, a pleasant 97

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romance starring LaKeith Stanfield and Issa Rae. I still have the electronic ticket in my Apple wallet, dated March 7, 2020.

During the shutdown, I kept announcing to people, in a continual state of slight alarm and astonishment, that I’d never gone this long, this long, this long in my adult life without going to the movies. But I watched the 2021 Oscars anyway. It was a bleak affair, everyone seated and masked and muted. Chloé Zhao’s historic win for Best Director was as quiet as the sneakers she wore to walk up and receive it. I liked Nomadland okay, but I know that the film was ill served by the way viewers, including me, saw it — at home. A filmmaker who, when stuck, asks herself, “What would Werner Herzog do?” is not making a movie that you can deeply comprehend if you stop to text your sister in the middle of it. The pandemic forced Zhao’s vision into a space much smaller than it deserved.

Even as the Oscar ceremony has slipped and slipped and slipped in ratings, in relevance, in how interesting it is to watch, in everything, I never miss it.

This year, before the ceremony began, my friend Emily Nussbaum tweeted, “I get that everyone is media trained and grateful and appreciative of their opportunities and their fellow cast members but I crave CHAOS.” About three hours later I texted her, “I think you got your chaos. OMG.” In my movie-addled mind and heart, that chaotic moment was oddly emblematic of the death of the Hollywood I grew up on and the birth of a Hollywood that is cracking open into something yet unknown. To see a movie star lose it and slap a fellow movie guy (Chris Rock isn’t exactly a star, but he’s certainly a big deal and a 98

former Oscars host) at the public celebration of the movie industry thrown by the movie industry, felt like a slap in the face of … everything? I’m not talking about the dynamic between the two men, or the dynamic between Will and his wife, or about the many, many conjectures about what it all meant as far as race, culture, gender, hair, the pandemic, etc. And I’m not saying that the industry doesn’t deserve a big slap, doesn’t need to change in a million ways.

I’m saying that for me, as the ceremony staggered on after the slap and the very blond, blue-eyed, dear-to-me, now-dead William Hurt slid by “In Memoriam” with so many other (mostly white) faces, my heart broke a little. I’m saying that I felt my own aging and the loss of the young woman I was just a little more keenly.

Will Smith achieved his stardom in the waning days of the Hollywood in which William Hurt’s career was forged.

Smith’s success also represented a significant change — for a while, the most financially successful movie star in the world was a Black man. Smith is 53. As he was coming up, movies that took place in the human realm were still widely enjoyed and were the most respected, but movies with nonhuman activities were beginning to make the most money. The kind of domestic drama Hurt often starred in was fading as a money-making proposition, but there was still room for stars if they knew what sold. Will Smith made it his business to know. In a post-slap New York Times article about his brand, I was amazed to read: “With a business partner, James Lassiter, Mr. Smith plotted out, with actuarial zeal, the commonalities among hit movies: special effects, aliens, a love story.”

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The ice-cold calculus worked. In the same article: “From 2002 to 2008, he starred in eight consecutive films that each grossed more than $100 million domestically.” He was big, bigger than William Hurt had ever been, in a world that embraced a different kind of film, a different kind of hero.

Smith’s most financially successful films happened in a somewhat deracinated space. They weren’t about race, they didn’t comment on race, but neither was his presence whitewashed or muted. He was definitely African American, maintaining a sprightly inner-city vibe, grown on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and honed for many years after. A man who has been tightly wrapped his whole career, who has exposed his family’s private life as part of his brand, who has always been Black — but not scary Black — just snapped. The street came out, the nine-year-old who saw his father smack the shit out of his mother came out, the middle-aged man caught in a business that is changing under his feet came out. One little fight and we all got scared. My guess is, when he’s lying in bed at home in the sprawling aftermath, that he is too.

In his review of King Richard, A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote: [it’s a] “fundamentally — and I would say marvelously — old-fashioned entertainment, a sports drama that is also an appealing, socially alert story of perseverance and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence.” Scott goes on to say that “[i]n the best Hollywood tradition, ‘King Richard’ stirs up a lot of emotion while remaining buoyant and engaging.” And yet, moving forward, it’s likely they’ll be making fewer films “in the best Hollywood tradition”

every year, because they (audiences, that is) don’t go to see ’em anymore. King Richard was a critical success but a box office failure, as were many of the 2021 Oscar nominees.

This process of erosion was already well underway before COVID sped matters up to a previously unimaginable degree, compounded by the many months no one could go to the movies and the switch to debuting blockbusters and tentpole productions on streaming platforms. For many, the habit of moviegoing, already wavering due to inconvenience and expense, was finally broken. You’ve been at home all this time.

It’s still a little scary out there. And you don’t have to wait months any more to see it at home — it’ll be there in just a couple of weeks. Plenty to watch while you’re waiting, if you’re waiting, if you even care.

As we all know by now, nothing in this world is entirely predictable and that includes where the movie business is headed.

Maybe people will return en masse. But as I write this in May 2022, the movies that are making big money are big brand extensions, big spectacle, and big superheroes. With the possibility that they’re not gonna keep making ’em like that anymore — big-budget films with original stories and no brand extension value — Will Smith, an actor who was the biggest Black superstar, who first stood alongside and then partially moved aside the William Hurts of the 1980s, might not have a place anymore either.

•

William Hurt’s death and Will Smith’s slap keep ringing through me; a connection that’s clear to my soul, though hard 99

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to explain outside it. To me, both events mark the end of an era: an era when everyone went to the movies; an era where the movies mattered on a large scale; an era where we embraced the isolation tank, the surrender, the giving up control of what we’re watching for two sometimes-magical hours.

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times had this to say in her post-Oscar roundup conversation: “The movie industry is changing and is no longer the citadel of white male power that it once was.”

The movies I grew up on were products of that citadel, and that citadel must fall.

The abuses it held are too many and too vicious. Too many were hurt. Too many voices were not heard, not permitted to even speak. But products of that version of the movie industry helped make me who I am. Occasionally, products of that institution speak to what it is to be human in a messy way that defies explanation, that transcends identity and glories in gray areas, that lives in the body where logic disappears. That disappearance happens in the dark of a theater and then in the dark of a heart.

The late Laurie Colwin wrote a short story, “Saint Anthony of the Desert,” that I have always loved. In it, a young woman begins to emerge from a painful love affair.

After weeks of crying in her apartment and rarely seeing daylight, she finally goes outside and a local cat — one that belongs to her whole neighborhood — stops and licks her cheek. She bursts into tears. Colwin writes, “My tears over that cat were simply tears of envy over what would never be mine to give again: that witless, spontaneous affection; that hungry purposeless 100

availability; that innocence.” Part of growing old is having to give up and give over, to concede to time’s endless march, even as (ideally) wisdom is gained. Change is inevitable and sometimes for the better.

But oh, the availability of that girl who sat through movies five, eight, 10 times in a row. I miss the exhilaration of moviegoing being a large, shared cultural enterprise, the thing you talked about at dinner parties, the isolation tank everybody floated around in. I miss the movie-mad young woman who was witlessly gonna love W. H. forever. And I miss the dream that that love represented. I miss who I was — who we all might be — at The Movies.

Gillian Garcia, Untitled from series Istasyon

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THE 100% SILICONE VIBRATING ASS & PUSSY SPEAKS

by Elaine Hsieh Chou

I

get to know him through his habits.

In preparation, he spreads apart my cheeks and kneads them. He licks me but doesn’t seem to appreciate the taste of my phthalates-free material because his face pinches into a pucker.

The applying of lube — brand name, hello! — is practically reverent. I have a feeling he wasn’t touched enough as an infant.

Then follow the usual to-and-fro banalities. He prefers pussy to ass then ass to pussy. I think he’s interested in spanking — meaning he does it without confidence, assaying his own enjoyment (do I like it? am I a spanker?). He transfers the same

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ambivalent attitude to obscenities. Of rhetorical questions, he’s an amateur. I humor him, silently, in the affirmative: I am. He gives me a name and whines it over and over, and despite the purpose I’ve been built for, I feel embarrassed for him. Clean up is warm tap water and lemon-scented dish soap, astringent but sanitary, then patted dry on a towel. At least I don’t have to worry about UTIs. Sometimes, after he finishes, he kisses me on both my cheeks and I hate him for it. I didn’t know what to expect from a man who bought me at 5:00 a.m. with a Black Friday promo code, but I didn’t expect this.

•

He keeps me on his desk, affording me a generous view of his computer screen. I want so badly to live inside his screensaver images: a beach, a snowy forest, a sunlit park. I’ve never been on a picnic before but I think I’d like it. Eating food (food you could easily eat indoors) on a blanket, outside, just because? Sounds useless but nice.

I can never savor these pleasant images for long before they’re replaced with: “anal creampie” or “teen gangbang.”

How he looks at these women with heads and arms: devotion, awe, something close to spite. I become unreasonably interested in them: I wonder about their real names, their hobbies, if they always wanted to be a porn star or if they wanted to be, like, a cruise director.

And yet, when a woman engages in acrobatic performances making use of all four limbs such that I can never hope to mimic, I can’t help but think: fucking show-off.

Sometimes he watches them for so long, I think he’s forgotten my presence.

A curdling sensation envelops me, a desire to unplug the screen and veer his attention back to me. Those women are 24-bit pixels while I, all glorious synthetic flesh, sit patiently before him. Relief (instantly revoked by disgust) when he props me on his lap and rams into me, ass-first. And then I think I’m sick. I’m the one who must have come from an unloving home.

