Lyceum Fall 2020 Volume V

LYCEUM Volume V | Fall 2020

1

Lyceum

A Literar y Science Journal Co-Presidents

Miriam Hyman Meheret Ourgessa Sierra Smith

Treasurer

Sumaya Ahmed

Editing Team

Rand Burnette Nathan Chu Meg Dye Hailey Napier

Design Team

Grant Holt Miriam Hyman Ansley Grider Meheret Ourgessa

Media Assistant Ansley Grider

Front Cover

Sierra Smith

Back Cover

Ansley Grider

Volume V | Fall 2020 3

Editor’s Note This semester, Lyceum was compiled entirely online, by Kenyon students living in different time zones, eating different food, seeing each-other on different screens. It is a peculiar world we’ve been living in these past few months. As if we all simultaneously lost a sense in May of 2020 and have since scrambled to restructure our lives with the senses that remain.

The Kenyon community, familiar to us as a bubble on a hill in Gambier Ohio has burst and reformed into many smaller Kenyons scattered across continent and the world. (Some of these Kenyons took the form of group houses, hidden within the cells on the front cover). Without the gravitational force of physical togetherness, Zoom’s private chat stands in for side conversations in the classroom. Emails replace a passing word on Middle Path. Phone calls become dinner conversation in Pierce.

The replacements are incomplete. Awkward. Stressful. This Fall 2020 issue has fewer contributors than that of Fall 2019, and the editor’s note is being written over an extended winter break of 2021. We are publishing our first article by a Kenyon graduate, originally scheduled for a year ago. And yet it is miraculous when, leaning on those less favored senses, we recreate something beautiful, but not quite the same.

As always, Lyceum captures the creativity and interdisciplinary perspectives of Kenyon students. The magazine features poetry, short stories, articles, artwork and an interview. It offers an escape to outer space, an underground world, Freud’s Vienna, and the ancient wisdom of a bog. We hope, as you read, that the artwork will touch you, that the articles will take you sight-seeing and that this issue will provide a sense of place.

Warmly, Miriam Hyman Co-founder and President of Lyceum

4

Table of Contents Editor’s Note..........................................................................................................................4 Snot by Rand Burnette................................................................................................................4 Night Hawk & Barn Owl by Hailey Napier............................................................................6 Birds by Rand Burnette..............................................................................................................7 Black-capped Chickadee by Hailey Napier............................................................................8 Mask by Sierra Smith..............................................................................................................10 Underground by Huijun Mao................................................................................................11 Shovel by Rand Burnette.........................................................................................................11 Tardigrade by Sierra Smith.....................................................................................................12 Silver Film by Nathan Chu....................................................................................................15 Sideways by Nathan Chu......................................................................................................16 Sunset by Miriam Hyman ....................................................................................................16 Cocaine and Sigmund Freud by Grant Holt......................................................................17 Cocaine by Rand Burnette......................................................................................................19 Stress by Sierra Smith...........................................................................................................20 Nuclear Repository and other poems by David Han..........................................................21 Infotubes by Rand Burnette.............. .....................................................................................21 One Remarkable Finding by Jenny Jantzen..........................................................................24 Mitosis by Eva Illuzzi...........................................................................................................24 Alice Dreger’s Middle Finger by India Kotis.....................................................................26 Nitrile Glove by Sierra Smith................................................................................................28 Spring Break by Sierra Smith................................................................................................29 Water by Ansley Grider...........................................................................................................30 Water Rights Fights by Chris Bechtol....................................................................................30 Enmired by Miriam Hyman...................................................................................................32 Mosses by Rand Burnette.........................................................................................................32 Accreditation Vessel by Rand Burnette.................................................................................38

5

NIGHTHAWK

&

BARN OWL

Listen To the brightness Carry the sun Until

There is Blunt black silence

Birds sing themselves to sleep But call her Bull Bat Unfold the moon From her milk white Wings She flies low She leaves a silver brood On graveled roofs On sidewalks On the line in the middle of the road Where the light is glaring And darkness crushes bones When you shoot down the sun Light leaks out By the morning It is cold

Poems by Hailey Napier Illustrations by Rand Burnette 6

7

8

BLACK-CAPPED CHICKADEE I Chickadee is admirable among northern songbirds; she doesn’t migrate in winter, she freezes into stained glass.

She is traced onto printer paper with crayons.

She flies on scraps of leftover yarn, through bare haylofts, to harvest dried apple heads of wooden hanger dolls.

II Black-capped Chickadee’s rotting house is warm, so she welcomes dip-dyed bluets beside her own muddied snow rockcress.

When spring changes phase, they melt into song.

III Trees drop their darlings in summer, dandelions lose their heads.

Black-capped Chickadee finds hiding places between pine needles, under flowerbeds, in the down of cotton ball clouds, where squirrels don’t bother to check.

IV In fall, leaves surrender, and Black-capped Chickadee kills her brain.

Her skull is hollow bone and knotweed roots break through.

She lays them out to bake in the last warm blaze of October.

They burn, turn black-capped

9

Sierra Smith 10

Underground Huijun Mao

“It’s time!” A voice penetrates the booming sound of the machines.

“Alright,” answered Ben as he climbed off the eight-meter-high excavator. Jim, the one who took over his duty for the next round of excavation, patted his shoulder and started climbing the ladder on the side of the machine. Ben nodded and lowered his head, evading the whitish ray of the searchlight and heading toward the entrance. He was exhausted after a twelve-hour shift, with sour eyes and burning shoulders.

He wasn’t craving rest though because it would ultimately come every day. When things were made into routine, they lost the original attraction.

He wasn’t walking too fast nor slow, because nothing was waiting for him ahead and nothing behind was dragging him. The ground was rugged, covered in irregular pieces of granite typically found 100 km underground. His feet were blistered for the first few months when he arrived ten years ago, but he got used to it in the end. No underground workers walked without calloused feet.

After ten minutes of walking, passing through dark caves and piles of boulders, he entered the official territory of the Underearth City, one of the ten cities built underground, or excavated underground as the first phase of the The Global Underground Project (GUP).

He remembered clearly that, ten years ago when he arrived, the city was just as small and narrow as the tunnel he just exited. He and the other 149 members of the No. 7 pioneer excavation team were packed into a crowded opening, with only tents to sleep in and shovels to work with. Day and night, they were showered in shards of rock. Or more precise-

ly, night and night, because there wasn’t any real concept of days underground. It was always dark.

Underneath City was much better now, he thought.

With all those excavator machines, young, energetic workers, and a thriving city. The smoke coming out of the chimney every afternoon, the sound of pots and pans, and the smell of cooking. The inhabitants brought back the sense of life.

Those were none of his business though. As an excavation worker, he lived at the edge of the city, away from all the livings.

Soon, he was standing in front of the stone door of his caveloo, his home, or his resting place, as he preferred to call it. He shifted the small, incandescent light situated on his cap so that he could see the keyhole more clearly.

He pulled the heavy rock door open slowly. When there was a large enough gap, he squeezed through the door and closed it behind him. It was a small, cave-like room carved out of granite, a typical residence in the city. He took off his cap and hung it on the wall so that it would illuminate the room.

Lying on his bed, Ben started his regular exercise of counting the bumps on the ceiling and trying to get to sleep.

He was a bit envious of his younger days, when he could fall into dreamless sleep in seconds. But sleeping becomes harder as people get older, once they’ve lived through enough to have some past to reminisce about and lament.

How he wished he could shower right now and wash off the greasy sweat that clung to his skin.. But water was scarce here and he couldn’t afford to pay for the public bathhouse two nights in a row.

11

Sierra Smith He closed his eyes, trying to drag the memory of the cool feeling of water splashing on his back out of his mind while blocking out the other ones that stung.

And yet, he couldn’t do it. Those memories were so closely intertwined with water that he couwldn’t recall its sensation without bringing them back.

