BERCK, KINGDOM OF THE DAMNED

by Max Blecher, translated by Gabi Reigh

Translator’s Note: Like many early-20th-century Romanian writers and artists, Max Blecher revered France and its culture. As a burgeoning writer, he corresponded with André Breton, who published Blecher’s literary experiments in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, and his dream of visiting Paris was finally fulfilled when he went to study medicine there in his late teens. While in Paris, crutches and bodies ravaged by rickets cling desperately to the arms of their companions. They are here on a pilgrimage to Berck, the sanatorium town, the most astounding town in the world, the Mecca of spinal tuberculosis.

Blecher was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis, and, through a cruel twist of fate, the rest of his time in France was spent receiving treatment in the Berck sanatorium rather than enjoying the delights of its capital city.

In the following pieces of short prose, Blecher reflects on the atmosphere of Berck, a town that became defined by its disabled community and found ways to accommodate their needs, enabling them to live a fulfilling existence. Blecher’s prose eschews surrealism in favor of naturalistic descriptions of the sanatorium town, revealing the seldom-explored daily life of the disabled. Blecher explains to us the hard-won freedom that a gurney can provide to immobile patients and illustrates the way that urban spaces can be reimagined to allow accessibility to all. Despite their poignancy, these vignettes insist on the resilience of the human spirit and its continual striving for happiness, even in the most difficult circumstances.

This entire crowd will be squeezed into a train as tiny as a toy, with a locomotive that resembles a camel and drags away slowly, noisily puffing out too much steam far too much steam given that it only travels five kilometers. It is the famous tortillard, the little Berck train, filled with Berck’s patients and their relatives. Naturally, the only topic of conversation on this train is illness, patients, cures, and treatments. I believe that there is more discussion of sickness on this little train than in all the Academies of Medicine in the world put together.

On the Paris–Boulogne line, there is a station where all the trains stop for a minute longer than usual. It is Rang-du-Fliers, the connecting station for Berck. When arriving here, the unsuspecting ordinary traveler, rubbing his sleepy eyes while gazing casually out of the train window, will momentarily imagine that he has drifted into a nightmare.

While in all other stations he would have encountered the ordinary babel of travellers hurriedly embarking and disembarking from the train, here he will see orderlies and porters hauling stretchers heavy with moribund patients out of the carriages with infinite care. Cripples hobble on

On the other hand, the traveler who has previously been informed that Berck is the destination of 5,000 patients immobilized in plaster will be primed from the very start of his journey for revelatory signs of its singular and melancholy character. When he disembarks, he will be bewildered to find only a banal little provincial town with an Avenue de Gare identical to any other that can be found in every little provincial French town, with a banal high street, with ordinary people idly shopping, with old-fashioned houses reeking of mold and stale air.

However, Berck’s true character will be suddenly revealed to this traveler the moment he turns a street corner and is faced with the first patient lying in a carriage. The vision is stupefying. Imagine a kind of rectangular pram with a swing at the back, a kind of crate, a kind of boat on wheels containing a sick person, swaddled in blankets, steering a horse. You are probably imagining a person lying back in a carriage, in a comfortable and fairly normal position. No. The patient is completely supine in the wooden frame, gazing upwards, into the void. He does not turn his head to the right, to the left, doesn’t lift it, cannot move it: he is fixedly staring into a mirror suspended above him that can be maneuvered in different directions. The carriage passes, turns a corner, avoids a child, stops in front of a shop, and all the while its driver’s gaze remains fixed into the ether while his hands pull the reins this way and that, with the gestures of a blind man groping his way through darkness. There is something sad and surreal in this fixed stare, something that indeed resembles the faltering journey of the blind and the feverish tattoo of their sticks on pavements as their milky eyes gaze out with indefinable vagueness.

The patient in the carriage is impeccably dressed, with an open jacket, tie, white handkerchief peeking out of his top pocket, gloves. Who would ever guess that underneath his shirt he is encased in a cage of plaster, a white, rigid armor, which he might, perhaps, shed in three months’ time?

A note on plaster

…because Berck is the kingdom of immobility and plaster. Here gather all the broken, decayed bones from every corner of the world so that they might be straightened and mended. Deformed, crooked spines, loose joints, rotten vertebrae, misshapen elbows, crooked fingers, crooked legs, all gather here praying for the miracle of plaster. Plaster mends, straightens, seals. Plaster defines Berck just as steel defines Creusot, it is Liverpool’s steel and Baku’s oil. There are plaster casts that encase only fingers and others that encase entire bodies. There are plaster casts like aqueducts from which the patient can escape whenever he wants and others that are hermetically sealed for entire months. The latter are the most terrible of all. Aside from the torture suffered while the plaster is drying, during which the patient feels as if he is lying in a cold, oppressive swamp, he must also endure the torment of not being able to wash for several months. Naturally, during this time his skin gathers a thick layer of dirt, becoming infernally itchy and sore. These kinds of plaster casts are becoming increasingly rare nowadays.

A horizontal town

At the first bookshop you come across in Berck, you can buy a visitor guide explaining that the town occupies a privileged position on the Channel as the Authie gulf directs favorable ocean currents towards it. The same guide will inform you that the air in Berck is incredibly clean, extraordinarily pure, in fact the purest air in the world, with only four bacteria per cubic meter, while in Paris the same volume would contain 900,000 bacteria. For the ailing visitors who have traveled here in the hope of restoring their health and who know that they are likely to spend several years in Berck, these statistics are not insignificant.

But I can confirm that not one of the 5,000 invalids in Berck have been attracted here by these boasts of ocean currents and clean air. There is another reason why they flock to this place: it is because in Berck all of these sick, disabled, paralyzed people, disinherited by life, who in other towns lived as pariahs, hidden by their families, shut away in stuffy rooms, profoundly humiliated by the life that defiantly thrived all around them, can become normal again. The entire town is organized in such a way that they can live a perfectly ordinary life even as they are permanently horizontal and undergoing treatment. Still horizontal, they can go to the cinema, ride in a carriage, go to a nightclub, attend a conference, or visit one another. Their gurneys can pass through every door in Berck, they can enter any public place, any shop: in Berck, none of the buildings have doorsteps. Here, someone has reorganized life by rotating it 90 degrees and proved that a horizontal existence is perfectly feasible. In the grand hotels, sick men and women reside in rooms that are no different to any other hotel rooms, and they take their meals in dining rooms specially designed to accommodate them, where they are wheeled on gurneys to their tables. The spectacle of these dining rooms is simultaneously strange and sumptuous. Sumptuous because it resembles a Roman feast where all the guests lounge around on their backs, but strange because the sickly pallor of these revelers brings to mind some kind of hallucinatory novel by Edgar Allan Poe.