•

He’s started sleeping with me, a habit that shits on my physical (and emotional) boundaries. He squishes me against his chest and lobs a sweaty arm across me.

As the night wears on, I am turned upside-down or wriggled to the bed’s edge, dusted in lint and crumbs, which — any way you look at it — feels anti-feminist.

After two weeks, he admits he loves me. I wait for the familiar twist of disgust to knife through me but — sucker that I am — something common and predictable in me thrills to the words.

•

Like a married couple, we fall into a rhythm. On weekdays, when he returns home from work or in the morning following especially vivid dreams. On the weekends, up to three times at any hour of the day.

He’s stopped visiting me (I like this word, visit, the distant cousin of permission) without additional stimuli. Now he automatically boots up his computer and I learn his fixation of the week: MILF, lesbian strap-on, breastfeeding, uncensored hentai.

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He lets me sleep on the floor rather than bring me to bed and I think, now that’s really thoughtful. He switches from brand name lube to generic and when he hasn’t had time to restock, a cloying hand lotion that irritates my labia. I don’t mind — I’m surely a drain on his finances.

I mean, I don’t even have a job.

But I’m happy to accommodate him.

It’s what I was made for: the patent to my patent.

•

When he lifts me into the stale darkness of his closet, I think we’re playing a naughty new game. Naked hide and seek?

But he clicks the door shut and disappears for hours.

Then: A woman’s mellow voice, her light tread on the carpet. Through the slats, I see him sweating mutely, his gestures clumsy, and a weirdly maternal excess of concern overtakes me. I want to straighten his shirt, fix his hair, tell him to look someone in the eyes when speaking, it’s a matter of politeness. What is wrong with me?

She’s not what I would call eager but — pliant. Yes, very pliant. He climbs on top of her, then she on him. I’m just happy my ass is tighter than hers. I’m allowed my personality flaws.

Hey! What’s so great about her, anyway?

I shout. But he doesn’t hear me — he never could. And besides, he is busy touching her, so gently, and meanwhile I have never felt so finite.

•

I wait for the woman to be expelled. And for the first few months, she only appears 104

at night and on the weekends. He locks me in his closet, cutting me off from the soft streetlight in the window, the low vibration of passing cars, the screensaver of a milky waterfall.

Sometimes he doesn’t take me out for days, even when she’s gone. I wait for him to say, “Sorry.” “Sorry for shutting you up in there — I’ve just been so busy lately. Work sucks. My boss is really coming down on me, you know how it is. But thanks for sticking around and hey, I want you to know I don’t take you for granted.

One day we’ll go on that picnic. Promise.”

•

His search terms adopt a foreign tone: romantic, passionate, lovemaking, female orgasm.

Instead of my name, hers is the one he suckles. The pleading in his voice makes me chafe, in more ways than one. I want to punish myself because how could I have been deceived by a ruse I was in on from the beginning?

He isn’t even an interesting or especially kind man. I suppose he’s the only man I know.

•

After a while, she never leaves.

I watch the two of them on his bed, her hands clasped (a bit desperately, if you ask me) around the pale ridge of his back.

A ring flashes on her left hand — flinging the light at my loss, blinding me with her happiness.

He only takes me out once more when she is out of town. Somehow, I understand this is the last time (feminine intuition?).

When he positions me on the mattress, I

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wait to be anointed by tenderness, like a reluctant goodbye kiss. But the sex is hurried and painful, and without bothering to disinfect me, it’s over.

When he carries me from his bedroom, I take in the rest of the house for the first time. Photos tilt on the wall, of other faces bearing joyless smiles. I think I see one of him as a kid — even then, how very ordinary.

The thought of going outside, of drinking in the gasping blue sky, is almost too much happiness to bear, but instead he swings open the door to the garage. It smells in here, of dampness and forgetfulness.

I’m folded up in a shower curtain and lowered into a cardboard box. What clutters against me? It’s too dark to tell but I sense kitchen appliances. Weight bears down: more boxes heaved on top. He has left me where objects shorn of use retire.

A whisk presses into my ass and I think, at least I won’t be lonely.

years have passed, I feel we’ve become strangers. What to say to him after all this time? Something casual. Don’t act needy.

Oh! But it isn’t him holding me up to the fluorescent light and squinting through the shower curtain. It isn’t him unwrapping and dropping me — how I still delight in my eternal jiggle — back into the cardboard box.

It’s his wife. Her lovely face screws up into a range of emotion I cannot describe.

“Hello?” I say, and I am every bit as surprised as her.

•

A favorite fantasy: He tucks me in his bicycle’s basket and the wind laps at me, soft as cotton. He lays me out on a red-andwhite-checked cloth along with triangle sandwiches and sliced fruit, so perfect they look plastic. I can see the sun and the clouds and if we stay long enough, their different temperaments and moods, the way his screensaver shifts from day to night, night to day.

•

When a slant of light pierces through the box, I want to cry. Today I will finally venture outside, I’m sure of it. But so many 105

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A RED BLIGHT

by Juan Cárdenas, trans. Lizzie Davis

N

ow I'd like to touch briefly on the surreal apparition of a bridge. It must have been ’95, the start of the summer after we finished high school. My friend Chino and I were headed down a yellow dirt road, and who was that coming up behind us? Milena and her friends, of course — their names, I don’t remember. We were on our way back from the campesino co-op, we’d gone for cans of tuna, some eggs, a crate of Póker beer.

Chino and I were doing our best to carry it all. We had to stop now and then, because we were skinny, the both of us, and not

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very tall; we’d set the crate on the ground and mop off our sweat with our dusty forearms. This sun isn’t fucking around, Chino said, and the girls, I can see it now, they climbed up a tree, the guamas were ripe, and we acted like we couldn’t see their legs.

Come on! Chino yelled, but they ignored him, kept eating the cottony skin of the fruit, throwing black seeds at us, laughing, ridiculous. You come on, you pussies! yelled Melena, who was like that, precocious, and always got carried away.

We ignored her too. We just waited for them to finish doing their thing up in the guama branches, and let the wind circle us, pulling along their laughter and the shouts of some campesinos who played soccer there that time of day, up on the field in front of the co-op. Chino observed that the river was very low. Summer’s giving its all, he said, but we can still swim at Monte Agraz, no problem, and even jump off the cliffs, you’ll see. Monte Agraz was the land Chino’s family owned. That’s where we were, our minds elsewhere, when we heard a motorbike coming along.

It was Pipo on his Yamaha 175. On the back was a guy we called Bofe who never cracked a smile. He only laughed on the inside, like he was swallowing up his laughter, and no one knew a thing about him or his life except for Pipo, who went all over the place with Bofe and would have fought anyone for him. Pipo stopped at the foot of the guama and, with motor still on, he started to chat up the girls.

Eventually, he offered to take one, whoever wanted to go, to Monte Agraz. Get off, Bofe, he said. And Bofe obeyed so that, obviously, Milena could get on, and the other two even hid any hint that they

wished they were in her place. Pipo and Milena blazed by, and two seconds later they vanished behind the first curve in the road. The other two shuffled over, as if whipped by Milena’s display of power.

Chino had gone over to the riverbank to look for a piece of bamboo we could slide through the crate handles, so we could carry the beer on our shoulders. The girls couldn’t make up their minds: first we were two costaleros carrying floats for Semana Santa, then two servants carrying white people’s luggage in Tarzan. It was easier to carry like that, but we still had to stop and rest sometimes. Bofe followed behind, not a word came out of him, mug fixed right on the ground. His presence was so subtle the girls hardly noticed him.

An hour later, we got to the entrance to Monte Agraz, shirts soaked with sweat.

Pipo, Milena, and four other nobodies, who’d snuck their way in who knows how, were half-naked already, laying out poolside, music cranked all the way up.

Vallenatos, which is what people listened to then. The start of an era, you could say, the era of teenagers with pool water up to their waists, the bottle of guaro held high, those ragged vocals, too sentimental, love as a barricade hiding … I don’t know what, hiding something. Now we know the notes of the vallenato are written in barbed wire around land irrigated with blood, but back then they still seemed like an innocent demonstration of lightness. Pure show. Didn’t the Pythagoreans say we should fear a change in music taste more than a change in administration?

Well, that’s what it was, what they were, those kids, those vallenateros — they knew all the lyrics by heart, and they sang them, 107

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almost screaming, and drank guaro from small plastic cups. A musical change of regime.

The only ones not singing, or half singing just for sociability’s sake, were Chino and me. And Bofe, because back then, we still didn’t know what music he liked, or if he liked music at all. In the span of a couple years, Chino and I had gone from techno and house to punk, but since we were too provincial and proud to admit that we still liked electronic music, and dance music, we publicly declared ourselves rabid enemies of anything with synths. And against all odds, there we were, standing out but sitting on the edge, legs stuck in icy water.

It was that or what Bofe was doing: playing loner beneath a plantain tree. Chino and I were holding out hope that one of those girls would look at us the way they’d been looking at Pipo, and another one of the heartthrobs, a tall blond kid who always dressed well, even there, in the middle of nowhere: shorts and sandals, yeah, but a nice floral shirt up top, and he slid down his sunglasses over and over, just to show off his blue eyes. Neither Chino nor I had mastered that kind of flirtation. To tell you the truth, we’d mastered no flirtation at all. We had no idea how to catch anyone’s eye, but it’s true there was something classy in that: we were patient, and we assumed that no one would touch us, not with a 10-foot pole.