He was always with water growing up.

As a member of the village professional swimming team, his life was built on water, his soul was made of water and his dream was destroyed by water.

He had been a part of the team for almost as long as he could remember. His days usually started with running up Driftwood Mountain with the sun. When returned, all his clothes would be soaked in sweat. Then, he would stand in front of the pool and hold up a water pipe. The water then poured down from head to toe, penetrating his body with a trembling coolness.

He was healthy, young, and strong, one of the best swimmers in his team. He could still clearly remember the day he won his first medal at the age of 8; he was the pride of the whole village for a week. “The rising star,” his coach commented. “The athletic one,” the girls pointed. “Fishy Flash,” his brothers called him. Jacky, Daniel, Benjamin, Philip and him. The five big brothers of the team and he was the oldest, and the strongest.

12

“The good old days.” He murmured. How sarcastic. The climax of his life came at such a young age and left as swiftly as it came, leaving nothing but a memory that tortured him for the rest of his life.

The feeling of sleepiness was gradually crowding around him. That was a good sign because it meant that the memory would not be chasing him for long. Every time he couldn’t help but recalling the only glorious moment in his entire life, it was like being slapped in the face. It was mocking him, laughing at him, constantly reminding him of his failure.

He shifted uncomfortably.

One thing about being young was that you could easily be fooled by the supposed eternity of time. Believing that the rest of your life would be spent exactly like the previous thousands of days. Believing that you could still skip training with your brothers to barbecue at the top of the mountain and get punished for a thousand frog jumps the next day. Believing that you still have lots of time for training, for getting faster, and for winning the gold medal you missed in this race.

But time can turn against you rather quickly.

Snoring started to float softly around the caveloo. He was asleep.

In his sleep, he dreamt.

From when did the jealousy arise?

From where did the hatred accumulate?

From when did defeat become a habitual feeling?

Time could be especially cruel on athletes. Falling behind on training, some screwed-up competitions, a small delay in your records. Then, you are out. Useless. Abandoned.

His position on the team kept moving down, from the first, to the middle, to the last, then to the one “who is unable to drink others’ feet wash” as their coach noted.

He stood in the corner many times, watching the waves of applause that used to belong to him now crushing his four brothers, asking himself over and over again: Why couldn’t he be faster? Why was he always the last? Why did his efforts produce no result?

Many times, he was the last to be picked in the relay race training. Even though he remained composed, fury had already burned through his heart and rendered him with a sense of powerlessness.

“You probably just didn’t belong here,” his coach’s wife said.

He didn’t believe it. Nobody understood water better than him. Nobody could work harder than him. Nobody was more willing to sacrifice so much for swimming than him.

He had such a maniac desire, an imperishable flame, to win, to surpass, to stand out.

He remembered the pity in his coach’s eyes when he demanded a position to participate in the coming competition.

He remembered climbing up from the empty pool after his last one, an opportunity which cost him all of his savings.

He never imagined that he would be the person who paid money to secure a position to participate in a competition.

He became the person he most despised before, but what other choices did he have?

The early autumn wind was bitterly cold. He could hear his heart falling.

“Bibibi…” He was awakened by the loud blaring from his wireless communicator.

“Emergency!” The other side shouted.

“Coming,” he replied with the husky voice of someone who was half awake, while fumbling for the cap on the rugged wall.

Hurrying in the direction of the tunnel, he couldn’t help but wonder what he would be doing if he didn’t see the GUP conscription on the bulletin board one day coming back from training.

He’d probably maintained some juvenile temperament the last time he left the village, determined to make something big of his life, to prove himself. Without the slightest idea of what the GUP was or the meaning of the incoming asteroid attacks, he signed up his name and didn’t turn back.

Recalling his resolution, he twitched the corner of his mouth mockingly. Teenagers. Always overly optimistic. If he knew that signing up for the GUP meant burying the rest of his life in the darkness and never seeing the sun, the pool, and every other element that constituted the first half of his life again, would he be so persistent in his decision? He didn’t

know. But whatever he wanted, he didn’t get it here.

Crossing the entrance, he could already see flashes of lights ahead. Speeding up, he saw ten days of effort gone in one strike.

Landslide.

It wasn’t an uncommon accident underground. For the first few years he arrived, landslides happened almost every week, big and small. There were times when he was buried right underneath, but thanks to the strength years of training brought him, he always escaped from the hand of death just in time. But landslides were becoming rarer in recent years, as the outer structures of the underworld were strengthened by reinforced concrete. He hadn’t seen such a large landslide in a long time.

“Anyone buried underneath?” he shouted.

“Ten people are down and the rescue team is working” Jim turned and replied, “but the overground was the major hit. A mountain and a whole lot of land were destroyed.”

“Where are we?” Ben asked. He meant the location of the upperground.

“Right beneath some place called Driftwood.” Jim answered, as he matched the underworld map with the upperworld one.

Ben froze.

A name so familiar, but so saturated with pain that it stung to hear aloud.

His home.

He watched silently as the rescuers worked.

When he finally spoke, he could find nothing to say except, “Come, let’s give a hand.”

Even though he seemed to possess every bit of hatred and anger towards his home, Ben knew clearly that he still considered himself as part of the Driftwood. He never gave up the hope that one day, he would return, to win over, to be the center again.

And time was definitely a jerk.

It gave him a punch when he was at the top and tripped him over when he was already at the bottom.

But this was the last chance time had to afflict him. He had no more things to be taken away ever after.

He was empty now.

He had never experienced such a strange feeling of emptiness. Not the day he was surpassed by those younger than him. Not the day he messed up his last competition and knew it was all over. Not the day he left the village alone without telling anyone.

He could always feel the burning of anger and jealousy in his chest at those times. They gave him power; they made him alive.

But now, he couldn’t feel them anymore. The source of his hatred was gone. It was as if a heated iron was suddenly thrown into icy water. When every trace of fervency died down, there left only lifeless cold.

13

He not only hated swimming, but he depended on it. He realized this only after he lost swimming forever.

He wanted to cry, but burst into a small laughter, and then stopped. Tears were hidden in his eyes. ~~~ The twelve captains of the Underneath City Excavation Team were sitting around the meeting table; Ben was one of them. The person in charge of the GUP in Underneath City was making a speech at the head of the table.

“The situation isn’t very promising”, he said. “The first wave of asteroids groups hit right above us, causing all those landslides underground.w Nothing can be detected from the pictures sent over by the satellite, but a sea of flames. The expert from the central government speculated that the temperature must exceed 160 ℉ above now. For security reasons, we are now closing the recreation lift at the center of the city.

Captains, be sure not to give the permission of entrance to the industrial lift to anyone...”

It was Sunday. He got a day off work.

Normally he would spend the holiday laying on his bed the whole day because he had nowhere to go and no one to visit. But he got up early today and walked towards the industrial lift only a few miles away from his resting place.

He met Jim at the gate of the lift.

“Thanks, man. It is very kind of you to help me with the final check. I know you should be at rest today,” said Jim as they walked in.

After a thorough examination, Jim got up and readied to leave when Ben suddenly turned towards him and said, “ Can you give me the key again? Just remembered some important points to check.”

“Sure.”He threw the iron key to Ben. Ben stepped onto the iron platform of the lift, inserted the key into the control board and quickly tapped some buttons. The iron door shut down, cutting off the light as well as the shouting from Jim. “What are you...”

The lift started to ascend. Ben stood silently in the darkness. He didn’t bring his cap with him; he didn’t need to see anymore. He would use his heart to live the rest of his life, which wouldn’t continue for long.

He waited.

Droning Squeaking The feeling of weightlessness.

Sweat dripping.

The temperature rising.

Booming sound in the distance.

The iron lift trembled a bit.

He was returning home.