But even more surprising is the spectacle of the beach during the summer months, where the patients flirt with the beautiful women that flock around them. And these flirtations are not always innocent. I have already mentioned that sick people come to Berck to become normal again …

Of course, there is also drama, and unbearable heartbreak. But in Berck, these seldom lead to tragic conclusions. Last winter, a hysterical woman and her incurably ill lover committed suicide under a calvary cross. The incident caused a stir and the reporters in Paris embroidered some wonderful tales about the tragic town of Berck. In truth, though, such cases are the exceptions. Caught up in the rhythm of an almost ordinary life, the sick wear their misery lightly. It is the psychological miracle of Berck.

What is a gurney?

For the sick, carriage rides are a real blessing. But it is an expensive, extravagant blessing. In Berck, patients might pay between 25 and 30 francs for a couple of hours’ ride. To their frustration, the town council has never attempted to regulate these prices. The patients, therefore, pay almost 15 lei for a 15-minute ride, about as much as it would cost to run the engine of a splendid car for that time. Because at Berck, you see, a horse-drawn carriage is the equivalent of a Rolls-Royce. Under these circumstances, the health benefits of the sea air and the pleasures of outings would be enjoyed only by the privileged few were it not for the gurney, a mode of transportation that is universally available. The gurney is an invention that transforms a sick person into a healthy one. It combines the functions of a bed, a carriage, and a healthy pair of legs into one. A gurney is a stretcher with four large rubber wheels, a frame that supports the supine body of the patient, and tough springs that prevent it from juddering on the bumpy road.

In the cheaper sanatoria, where patients of slender means lie side by side in communal wards, the gurneys are only used for seaside promenades. However, in certain hotels and guesthouses, the patients are permanently installed on their gurneys. They sleep on them, eat on them, lie on them during their outings. A patient can navigate the whole of his room on his gurney, simply by letting his arms drop and maneuvering its wheels in any direction. For example, I have seen an invalid “walking” in this way to his bookshelf to pick up a novel or independently cruising the corridors. When a patient wants to buy something in town, he will immediately telephone a nearby sanatorium and a former patient or convalescent will be employed to push his gurney to the chosen destination. For this service, he will charge five lei. In Berck, a human being is cheaper than a horse and just as serviceable.

Hotels and sanatoria

The brochure advertising Berck explicitly claims: “Berck offers treatment facilities that cater to all patients, regardless of their financial situation.” This is perfectly true. However, the difference between a modern hotel and a sanatorium is as vast as that between a distinguished gentleman dressed in a gray tailored suit, with a boutonniere, and the beggar in rags who stretches his hand towards him in supplication. All of the grand hotels in Berck promise green lawns fringed with splendid flowers, elevators, and running water. All of the “budget” sanatoriums have dank walls, smelly corridors, and dirty floors. The difference between the clinical treatments and general morale in these places corresponds to their outward appearance. However, there are a couple of notable exceptions two Berck hospitals catering to the poor, both of them admirably organized along the principles of decency. They are “The Maritime Hospital,” belonging to Paris’s Public Assistance Institution and “The Franco-American Hospital,” a charitable institution.

The trouble is that the former only admits Parisian patients while the latter has very few spaces available. Therefore, a patient in reduced circumstances who cannot find a place at either of these institutions falls prey to the entrepreneurial owners of “budget” sanatoriums.

Berck, kingdom of the damned

In Berck, 5,000 spinal tuberculosis patients are lying immobilized in plaster, waiting to be healed. The dreadful illness discerningly targets the joints the vertebrae, the hips, the knees and the attacked area must be immobilized immediately. Five thousand patients lie on gurneys and beds, lost in their reveries, endlessly absorbed in their endless books, dematerialized by their infinite contemplation of the ocean’s immensity.

Healing is slow, unbearably slow, but it happens. Nowadays, we see miracles that no one could have ever dreamed of in the past. In the 50-year history of Berck, the mortality rates for spinal tuberculosis have fallen from 80 percent in the last century to five percent, as a result of constant progress in clinical practice, hard-won through logic and determination; it is a unique achievement in the chronicles of medicine.

What is more, in Berck the patients live a normal life and the horrendous curse of their physical limitations becomes more bearable to them in the midst of a community filled with others like themselves.

But one cannot help but be moved by Berck. From the drama of the sick being hoisted onto carriages like coffins onto hearses (just like the hearses, the carriages have rollers to help the patient slide into them) to the spectacle of perspiring patients knitting in the sun and peddling their creations for a few coins to holidaymakers, Berck is filled with striking, heart-rending scenes.

But I have never seen anything so moving, so profoundly human and sad as the Christmas liturgy at Berck. The Catholics celebrate the birth of Christ in church at midnight. Nothing can be more affecting than the extraordinary emotion of the sick, their ecstatic pallor, during the quiet solemnity of the midnight Mass.

Scattered among the crowd, you could see mothers and relatives stifling their desperate sobs into handkerchiefs while the priest weaved among the ailing with the holy communion every diseased body suddenly transfigured, trembling as they received the divine grace.

During the moment of “elevation,” when all the faithful sink to their knees, the patients simply cover their eyes with their hands. At that moment the silence in the church deepens, swells, while outside the rain pummels the staves and the wind hollers its sinister chant as if beckoning all the world’s damned with its all-encompassing, ravaging wail.

Nobuo Sekine

Phase of Nothingness, 1969 / 1972 natural stone, stainless steel, 520 x 450 x 150 cm

Shiki City Municipal Office, 1972– , Saitama photographer unknown

© Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo

by Juliana Spahr

A friend told me a story about her elderly mom whose partner had died. It was a complicated story. The mom’s boyfriend had died in the hospital, during the one moment the mom had gone home for a break. When she came back, he had died so recently that the nurse had not yet closed his eyes, and his eyes, the panic in them, now haunted her mom. The mom dealt with the haunting by going to the bar every night. This was something new for the mom, a new way of being in the world that confused my friend. But also, the friend’s sister who lived with the mom was a part of this story and the sister’s many unemployed friends and there was a lot of coming and going. But as my friend told this story, a story with lots of chaos and anxiety, she kept returning to how there was cat shit all over the kitchen because no one would clean the cat box. When my friend was done with her story, I told her she had to read this new Hiromi Itō book, The Thorn Puller.