That afternoon, I made a big pot of tuna pasta for everyone, and when it got a little later, because the sun was still beating down on us, and because Chino insisted, we decided to go off in search of the famous swimming holes. We walked a long time, crossed coffee fields and pastures, 108

and then we came to the tracks of a train that hadn’t been through in forty years at least. There was a nobleness to those ruins, the old wooden cross ties, the stretches of rail that hadn’t been carried off yet, to sell as scrap. There was a tract of at least two kilometers where Chino’s parents were running a brujita — a little witch, that’s what they call handcars over there. We piled onto the wooden platform, and Pipo and Bofe grabbed either end of the lever and set the brujita in motion. We weren’t moving very fast, but it was nice going down the tracks on an improvised flying carpet. One of Milena’s friends had been glued to her wannabe boyfriend the whole time. They’d been talking soft to each other. I listened in and was surprised to hear them going on about biology — birds, to be precise, a topic I also found interesting.

The girl abruptly changed the subject, murmured something about starting college: she was finding it hard to convince her dad about the major, who of course had hoped she’d pick something useful, with better prospects. The kid let out a sharp laugh and said maybe he was better off fatherless. The girl gave him a tight smile, she didn’t know what to say, so the wannabe had to explain himself: my mom raised my brother and me on her own, we have no idea who our dad is, but it’s no difference. Plus, he said, we’re not highschoolers anymore. Everything’s going to change when we get to college and stop being a bunch of brats. That, everyone on the brujita could hear. Minutes passed, and no one said a thing. Then Pipo tried to talk us into another vallenato, but no one jumped in to humor his wounded-male howling.

Real pals you are, he said, and there was

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nothing for him to do but keep pushing the lever in silence, till we got to the end of the track. From there on out, there were no rails, not even sleepers, and the yellow path looked like a toothless gum.

We kept on that defanged path for a while, sometimes pushing through mountains of brush that sprung up in ditches left by the rails, and it was then that I realized I was surrounded by little impromptu pairs. The two who’d been talking about birds, of course; but also Chino and Blue Eyes; Pipo and his faithful Bofe; Milena and the other guy. At the end of the line, stragglers, maybe up to something, still laughing nonstop, the two girls who’d lobbed guama seeds at us that morning. I didn’t have a match. Suddenly, I was alone.

I hurried to latch onto Chino, who’d already started to sermonize to the other guy about Argentinian rock, its obvious superiority. Come on, don’t think twice about it, he said. Mexico, Spain, Brazil, that’s not rock. It might be good music, but it’s not rock. The stud in the floral shirt, who’d already used up the technique of peeling off his sunglasses to reveal the blue mirage, tried to convince him otherwise. But Chino was walking all over him. It was obvious the stud knew nothing of rock, much less Argentinian rock, and he barely managed to throw out some overworked names. At one point, I wanted to jump in, show them that I knew my way around, but, I don’t know why, I couldn’t open my mouth, and after that, I felt a little weird.

Then I tried to attach myself to the girls at the tail end of us, but no way there, either.

I was alone, without a pair, for almost the rest of the day. And when we finally got to that swimming hole, I made up my mind

to dive off the top of a cliff where Chino’s parents had a plank halfway suspended in the void: a makeshift trampoline. Later I swam to the opposite shore of the river to lay on a rock. I was basically throwing a tantrum to get anyone’s attention, but still, no one noticed.

The pairs were having fun and I, resigned to solitude, tanned my puny body; as Milena had said, you’re a pussy. For two years I’d been trying to build muscle, exercising, eating tons of protein, but all of that just gave me acne, and depression, and more acne. A strange acne, coming and going, not the typical rash, the huge pores, but gigantic balls of blocked oil that sometimes covered my nose or my forehead, impervious to all creams. I just had to wait, sometimes months, and grow out my hair so it covered my face. No, not thin.

Scrawny. Spotted. But at least you have interesting hair. That’s what I said to myself while the sun stuck my bones to the bank.

I had a rockero’s hair. It could have been worse. And the permanent depression gave me an interesting aura. That’s how I tried to cheer myself up back then, in that sad period when I tried everything, even Mom’s makeup, to cover my blemishes. There were days when I showed up to school caked in foundation, like Edward Scissorhands, and at first they all made cruel jokes, but eventually they accepted it, the way you come to respect somebody’s illness. That hurt a lot more than the jokes.

Once, lining up at the store on our break, I heard one classmate say to another, So you really think he likes guys? And when they saw it was me behind them, they froze, and they had to make a huge effort to even half cover it up.

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I pretended like nothing had happened and made it all the way through the line to buy the greasy food that would supposedly toughen me up.

At the end of break, shut up in one of the bathroom stalls, I came to a few conclusions: they thought I liked guys because of the makeup, but they also thought that was too bad, because I had a nice face. I tried not to take it too hard, but that afternoon I couldn’t get out of bed. Not the next day, either, or the next … I spent two full months half asleep, lying in my bedroom, headphones blasting music. And that’s how I felt now, sun beating down on me, imagining my cartilage was liquefying already, to fuse with the rock. I’m skinnier than a mosquito, I was thinking. Luckily, on those summer days, my acne almost disappeared. Maybe I was becoming an adult, like the aspiring biologist said.

Maybe something was finally changing for the better in my body.

On the way back, I forced myself out of my mental hideout and toward the conversation Milena was having. She’d changed pairs and was now discussing real estate with Pipo. Milena was bragging that her family didn’t have land. My dad is a businessman, what we have is houses. One here and another in Cali. But land, no, she said, what for. My dad says that’s just a money pit, ’cause farming has no future in this country. And especially not around here, where the campesinos live off the backs of everyone else and just want the land to sit around on it, scratching their balls. I mean, that’s what my dad says. I think he’s probably right. Pipo nodded, a little confused, because he agreed with part of that, and part, he disagreed 110

with, and his family, a family of surnames and bloodlines, owned a huge swath of land, they’d been accumulating land, it was said, since the 18th century. In fact, to some people, the name “Pipo” was synonymous with enslavement, gold mines on the Pacific coast, notorious haciendas, though there was only a shadow of all that left: some properties as sprawling as they were useless, take the cattle away, and there’s nothing. For all those reasons, he had no response for Milena, so he hurried to take shelter in a less threatening conversation.

When we were alone, Milena asked if my family had land, and I said no, that my family had been very poor until my parents made some money and we became middle, maybe upper-middle, class. My grandma only finished third grade, to give you an idea, I said. And Chino? she asked. How come he has land? Is Chino Chinese? I was quick to explain that Chino wasn’t Chinese, his mother was Japanese. The land had belonged to his grandfather on his dad’s side, a military guy in Santander de Quilichao, or something like that. Her interest in the subject of property faded fast, and we started jumping from one thing to another. Milena was obsessed with motorcycles. I knew nothing about motorcycles, but I paid attention while she rattled off cylinder capacities, makes, motocross racers she’d dated or partied with in Cali on the weekends. For her, there was nothing sweeter in life than a motocross race featuring, you guessed it, Camilo Reina, which rolled off her tongue like one word, “camilorreina.” Then she confessed she’d done coke for the first time with camilorreina the year before, and all those motocross guys did their races high

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out of their minds, coked-up, assholes and all, because they jumped higher that way, it made them more aggressive. I didn’t know much about drugs, either — Chino and I had smoked weed a few times, that was it — so I asked her what it was like.

Milena answered without hesitation that she had a bag right there, and if I wanted, I could try some. I was so excited, and also scared, that I started to shake, but I didn’t want to come off like a prude, so I said let’s do it, how?

First, we let all those narks get ahead, she said, showing the whites of her eyes as if we were plotting a murder, and I knew that it wasn’t her gesture, that it was copied from somebody else. Surely that’s how she’d been offered it her first time, like being invited into a kind of satanic ritual.

When they get back on the brujita, we’ll tell them we’re coming behind, she said, that we’re going to walk, and we’ll cut through the field. And that’s what we did.

All the others got on the brujita, operated again by the group’s two strongmen, and Milena and I cut through an empty pasture where the grass had shot up. This finca is, like, abandoned, she said. She was nervous about snakes.

I told her that Chino’s family’s business had been way down for years, actually, ever since Chino’s mom died, because she was the one who managed their money and kept it all in order. Chino’s dad is pretty much useless. He’s thrown all their money down the drain, I think, bad investments or something. There’s no one to manage the farm anymore, or to cook or clean the house, they can’t pay anybody. We had to clean the pool ourselves yesterday. You wouldn’t believe it, it was

all full of spiderwebs and feathers, a bat had drowned in there too. Nasty! Milena said, hopping around like she was dodging creepy-crawlies.

She was happy we were nearing the end of the pasture. Then we entered a coffee field I’d never seen, the entirety of the old crop eaten away by fungi, the ground covered in rotten produce, forest already taking back some terrain: we even saw little squirrels hopping between the branches of guayacans. It’s already getting overgrown, said Milena. We’re lucky we haven’t seen any mutts, or worse.