14

Silver Film Nathan Chu

*//// snap* *//// snap* Like a silver thread loose Prismatic bolts knock on doors and black silver comes falling down a perfect catch Almost your eyes I’m sensitive to blues at night, capture a listless tune Dye me red I’ll catch Sunset’s hue pale violent blush Pacific beaches and cliffs caught the wind rips rudely across the bridge and nature’s view An inverse ideology sings reverse flip again like your eye You’ve found ways to tag truth’s energy carved in my flesh developer, fixer, stopbath Refocus your gaze Small adjustments with hands All eyes on me Rays now land Glide in front, across to expose vulnerability And at last *sna-////* *////////////////////////////////////* Snug again inside my case, await the bitter sting that brings my heart to bear the light that bore my wealth away 15

Sideways Nathan Chu My favorite position is being sideways. I don’t mean just lying down, but being on my side. Horizontal in both directions, though if I’m on my side while lying down then I guess my body’s vertical?

My favorite sensation is being sleepy, not sleeping. Being sideways, I can feel my blood slow in my arm. My hand cools, and veins bloat. I don’t like the cold, so I’m usually in bed while sideways. This nighttime sensation, I like. A mental blanket, a fuzziness.

I can feel my mind cloud over, finally wind down. Anxieties and stress bleed out my arm into the cool night. Unlike fireworks, my nerves don’t spark, dreams don’t come. It’s a beautiful silence.

Some say the dark is scary, but the light is much scarier. I wake up in a panic, but the dark is comforting. It’s a soft warmth. It tucks in around me like sleep, but I can feel it against me and know that I’m apart from the sleep and the dark.

I read about near death experiences in a magazine once. It mentioned people walking out of a dark tunnel into the light, but I imagine death is much more like the tunnel.

They say sleep is just a smaller death. I hope when they bury me, they put me on my side.

Miriam Hyman

16

Casting the Devil out with Beelzebub: The Cocaine Studies of Sigmund Freud Grant Holt

Far from a trivial hobby of his youth, cocaine represented Sigmund Freud’s first independent efforts to alleviate psychological suffering. He published multiple papers on the drug—believing it to be a miraculous cure for misery—but his expectations fell short. Freud prescribed cocaine to his family, friends, and colleagues—resulting in the expedited decline of at least one of them. Freud soon suffered the condemnation of the medical community for unleashing a new horror upon the world. Nevertheless, cocaine allowed Freud to try to treat mental illness early in his career, paving the way for his later theories of psychoanalysis.

The neuroses that Freud struggled with—and later tried to alleviate—have roots in his childhood. His grandfather, his younger brother, and his beloved nanny died by the time he was four years old. His father’s financial troubles left Freud’s family impoverished. When Freud qualified as a doctor in 1881, he preferred to research brain anatomy, but failed to secure a research job at the University of Vienna. His impoverished background left him no choice but to practice clinical medicine. In 1882, Freud met his fiancée, Martha Bernays.

They were engaged two months later. With his life coming together, Freud needed a discovery to establish his reputation and ensure financial stability. He found it one year later while reading a medical journal.

In 1883, German physiologist Theodore Aschenbrandt enlisted in the Bavarian army as a surgeon. While marching with his brigade one hot day in 1883, a soldier collapsed from exhaustion. Using cocaine from the pharmaceutical company Merck, Aschenbrandt administered a tablespoon of water with drops of a cocaine solution. After five minutes, the soldier stood up and continued to march easily. Aschenbrandt later suffered a sleepless night. Upon waking, he mixed cocaine into his morning coffee and for the rest of the day felt completely energized. Aschenbrandt soon published his findings in a German medical journal—which Freud read.

Fascinated, Freud placed an order for one gram of pure 98% cocaine hydrochloride from Merck. Freud first experienced the miraculous effects of cocaine on April 30, 1884.

Freud drank 0.05 grams of cocaine in a solution of water.

A few minutes later, Freud felt rejuvenated. He wrote that he enjoyed these results without any unpleasant side effects.

Freud asserted that he felt no craving for the further use of cocaine, and that he instead felt an aversion to it.

Whenever Freud took cocaine, he almost always con-

sumed the drug orally. Administered orally, the body metabolizes cocaine at a much slower rate than if it was, for instance, injected into the veins. The effects of cocaine are also dispersed over a longer period of time. Freud did not experience the typical burst of euphoria when it is injected or smoked. Consequently, Freud’s oral cocaine use might have caused him to underestimate its effects.

Sigmund Freud, ca. 1921 Nevertheless, this first experience with cocaine mitigated Freud’s depression and fatigue. Over the next couple months, Freud tested cocaine a dozen times. He administered cocaine to his friends, colleagues, patients, and—most importantly— himself. The drug worked for him, and this made cocaine worth studying. Freud plunged into research, finding everything he could read about cocaine. Despite finding a few negative accounts of the drug, Freud did not read about any concrete damage to people taking cocaine.

During his initial research, Freud came across evidence of cocaine treating morphine addicts. He found a journal article published in the September 1880 edition of the Detroit Therapeutic Gazette. Titled “Erythroxylon Coca in the Opium and Alcohol Habits,” the article described four different cases where cocaine reduced or even eliminated the patient’s need for morphine within two years. Freud took special notice of these results. His close friend, teacher, and colleague—Ernest von Fleischl—developed an addiction to morphine after a workplace injury. After reading this article, 17

Freud believed that cocaine could help him.

A German physiologist, Fleischl injured himself during an autopsy. He sliced his thumb during the operation, which shortly became infected. Fleischl lost the thumb. After amputating it, Fleischl developed excruciating chronic pain as neuromas—or, nerve tumors—grew around the amputation site. In order to manage his pain, Fleischl turned to morphine. By 1884, the young physiologist was wholly addicted to regular morphine injections. This troubled Freud, and nine days after taking cocaine for the first time, he prescribed it to Fleischl.

Ernst von Fleischl, ca. 1890 Allegedly, Fleischl stopped using morphine and took only cocaine for three days. Although he did not monitor Fleischl’s treatment, Freud reported that cocaine prevented symptoms of morphine withdrawal, like diarrhoea, depression, and—of course—a craving for morphine. But according to Freud, Fleischl experienced none of them.

Freud planned to write about his studies, expecting cocaine to become a quality therapeutic drug. Freud sincerely believed that cocaine cured a morphine addict.

Unfortunately, Freud’s cocaine therapy did the exact opposite. Fleischl’s condition grew increasingly worse. Just five days after starting Fleischl’s treatment, Freud’s ability to enjoy cocaine’s successes were hampered by Fleischl’s worsening condition. Fleischl continued to take cocaine, but he soon developed convulsions that left him nearly unconscious. By the end of May, cocaine had clearly failed to cure Fleischl’s addiction. But Freud did not see it that way. He blamed Fleischl for taking cocaine in enormous quantities.

Freud convinced himself that cocaine failed only because Fleischl took too much of it.

His faith in cocaine unscathed, Freud turned his attention to publication. In July of 1884, Freud published his first paper on cocaine. Titled “Über Coca,” the paper dissected the coca plant and its biological processes, outlined how Spanish explorers first encountered Indigenous coca leaf chewers in South America, and proposed some therapeutic applications of cocaine. Among these applications, Freud suggested using 18

cocaine to treat addictions to morphine. Freud concluded his paper with a brief paragraph, in which he mentioned that cocaine had an anesthetizing effect when applied onto the skin. He did not realize it at the time, but Freud accurately listed the one lasting medicinal application of cocaine—local anesthesia.

Had Freud pursued cocaine as a local anesthetic, he would have achieved the fame and financial stability he craved. But after publishing his paper, Freud left for the city of Hamburg to visit his fiancée. He had not seen Martha in two years. During his absence, the ophthalmologist Carl Koller read “Über Coca,” and was inspired.