I did not tell her why, but I suggested this book because much of it is about taking care of one’s elderly parents from far away and flying back and forth and there is also a dog with a starring role. Itō (the book is written in first person but the chapter heads refer to this person as Itō) in the story gets her elderly parents a dog, but they are too old to care for it and the dog pees on the floor so many times the flooring has to be changed and then soon there are dried up pieces of dog shit in the corner, a sign of her mom’s decline. But what I did tell her was about how my mom was also not doing well, although in different ways. She had recently had another stroke and broken her hip and leg. The doctors had put in a rod and some nails to hold the bones together. The surgery was intense, and the recovery was difficult and would have been for anyone, but because my mom has dementia, she was constantly confused about why she could not walk. I had gone back to Ohio the first time to be there after the surgery and I was there when they moved her from the hospital and into rehab. And then I had returned a few weeks later to get her out of rehab and into assisted living as she was unable to return to her apartment. In between packing up boxes, moving boxes, throwing her stuff out, buying a recliner, and scooping her cat’s shit at her old apartment, I would regularly leave and go to her new room in assisted living and help her get to the bathroom. My mom at the time was more or less incontinent, mainly because she could not remember to press the button she wore around her neck that would bring someone to help her get to the bathroom. The button had arrived after the latest stroke and she could not get the presence of the button into her memory. I was worried about my mom sliding into permanent incontinence, so for the week I was there I would leave her old apartment to go to her new room every two or so hours. When I got there, I would first help her up and into the wheelchair and then once in the bathroom, after I got her standing, I would pull her pants down, then her diaper down, and help her shuffle around so she could sit and then I would stand there while she went to the bathroom. When there she often pooped, a soft, slippery sort of poop with a strong smell. And when I handed her the toilet paper, she would wipe so vigorously that I kept having to say, “Mom, don’t wipe back and forth because of infections.” This is how The Thorn Puller begins, with Itō, her mother having just had a stroke, taking the mom to the bathroom, dealing with her “soft, slippery bowel movement,” getting it on her hands, and the stink never going away. Not in a bad way. “Yeah, we eat, we shit. And our shit stinks. Honestly, those are the most natural things in the world,” she thinks. But she is clear that she is dealing with shit: “Mom’s loose stools were shit. They had the same foul smell as the ones I make.” And yet as normal as it is, these sorts of moments are not part of the range of content that is often in- cluded in literary narratives and Itō’s genius as a writer is in recognizing these moments and spending some uncomfortable time there with them, all the while insisting it is normal.

My friend had been flying back and forth to Las Vegas all year, dealing with the heavily drinking mom and the sister and the sister’s friends and the cat’s shit. She would often text me when she was there. The trip with all the bathroom visits was the second trip I had made back to Ohio in less than a month and I had texted her too. We would text about the weirdness of where we had arrived. A great deal of The Thorn Puller is about flying back and forth between Japan and California, dealing with two elderly parents in Japan, a much older and elderly husband in California, and a teenage daughter who traveled with her. My partner, while not much older than me as both of us are heading into elderly, was flying a lot to care for his two elderly parents who were in Florida. His mom had a stroke a few weeks after my mom. His dad was losing circulation in his feet and was at risk of amputation. A few weeks later, the mom was out of the hospital but the dad was in the hospital, fitted with a defibrillator vest. My partner would also text me stories about the weirdness of where he had arrived. In one story his mother on the way home from the hospital after her stroke insisted on getting a martini at a nearby bar because, she announced, it had been a hard week. I was also texting with another friend who was dealing with her mother who had a wound that would not heal and was constantly oozing after a minor surgery, and no one could get it to stop. She was dealing with a divorce and a teenager too and at one point she had her father-in-law living with her and then her mother-in-law moved in too after she left the hospital and then her son returned to live with her. She lived, like everyone else in this story, in a small, modest house, so the mother-in-law stayed on the couch in the corner of the living room as she recovered. I texted her too that she should read The Thorn Puller.

And yet another friend. I also told her to read The Thorn Puller when she was trying to help her mother-in-law who had never worked in her life, and thus had no income, find a senior living apartment cheap enough that my friend, of fairly modest income, could pay for it. This search went on for many months and involved much filing of waivers, but whenever one of the places wrote to the mother-in-law to notify her of an opening, the mother-in-law threw the letter out, saying she did not need to move. But she did need to move, for many reasons. The main reason being that the landlord had said she had to move. So, the search continued. And while the search happened, life went on. The brother-in-law died after many years of drug use. Numerous people in the family got COVID-19. My friend’s partner switched jobs two times, stressfully and not for the usual reason of increased income or sense of purpose. And my friend, like myself and like the friend with the mother with the wound that would not heal, first lost her job and then unlost her job. We all taught at the same small liberal arts college, and it had briefly been shut down because it could not make payroll and then a few weeks later a big polytechnic university acquired the college and we all unlost our jobs. The unlost jobs, as relieved as we were to have paychecks, were also part of the problem. The jobs we unlost were in no way the same as the ones we had lost. The jobs had become difficult and complicated, depressing too, as most of the people we respected had left in the first few years, and the new culture of the polytechnic university was very different than that of the small liberal arts college. The university tended to treat us less as faculty and more as ghosts and when they did notice us it was usually to tell us that they were not going to listen to us, although they did pay us regularly and that was a relief because we all needed money for elder care.

At some point, I texted my friend with the mother-in-law who needed housing about this moment where we were trying first to keep our jobs and then, once kept, trying to do our jobs, about family, about my teenage son who both needed and did not need me in the time-honored tradition of teenageness, about my partner who went around the house saying “I hate you; I hate you” to himself and it seemed to be about his job teaching math at an urban high school, about the cat box full of shit too, and about how I was going to have to move my mom from Ohio to live in the corner of our living room, the only room available in my modest house, because I could not afford to leave her in assisted living. The inability to leave her in assisted living was partially my fault. I had done funny things with her small amounts of savings that disqualified her from state assistance until I paid the money back, which I could not do because my salary was also modest because the small liberal arts college had frozen all salaries 10 years ago and the polytechnic university was refusing to pay us the going rate. In the middle of my self-involved inventorying of my woes, my friend texted me back, “Lol. I was reading the part in thorn puller last night before bed where she’s heaving her body from surface to surface while bleeding too much after some kind of uterine surgery bc her elderly husband is too weak to help her stand up which neither of them say but both of them know and she has to get to the car to go to ER and it was oddly deeply very comforting.” I knew immediately what paragraph she meant. It was this one: “Incessant waves of nausea and dizziness washed over me. I tried to stand but couldn’t, I tried to walk but couldn’t. I threw myself toward the wall in front of me, and when I crashed into it, I stopped. I leaned on the wall with all my weight, then threw myself forward again toward the table a few steps away, and when I crashed into that, I stopped again. Using this method, I inched closer, step by step, toward the car outside.” On its own, this paragraph might not seem like much, but in context, it does a very good job of describing those moments when you have no other option than to pull yourself forward, despite being barely able to do it, while another person that you rely on for help and support is unable to help you and instead stands there watching.