Almost involuntarily, we were drawn by the sound of the river, which, here, was very rocky, the current strong. We walked along on the bank, and she looked for the perfect place. This is good, she said finally, pointing at a rock that looked more like a king-sized bed, under the shade of two guaduas. With some ceremony, we settled on the smooth surface, finding lotus pose like two Tibetan monks about to jump into the bardo, and started doing bumps off the tip of a key. I was filled with false joy, grating euphoria, pain muffled like an LP spinning in the neighbor’s apartment.

Combined, all those semi-discomforts were enjoyable, in the long run —pleasant.

She asked how I was feeling, and I tried to sum it up: bad and good and bad and then good again. But good. From Milena’s mouth escaped a slippery laugh that jumped from stone to stone, and it was in that moment, trying to follow its skipping downriver, because it really was like her laugh had described the space we were sitting in, the tunnel of vegetation growing between shallow cliffs, it was then that, I kid you not, we both saw the bridge, its 111

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legs spread, at the back of the landscape.

It seems like a total lie, I know, like something out of never-never-land. But in the light that came through the wavering foliage, the bridge shone, the way they say certain animals shine on the hunt. The golden prey that offers itself to the noble and somewhat distracted hunter. What the fuck is that? Milena said. And I didn’t know what to say back.

The whole situation was too much for me, it seemed measureless. We sat there and took in the vision of that magical bridge for a while, I can’t say how long, maybe half an hour, or maybe just five long minutes. We didn’t even think about going over to get a better look. We both knew that if we moved around too much, the bridge would flee like a scared animal, so we focused on just admiring it: it was beautiful and strange, a suspension bridge made of vines that had grown almost on a whim to claim its bamboo frame and rungs of fine ruined wood. We thought we noticed that bag of bones breathing, exhaling a red blight over the living foliage.

And for a second, I almost couldn’t help but ask Milena: Do you love me? Are you in love with me? With me, in spite of everything? But I didn’t say a word, of course not. I bit my lip and held on, mouth shut.

No one with any tact would ruin a moment like that with such a stupid question.

She was the one who grabbed my hand and spoke: It’s okay, she said, her voice very sweet, the childlike voice of cocaine, it’s okay. It’ll pass very quickly, you’ll see.

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Gillian Garcia, Untitled from series Istasyon

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DESIRE

by Katherine Hill

A

woman left a false man, about whom the less is said, the better. She set herself up in a new apartment, which was neither better nor worse than her old apartment, but which bore the qualities she had always loved in apartments — windows, rooms, ceilings, floors — and had the added virtue of being new.

One day when she was setting up her workspace, a light flickered in the darkest corner beneath the desk. Her first thought was that she must’ve accidentally disturbed an electrical outlet, though she knew outlets by themselves didn’t flicker, and she had

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yet to plug in her lamp. When the light flashed again — no mistaking it this time — she dropped down to her hands and knees and peered into the hazy space beneath the desk.

There was nothing happening with the outlet. There was, instead, a baby, dewylimbed and glowing from the core of its eyes and chest. It was sitting upright without any trouble, dressed in a fresh white diaper with a full head of hair.

Oh God, she thought, the last tenants have left their baby.

Come here, she said, and the baby crawled over quite easily. Now they were both on their hands and knees beneath the desk, a fun symmetry. Whatever work she’d planned to do that day no longer mattered; she had a different obligation now.

She carried the baby, which had a nice weight, and which held her intentionally with its legs, into the kitchen. She put it down on the floor with a stack of measuring cups and called her closest friend.

“There’s a baby here,” she told her friend.

“Have you fed it?” asked the friend.

“Yes, of course,” the woman said. “I mean, no, I haven’t. But that’s absolutely the right thing to do.” She looked around the kitchen for a food appropriate for a baby who had no trouble sitting upright.

She herself did not drink milk and anyway she didn’t know the baby’s dietary restrictions. She had heard things about cow’s milk and babies.

“I’m going to take her out,” the woman told her friend, deciding suddenly that the baby was female. “I’ll get her all the things she needs.”

She lathered the baby with sunscreen, then fashioned a sling out of a long, stretchy scarf she never used but had somehow survived the move. The baby fit perfectly in the snug X across her chest, face out, legs dangling.

On the street people were happy to see them, each man, woman, and child she passed seeming to congratulate her on doing the right thing. She felt her shoulders, which she hadn’t even realized were tense, relax into the fabric of the scarf. She felt reassured. The baby pointed at a trash can, a billboard, a bird.

They picked up diapers and some fresh fish and vegetables and a stack of clothes that looked the right size for this baby. She thought about the writing she was doing, about sufficiency, the state of having enough, and desire, the state of wanting more. The baby pointed at a car, a dog, a flower.

When they returned home, her closest friend was there with a man she had never met. “I thought you could use some help,” her friend said.

They all went inside and began tending to things, the woman to the baby’s diaper and clothes, the friend to the fish and vegetables, and the man to the light fixtures all over the house. Several, it turned out, were missing bulbs, which might’ve explained why the woman hadn’t seen the baby at first. It did not, however, explain the flickering under the desk, for the woman knew for certain that missing bulbs could not make light.

When they were done with their respective tasks, they all sat down to eat.

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admired. She should learn to eat like that, balancing the imperatives of sufficiency and desire.

•

It was only several days later, after everything from the move had been sorted, and the woman and baby had grown used to each other’s rhythms, that the woman registered another thing she ought to do. She ought to find the baby’s parents. It wasn’t even a suggestion from her closest friend, who had always advised the woman correctly, and who often proffered that advice, unsolicited, when it was clear she had missed a step. This was something she’d come to on her own. And that was especially hard, because she found she already loved the baby. Just a few days of caring for her and talking to her (for the baby did indeed have female anatomy) was enough to instill in the woman a riotous and sticky sense of possession. The baby reached for her hands to pull up and used her as an overhead walker. She made cooing sounds while maintaining stern eye contact. She giggled when the woman said “coffee.”

The woman did not always consider herself the most ethical person. When she was young, she’d made a habit of sneaking into the pantry to steal pinches of chocolate chips. She often quickened her pace to overtake another person when it became clear they were both headed for the same queue. She frequently bought herself treats when she was supposed to be shopping for someone else, and she never failed to let her phone go to voicemail when her saddest friend called. Yet this situation with the baby was very real, not like any of those little experiments in living selfishly.

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There would be consequences now if she did the wrong thing, or overlooked the right one.

Resigned to her obligation, the woman typed up a brief, informative flyer, printed several copies, and, having secured the baby in her homemade sling, went around to all her new neighbors to see if they knew anything about the baby. The first door that opened on her floor belonged to an older couple cooking with garlic. They knew nothing of the previous tenants nor this baby, though they themselves had grandchildren who were now in nursery school and this made them particularly sympathetic to the woman’s dilemma.

“Sometimes I think my daughter would like to leave her children with me permanently,” the older woman said. “But I just give her the old lesson: ‘You make it, you keep it!’” None of the other tenants were much help either. They included a firefighter in his firefighter T-shirt, a lawyer who gave the woman her card, a manic man without a shirt altogether, and many women caring for small children, none of whom could take another.

“Oh no,” the woman told them, “I’m not trying to get rid of her,” which for some reason, no one could believe.

The woman was starting to form a negative opinion of her new neighbors, who all, in some way, reminded her of the man she’d left, when she encountered the female mail carrier in the lobby, delivering packages. She had met the carrier once before, to receive her new, oversized printer, and they had carried the box up the steps together like old friends. She liked the mail carrier, who was older than she was, and who seemed to have very few

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complaints about her objectively tedious, demanding job.

“I didn’t know you had a baby!” the carrier greeted her. “What’s her name?

Has she received any mail yet?”

The woman realized she didn’t know the baby’s name, though she had given her a private one in her head. She tried it out on the mail carrier.

“That’s a good one,” the mail carrier assured her. “No one else in the building has it.”

It was only later that the woman realized she’d allowed the mail carrier, a government employee, to believe the baby was hers.

But what made a child belong to anyone? Surely it was the care work that counted, the countless hours spent naming and demonstrating, and paying close attention. The baby’s eyes were large and brown. Her own were blue, and this seemed to ratify their relationship as chosen family. Neither one of us wanted this, yet here we are, content, a love of pure sufficiency.

•

Things went on this way for some time.

The mail carrier brought packages for the baby — things the woman had ordered, and things her friends had sent — and before long no one remembered how the baby had originally come into the woman’s life. All anyone could recall was that she had once been a person who lived elsewhere with a false man, and now she lived here with her child.

One day, when the woman’s daughter was nearing adolescence, and the woman’s essay about sufficiency and desire had

become a book about sufficiency and desire, which had been followed by numerous other writings on other related and unrelated ideas, a man called from the electric company.

“We’ve noticed you’re still signed up for regular power,” he said. “I can switch you to green power if you like.”

The woman asked what that entailed.

The man told her a worker would come by to make some changes. This surprised the woman, who assumed everything to do with modern power happened invisibly, in some fortified central location. Charmed by the old-fashioned, small-town nature of the offer, she accepted.

The day the worker arrived her daughter was doing homework at the kitchen table. When the woman opened the apartment door, she was startled to find the false man she had once shared a life with, having evidently changed careers. The false man had been a writer like herself, but this person made changes in household power. She stared at him, wondering if she was seeing things, but it was clear he recognized her, too.