Koller tried cocaine orally, and noticed that it numbed his tongue. Believing that this drug could be a local anesthetic, Koller immediately went to the laboratory in order to test the effects of cocaine for himself. In August of 1884, he officially discovered cocaine as the first ever local anesthetic.

Koller quickly rose to medical stardom, leaving Freud behind as a mere footnote.

Despite this, Freud remained on friendly terms with Koller. Freud did not claim credit, and instead declared that Koller had the idea of using cocaine as an anesthetic. In fact, when reflecting on this missed opportunity in later years, Freud actually attributed his oversight to his fiancée. Freud simply reconciled with the fact that he had missed the discovery. He accordingly resumed his cocaine studies.

Freud published more papers preaching the therapeutic power of cocaine. He particularly recommended cocaine for the treatment of neuroses. In early 1885, Freud published “Contribution to the Knowledge of the Effect of Cocaine,” a paper concerning the internal effects of cocaine. He discussed a study in which he measured the power of cocaine to create an elevated mood, and increased physical and mental endurance. Freud wrote that cocaine stimulated certain muscles and impacted reaction time. His desire to use cocaine to treat psychological conditions like depression and weakness sprouted from Freud’s continued struggle with both.

Freud’s career was difficult. He gave up an academic job after pursuing it for six years. In its place, Freud prepared himself for a job at the Vienna General Hospital that he did not care for. His separation from his fiancée for years left him emotionally frustrated. Cocaine fixed this. Unlike alcohol, this drug elevated Freud’s mood and boosted his productivity. This effect gave him an important insight—that an unknown psychological factor hampered a person’s well-being, and that cocaine treated it.

The rising demand for cocaine dropped suddenly around 1886. Even Freud stopped experimenting with the drug.

There were a few reasons for this—like starting his private medical practice and marrying his fiancée—but chief among them were the countless reports of patients developing a severe addiction to cocaine.

These reports excluded Freud. Despite his continued use of cocaine, Freud did not develop a serious addiction. Fleis-

chl, however, did. After six months of cocaine, Fleischl continued to deteriorate. He experienced mood swings, convulsions, and insomnia. Fleischl’s tolerance to cocaine grew and resulted in greater doses. In 1885, he developed a drug-induced psychosis, and his symptoms were graphic. While suffering delirium tremens, he hallucinated white snakes creeping all over him.

Such symptoms could only be the product of heavy cocaine use. At this point, Fleischl injected into his veins one whole gram of pure cocaine every day. Fleischl consequently became one of the first morphine addicts to be “cured” by cocaine, and subsequently one of the first cocaine addicts in Europe.

By 1886, cocaine addicts were reported all over the world.

Germany, in particular, had a huge sense of alarm about cocaine. Nobody better articulated the panic and dread of cocaine more than German physician Albrecht Erlenmeyer, who condemned Freud and his cocaine for unleashing, in addition to morphine and alcohol, “the third scourge of humanity.” Just three years after his first dose of cocaine—and just one year into his private practice—Freud faced condemnation for unleashing a new kind of terror on the world.

But Freud refused to admit his mistakes. In July of 1887, Freud published his defense. His 1887 paper “Craving For and Fear of Cocaine” defended the drug against accusations of addiction and harm. In the paper, Freud did not blame cocaine for inducing addiction. He asserted that all patients who fell into cocaine addictions were already addicted to morphine. He explained that he took the drug himself for months without the formation of addiction, and in fact developed an aversion to cocaine. Freud did admit that, depending on the person, cocaine’s effects fluctuated. After this paper, Freud did not publish another major article on cocaine. His contemporaries did not change their minds.

Cocaine vanished from psychiatry, and in time was even replaced by non-habit-forming methods of local anesthesia.

Fleischl died six years later in 1891. Had Freud not intervened, Fleischl’s condition would likely have deteriorated

anyway. Cocaine merely expedited his decline. Freud did not kill Fleischl, but he certainly did not heal him. Years later, Freud reflected that treating morphine addiction with cocaine was “like trying to cast out the Devil with Beelzebub.”

At the time, however, Freud stubbornly refused to believe this. When he stated that he experienced an aversion to cocaine—and not a craving—Freud prioritized this singular fact over everything else. He hesitated to recognize that his own experience was not the rule, but the exception. This rightly stigmatized his work as unscientific. However, without this belief in the experience of the individual, it is hard to imagine Freud ever developing his personalized theory of psychoanalysis. Through cocaine, Freud started to think on a psychological level. This drug bridged the gap between Freud’s physiological work and psychological work, setting the stage for his later psychoanalytic theories. Cocaine continued to influence him past 1887 and into the future, as demonstrated when cocaine materialized in Freud’s seminal psychoanalytic text, The Interpretation of Dreams.

In the first dream of the book—Irma’s Injection—Freud subjects his cocaine studies to psychoanalysis. In the dream, Freud peers into his patient Irma’s throat and sees scabby nostrils, reminding him about his own health. He explains that he suffered from nasal swellings, and used cocaine to treat them. Freud mentions that he was the first to recommend the use of cocaine, and that it resulted in the expedited death of his friend, Fleischl. Later in the dream, Freud states that Irma received medicinal injections. This again reminds him of Fleischl, who immediately gave himself injections of cocaine. Freud judged the recurrence of cocaine, along with Irma’s health and his own ailments, to be his latent concern to restore the well-being of his patients. Years after this drug failed to help his patients, Freud remembered cocaine in a dream that manifested his desire to alleviate suffering. His desire for cocaine to become a cure never materialized. With this in mind, Freud concluded his analysis with a fundamental tenet of psychoanalysis—that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish.

19

20

Sierra Smith

Poems by David Han Illustrations by Rand Burnette The following three poems are exerpts from a poetr y collection exploring how forms of information, from genetic material to literature, can change over time.

As par t of this project, Han translated the first poem, “Nuclear Repositor y”, into an amino acid sequence following the IUPAC system, then into a corresponding DNA sequence, which was finally inser ted into a plasmid map. This plasmid could be replicated for years if introduced into a bacteria colony.

Nuclear Repository How many of us trail away in the tail of the century’s comet Pared down through successive and minor apocalypse While everything carries on unconcerned, Like a serial, unconstrained by the passage of time.

All this builds a low ache that worries away the satisfaction Of designing a time capsule encoded in the frail length of nucleotides.

Memories of now like pollen stirred up from grass underfoot And reading about them the hayfever.

It’s better, then, to saturate cells with looped caution Like the Sandia report said: This place is not a place of honor.

The letters meant to be decoded after interpretation Has been made moot by force, Their reading a strange iftar following a lengthy fast from recording these things.

This poem is a transposon, not a text, Which can be left to convalesce in a glass dish, or in the dirt, Until it’s something else, how wonderful that Not only meaning, but words themselves become Emergent structures of time and separation, As bases melt away and are themselves replaced.

Time capsules and half-lives quote themselves into redundancy, but the I Ching is already the state of nature, not red or Hobbesian And so from this typeset anlagen knotted into a loop In a tiny bacterial tefillin that glows when read, New and more eloquent words write themselves out over the centuries.

21

Chimeras Stop tapping on the glass so much, it rings The aquarium senseless, recombinant frogs and all, Oscillating about the awkward fifth leg, glowing red With a stolen jellyfish light, kicking welterweight with bantam limbs Or shake the plates of Escherichia, made full Of plasmids by electric pulse or lipofection, churning out Packets of antibiotics and chyme for storage in little membranes, Factory lines set by emetic rhythms and fresh agar.

There’s a strange scansion to rows of corn seedlings taking root Changing meter with every mutant line, caesuras where inbreeding proved too much All in service of productivity, sun to ethanol, vented into melted northern lights When demand fails to reach supply.