At the same time I was reading The Thorn Puller, I was trying to write something. For a number of months, I had been reading The New York Times on my device for about half an hour in bed after I woke up. My partner would leave to go teach and I didn’t have to start work until later because I taught at night, so I luxuriated in the mumble freedom, although reading The New York Times seemed like a misuse of this precious mumble free time. So, in a halfhearted attempt at self-improvement, and also in an attempt to fulfill the obligations of my job because the rare moments when the polytechnic university noticed us they usually were insulting our research output which they seemed to feel was not up to their standards, I decided I had to stop reading The New York Times on my device in bed. I made a rule that I was only allowed to stay in bed if I wrote something on that same device. I had decided I wanted to write something about crows. I am someone who loves crows, loves their loud squawks, the way they tilt their heads when looking at you. I love their eyes filled with what I imagine is a searching intelligence, an intelligence of connection. I also love their communal ways, the way they roost together, loudly exchanging information as they settle in for the night. I wanted to write though not just about any crow but about this specific crow called the ‘ alalā. The ‘ alalā had lived in Hawai ‘ i but were now extinct in the wild. The ‘ alalā is a beautiful and smart crow. Beautiful and smart basically describes all crows. But the beauty of the ‘ alalā is that they have wings that are a little more rounded and a bill that is a little bit thicker. And as for smartness, they know how to use sticks as tools. The ‘ alalā, to my disappointment, did not nest communally like the common crow. But still they shared. They often treated trees as pantries, caching ‘ oha kepau and ‘ ōlapa fruit clusters in the crotch of branches or twigs of trees near the nest so as to feed their partners when they were busy with incubating or brooding.

The ‘ alalā went extinct in the wild, but there were nine crows still alive in a lab. These nine were now being bred by a team of humans who wanted to reintroduce them to the wild. It sounded like it was not a great thing to be one of nine remaining ‘ alalā. ‘ Alalā are among those birds who are monogamous and form strong bonds but when held captive were forced to breed not for compatibility but for genetic diversity and so they were provided only with one mate at a time. Frequently the two ‘ alalā did not want to mate. But for those that did, after they laid a clutch of eggs, someone from the team of humans would go in and pull the eggs away so the ‘ alalā would think the first clutch had died and produce a double clutch. But even when the ‘ alalā laid the double clutch, the eggs were still often taken away and the chicks were raised by humans. The humans did not trust the ‘ alalā to raise their own eggs. They felt the ‘ alalā were bad parents. In this way, at great expense and much trouble, the humans produced about 15 ‘ alalā each year. There it got complicated again for the ways it is not great to be one of the remaining ‘ alalā seem to be many. One year, at the beginning of the rewilding, enough birds had been produced that 30 were released. And very shortly 25 of those 30 were dead or disappeared. The humans then recaptured the five remaining birds. They decided that part of the problem was that the captive ‘ alalā no longer recognized the ‘ io as predatory and so were quickly eaten. The humans set about to train the ‘ alalā to recognize the ‘ io as a danger. This involved bringing in a glove-trained ‘ io and a taxidermied ‘ io. The humans would attach the taxidermied ‘ io to a pulley and have it mimic flying over the ‘ alalā’s cage and then another human would stand at the cage, body hidden, holding out an arm with the glove-trained, live ‘ io so that the ‘ alalā could see the ‘ io. Then another human would play prerecorded ‘ alalā alarm calls and as the calls continued, the human with the glove would put a dead ‘ alalā underneath the io’s feet, moving their arms up and down, the ‘ io balanced on the

Fields of Sight (published by Edition Patrick Fey) features a series of works made in collaboration between photographer Gauri Gill and acclaimed Warli artist Rajesh Vangad. The collaboration consists of photographs of landscapes in Ganjad, Dahanu, an Adivasi village in coastal Maharashtra in India with drawings by Vangad. Vangad’s inscriptions, rather than adding to the photographs, include and remember an important layer of myth, memory, and history — precisely what is lacking in the photographic capture of the (exclusively) immediate for Gill. Their collaborative works offer a meditation on perception itself in witness of the destruction of the earth (by way of the immediate and industrial) and respect for the land. Alongside the exquisite inscription-laden images, the book includes annotations by both artists on their respective photographic and graphic languages. above and facing page:

Gauri Gill, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad

“Fields of Sight,” Edition Patrick Frey, 2023 glove, awkwardly. This was what I thought I wanted to write about.

I had convinced myself that I wanted to write a small book, one more idiosyncratic in form and content than encyclopedic. At first, I thought I wanted to write a book about emotions, about the emotions that I felt when I watched the videos of the captive ‘ alalā. About the odd look in the glove-trained ‘ io’s eyes as the dead crow was shoved underneath it to demonstrate the predator training protocol. About how in another video the woman who came to feed them would first put a black shroud over her head as if she were a druid, climb a ladder, and attach a food dispenser to a fence.

At the time I was partial to writing poems that had lists of animals in them. I had in the past used elegy to talk about endangered species, listed names of extinctions as if in real time, created fake ecosystems to suggest connections in the poems that I wrote. But now I wanted to deal not with the natural world but with humans trying to respond to ecological crisis of their own invention, not by stopping doing what they were doing that was causing birds like the ‘ alalā to become extinct but instead by pulling a taxidermied ‘ io over the cage of the ‘ alalā, playing ‘ alalā alarm calls, and holding a captured ‘ io out near a cage with a dead ‘ alalā shoved underneath it. It was the things that humans do in the name of care that are something other than care that I found so enticing in this ‘ alalā story.

I imagined this small book having this as its opening sentence: “There once were only nine ‘ alalā left and these nine were bred by humans to produce other ‘ alalā that were then trained by those same humans to be introduced back into the wild where they were then eaten by the also endangered ‘ io.” I was not sure this was the right sentence. But at the same time, I thought this sort of sentence would exemplify my concerns with avoiding the romanticization that defines the writing about what some people call “endlings,” or the last known example of a species. I did not at all want to write something about taking care of my mother. But it did not occur to me that maybe I was interested in the story of the ‘ alalā because my mom was also a sort of endling, at least to me, and stuck in a version of a cage. But I did not let myself have this thought while flying back and forth to Ohio every few weeks and getting no writing done. The more likely explanation, despite my grand plan and my statements of intent, was that it was not really the ‘ alalā that I needed or wanted to write about, it was rather the absurdity of the caretaking. My mom had a million times said to me that I should never drop her off at a nursing home or an assisted living facility. If she ever got dementia and was in diapers, I was to let her die.

Itō does a good job in The Thorn Puller of explaining the constant feeling that there is not room for one more thing and then yet one more thing comes along all the time because life is a list of things that happen and is never still. For me, I felt the absurdity peak when I began the process of trying to move my mom out to California so she could live in the corner of my living room and began to try to figure out the California medical care system, a system that was much better but therefore much more complicated than the one in Ohio. For weeks before she moved, I got up and did my calls, as I called it, for at least an hour each day. Among the people I called were a lawyer who for a fee would help me apply for Medi-Cal; someone who was basically a real estate agent for assisted living facilities who would be paid by the facilities if we found someplace although none of the places were affordable; a person who would help me find the right version of Medicare insurance for my mom in California who would be paid by the insurance company if I worked with her; some guy who kept calling me when I naïvely gave my phone number to some site so that I could see the rates for an assisted living facility and who seemed slightly bad at his job, which was also to be a sort real estate agent for the elderly; someone from a nonprofit whose website featured stirring patriotic music and lots of flags and who would for a fee help me apply for veteran’s benefits for my mom, a service I needed because the free versions of assistance with these forms that the veteran’s sites recommended never returned my calls or my emails and their website warned me not to come by their office; my own tax accountant who for years I had paid to do my taxes and who seemed annoyed by my questions; an elder lawyer in Ohio who had been helping me understand Ohio Medicaid who I also paid, and a social worker who I would pay if I wanted them to figure out where I might get medical help for my mom. There were, I learned, a whole range of other services that had unclear costs or unclear requirements, many of which my mom could never receive because she had a small pension from her years of being a schoolteacher, which meant that she made too much money to qualify for many things but not enough money to pay for the level of care she needed. Many of these people seemed as confused as I was and gave me contradictory advice and it was never clear to me what was true. In the meantime, I kept paying more than I made in a month each month I kept my mom in assisted living in Ohio.