He was happy to see her and told her she looked wonderful, in his old, intimate way, as though no time or pain had passed between them. She accepted the compliment, let it wiggle up and down her neck, as she led him to the home office. He got down on his back beneath the desk and began loosening the plate over an outlet with a screwdriver. Things had not gone well for him, he told her, and she suddenly remembered the small, erotic scandal that lost him his full-time position. But he had rebounded, he said, and found new love in green power, which helped more people 117

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than any opinion piece he’d ever published. Having endured his opinions for years, she found she had to agree. Perhaps he’d finally learned how to treat people.

When he was done, he stood up and dusted something invisible from his pants. “You know she doesn’t belong to you,” he told her, in a voice that sounded prerecorded.

“Pardon?” the woman asked, worrying he wasn’t the green power worker after all.

“She taught herself everything she knows. Plus, her eyes are a different color.”

He was wrong about this, but also right, and the tension between these states of truth was more than her body could bear. She sat down right there on the floor.

“Mom?” her daughter called from the kitchen. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine!” she replied. “I’m just getting something from under the desk.”

The false man produced a water bottle from his workbag, which he offered her. She wanted the water. It would feel so good going down her dry, short-circuiting throat. But there were some offers one had to decline.

She crawled under the desk and touched the nearest leg.

Thank you, she said. This is sufficient.

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Gillian Garcia, Untitled from series Istasyon

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TRYOUTS

by Chelsea Bieker

T

he Mazda, Evie’s father explained, wasn’t a gift, even though it was Evie’s 16th birthday, but a loan from God for the express purpose of taking her 12-year-old brother Elliot to the gifted-child summer school on the edge of town where her mother Luanne refused to drive. Her father said the faded red two-seater had been abandoned in the Ways to Grace parking lot, keys on the seat, just for her. “Some,” he said, tossing her the keys, “would call you blessed.”

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“Some would call you an idiot,” Luanne said, inspecting the dented bumper.

“Anyone can see a criminal ran someone over with it.” She pointed a spray bottle fan at her exposed cleavage. “Now we’ll get slapped with hit and run charges. How’s that for a birthday present?”

Her father pretended Luanne did not exist. “One step out of line, Evie girl,” he said. “And the car goes right back.”

Evie had never stepped out of line, but since her father had inexplicitly taken up with Jesus two years ago, he was always on guard, ready for it.

“Back to the parking lot?” Evie said.

Lu tapped her high heel on the hot concrete. “I don’t want people seeing this thing in front of the house. They’ll think we’ve really gone to pot.”

He finally looked at Lu. “I’m happy to return the car and you can take Elliot.”

“Oh no, buddy,” her mother said. “I’m not taking the Range over there. I mean, talk about asking for it.”

On her lifestyle blog, Lu claimed she was all country, and tough as nails, but really, she had grown up in the nicest planned community Fresno had to offer, Woodward View, a cluster of mansions centered around a manmade lake. Now they lived across the street from it in a less desirable but still rich development, The Villas. Evie’s father worked for an almond distributor and, devastating to Lu, had never matched her own father’s wealth.

Lu’s face was red and shiny. She had just gotten what she called face work. Once a month someone jabbed tiny needles into her skin, bringing new collagen to the site of the microscopic wounds. Lu paid for these procedures with her lawsuit money

after she’d sued Dr. Scott two years ago over a botched cosmetic dental procedure.

He’d lost his license and become a driver’s ed teacher, and because he was the father of Evie’s best friend Macy, Evie lost all her friends.

Lu crossed her arms over her chest and stood protectively next her beloved lifted matte black Range Rover with the automatic step down, the tinted windows, license plate: Cntygrl. Meant to be “Country Girl,” the name of her blog.

After the lawsuit, the kids at school joked that it said “Cunty Girl,” something her mother had only noticed once the plates were fastened to the car, once the URL was purchased, and by then pride had taken over. “That isn’t a word I use,” Lu had said when Evie pointed it out. But Luanne said it all the time under breath. Cunt to the woman at the TJ Maxx who took the last Michael Kors bag. Cunt to the woman at the grocery store who was just a wisp of unfriendly at check out, and cunt to Evie once when she’d refused to use the “BoostMe” for picture day, a headache-inducing clip-in attachment that secured to the crown of your head and gave the illusion of volume by lifting your hair up a good three inches, more if you ratted it. It was a beautification device Evie’s grandfather had invented and made millions from when her mother was a child, and now was the perfect thing to provide Evie’s thin baby hair, and all the unfortunate limp-haired broads as her grandfather would have said, some oomph. “The higher the hair…” her mother always said.

“The closer to hell.” Evie’s father had begun to finish the sentiment.

Lu marched inside, leaving Evie and 121

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her father in the heat next to the Mazda.

He raised his arm as if he were going to rest it on Evie’s shoulder, but then decided against it. “Keep the doors locked and you’ll be fine.”

She knew how to drive. She’d taken the required lessons and faced down the awkwardness of seeing Dr. Scott working as a driver’s ed instructor, a job he somehow made look cool.

She had hoped to be placed with Dr. Scott to repair her friendship with Macy from a new angle, but instead she was paired with a humorless woman with spiked hair and an old tattoo on her bottom lip that had muddled with age and looked like she’d eaten a blue popsicle.

On her first session, Evie had asked if she could trade for Dr. Scott since she knew him already and might be more comfortable and the woman let out a labored sigh and said, “You get me today. One day you’ll be grateful for it, too.”

But Evie had been in Dr. Scott’s classroom during the viewing of Red Asphalt where he’d asked everyone, You text and drive? For flourish, he’d taken his cell phone out of his pocket and thrown it in the garbage. You’ll be throwing your life away instead of that cell phone. Everyone gasped. Do you or don’t you want to die? The whole class was in love with him. No, they whispered back. He wore slim jeans rolled at the ankle with Tom’s slip-ons and his hair was combed back greaser style in a shiny black swoop. Tight T-shirt. Only up close could you see the work he put into his appearance, his skin just a shade too orange to be a natural tan, his teeth too white, and his eyebrows, which, she was sure, were tattooed on.

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Evie had hung back gathering her things to see if he would fish his phone out of the garbage, but it was a stalemate.

He sat there, legs spread on a desk and watched her. Chewed gum with an open mouth. Was he mad at her? Was he going to yell at her, send a message to her mother? According to Macy, and everyone at school, Evie’s mother had ruined her family’s life.

“You look familiar,” he said finally.

This was typical. People seemed to forget who she was all the time, and she had to reintroduce herself, remind them they had already met, had spent ample time in proximity to one another. She was about to list all the times she’d swam in his pool, eaten at his kitchen counter, sung pop ballads in his daughter’s room. That she was Lu’s daughter for God’s sake. How could he not know that? She opened her mouth to speak but he shhhhed her.

“No, no, I know what it is,” he said. His eyes drifted to her chest and back up. “I used to have a girlfriend that looked just like you.”

His lip curled up a little as if remembering the girlfriend. He shrugged and hopped off the desk. Reached into the trash can and retrieved the phone.

The next day her mother had baked the Mazda situation into a blog about teaching perseverance to teens, posting a photo of Evie next to the beater car. Caption: “My daughter with our new lawn ornament, LOL.” “You don’t start out with a Range,” she wrote. “You work for life’s rewards.” Now as they drove to Jamba Juice, her mother repeated it to Evie. “You work for something like this,” tapping her long nails on

FICTION

the dash. Then she drifted off into a story about Lu’s father’s rags-to-riches childhood, how he had had nothing. N-O-TH-I-N-G, she spelled out, her finger jabbing the air, until … drumroll please … he’d invented the Boost-Me. Evie knew it so well. How Lu’s mother had wanted to be glamorous and was jealous of the women with their bounty of hair who had money to afford the expensive salons, and her husband had been struck with a rather simple solution one day that involved a piece of foam, hot glue, and a barrette.

“Are you sure grandma didn’t invent the Boost-Me?” Evie interrupted. “Seems like she was more creative.” Grandma had died when Evie was a child and had worn raw silk dresses she made by hand.

“My mother was too busy whining about her life, but my father was all solution and no sadness. I’m the same, and you should aspire to be that way too.”

After they got their smoothies, they sat on the patio and Lu went on about how lucky Evie was to have her as a mother.

Evie wasn’t sure she felt all that lucky. Next week she’d have to try out for junior year’s cheer squad in secret because Macy was the captain. She had begged to be allowed to try out anyway, but Lu’s will won out.

Or so Lu thought. The Mazda was Evie’s, not God’s. And soon she would find out she had made the team. The girls would forgive her, Macy would love her again.

Evie looked over at her mother while she sipped her power greens smoothie.

She hated her. “I have no friends because of you,” she said.

“Two words.” Lu set down the greens.

“Victim. Narrative.”

Lu picked up Evie’s full Jamba and

threw it away. She stormed back to the Range Rover where she blasted the air conditioning and fumed. Evie watched her from the patio. She felt bad for her mother sometimes when she saw her perfectly shaped dentures in their cleaning liquid on the bathroom counter at night. When she really considered what had happened to her. Of course it was awful. It was not fair. But everyone in their community had been on Dr. Scott’s side. Everyone, even Evie most of the time. He was beloved.

•

A new week arrived, and Evie began driving Elliot to the summer program. She had learned the car by now, how occasionally the Mazda wouldn’t start and she’d have to reset the electrical system by leaving the key standing in the ignition for 15 minutes exactly. It didn’t bother her. She loved the car. It meant more than driving Elliot to his genius school. She could drive to Target and buy thongs and push up bras and chocolate almond ice cream bars without telling her mother, who would insist one week that Evie never eat dairy again. We aren’t baby cows! It makes no sense to drink milk! And the next week take it back and dole out heavy cream in stout mason jars along with buttered roast chicken. We need a high fat diet to burn fat.