Everything is just so brutally fungible, commodities exchanged freely after short sproutings between damp sheaves of green lichen Tightly bound muslin mycelia sponging up surplus value, inside A rotten log a textile mill.

22

The Poem Handed Down in the Long Term A breakthrough, the genome sequenced, Short phrases make sense in isolation, excited linguists Looking for clues in the past, pick out promising nonsense: “What is knocking at the gate? And who can say?

The answer, a head turned, a walk down the garden path Towards a specific end.”

All at once though, reading it leads to nothing really decisive, thoughts slow to a birdlike two-step Picking out trivia line by line, Thinking, “threnody is such a nice sounding word” Suggests ophanim resonating, brasslike ringing, a certain forgetfulness follows “Slow cranking of a lethe” The substitution unbeknownst rendered from lathe.

Makes sense, considering where this ended up from; Cell to cell samizdat passed under ruinous light’s scrutiny Feldspar glint along cleaved shearing, purpling under gram stain That supplies the petrichor of it; stacked up and mineralized underground, Evident only as scent long down the line when bright blue air floods over the record of past rain.

Which is to say such a poem is not waxen, lying in state Between pine sheets, in vellum panes, under glass. No, Meaning is set adrift like a paper boat, coincidences Stack, change by change in current And it becomes something else entirely, not a raft as before For ideas, a hope of posterity imagine the Alexandrian Library pressed under a slide, or cultured in cheese and beer But the repurposed material still suggests some initial form, as a skeleton might.

Perhaps someone will reverse-transcribe all history from the missense mutations there, Creation back from Croatoan, great insight from palimpsest.

23

One Remarkable Finding One remarkable finding from genetic manipulation is anxious mice hyperactive mice mice that cannot learn or remember mice that groom themselves to the point of baldness mice that fail to take care of their offspring (and even) mice that learn to drink when stressed (Marcus 2004) and what a time to be Marcus what a time for him to hand up the coat and go home and smile and even feel like a person while the mice prod at his bed frame, fill up his pillows, tear the hair away away Away

Jenny Jantzen

24

Eva Illuzzi 25

Alice Dreger’s Middle Finger Science + Activism’s Mutually Bound Fate India Kotis

Alice Dreger has placed her head firmly between the jaws of a lion and dared it to roar. This is nothing new, of course.

Dreger, a historian of science and former professor of the medical humanities at Northwestern University, has built something of a reputation as a rabble-rouser on both sides of the political aisle. Dreger’s work has been denounced by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Lambda Literary Foundation--a fact which Dreger herself does not shy away from.

Her projects run the gamut, from One of Us, a 208-page history of conjoined twins (which John Green ‘00 has described as a meditation on “disability, power, and how people in charge ‘tend to essentialize and marginalize the other’”) to the history of intersex conditions, to patient’s rights advocacy, to critically live-tweeting her son’s abstinence-only sex ed class, to 2015’s Galileo’s Middle Finger, a book that is part personal odyssey and part academic inquiry into the links between activism, science, and democracy. She left a tenured position at Michigan State University to focus on intersex activism, do mainstream writing, and raise her son, and left her full professorship at Northwestern University after her work was censored by her dean for political reasons. Alice Dreger thinks, writes and researches on her own terms, in a way I find wholly inspiring. Reading this book felt like getting drowned in oxygen. It felt like being given permission to think.

Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science makes the case that science and activism need each other in order to survive. Both are bound by a drive towards, and need for, freedom. Ideally, the scientific and activist communities would find support from each other. Ideally, activists can draw upon the reservoir of scientific findings to inform the way they advocate for disempowered people, and scientists could find interesting, fundamental questions to explore within social justice activists’ work. However, as Dreger vividly illustrates in this resounding call to reason, too many people in the scientific and activist communities are presently locked in warped, self-defeating battles over power and ideology. Galileo’s Middle Finger outlines several recent case studies of scientists angering activists, activists protesting scientists, and both groups devolving into squabbling tribes, to the detriment of everyone.

Dreger writes that “Science and social justice require each other to be healthy, and both are critically important to human freedom. Without a just system, you cannot be free to do science, including science designed to better understand 26

human identity; without science, and especially scientific understandings of human behaviors, you cannot know how to create a sustainably just system.” Science and social justice need each other, Dreger writes. Science offers something invaluable to social justice, just as social justice can positively and crucially inform activism. But science and activism have responsibilities to each other. These fields owe each other transparency, integrity, and good faith. They owe each other good praxis and good health.

So, what does “health” look like in this context? In a word, data. Dreger writes that “The pursuit of evidence is probably the most pressing moral imperative of our time. All of our work as scholars, activists, and citizens of democracy depends on it. Yet it seems that, especially where questions of human identity are concerned, we’ve built up a system in which scientists and social justice advocates are fighting in ways that poison the soil on which both depend.”

We spoke on the phone a year ago, in a different world, about gender + sexuality research, asking dangerous questions, and changing your mind. ~~~ India Kotis: I thought I would start off by asking if you have any lasting impressions of changes that have happened within the academy since you were in graduate school, or even undergrad, and now?

Alice Dreger: I dropped out of college when I was 19, so I was never a proper undergraduate. But when I was in graduate school, it was pre-internet. When I was in grad school, email had basically just started. And that was hilarious. That was really our first use of the Internet, was email. And so what I’d say is, what’s changed radically is the experience of being constantly connected to other people through computers, and our phones or whatever. I know for folks like you, you were born into it, [the internet] almost feels like completely part of the atmosphere. But when I started my work in graduate school, scholarship felt really, really different. Because we were disconnected all the time. And that meant less accountability. But it also meant a lot more freedom.

IK: In your book, you discuss a number of different case studies of contemporary tensions between activism and science. But I was particularly interested in your discussion of sexuality and gender research. I was wondering why you

think that matters of sexuality and gender are particularly explosive, at least right now?

AD: I think they’ve always been explosive. And I really think it’s because it invokes the part of the brain that is a very explosive part of the brain. We can’t reproduce without sex.

Sex is necessarily an incredibly important thing in our evolution. Nature needed to program us to have sex. And, you know, that can take different forms, people can have different orientations. But the fact is that once we’re sexually mature, in particular, sex becomes a very explosive part of our brains.

And so when we begin to talk about sex, or we talk about gender, which really is connected to sex, it trips up the parts of our brains that are about sex, and it becomes very intense, necessarily. ... Foucault talks about the idea that when we talk about sex, when we write about sex, we’re having sex. And it took me a long time to understand what he’s talking about.

But I don’t think he’s wrong, that if we think of the brain as the chief sexual organ, in fact, which, I certainly would think of it that way, then when we are writing our texts and talking about texts about sex, we are at some level engaging sexuality, and we are having a sort of sexual encounter. And so whenever we’re doing that kind of stuff, it’s very intense.

IK: What do you think gets lost when debates over policy simplify the science that would inform that policy?

AD: What gets lost is the actual science! Yeah, this yes or no attitude totally ignores what informed decision-making really looks like, which is actually knowing the risk data and actually knowing the effectiveness data and all the rest of it. And so, when I dared to ask, for example, about the effectiveness and the safety rating for a vaccine that I was absolutely planning to give my son, but I just wanted the data, this nurse looked at me like I was the worst parent on earth.

And I thought, ‘how am I a bad parent, by asking about the data? How am I a bad parent by asking about safety and effectiveness? And the studies? It seems to me that that makes me a good parent!’ But what gets lost is the … intellectual humility that we might not know what we’re talking about.

That maybe we need to know more. And I think that’s a really dangerous posture, to think that you always know enough.

That you don’t need to know anything more.

IK: Taken to the extreme, what does that look like? That lack of academic humility?