It was not surprising that my friend referenced The Thorn Puller when I complained to her. We are, my friend and me, part of the Hiromi Itō fan club. Or so we decided years ago when we brought Hiromi Itō to read at the MFA program that was offered by that small liberal arts college. Hiromi Itō read that night from Killing Kanoko, her book about motherhood and depression written after her daughter was born. While The Thorn Puller says a bunch of things that I have never seen anyone say in literary fiction about elder care and late-in-life partnerships and the difficulties of raising teenagers and dealing with one’s own bodily decline at the same time, Killing Kanoko said the same about caring for an infant. The poem “Killing Kanoko” is willing to go to the dark place: “congratulations on your destruction” is one of its refrains. But also passages like this: “After six months / Kanoko’s teeth come in / She bites my nipples, wants to bite my nipples off / She is always looking for just the right moment to do so / Kanoko eats my time / Kanoko pilfers my nutrients / Kanoko threatens my appetite / Kanoko pulls out my hair / Kanoko forces me to deal with all her shit / I want to get rid of Kanoko / I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko / I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples.” I had a young son at the time whose teeth had just come in and who was also biting my nipples regularly. When this happened, I would scream ouch loudly, then he too would begin to scream and there we were, my boob hanging out in public, him loudly causing a stir because I had loudly caused a stir. Every time, I felt as if I was being a bad mother by reacting to the pain and not being able to gracefully pull my child’s mouth off the nipple and then just as gracefully reattach it and do it with such ease that he did not scream. I was convinced that all the good mothers, those who really enjoyed their babymoon, knew how to do this. This, as you might imagine, made reading Killing Kanoko feel as if someone had finally walked across the room to me when my baby screamed after I went “ouch” and told me that I wasn’t a bad mom because I went “ouch.” Something that never once happened.

The night that my friend and I created and then joined the Hiromi Itō fan club, Kanoko, the daughter whom Hiromi Itō had, of course, not killed and whom as far as I could understand she loved dearly, was there. Kanoko played some instrument she had made, and the music was the sort of experimental music that was made at the small liberal arts college. It was exciting and lovely and I remember thinking that night that poetry could do some work, something that I do not feel that often. And I also remember standing outside the reading on the porch of the building because my friend at that time still smoked and we were talking about how there needed to be a Hiromi Itō fan club. This was a very different time, a time when the small liberal arts college was somewhat functioning, and the room was packed with people to see Hiromi Itō, and my friend still smoked which meant we were younger and less worried versions of ourselves, a time when we had time to joke about a fan club. Now literature feels sort of like an afterthought.

I have this theory about poetry in this moment. I do not tell many people who write poetry about this theory because it annoys them and then they complain about it all over the place and then I get annoyed and feel bad at the same time. My theory is that we are in a moment where all the poetry is a form of heroic confessionalism where people talk mainly about their lives, as many poets have over time, but unlike before so many of the poems right now feature the author as the hero of their stories, someone who triumphs or rights wrongs or scolds people who are wrong loudly and convincingly. Poetry has become self-hagiography. Sometimes when I read poetry, I think of it as telling the stories of these godlike figures who always know the right thing to do and then who get right on it and do it, helping everyone be better, fighting injustices in their various ways, some despite oppression and some righteous in their refusal to be the oppressor. This work can, like all poetry, be good or bad. But even when it is good and I admire its skillful turns and its beautiful metaphors and maybe I go ohh marveling at the narrator’s abilities to right wrongs or out of respect for their strong righteous anger, I find it little comfort.

Sometimes I just want someone to say something fucked up in their poem, to confess some fucked up things they thought or did, some moments when they realized not how they were triumphant but how they were on the wrong side or they did something disgusting or their body did something disgusting without their consent or someone did something disgusting to their body and they dealt with it or enjoyed it or maybe just did not mind it. Congratulations on your destruction, I want someone to say. And this is the reason why I am a member of the Hiromi Itō fan club, a club with no membership cards and no dues and only a few other members who never hold meetings.

In each chapter of The Thorn Puller, Itō references a bunch of other writers and she is, she says, imitating their styles. I can’t hear these voices because most of these referenced works are not translated and I’m stupid in my monolingualism. But it is a nice way for a writer to be in the world. It is nice to think about how the stories we tell are created over time and are impossible for any single individual to own, something I believe so strongly that I sometimes end up on the wrong side of all the debates about appropriation. Itō’s stories tend to end mid-narrative, as if they were fables. In the one about the bleeding, it ends with Itō unable to get herself into the hospital, so while her husband goes to get a wheelchair, she lays down in the parking lot and as the winds blow over her she realizes that there is a wildfire nearby. Eventually she is picked up and taken into the hospital and it is unclear what is done to make her better because suddenly there is a story about the dog and then another call from her dad about her mother and the hospital has just disappeared. This chapter ends the book, and it ends with a moment where Itō and her husband and her teenage daughters have driven to the snow to go sledding. Itō has hurt her neck and so does not want to turn and feel the pain but her daughters call to her and she turns despite the pain: “I felt myself shake again. I shook until I felt myself. I exist. Here. Meanwhile, they were shouting themselves hoarse. I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive! I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive!”

On one of these many trips I made to care for my mom, I can’t remember if it was the time she was recovering from bladder cancer or the time she had her gallbladder removed or the time she had her knee replaced, one by one my mom’s friends came by to check on her. I was at the dining room table working on her accounting as the friends came by. This was about five or so years ago and it was when the opioid crisis was at its peak and my mom lived in the center of the opioid crisis. As I worked, I listened to them tell my mom their stories, so many of them about their children and opiates. There was one about a son who had a drug problem and while his girlfriend, also with a drug problem, was in jail for theft, he took up with another much younger girl who also had a drug problem. Around the time the girlfriend got out of jail, the much younger girl overdosed. The son and the girlfriend did not tell anyone the girl had died, and they buried her in their backyard. Eventually, the girl’s body was dug up and that was what the story was about. It was about what her body looked like. It had become purplish black, the woman said, unrecognizable. And she said it several times. The story stopped there. There was no presumed ending. It was a story that could not accommodate an end and all it said was I’m alive.

by ML Kejera

Two years had passed since the revolution and Tunis was football mad, but I didn’t care, I was in love. Granted, the match was to start soon and I’d have to wax up my ears from the whole city, country, and galaxy breathing football. Granted, too, Esther wasn’t texting back my téléphone portable, but no matter, Maman smiled as she fixed my tie. Taking photo after photo, she palavered on about “my big man, mon Benedict, mon filston going to his senior prom. And with a date, at that!” Maman wasn’t sure what senior prom was, or why an international school “is following a custom so American, or why I only heard about this Indian girl when you and the boys were buying tuxedos, or why you’ve never learnt to tie a tie yourself but one thing I am undoubtedly sure of is that a man brings a woman flowers. Tu m’entends, Benedict?”