Evie had taken to cruising Blackstone on Saturday nights to see the speeding shine of the low riders blasting their music and the slicked and gelled people inside, people that seemed to emerge from nowhere she knew — they weren’t visible to her in the day — and they gleamed past her like she wasn’t even there. Was she there? she wondered at stoplights when their eyes 123

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would glance briefly into the Mazda and then away. She would look in the small visor mirror. Her face, clean and bare, stared back. A kind face, Lu liked to say, the worst of insults. Sometimes Evie could feel her mother assessing her, figuring out solutions, and then, overwhelmed, giving up.

Pictures of her mother’s youth showed high cheekbones and sparkling eyes, a tanned chest with collarbones you could grab. Her long legs stretched out as she sat on her father’s lap, a Boost-Me, like a crown.

•

Today, after walking her brother to the door, the Mazda didn’t start. Evie’s bare legs stuck sweaty to the cracked leather, and she left the door open while she reset the system. What did her mother fear about this area of town? The buildings and gas stations just seemed old and the people who walked around didn’t seem to be walking for sport in athleisure with plastic water bottles like the walkers in their neighborhood; these people were walking for transportation, pushing carts and smoking cigarettes squinting in the beating sun. She hadn’t seen anything that alarmed her.

It was then her eyes settled on a tiny house, a drive-thru window, Twin Perks Espresso, across the street. Inside, a girl wearing a neon green bikini doled out whipped cream topped drinks. The line was mostly men with freckled sunburned arms hanging out of work trucks covered in dust, but occasionally someone surprising rolled through like an older woman with prim glasses, a businessman with a kid in the backseat, or like now, Dr. Scott.

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She remembered Macy’s 12th birthday before her mother hated him, where Dr. Scott dressed as a clown, doing a sort of Elvis-inspired dance — eyebrows raised and mouth hanging open like, Can you believe what my pelvis is capable of ? It was the sort of dancing that was mildly to moderately uncomfortable for others involved because it seemed to say both: dance along with me but also don’t you dare dance, let me have the stage. But to Evie, the dance seemed to speak to a preternatural confidence. She felt a jolt of desire that surprised her, to be dancing too, but she pushed it down to where it came from only to have it come back up and redden her chest in blotchy hives.

Dr. Scott had come close to Evie and showed her a magic trick where he removed his finger. Evie gasped. It looked so real. He saw that he had truly horrified her and he opened his hands to show they were still intact, looped Evie into a big bear hug, and she had felt the surprising urge to cry. Her own father had never hugged her in this easy way, these soft angles. “Awww, I think I scared her,” Dr. Scott said, and Macy’s mother, a petite woman who seemed always to be balancing on her tiptoes with a high voice like a child, walked by and tapped him on the butt, said, “Knock it off.”

They seemed playful together, Macy seemed happy, and Dr. Scott had whispered in Evie’s ear, “I’ll show you how to do the trick later.” Evie waited the rest of the party for Dr. Scott to pull her aside, only her, and show her how to remove her own finger. She positioned herself in easy proximity, she walked by in his view many times. But later never came. And then Dr.

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Scott lost his job and started working as a driver’s ed teacher, and her mother was able to afford a real Louis Vuitton suitcase set and the Range Rover and all the things she wished her rich Boost-Me father would give to her but wouldn’t. She claimed some of the lawsuit money was going in an account for Evie’s college fund, not Elliot because he’d get full rides, but Evie doubted the existence of such an account.

Now Evie lowered herself in the Mazda’s seat. What if Dr. Scott saw her staring at him in the bikini barista line?

But why should she feel ashamed? The shame would be his: Why was he here, on the edge of town, folding money into the tip jar of Twin Perks anyway? When he’d testified against her mother, he denied everything, especially Lu’s claim that he’d touched her breasts while she was on laughing gas. He tearfully explained to the court that he had a documented mental condition where he could only be attracted to one woman at a time, and that woman was his wife. He’d even gotten one of his friends, a male therapist, to vouch for him.

Dr. Scott talked to the barista, her long blonde hair in a nest on top of her head, no doubt wearing a Boost-Me, her huge hoop earrings, her breasts held high in the tiny top. His hand touched hers when she handed him his mocha blast.

Evie felt her own breasts under her thick sports bra and T-shirt. She knew the other girls at tryouts would be wearing cropped tees with their school’s name across the front and soft cotton shorts, rolled at the waist. She had done her best to look like them that morning, but everything still seemed wrong. Looking at the barista,

Evie wondered what she would look like in a bikini.

And what would Macy think of her father at the Twin Perks? She supposed there were worse places to be. She knew that men liked to look at women in bikinis. But the whole thing still seemed embarrassing, seemed to go against his mental condition of only being attracted to his wife. It struck her for the first time that this was an unlikely condition, perhaps even made up. Her mother echoed in her ear — One day you’ll understand what happened to me, and you’ll see things differently.

Was this what her mother meant? That the truth of adult life would hit her one piece at a time, jarring and brutal and clear?

But still, she couldn’t stop thinking of what Dr. Scott had said. He used to have a girlfriend that looked like her. And now she had seen him here. These were two exchanges between them that no one else knew about. Not her father, not Lu, not even Macy, his own daughter.

Evie felt her breath release. Dr. Scott pulled away from the drive-thru and down the road, and the Mazda started up.

•

At cheer tryouts in the school gym, the girls looked shocked to see her. Some almost said hi, but then retreated. Remembered the rules. They were good at the silent treatment. Coach Mindy announced they would be filling four spots on the varsity team, but maybe only three if Cassidy recovered from her broken hip in time for football season. She’d been dropped on cement from a very high basket toss during an exhibition in the mall parking lot, Mindy explained to the new girls. Macy 125

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looked annoyed as she stretched a perfect split. Macy was a tumbler, fast and aggressive, capable of 10 back handsprings in a row. Evie could remember when Macy could barely do one. How she’d spotted her so many times in their backyards, her palm on Macy’s sweaty lower back.

Throughout warm-ups Coach Mindy kept snapping her fingers in Evie’s face, saying she had slow-twitch muscles.

Waiting in line to show off her handstand, Evie feared she had a slow-twitch mind, too, because she wasn’t brainy like Elliot.

What was left if not gifted in athletic ability or intelligence?

Mindy held Evie upside down in a handstand, pressing her ankles together.

Her arms burned and quivered. All the blood rushed to her head and she saw herself not in a cheer uniform, but in the Twin Perks box, blending drinks, her small boobs roosting in a push-up bikini top.

The fantasy went further; Dr. Scott passing her a note as he handed her money for his blast. Come away with me, it would say, and he’d drive her out of Fresno with perfect lane changing precision down the 99. She’d have long acrylic nails and they’d hold hands. When they made it to their new life, he’d relieve her of the bikini and … her mind went blank. She didn’t know what would happen next.

“Hello!” Macy yelled at her. It was more than she’d said in a long time. Evie snapped to attention as Coach Mindy let go allowing Evie’s arms to buckle. She crumpled awkwardly to the floor, burning the skin of her nose on the carpet. But Macy had talked to her. And she spoke again to her when she said: “You’re wasting everyone’s time.”

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The girls stared at her. She continued down the floor, launching into her cartwheel, and even though her ankles felt wobbly with nerves, she landed firmly on the other side in a lunge. She did another and another. Mindy wrote something on a clipboard. Angela, a tiny upturned nosed girl who had just quit competitive gymnastics to have some real high school experiences, did a round off back handspring double twisting layout. The cheerleaders cheered.

As they cooled down in a circle, Coach Mindy thanked them all for being there, and reminded them that cheer simply isn’t for everyone, and to be on the lookout for an email with the results very soon. Evie thought of how she alone, out of the group of girls, looked like a girlfriend Dr. Scott had once had. This knowledge became some sort of tapping inside of her, that replayed and replayed the rest of the day, long after she’d showered the smell of the gym off her body, until she felt near some sort of panic.

•

That night, Evie’s father watched the news. Lu wrote a blog about making banana bread, the way it smelled, the healthful ingredients, how it brought them all together around the table and was gone before she herself could even have a second helping. But there was no banana bread in sight.

“Your mother’s a good writer,” he said, looking at his plate, pressing his Salisbury steak flat with his fork.

Evie waited. He was warming up.

“Of fiction. Of little stories that aren’t real.”

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“I got 400 new followers today after posting about Elliot reciting the Bible from memory,” Lu said, not looking up from her screen. The glow made her face look eerie and tired. “I’m telling you, big things are coming. People are loving seeing our boy prodigy here. They’re calling him Jesus. I say come for Jesus and stay for the beauty recs! Whatever gets them in the door, like my daddy always said.”

Her father flinched. “Your son, and your father for that matter, are not Jesus.”

Elliot shrugged and looked at Evie.

As if to say, Maybe I am. Evie felt a pang of sadness for herself because she realized that while she’d always assumed her brother would be an outcast because of his weirdness, it was really her who was not accepted by anyone. Her who was painfully boring. She could see the Boost-Me peeking out of her mother’s messy hair. It was so pitiful when you could see it. And you could almost always see it.

“Evie,” her dad said. “Don’t become like your mother. Learn math.”