AD: It looks like the most boring class in the world to me. It looks like the type of class where, basically, the teacher knows the right answer, and you’re just supposed to learn it, spit it back. And that, to me, is just so incredibly frustrating, where there’s no space for inquiry, and for changing your mind. One of the most useful things a professor said to me in graduate school was, if you haven’t changed your mind lately, how do you know it’s working? And I mean, one of the things I always looked for in myself as a teacher was whether or not my students were changing my mind. My feeling was that if my students weren’t changing my mind on various things, then I wasn’t doing my job as a teacher, 27

because it meant I was not creating spaces in which all of us could change. I had to include the potential for change, because otherwise, what’s the point, right? Otherwise, you’re just teaching content, you’re not teaching process. And what good teaching looks like is teaching methodology and teaching process, not the teaching of content. In fact, it’s really teaching people how to engage the world. And that’s where I think I get frustrated with, you know, some areas of the humanities, where it feels like all you’re supposed to do is calculate who has the most oppression, and then whoever has the most oppression gets to say whatever they want to the next person. And that’s a stupid way to do knowledge generation.

IK: But, how do you think about the fact that the way we are socially conditioned might affect the ways we interpret data? Does that figure into your approach at all?

AD: Yeah, I think we do that by looking at that and talking [to each other] all the time. I think that’s a really important thing to do, is to constantly [look] at the ways in which our social conditioning is lining up. Because it obviously is, I mean, there’s no question about it. It limits what we can see, and what we’re capable of knowing or thinking or questioning. But, you know, the best way to do that is by engaging other people who have different perspectives, and trying like heck to get them to think with you through a problem and see if you’re seeing the problem in a different way.

IK: Were any of your assumptions challenged during the writing of Galileo’s Middle Finger?

AD: Yes. One of them was the idea that there were whole areas of inquiry that we should just not engage in, because they were too dangerous. The more I got into the book, the more I became fascinated with the idea of going to dangerous spaces intellectually and socially and politically. I would say, also, one thing that changed for me was simply individual people--that I thought I knew what was true about them, but then it turned out I didn’t know their stories, really. And so examples of that would be [psychologist J. Michael] Bailey and [anthropologist Napoleon] Chagnon, people like that, who I think I felt like I understood, but I didn’t really understand in any meaningful way. One thing that surprised me was the degree to which people I thought of as strong and impossible to harm were, in fact, quite wounded by some of what would happen to them. I really thought that people who were at the top of their game in terms of their academic careers, people with jobs at Harvard, you know, members of the National Academy of Sciences--infinite praise, lots of books, and they could get a book contract in the blink of an eye, all the rest of it--[Basically I assumed that] they felt no pain, and that they were never frustrated, and that, you know, their daily life was just so much easier than mine. And that maybe someday I would achieve that. And then my life would always be simple, and easy and painless. And the more I got to know famous academics, people like E.O. Wilson, and people like Steve Pinker, the more I came to realize, no, it doesn’t get easier. Like, it just doesn’t get any easier. There 28

are some people in academia who sit back and smoke a pipe and never really worked very hard, and they don’t suffer very much. But for the most part, everybody I met, even at the top of their game, if they were still engaged in the world, they were suffering actively for that engagement. And that was surprising to me. And part of my reaction to that, to be honest, was to withdraw more, because I came to realize that this is not a game that was winnable. And it was worth doing for the sake of social justice to engage sometimes, and that sometimes it was okay to do some self care and step back and say, I’m just gonna take care of myself for a little while. Because otherwise, it was just just so exhausting all the time.

IK: I was wondering what encourages you. What’s the most encouraging experience you’ve had in terms of academic freedom, and non-censorship recently? What gives you hope?

AD: When I was at the Wellesley College Freedom Project. [They have] a lot of young women who are undergraduates actively working for free speech and sharing of ideas on campus. And I found those women incredibly inspirational.

I meet more and more young women who are working in that area. And I find them just really fantastic to watch. That’s what gives me hope, is seeing--I mean, seeing other young people work is great, too--but see, for some reason, I think because I’m a woman, because I came out of the background of dealing with all the sexism and misogyny in the world, watching young women really understand the principle and work for the principal, while also maintaining the sense of justice for themselves is really powerful to watch and really inspires me enormously. It’s the one thing I really miss about being in academia honestly, is being among those kinds of young people who are really on the cutting edge in terms of their ability to look at principles. And that, to me, is the most exciting thing, is the people who can see the bigger picture.

I think it’s easy for a lot of folks to write off young people and assume that they’re sort of naïve, uneducated, incapable. That was never my experience teaching undergraduates.

I only saw enormous capabilities--of the sort I recall when I was that age. And seeing that always allowed me to remember that I was the same way, and to remember the power of having a youthful body, a youthful perspective, and also having the wisdom 18 and 19 to 20 year olds have, which is a lot of wisdom. I think we live in a world that really discounts the level of wisdom among people who have achieved that age.

That’s what I really meant, is being in colleges where I can be among that kind of intelligence, that is a fresh intelligence, but as a deep intelligence. My son is now 19, so I get to hang out with him and his friends. And that’s a blast. I just love, love, love listening to them. I think it’s amazing. It feels like I could just go to my grave, because just listening to them, I just feel so hopeful.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Sierra Smith 29

Water Rights Fights I My Parents Have been looking to retire In New Mexico One of their concerns Is that they won’t own The water rights To their property You see In New Mexico There is limited water As in The right to use it Is often limited One of the main sources of Conflict For the Native American tribes In the area Is over water rights Many a government treaty Has stripped them of them Which causes so many problems Because most of New Mexico Is desert II Santa Fe The state capitol Is rapidly growing Which is great for the people within But there is only so much water In the water table And so now Property is being sold without Access to water rights In some places Which puts a burden On poorer people Of which the Land of Enchantment Has more than its fair share

Ansley Grider 30

III This isn’t unique to New Mexico As the world warms And populations boom in desert areas And in places previously uninhabited Access to fresh water Becomes more and more scarce And as time will show He who controls the water Controls The land

Chris Bechtol

Ansley Grider 31

Enmired

Miriam Hyman To sphagnum bog, I bequeath my carcass Embalm my heart in tannins once it stills Submerge me in the depths of your embrace My life buffered in yours, I’ll die fulfilled.

Once I loved a woman and her youth.

We shagged without reflection or foreplay, But once she bore the offspring we’d produced I smelled her afterbirth of quick decay.

To flee the stench, I sought your mossy ground.

You whispered, “restlessness will break my spell.”

Your silence was a glacial, ancient sound.

I breathed in slow - in gratitude - I fell.

Oh sphagnum, enshroud my love eternal Preserve me from my decomposing world.

The notebook was not in his backpack. After unzipping all the pockets, Solove turned it upside-down and dumped the contents onto the floor of his office. He placed each item back in one by one - a pair of mud-sodden socks, some sheets of sticker-labels, his binder of sample-collection methods, three different colors of Sharpie. The notebook was not underneath the mat of papers and legal pads on his desk. It was not hidden on his bookshelf, or under the overflow of textbooks stacked haphazardly on the seat of the armchair. It wasn’t in the duffel bag still half-unpacked from his trip, or on the mantle near the window that looked over the science quad, where students scuttled between buildings, avoiding the rain.

Solove swore. The joint in his left knee popped as he crouched to peer beneath the furniture. It popped again when he climbed onto the armchair to check the top of the bookshelf. This was something his dad had told him many times. “If you can’t find it standing up, lie down. If you can’t find it lying down, climb.” Growing up, Solove lived with his dad in a small house near Hawley Bog, in Massachusetts.