Before I could ask whether Papa had bought her flowers on their first date, Maman’s footsteps were echoing down the stairway. I rifled through the pockets of my fifth grade Olive et Tom backpack for my box of unopened condoms, pack of Camels, wallet, and lighter.

My Nokia vibrated in my pocket; midstep, I reached for it and tripped in the staircase. It wasn’t Esther, but a text from Arabella, who’d slap you if you called her anything but Bella. She was at Café Mosaic and needed “2 talk bout Esther.” Bella was more in a series of laborious fights than a relationship with her girlfriend, so to my thinking, she wasn’t in a position to give romantic advice. That said, she’d known me since Cote D’Ivoire.

The blue veins on the marble stairway snaked down the steps and onto the living room floor until they reached Papa’s feet. He was sitting before the sharp green of the stadium pitch on the television. Our leather couch swallowing him, a voice emanated from the shiny baldness of the back of his head. “Maman says you’re off to this prom, Benedict? Was there a ticket? Do they make it more expensive for the ADB children? Combien ça m’a coûté?”

Yes. Yes. No. Ninety dinars.

The baldness shook as Papa laughed, wondering out loud if I had opted to attend a cheaper college in America. As the two teams walked out onto the pitch, Papa went over the advice he always gave before casting me to the night. “No drugs and don’t get anyone pregnant.” My Muslim friends were told to avoid alcohol as well.

Tonight’s advice came with an additional warning. He had seen protestors clashing with police on his drive back from work. “Even with my ADB license plate, les flics” but before he could explain that they had given him some trouble, his voice trailed off when Mejbri, a star player, appeared on the television. Maman told Papa that I’d need taxi fare and spending money while Mejbri bounced the ball on his right shoulder, and Papa, torso now leaning into the television, pointed to the ebony table behind him, indicating that I was to pick up his crocodile-skin wallet and remove whatever Maman determined was enough (five twenty-dinar bills). Maman gave me boustines on both cheeks at the door and told me again about the flowers.

In the garden, the moonlight and streetlight cast a sickly yellow blend over the bougainvillea, roses, daffodils, almond and apple trees, and our pet turtle. Through the window, Papa loudly said he couldn’t understand why I’d miss the match of the century for some silly American dance. The boys in my class were of the same mind. They’d protested when the all-girl planning committee didn’t factor in the match, marching down the hall and chanting “la grève, la grève.” Even I joined in. A 75-inch flatscreen TV was placed in a room adjacent to the main dancing hall.

Walking the two blocks to Mosaic, football lunged at me from the dark. Two security guards, sitting with a radio, argued in French I could understand, and Arabic I could not. The older one kept insisting that the match was nothing more than an exhibition between clubs in comparison to Maradona’s 1986 thrashing of England; his neighbor, “wallah,” he swore, had been the referee who’d allowed Diego’s head and God’s hand to win the Falklands War.

Seven minutes in, by the Monoprix that had been burnt down during the revolution, a shopper was rebutting Ali Bin Nasser’s neighbor: the match would be a clash between two of the world’s greatest rivals that would free the country from the dictator’s psychic clutches. He talked over the commentator who marveled at the footwork of “number 12, Dali. He’s past one defender, past two, oh!” When I walked through the doors of Mosaic, the ball was in the hands of the goalkeeper, Roble, on the television above the bar that served no alcohol. My friends were sitting at a circular table underneath a smoke-browned painting, but when I found them, not one of their eyes met mine.

Bella was bubbling away at a chicha next to a girl who was not her girlfriend, a girl with the same strawberry blonde hair and dull blue eyes as Amber, who was Bella’s girlfriend. Next to the girl who was not Bella’s girlfriend was Leopold, who kept a Jansport backpack by his feet. He was a white cousin who wasn’t really my cousin, but his diplomat parents had known mine back when they were in Dakar, and French was still his preference. By him, arms splayed out on the couch, fixated on the television, was Yonas, whom we called Yono, who couldn’t have turned away even if the icon of the Habesha Virgin Mary he kept in his wallet, “for protection,” stepped into the three-dimensional plane.

“Hang on, where’s Malick?” I asked, interrupting the sound of football devouring silence. Yono blinked but his eyes remained locked on the television. “Benedict,” Leopold began, but Bella cut him off, though I knew whatever was coming next would be catastrophic as my friends never called me anything but Bando, a name that had stuck after a better-forgotten 9th grade rap career. Thirty seconds passed on the game clock as my brain registered what Bella, in her British-laced Ghanaian accent, was saying: “Right, then, mate, you’ve lost your date to prom. Simple as that. I’m sorry.” Before I could ask what in the actual fuck she was on about, she said that Lewis, who we called Lulu, had seen Esther and Makaveli pre-gaming, and touching, in Marsa.

“Makaveli the Gambian?” I asked. “Makaveli the Gambian, yes,” responded Bella. Makaveli whose name was Malick but insisted you call him Makaveli? Makaveli, who’d correct you if you spelled it Machiavelli in a text? Makaveli, whom we all assumed was in the closet? Makaveli, who smokes Gauloises? I mean, who the fuck smokes Gauloises?

“Bando, puff on this,” Bella said, taking the pipe from the girl who was not her girlfriend. The smoke went in smoothly, but I tasted ash on my tongue when Yono jumped to his feet and shook the coal in the chicha bowl. As the commentator commented, “Out of sheer frustration that every man was marked, Dali has taken a shot from outside the box and, oh God, it’s hit the post! A prelude of the drama to come.”

Over the crowd’s cheers made hollow by the television’s speakers, I could still hear myself saying that I just need to get her flowers, that Maman said to get her flowers. “And then what, Bando? She falls in love with you, just like that? Much love to Tantie but what the fuck are flowers going to do?” Yes, I nodded, Esther and Makaveli had been close for ages. Yes, I barely knew her. No, I couldn’t actually list a single thing I loved about her. Maybe, being honest, I just wanted a date, to finally fuck.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said after Bella was done. “You don’t take another man’s girl.” “Another man’s what, sorry? Tu es mon pote, Benedict, depuis Abidjan, but you’re speaking rubbish. We’re not property.” “You know what the fuck I mean, Bella.” “Non, mec, I’m afraid I really fucking don’t.”