Her father threw away his plastic-tray meal and got in his truck to listen to Dave Ramsey’s money-saving talk show. The engine worked hard to keep the air conditioning going. Evie knew the floorboards were littered with empty tins of clams, anchovies. She had no idea who her father was at all. She once saw him standing in their backyard looking outward at the bluff, the farmland that continued for miles and miles, the haze of the pesticides used to shed the trees of their almonds hanging in the landscape. He said he didn’t expect to live past 50 on account of those pesticides. Well, that was the air they all breathed, wasn’t it? It was part of

living in the valley. Evie felt uncomfortable watching him. If he shot himself one day, it would not be surprising.

Evie went to her room and closed the door. She pulled out a bathing suit from the summer before and put it on. It was too small, a wide-strapped tank one piece with matching shorts. Looks like stumble-wear, her father had said when they bought it. Her mother had snorted under her breath. You want her to be one of those girls in a T-shirt in the water? He meant it looked slutty, prone to garner the attention of helpless hormonal boys. But now Evie wanted a two-piece like the girls at Twin Perks. She took out her scissors and cut the suit in half. She put the two pieces on her body and tried to shape them. As she posed and turned in the mirror it was like Dr. Scott was there, too, his eyes on her. They had been on her the one time, and now it was forever. What might she do under his imagined gaze?

She called Macy’s number. Maybe if she could catch her alone, she would soften. She could tell her how nervous she was about cheer, she could ask about Dr. Scott casually, take the temperature on whether Macy knew about her father and the bikini baristas, that he in fact was lying about his mental condition. Maybe it would form a bond between them again, re-orient things as they were always meant to be: us versus them.

Macy answered on the first ring.

“Hello random number.”

“What?” Evie paused. Random? “It’s me, Evie.”

“Huh?” “Evie.”

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distracted. “I don’t have your number in my phone.”

She wanted to say, Why not? It hadn’t changed since junior high. But of course, Macy had deleted her contact.

“So. What do you want?”

She heard her whisper It’s Evie to someone.

“I was just wondering how you were feeling about the cheer results coming out tomorrow.”

“I’m the captain so I’m pretty much safe.”

“You did great today. I’m nervous though.”

“Well, I’ll save you the wait. You didn’t make it.”

“Doesn’t Coach Mindy decide?”

“Some people want to know if you tried out cause you’re stalking me.” More cackling.

Evie felt her bedroom fall away.

“Maybe,” Macy went on, “You should stop following me around.”

“And go kill yourself,” someone yelled in the background to more hysterical laughter.

“I saw your dad today at the topless coffee place,” Evie said. “What do you think he was doing there? Finding more women to feel up?”

“Your mom wishes my dad touched her,” Macy said. “She’s desperate. Everyone knows your dad doesn’t even look at her.”

Evie looked up to see Lu standing in the doorway. The call was on speaker.

Perhaps her mother had heard everything.

Evie forced a laugh. Changed her tone.

“Yeah, you’re right. He doesn’t.” But the line was already dead, the girls on the other end of it back doing whatever it was they did together. Evie would never know.

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•

The next morning Evie drove Elliot to school and obsessed about Dr. Scott and the bikini girls and if he would be there again and if he was, would she try to flag him down? Would she reveal she’d seen him there? She would have information that might make her seem in his category, an adult. She would carry a bit of power, and then what would happen? She wanted confirmation that he had seen something worthy in her.

“Why are you in such a mope?” Elliot asked. He wore an orange juice mustache.

He wasn’t self-aware at all and when Evie felt jealous of him, she remembered this fact. That at least she was self-aware. At least she knew the truth about herself.

“Go on,” she said to Elliot, reaching over and unbuckling him. She would miss him terribly one day. “Don’t be late.”

Across the street, the bikini baristas were working as usual, the line of cars about four deep. She pulled her top off to show the homemade bikini. She drove the Mazda across the main road and into the drive-thru line.

She counted three bills from her wallet. She would order something. Mention the long, undefined summer ahead of her, the long, undefined life. She was friendless. It was now a confirmed and simple fact. She felt reckless with it.

When her turn came, she was greeted by LeeLee, a young woman in a zebra-striped bikini with shocking pink nails. There wasn’t anything weird about the setup. It was hot out. The baristas were dressed appropriately while the rest of society was wrong.

“Are you hiring?” Evie asked.

“Are you 18?” LeeLee asked. But she

FICTION

didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s easy. Free drinks all day.” She knocked on a brickthick horror novel with blood dripping down the spine. “Lots of free time.”

“Mostly regulars?” Evie asked. It’s what she wanted: people who would expect to see her. Be excited to see her. Remember her name.

“Nearly everyone,” LeeLee said, handing her the application and a frosted blast.

A cherry sat on top of the whipped-cream tower. “Get lots of nice tips. How do you think I can afford something like this?”

She held up a beige leather purse covered in Cs. Evie drove off, sipping the drink that Lu would not approve of and parked again across the street. Soon, he came, Dr. Scott with his wad of bills and his smile for LeeLee that would also be for her once she was hired. And that night, over the sound of her parents fighting, Evie felt a dark force around her bed pressing her into the mattress, changing her from the girl she once was into someone else. But who?

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POETRY

YOU CANNOT HOLD BACK THE PASSING DAY Brian Tierney

I pass Ben Franklin’s bones, brick colonial rowhomes, window-box planters whose unruly yellow mums have begun to concede to their container and containment, being only as all of us the one thing they are for now; were they somewhere else they would be that somewhere. Whatever it had been, my argument withers in the crosscurrent Old City traffic, the clacking clacking of mounted police, minutes splitting sunfall into streets and cobbled alleys and difficult truths. All dusk, seagulls bicker like children we’ll never have and shouldn’t. Admitting this, I remember who I am. A footnote in the middle of things, so many faces so many stations, but refusing the nature of whomever I had been before tenderness found me. In an hour I’ll meet Jess in the park; I sit down for it. A partly deflated red-foil balloon briefly stranded on a garage roof opposite me, when it rolls off, seems heavier than it is. Everything so easily explained.

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THE TUNNEL Brian Tierney

At the end there was a corpse, I tell Jess, and I had to touch the corpse — We pass a sky-blue door off its hinges lying in a puddle, we pretend the children laughing somewhere we can’t see are ours, though we’ve decided all that; I name them anyway Connie, Rosina, Celestina Marie, after elders never met, my Italian side; Jess writes in cursive on my forearm with her finger, so that only we will know regret of a sort, xo xo, a tenderness between us as local trains pass then pass back the other way. Which is the counterpoint is still unknown —

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POETRY

FROM THE ASSEMBLAGE POEM LOOK AT THIS BLUE Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Left there.

Let love lead.

Let hand that pummeled rest.

Let scowl rest, face relieve.

Let shoulders locked high, tight, recede.

Let feet cracked, worn, ease.

Let back, stiff, sore, bent open.

Let lungs swell breath like ocean.

Let all of us, all of us, all of us,

let all of us be unbroken.

Take heart. Earth hears every tremble touch. Feels each foot. Listens now.

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CERTIFICATE OF PRESENCE Erika Meitner

when the water leaves us, it’s with notes rendered in pencil on scraps ditched beside a washed-out house tangled in the woods. see the doorways that narrow as they go? light-filled peripherals leading to the river’s edge — a frontier, the brown shoreline cracked with sun. your stash still hidden in the bedroom. you’ve left a trace of anniversary behind, flood-swollen, untamed. love and sobriety are not the same thing. when the water leaves us, numbered markers remain, graffitied on highway pylons and fence posts. anything upright and intractable. if you are a builder of bridges. if you are a vector. happy 1 month says the red scrawl with a heart, the rest blurred in the mouth, the confluence. we’ve already dismantled the monuments. water as gauge of overflow, abundance.

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PAIN IS THE BEAM THAT PENETRATES, Rose DeMaris

Comes brazen, even in daylight, ordained by the gods Holds infinite motes in suspension, appears citrine Enters sometimes obliquely, outwits the amulet, the chant Leaves a hot-to-touch scar, initiates a tenderness of decades Says you are gone Causes drought, chronic longing, the unwitting all-night vigil, tears on linoleum, the shut door Manifests as pestilent thorns if overindulged or ignored Transforms if acknowledged, gazed lightly upon, if made recipient of secret letters Granulates in a climate of continuous acceptance Reduces to lambent dust, self-luminous Bestows a capacity for seeing, breaches the retina, darkens the limbal ring of the eye Does not ever really leave, but suffuses the system Hums in spring in the skull on the lap of the Magdalene Links to the global network through which compassion passes as juice passes through my hands now folded on the tablecloth and into the hard green beginnings of our orchard’s plums Repeats you are gone

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Looks, under a microscope, like sugar many times refined Heats the bulbs, the clenched peonies, the bunched-up clumps of leaves to a point of capitulation Opens glossy folios, ultraviolet, in the mind.

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SONNET OF THE BULL Omotara James

A bull killed itself on a wooden post after being sent into a terrified frenzy when its horns were set on fire in front of a baying crowd.

— The Independent The only woman I ever loved came with an army of strangers to kill me, so I made myself a star.

My pads cracking the cobbled streets free of the past. We began as two animals running (free), but our fat days burned thin beneath the wide eye of grief.

Had I not outpaced the delicate body of my birth, she might have never noticed me. Alas, one forgoes the rescue of love.