They went on nature walks along the main trail every morning before his dad went to work. As a young boy, Solove would give the ground a cursory sweep and then fix his attention on the bright red fluttering of a cardinal. His dad looked closer, searching for life that didn’t advertise itself. Laying on his stomach, he would brush away soggy, dead leaves and 32

beckon to the moss that grew as a carpet underneath. After many walks together, Solove learned that his dad’s smile at an unassuming grey tree trunk meant it wore green on the other side. Sometimes, when a tree appeared barren all the way around, his dad would hoist Solove onto his shoulders, and the young boy would find the branches adorned with moss. Slowly, Solove had learned to see with his dad’s eyes, to anticipate where the moss would change from brown to green, when he would find it flush against a trunk or flared like little green petals beneath the autumn detritus. But for all his years of observational training, Solove still couldn’t find the damned notebook.

From his perch on the armchair, the office looked even more disheveled. Solove saw the dirty Tupper-ware containers, and discarded shoes on the floor. His door was papered in almost ten years of his daughter’s drawings. The notebook wasn’t among the clutter.

For a moment, Solove closed his eyes and attempted meditative breaths. In. Out. In. If it was not in his office, it had to be in the car. Solove packed up swiftly, making sure to save the manuscript he’d been working on. He locked the office door, and headed towards the parking lot, hoping none of his students would see him jogging through the halls. He was getting too many concerned emails from students as it was. He got too many emails in general. They distracted him from the manuscript.

The notebook was not in the car either. Solove checked in the glove compartment, and beneath the seats. The back seat needed a thorough washing – it was spotted with dried mud and smelled of swamp. The windshield began to thrum with rain. He was hungry. Maybe the notebook was at home.

Solove tuned in to WCAI to distract him as he drove. It was broadcasting an interview with a climate scientist.

“We need to act soon” The scientist urged him through the car radio. “We need to start making some real changes before it’s too late.”

The sky was flat and grey. It reminded Solove of the first day he’d spent at Stordalen Mire’s research station that summer. He remembered walking alone in the cool, misty drizzle.

The absence of his dad walked beside him - noting the lack of woody shrubs, the thawed ground beneath his feet, the wind a little warmer than the last time they’d walked the mire together a summer before. It was amazing that the world was warming fast enough to sense it on the breeze. His dad had once told him being an ecologist felt like being a passenger on a train as it was crashing, taking notes as the walls of metal folded inwards, describing how exactly the train car would crumple. Except his dad had the luck to die before the walls really caved in.

Solove pulled into the driveway, surprised that he’d arrived at home. His wife’s car was parked to the right of his.

He could see a glimpse of her through the kitchen window.

“Have you seen the leatherbound notebook?” He asked when he walked through the door. The house smelled like curry. Amy shouted back. “I haven’t. Why?” “I can’t find it anywhere.”

“Can it wait until after dinner? Mark is coming over.”

“Mark?”

“Emma’s boyfriend. Don’t you remember?”

“No. I really need to find the notebook.”

“They’re coming over in twenty minutes. At least help me set the table.”

Solove stalked through the living room, looking under books and stacks of mail on the hutch. Emma hadn’t mentioned a Mark. She was too young to have a boyfriend. Only four months ago she had tucked an envelope into his backpack while he was waiting in security, and he’d picked her up into a hug. On the plane to Sweden, Solove had unfolded a portrait of his dad, crouching over a stream, holding on to a wide-brimmed hat. Emma had somehow captured her grandfather’s gumption and wise-crack humor in the directness of his grin as he leaned over the water. The woman sitting next to Solove hadn’t known he was crying, as he’d watched the world fall away through the double-paned glass.

Sinking into a chair at the dining room table, Solove opened his wallet. Inside was a photocopy of his dad’s portrait. Beside it was Solove’s favorite photo; Amy and his dad

stood together watching Emma, whose face was contorted in concentration as she sketched, belly flopped on the ground.

He’d taken it the last time the two of them had joined him and his dad at the Stordalen Mire research station - the summer before Amy started working at the hospital. Emma had just turned eight and wanted to be a scientist, too. They had bought her a sketchbook, and she had treated it like a favorite stuffed animal, carrying it wherever she went.

“Dear, are you coming?”

“Right. Yeah.” Solove sighed, and shoved the wallet back into his pocket.

In the kitchen, Amy was still wearing her scrubs. The armpits were dark with sweat, and her bun was coming undone. She moved deftly between stirring curry on the stove and chopping tomatoes for a salad. When Solove entered, she asked him how his day was, and in the same sentence, told him to start filling glasses with water. Once the table was set, Solove started back upstairs.

“They’ll be here any minute Solove! Can you take over dinner while I get changed? I feel disgusting.”

“Yeah. Can you do a quick sweep for the notebook while you’re changing?”

“We’ll look for the notebook later. Let’s pay attention to what needs doing now, yeah?”

Solove didn’t answer her. He could see a car pulling into the free spot out front. A tall, lanky boy with long dark hair got out of the driver’s seat. Emma clambered out the other side. She was laughing, swaying a little as she walked. The boy took her backpack and slung it over his shoulder. Solove felt nauseous. He turned to busy himself in the kitchen and pretended not to hear when Emma and the boy – was it Mark?

– barged through the door and bounded up the stairs.

At dinner, Solove ate quickly and silently, staring at his plate instead of at his daughter and the boy sitting next to her who jiggled the table with his knee. Amy nudged him, and he realized the boy had asked him a question.

“Hmm?” Solove asked, still chewing.

“How was your vacation?” Mark tried to make eye contact but settled on the tip of Solove’s nose.

“My vacation?”

“Emma told me you were in Sweden all summer.”

“That wasn’t a vacation. It was for work.” Solove saw Mark flush and look down.

“But it was still fun wasn’t it?” Emma urged him. “I remember being there was like being at camp. Sweden is crazy beautiful.”

“It was beautiful. But I was there by myself doing research. It wasn’t a vacation.”

Amy gave Solove a stern look, and turned to Mark, smiling. “Mark, why don’t you tell us what you were up to this summer? Didn’t you say you had an internship?”

“Not an internship, really. I worked at the garden center nearby” “We met when I was getting supplies for the raised beds.”

33

Miriam Hyman 34

Emma added. “Mark, you know the peat we mixed with the soil? That’s what Dad studies.”

Solove set down his fork. “Did you really use peat? Emma – I thought you knew better.”

“What’s wrong with peat?” asked Mark, looking to Emma for reassurance.

“What’s wrong with peat?” Solove tried to make his voice more professorial. “It stores forty percent of all the soil carbon on the planet. Digging up peatlands is like…”

Amy interrupted him. “Emma worked really hard on the garden. We thought one bag of sphagnum couldn’t do much harm. And the garden is beautiful.”

“A peatland is beautiful too, until it gets dug up.”

Emma opened her mouth, and then shut it. She grabbed Mark’s hand.

“Thanks for dinner, Mom. We have homework to do.”

Solove grimaced. “I didn’t mean…” But Emma and Mark had disappeared into her bedroom.

Solove began clearing the table with Amy. The clatter of dishes was loud in their silence. They headed towards the kitchen at the same time, and he almost bumped into her.

“Leave the dishes to me. Go look for your notebook.”

Amy’s voice was measured, like she had calibrated the temperature before speaking to him. He gave Amy his plate.

“You okay?”

“I’ve been up since five and worked a ten-hour shift. I thought you said you would help with dinner.” Amy’s eyes narrowed, accusing. Solove felt himself stiffen.

“Amy – I” “It’s fine. But you’re on dinner duty tomorrow, okay?

Go find the notebook you’re so worked up about.” Solove watched Amy turn. It was his turn to speak in a flat, cool voice.

“It’s dad’s notebook.” Amy looked back at Solove then, into his eyes, and her brow crinkled in confusion.

“Why are you looking for your dad’s notebook?” She asked, gently.

“For our paper, Amy. All of his observations are in it.”

“I thought you were done with the paper – didn’t you go to Sweden to finish it?”