Amber, the girl who was Bella’s girlfriend, called but, before she even said hello, Bella was swearing to all the gods she could name “I’m not anywhere near Beatrix.” She had wholly forgotten about Beatrix. She was not sure she would recognize her if she saw her now. When Amber hung up, Bella turned to the girl who was not her girlfriend: “Beatrix, you ready to go then? Help me into my dress?” Turning back to me, she said, “You three still good to get hash and liquor for the afterparty?”

“And flowers,” I added, but Bella was already out the door, leaving me with Leopold and football and Yono’s cherubic face, which stayed fixed on the television while he told us we were close enough to Momo, our dealer, that we could stand to watch a few more minutes of the match, and that he could feel a goal coming. To Yono, the Kingdom of Heaven was not hidden in some field but manifested on the verdant pitch, in the beautiful game.

We cut past bruised chairs and tables, old men playing ancient card games, depressed waiters, cigarette smoke, all the mint chichas in existence, and flowed out into the street and the night and its cars. Yono whistled a car out of the streetlight-speckled dark whilst I monologued.

Malick, who really did insist on being called Makaveli, “must’ve thought this all up when we were buying tuxedos.” Yono, Lulu, Leopold, and I had opted for the Tony Montana look with black jackets and colored shirts. Malick Makaveli had reprimanded us all, in that affected British accent of his, because “black was only reserved for funerals.” He himself would go with “only the darkest of blues.” I hadn’t noticed it then, but when I told him I’d sent Esther a picture and she didn’t mind the color of my suit, his eyes had sunk into their pits.

“Samahni,” said the gap-toothed and jet-haired driver of the yellow taxi. “Je comprends pas bien ton Anglais,” but he communicated that he needed us to shut up so that he could hear the match. “Noah’s, number 22’s corner kick had too much power behind it and ended on the other side as a throw-in.” Reaching beneath him, the taxi driver pulled out a pack of Celtias and distributed them until everyone had a beer in hand. Our hyena canines painted streaks of reflected streetlight down the road.

We came to a sudden halt at a red light, a cuboid car next to us, and the woman’s grip tightened on her steering wheel as her eyes met ours. God himself must have fashioned her out of mud to be the quintessence of ugliness. I laughed but not the hardest, and Yono choked that he “bet no one’s ever bought her flowers” until the light went green, the taxi growled, and the radio shouted that “marauding down the left flank, it’s Mejbri, bearing apocalypse in his right foot. Goal! At the thirty-eighth minute! It’s Armageddon, it’s Meggido, it’s pure football!”

By the time the other commentator finished analyzing the angle Mejbri had used to sink the ball into the back corner, our taxi had arrived at the abandoned construction site where we were to meet Momo. The face of the ugliest woman on Earth faded from memory. I descended with Yono, leaving Leopold and his Jansport backpack to beg patience of the driver who, as luck would have it, needed a cigarette and another Celtia before he was good to drive again.

Momo’s moped came revving out of the darkness. “Habibi, yallah, yallah, let’s go. It won’t be halftime forever.” He swore that the hash we were each paying twenty dinars for was the best shit, straight out of Morocco. Pointing at deep purple bruises around his eyes, he said, through wheezy laughter, that “mes amis, les flics” had booted some fans from the stadium earlier that evening, and that protest had spilled into a larger nearby one. Tensions were high, Momo explained, as it was the anniversary of the revolution. As he saw it, the police had robbed him, so he’d got one officer in the mouth, and received the bruises for his effort. “Tu sais” that he was the truest fan, having taken grainy selfies with every player, even those eternally on the bench. Yono said he was rooting for the other side, and they boustined goodbye.

We were back in the taxi as halftime reached its end, where Leopold and the driver were debating Maradona’s 1986 handball, which was not dishonest because God Himself had suspended the Argentine in the air, transmogrifying him into a Patagon muscles bellowing fee fi fo fum so his hand could reach the ball. Their argument continued until we reached the Carrefour. “Et n’oubliez pas, khouya,” the driver began after accepting some of our hash. Maradona, he reminded us, had demonstrated the perfect separation of church and state, Ennahda be damned. He’d scored two goals that day, one for God, and the other for man. The second was pure, calculated skill: “Géométrie pure, science pure!” He continued even after Leopold exited the car.

Zipping through the Carrefour’s food court, we contemplated cordons bleus from Baguette & Baguette before stopping at the hard liquor for Absolut Vodka and Boukha. Yono’s eyes stole glances at every rectangular LCD in the supermarket, joining those of the workers and other shoppers in welcoming the players back onto the HDTV pitch. At checkout, our fake IDs weren’t checked: we were rich, international children whose parents clearly worked for the ADB or the American embassy, for how else would a kahloush have money in this country?

I didn’t notice anything on the walk back to the front because my eyes never left my phone’s pixelated screen, hoping that Esther would text me. As we got into another cab, Yono asked the driver if he could stop at the florist’s near the American embassy first. I thanked him. Before the driver could make the necessary U-turn, my phone vibrated. It wasn’t a text from Esther, nor Bella, but Lulu. “@ porto fino, they just walked in. his got his arm on her waist. lol lmao. he’s wearing a blue suit. its dark but u can tell its blue.”

After showing Leopold and Yono the text, I spoke to the driver. “Samahni, Berges du Lac, s’il vous plaît.” We became speed itself as we coursed through Tunis and the night once more towards the lakeside neighborhood, carried on by football. “If they keep attacking like this, they’re sure to receive,” said the commentator.

Amidst the streetlights, dim stars, cars, the glow of my phone, sirocco, and the ever-present, dull roar of the crowd chanting “on va gagner, on va gagner” on the radio, we passed the remnants of a protest, tear gas still hanging in the air as a thinning throng limped by. Police batons had beaten back the human shapes that were once a swelling sea. At a stoplight, I gave up counting the number of bruised and battered bodies after fifteen. Some dragged dented signs commemorating the anniversary.

Sitting behind me, Yono played with fire. In the front mirror’s reflection, I saw the crafty bastard combining wrinkled rolling paper, tobacco loosened from a cigarette, and the hash we just bought. The stoplight went neon green, the wheels spun, and Yono finished the spliff as we were off. The joint was passed from left to right, including the appreciative taxi driver who blew smoke out his missing teeth. At the seventieth minute, the radio commentator was praise-singing Suleimane whose full goal dive stopped a freekick from being an equalizer. “He’s celestial. The natural laws of not only the game but the universe itself cannot account for him. He reorganizes space. Where he is, the ball will be.”

We bent space, shortening the way and turning the lake into a blur that was so blue it was black, and before we could finish the spliff, we were at the tall glass doors of Porto Fino. Leopold took two puffs and left the rest of it with the driver.

I walked in like my father owned the place, since this all used to be my stomping ground before we moved to Laouina. We pass the low pastel seats and circular tables, old men in love with their chichas, and the general bourgeoisie as Bella called them that frequented Porto. At the corner we’d colonized years ago, I was met with the faces of my schoolmates, suspended above clothes and gleaming jewelry that told you they and, I suppose, I too lived in houses that’d make most homes feel like graves. Their eyes betrayed some great shock, like they’d met Death at a gala. Neither Esther nor Makaveli, whom we should all have stopped humoring and just called Malick, were present. Lulu’s tan, hairy arm came around my shoulder as his whispers entered my ear. “You just missed ‘em, Bando. They’re going straight to prom. Makaveli kept talking ‘bout how quickly she’d said yes, how it was really more her idea than anything.”