When your lover is the matador and your soul mate, the sunless rage.

The chase, the only stroke of pleasure to part you with soft hands.

Hot breath on the heels of your final gallop, then bam, Bull despairs amid the frenzy and dies instantly. Death, a picture made of light, sings for me. Because love croons like a surprise torch of fire.

Because love comes for your horns.

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

CONTR I BU TO RS Andrea Long Chu is the book critic at New York Magazine.

Brandy Jensen is Deputy Editor of Gawker.

Rona Lorimer is a writer, playwright, and translator based in Paris. Diaries, essays and articles on social movements, fascism, laws, softbois, conspiracy, and cinema can be found at Commune magazine, Endnotes, the Brooklyn Rail and the Conversationalist.

Cyrus Dunham is the author of A Year Without a Name. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a Dornsife Nonfiction Fellow at USC. He is a member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.

This summer, Dan Sinykin is on a pilgrimage with his dog Azul from his home in Atlanta to Danielle Steel’s sugar daddy chateau in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.

Stephanie Wong is a nonfiction writer, historian of Latin America, textile artist, Chicago loyalist, big sister from the diaspora, occasional jock, Mexico City resident, and pen pal to Justus.

Ricky Varghese writes about sex and death, queer porn and art, and memory and Judaism, not always in that order. He has edited Raw: PrEP, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Barebacking and the forthcoming Sex and the Pandemic. He is currently working on a book about suicide and the death drive.

In the 1990’s Martha Southgate wrote extensively about the film industry for the New York Daily News and Premiere magazine. She is the author of four novels, most recently The Taste of Salt.

Jonathan Alexander writes in Southern California.

The author, co-author, or co-editor of twenty-two books, he has just completed the Creep trilogy with the publication of Dear Queer Self.

Eberick Hashvay is a Fourierist missionary, gambler, and pamphleteer living in central Mexico.

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Charles Fourier (1772 – 1837) was French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker and one of the founders of utopian socialism. A traveling salesman under the Directory and a small broker under the Restoration, he was the inventor of the science of Passionate Attraction and Domestic-Agricultural Association. His notable works include The Theory of the Four Movements, The Theory of Universal Unity, and The New Industrial and Societary World. He died in Paris in 1837 with a great quantity of unpublished manuscripts, including several notebooks dedicated to the future employments of love, entitled The New Amorous World.

Irene Silt writes about power, anti-work, feeling, joy, and deviance.

Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYFA Fellow, her debut novel Disorientation is out now from Penguin Press.

Juan Cárdenas is a Colombian writer, art critic and translator and author of the novels Zumbido (451 Editores, 2010 / Periférica, 2017), Los estratos (Periférica, 2013), Ornamento (Periférica, 2015), Tú y yo, una novelita rusa (Cajón de sastre, 2016) and El diablo de las provincias (Periférica, 2017).

Lizzie Davis is a translator, editor, and poet from Nebraska.

Katherine Hill is associate professor of English at Adelphi University in New York. Her most recent novel is A Short Move.

Chelsea Bieker has published two books of fiction, and is working on a third about motherhood, domestic violence, and the generational shit we inherit that haunts us until we do something about it. Also secrets. She grew up in Hawaii and California’s Central Valley and now lives in Portland, Oregon.

CONTRIBUTORS

Brian Tierney is the author of Rise and Float, winner of the 20-2021 Jake Adam York Prize (Milkweed).

His poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as Paris Review, Kenyon Review, AGNI, NER, The Adroit Journal, and others. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and winner of the 2018 George Bogin Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America, he was raised in Philadelphia, and lives in Oakland, Ca., where he teaches poetry at The Writing Salon.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s 7th poetry book is Look at This Blue (Coffee House Press, March 2022), her elegiac love letter to California. Hedge Coke teaches for UC Riverside and is a California Arts Council Legacy Artist.

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which was the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her newest book, Useful Junk, was published by BOA Editions in April 2022. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can find out more about her at erikameitner.com.

Rose DeMaris writes poetry, fiction, and essays. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Image Journal, Roanoke Review, Vassar Review, Qu, and elsewhere. A Southern California native, she spent many years in Montana and now lives in New York City, where she’ll begin teaching poetry this summer at Columbia University.

Omotara James’ debut collection of poems, Song of My Softening, is available for pre-order from Alice James Books. Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poetry, The Paris Review Daily, LitHub, The Columbia Journal, etc. She is an assistant poetry editor at Bellevue Literary Review, in NYC. Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, and the author of five collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and the forthcoming Maafa. She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at L.A.’s MOCA and a music

and archive venue 2220arts that she runs with several friends, also in Los Angeles. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, and a research fellowship from Harvard. She is working on a collection of essays and a biography of Abbey Lincoln.

Ron Miyashiro was a Hawaiian-Japanese American painter, assemblage artist, and jewelry maker. He became became increasingly known in the 1960s while attending Chouinard Art Institute and has since been in several seminal group exhibitions of assemblage artists during this time period. He was well known for his participation in the iconic War Babies group exhibition in 1961 at the alternative Huysman Gallery. The exhibition also featured Ed Bereal, Joe Goode, and Larry Bell. Miyashiro’s wall-mounted and small-scale assemblages are well known for its erotic and violent innuendos through resemblances to war machinery and body parts.

Lloyd Kofi Foster is a Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn who works primarily with photography as well as sculpture, installation, video and mixed media. Foster uses these media to capture daily life and the interactions of the people and places he encounters. The artist also uses personal connections, memories, and his perception to reflect his dual identity as a Ghanaian-American and he continues to be inspired by his personal experiences, memories and ancestral curiosity.

Foster’s work has been exhibited at “Safe Journey’ at White Columns in New York, NY, USA (2022); ‘Home Museum,’ LagosPhoto Festival, Lagos, Nigeria (2020); ‘America Is…’, Touchstone Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2019); and ‘Connecting the Dots 2’, Torpedo Factory Art Center, Alexandria, VA (2018), among others. Foster is a graduate of New York University with a MFA in Studio Art. He founded Yeboah Studios, a platform that bridges African countries and the diaspora through culture and collaboration.

Gillian Garcia is an artist and photographer from Erie, Pennsylvania. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Yayoi Kusama’s (b. 1929; Matsumoto, Japan) work has transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: Pop art and Minimalism. Her highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures, which allude at once to microscopic and macroscopic universes.

Kusama’s work has been featured widely in both solo and group presentations. She presented her first solo show in her native Japan in 1952. In the mid1960s, she established herself in New York as an important avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking and influential happenings, events, and exhibitions.

Her work gained renewed widespread recognition in the late 1980s following several international solo exhibitions.

In recent years, large-scale retrospectives and major solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been presented at prominent institutions worldwide.

Tate Modern, London, is presenting Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms through June 11, 2023. Opening July 6, 2022, the Phi Foundation, Montreal will present Yayoi Kusama: DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE. Yayoi Kusama Museum, a museum dedicated to the artist’s work, opened in Tokyo in 2017. Work by the artist is held in museum collections internationally.

Serbest Salih is a photo artist and director of Sirkhane DARKROOM. SirKhane DARKROOM: In Southeastern Turkey, just kilometres from the Syrian border, is Sirkhane: a mobile darkroom which travels from village to village teaching children how to shoot, develop, and print their own photographs. Led by Serbest Salih, a young photographer and Syrian refugee, the darkroom is founded on a fundamental belief in photography as a universal and therapeutic language, and encourages children living in the area — many of whom are themselves refugees from Syria and Iraq — to experiment with the medium as both a form of play and a means of understanding the world around

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them. Full of laughter and joy, i saw the air fly is testament to the unfailing resilience of the imagination, the healing power of photography, and the enchanting perspective of childhood. All proceeds from this publication will go to the Her Yerde Sanat-Sirkhane charity.

Find Your Summer Reading Here From

REAKTION

Salvator Rosa

Paint and Performance

Helen Langdon

“Langdon’s superb biography presents Rosa in all his brilliance and wit, his vaulting ambition, his potent originality as a painter, and his infuriating complexity as a person.”—Gabriele Finaldi, director, National Gallery, London Renaissance Lives

Cloth $25.00

Sergei Rachmaninoff Rebecca Mitchell

“This is a vivid and original portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most beloved composers. It should kickstart the long overdue process of a reassessment and rediscovery of Rachmaninoff’s career.”—Pauline Fairclough, University of Bristol Critical Lives

Paper $19.00

Sigmund Freud Matt ffytche

“A compelling, highly original argument about why Freud can and must matter to us now, in our so profoundly troubled present. ffytche’s Sigmund Freud is a marvelous achievement.”

—Dagmar Herzog, author of Cold War Freud Critical Lives

Paper $19.00

Benjamin Franklin Kevin J. Hayes

“Informative and insightful, well-researched and marvelously comprehensive for its brevity, Hayes’s book is pound-for-pound one of the best introductions to Franklin.”—Kevin Slack, Hillsdale College, Michigan Critical Lives

Paper $19.00

From

SWAN ISLE PRESS

The Azure Cloister Thirty-Five Poems

Carlos Germán Belli Translated by Karl Maurer Edited by Christopher Maurer “Belli’s work seeks the limits of human experience in forms that summon ‘the bodies in which we dwell,’ sometimes with what Maurer calls the ‘tortuous Gongoresque syntax’ of the Spanish Baroque.”—Harriet (Poetry Foundation) Paper $24.00

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