Solove turned on his heels, walked to their shared office and slammed the door. He stood for a little while, leaning against it, catching his breath. The notebook preserved ten years of his dad’s observations at Massachusetts’s Hawley Bog. They were the scaffolding for the manuscript Solove had begun drafting with him only a year before. Last fall, they had spent hours discussing the paper in this office. His dad would sit at Amy’s desk with his eyes squinted closed, fingers tapping. Solove would sit at the other desk, working his memories into lines of text. But then there was the funeral, in May. He had not touched the manuscript while in Sweden.

Now that he was home, Solove was trying again to conjure his dad’s voice. He drove to the university every morning so

that he could sit in his private office and stare at excel spreadsheets, pretending to see the numbers shift into something alive and green. Sometimes, he would decide to do research instead. Read another paper about moss. Annotate it. Add it to his citation manager. Today, at least, he’d written a paragraph. He would have written more if he hadn’t needed to reference an entry in the notebook.

Solove wiped the lenses of his glasses with his shirtsleeve and shoved them back on his face. Amy must have cleaned the office recently. The wastebasket by the door was empty and the two side-by-side desks were cleared of papers and dishes.

Even the wires from their desktops were tied together neatly with colored twisty-ties. Photos of the family hung like a checkerboard on the walls. In one portrait, Solove stood like a patriarch, hands resting on the shoulders of his wife and daughter. It should have been Amy, standing there. She was the one who held the family up. Solove felt like throwing the picture onto the floor, just to hear the glass shatter. Instead, he moved methodically around the room, looking for the notebook he knew wasn’t there.

As his wife undressed that night, Solove noticed the bags under her eyes. Released from the bun, her long brown hair revealed its grey. It looked coarser, duller than he remembered.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” he said, quietly. “I’ve been really out of it.”

“It’s fine. I get it.” Amy’s voice was terse. She set an alarm on her phone for 5:00 am. Solove lay in bed, watching her.

“Did you find the notebook?”

Solove shook his head. Amy joined him in bed and turned off the bed-side lamp. She still smelled the same. Mellow, sweet. He wanted to hold her, but her back was to him.

He feared she might shrug him off.

They lay in silence for a long time. Solove could hear from her breathing that Amy was awake. He imagined she was watching the spinning shadow of the ceiling fan above them, just as he was. Finally, she spoke.

“I can’t make dinner every night.”

“I’m sorry. I was on edge today – the notebook. ” “It’s not just today Solove. I was basically a single parent while you were away. I juggled a full-time job, and all of the housework, and everything your dad left behind. And that was fine… but you’ve been back two weeks now. You’re on sabbatical. And I still feel like you’re not home.” Amy spoke quickly, as if her words were tearing off a band aid.

“I’m sorry. I tried to spend time with Emma on Sunday.

We went on a walk together, to Hawley Bog. She acted like I wasn’t there.” Solove grimaced at the memory.

Amy sighed. “You know, this was the first summer Emma and I didn’t go to the preserve.” Shifting, she rested her head on Solove’s chest and brushed her fingers over his cheeks. “It 35

36

must be hard, studying moss right now. I can’t see it without thinking of him. Maybe that’s why Emma didn’t want to go with you.”

“I want to remember him.”

“Sweetheart - of course you do.”

Solove grasped Amy’s hand. Squeezed hard.

“Amy?” “Yeah?”

“I didn’t finish the manuscript. While I was in Sweden. I couldn’t even start writing.”

“You miss him.”

Solove nodded. He breathed in slowly, so that the scent of Amy’s hair calmed the tightness in his throat.

“I can’t believe I lost his notebook” They lay together for a while, remembering. His dad had been so big – the whole forest. The mire. He had taught Solove to see. Taught Emma to draw. And he had guided Solove and Emma’s walks together, even when he wasn’t leading the way.

Solove sat up in bed. “What if I dropped it at the bog?”

“You should check there tomorrow.” Amy poked him in the chest. “But you’re still in charge of dinner, okay? My shift ends at 7:00 and I’ll be starving.” Amy shifted again so that her back was to him. Within a minute, she was snoring.

Unable to sleep, Solove started the car as soon as the sky turned the indigo of early morning. The sun rose up over the autumn trees as he drove, casting them in an ethereal, golden light. The parking lot of the preserve was empty when he arrived. Solove shrugged on a brown wool sweater he found bunched up in the back seat and pulled on the big yellow rainboots Amy had bought him last Christmas. Scanning from side to side, Solove retraced the path he and Emma had taken a few days before. He’d walked slowly then, too, keeping pace with Emma as she stopped every few paces to text someone – probably Mark. When he was taking samples at the bog, Emma had sat on a log near the trail-head and continued texting until her phone died. Then she’d begged to go back. Solove was so flustered that he tripped over a root with his backpack still on. They’d left in a soggy, angry rush.

The bog before him was peaceful now, enshrouded in mist. It looked the same as it had when his father had first taken him. A mysterious dip in the earth ringed by saplings and brush. The center of the ring pooled with water, and clumps of moss floated on it like living boats. No other plants disturbed the sphagnum, which Solove knew was as deep as it was wide. The moss was supported from underneath by its ancestors. Layers and layers of peat, descending hundreds of years into the past were preserved in the acidic, oxygen-poor water. The bog was inhospitable to decomposers – the microbes and fungi that recycled death back into life – and so the dead lived on in their stillness, sustaining a

single layer of impossible green. Looking more closely, Solove realized the bog was not the same as it always was. A corner of his dad’s notebook protruded from the center like a strange, angular stick.

As if pushed from behind, Solove stepped into the water.

At first, he balanced on top of the mat of moss, but he sunk into the bog with each step. Soon, his boots tugged downwards when he tried to lift his feet. He grabbed the top of his boots with his hands to pull them free. It was an exhausting slog. Water began to pool at the bottom of his shoes. He started shuffling without lifting them up – choosing instead to push through as if he were skating through dough. By the time he reached the notebook, Solove was in to his lower thighs. His left knee ached. His back hurt. Leaning forwards, Solove touched the notebook with his fingertips. It was sodden. Tannins that helped preserve the bog had dyed the pages as brown as the leather cover. Even if the notebook were dried, his dad’s entries would be indecipherable.

Clutching the notebook to his chest, Solove stood still for the first time that day. He took in big gulps of air, and then, longer, deeper ones until he breathed with the breath of the bog – in, and out, as if in prayer. Solove felt the mud soaking into his clothes. He smelled his father’s scent - the subtle tang of fallen leaves and ancient life. Above him, the sky was a crystalline blue. Light dappled the water and shimmered on the moss. He touched the translucent green springs and felt them soft between his fingertips. The moss murmured to him with his dad’s voice. Slowly, he began to decipher what they meant. Slowly, he saw, with his dad’s eyes.

This bog was a testament to stillness - a true stillness that paused the inevitable, urgent cycle of life and death. As long as the bog survived, as long as it bore the changing of seasons, the warming breeze, the shifting rains, it would preserve the notebook too. Even if Solove couldn’t finish their manuscript, his father’s memories would remain. Buried, but safe.

Still kneeling, Solove dug into the peat until it reached his elbow. Then, he pushed the notebook down so that it was fully submerged. “Take care of him,” he whispered. His hands were too muddy to wipe his eyes. He let the wind dry his tears. It was a calm wind, blowing in from the north like a promise, but Solove felt leaden. He could let himself sink with the notebook into the peat. He could do it without struggle, as if into a bath. He could embalm himself in a time before the walls really caved in. He could…

Solove closed his eyes and saw his dad, walking beside him through the mire. Amy and Emma were in front of them, scrambling over tenacious outcrops of snow. The air was crisp and cold. Emma stopped, crouched to peer at a crack in the permafrost. Soon, Amy and his dad joined her. Solove had snapped the picture then, captured the perfect still life of his family, the vast and beautiful mire beneath their feet. But Solove needed to replace that photograph. He needed to go home and make dinner.

37

Rand Burnette

38

40