We were interrupted when one of our friends in the corner asked Lulu for “une clope.” He handed him a cigarette. I asked why the boy looked so monochrome. Through Lulu’s hushed voice, I learnt that they’d seen a dead body by the side of the road on their way here. I was about to ask whether it had been a hit and run victim or someone from the protests, if the body had looked like the exploded cat we’d seen in the middle of the road all those years ago right here in Lac, but the commentator’s voice ran electric through Porto’s overhead speakers and even the grim faces of our friends turned to football. “And it’s a perfect drop for Panahi but here’s Suleimane again, restructuring reality to bunt it away. And Bwalya takes it on the chest. Will he take the shot? No! It’s a cheeky pass to Ouédraogo who sneaks it into the left corner!”

A bodily scramble ensued towards the doors as the players danced by the corner flag. The match was clearly going to extra time, if not penalties. If we left for prom now, we’d get there before the doors closed.

I lost the four who had seen the face of death to the throng. In the street in front of Porto, Yono, Lulu, and Leopold tried to get me into a cab with them, but I told them, “I need to get flowers first. Maman told me to bring flowers.” Yono handed me a spliff, they all wished me “bonne chance,” and they sped down the road.

I waved my hand into the night and a yellow blur came to a halt in front of me. Our ultimate destination was the dance hall, I told the driver, but we’d take the backroad and stop by a florist’s first. He complained about how muddy that backroad got. I placed two Camels between my lips, lit them, and handed him one. He fiddled with the radio. Every station was blaring football. Space folded and we blazed through more and more remnants of protest until we were at the florist’s and it was the second half of extra time. I begged the driver to keep the engine running as I’d only be a few moments.

The florist, an old woman with a face of dried leather, was behind her stand. Before her in plastic crates were bouquets and arrangements of sea-lavenders, chrysanthemums, roses, and other flowers whose names I’d never overheard the gardener speak. After eyeing me and my suit, she offered me a jasmine blossom like I was some tourist hoping to take back a memento of the Jasmine Revolution. I settled on pink roses, as I didn’t know what color Esther preferred or, in fact, what her preference for flowers was.

Right as I was about to enter the taxi, a tank gigantic under the weak streetlight came into view. Like Gabriel’s horn, its cold, noiseless gun blasted sound out of existence. All the world became the metallic thundering of steel tracks over tarmac.

As it passed us, even the radio of the soldier in the hatch was nothing more than the whisper of football. Only his helmet was visible. We humans on the street watched this death’s head mechanism of war rumble into the distance. I returned to the florist’s shack and gave her an extra 15 dinars without saying a word.

Football was the first sound to come back after the tank destroyed the world. On the taxi’s radio, Dali was “past the defenders. He’s locomotive flesh deep, deep in the black heart of the keeper’s kingdom. And it’s a lob, but oh my Lord, it grazes the post! And with less than five minutes left on the clock, it’s sounding like mene, mene, tick tock, upharsin. Penalties will be had!”

I could see the dance hall at the end of a muddy road that bled into night. Reducing the volume of his radio, the driver eyed my bouquet and asked me if I remembered the flowers. I was about to ask him how he knew what Maman had tasked me with when he implored, “Rappelez-vous, khouya, rappelez-vous les fleurs.” He reminded me of the flowers that had been left on tanks and trucks after General Ammar refused the dictator’s order to shoot protestors. Ammar had recently resigned in disgrace.

“Je suis désolé,” said the driver, still smiling at the memory of flowers, before informing me that this was where he stopped. He refused to risk the mud that made up the rest of the back road and I didn’t have time for him to get back on the main one. I begged and begged, offering all my money, even mentioning that he could watch the remainder of the match on the LCD that had been set up.

“Mais, c’est toujours le football, le football, le football dans ce pays. Je m’en fou du football!”

I had never heard a man say he didn’t care for football before. His voice growing faint as the moonlit horizon swallowed the taxi, the commentator said, “And as we await penalties, it’s the long dark night before the victorious dawn.” Bouquet of roses in hand, I ran on earth that got damper with each step. Abandoned by all, and a thousand dragons slain, my quest was near its end. Like a ball in the air, the marigold moon hung heavy and low over my princess’ castle. For a moment, there was peace. For the first time in 120 minutes, I was free of the aural cage football made of Tunis. The wind, carrying the chirps of crickets, was behind me.

I tripped.

I tripped and the bouquet went flying. It joined me with Adam’s twenty-three ribs in the mud.

Suit and pants wholly soiled, I scraped the earth for flowers. All the night’s effort resulted in nothing but a solitary pink rose the least caked with mud for Esther who, for all I knew, might not have been fond of flowers. I knew, though, that she hadn’t responded to a single text, which should have been enough. It would have been enough if not for Malick, that bastard who insisted you call him Makaveli. Besides, “Maman said a man brings flowers.” And, though I had just the one, I intended to give it to Esther. The dance hall now a quarter mile away, rumblings of football pierced through lonely night. My schoolmates had the volume up so loud that football, dampened by walls into incomprehensibility, dribbled holes through my skull.

“And he’s taking his sweet time, this Benedict, this Bando, this pathetic boy whose girl has been pilfered. At the pace he’s going, he’ll be lucky to get there before the doors close. And with but a single flower to win her back? They truly don’t make them like they used to, eh? Oh, Hannibal, if only you could see what has become of Carthage. Ecce homo saeculi viginti-unus!”

The voice that had colonized my mind and the voice of football from the flatscreen coalesced into one as I walked past the parking lot and its cars, past the slumped silver banners, leaving muddy footprints on the linoleum in the lobby, main dance hall, and adjacent television room. The winning team had their shirts off in celebration, nipples pixelated and enlarged by the TV. “With that miss, Delson has sealed his team’s fate. You can see him on his knees, face buried in the grass, wailing, ‘Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani?’”

Radiance rained down from the chandelier on my schoolmates, who wore dresses and suits they would never wear again. Bella, whom I hadn’t seen in a dress since sixth grade, sat next to a girl who could either have been Amber, who was her girlfriend, or Beatrix, who was not. Leopold, Jansport backpack at his feet, was talking to a Senegalese girl and Lulu. Yono, face of a trumpeting archangel, wept, his lamentation lost to the din of football.

Right underneath the television that encased the jubilant team were Esther, wearing a light blue dress, and Malick Makaveli who wore a blue suit so dark it looked black. She held a jasmine bouquet in her hand, and he had one of its blossoms tucked behind his ear. They kissed, eyes never wavering from the screen.

Nobuo Sekine

Phase of Nothingness Two Mountains, 1977 Korean stone, 45 x 60 x 35 cm

© Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo