2004-Vol56

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2004

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the literary magazine of the undergraduate creative writing program, Columbia university

SUBMISSIONS

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Current and recent undergraduate Creative Writing stu­ dents—including non-degree students and students enrolled in other divisions of Columbia University who are taking undergraduate creative writing courses—are encouraged to submit to QUARTO. We welcome poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including excerptsfi-omlonger works.

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EXECUTIVE EDITORS

CHRISTINA RUMPF BRIAN PLATZER

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MANAGING EDITOR

GABRIEL PETER-HARP ;2

Submissions are nonreturnable. Please include your con­ tact information (name, address, telephone number, and email address) on your manuscript.

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Manuscripts may be considered elsewhere while under consideration at QUARTO. Please notify us of acceptance by another publication.

JEFFBOBULA NICKBREDIE JONAH CARDILLO SARAH DZIEDZIC DANIELLE EVANS BENFALIK JORDAN HEIMER SASHA HEROY BRYN KEATING GABRIEL PETER-HARP NICK SUMMERS BARUCH THALER

Address all submissions and correspondence to: QUARTO 612 Lewisohn Hall 2970 Broadway Mail Code 4108 Columbia University New York, NY 10027 For information on becoming a patron of QUARTO, please call the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at (212) 854-3774.

Text set in Times New Roman.

Cover photograph by JULIA HART, 2002.

FACULTY ADVISOR

LESLIE Τ SHARPE Copyright © QUARTO 2004 All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists on publication.

ISSN 0735-6536

DIRECTOR, UNDERGRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING

LESLIE WOODARD

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Uptown MICHAEL AGRESTA

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t Before His Lobotomy 19 MARGOT POLLANS Ghost Dance TIM BEAN

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Seven Second Delay JOSHUA BOOTH

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Exceptionally Pretty 32 ALEX ORB AN Aquifers ELENA PEABODY

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Refusing the Buddha BRIDGET POTTER

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Messages and Messengers 46 Translations of Poems by Yu Xuanji ADAMKIELMAN Fast 49 AMBER MEADOW ADAMS The Sitters ANNA BULBROOK

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A Lucky Seven and a Girl Named Sex MICHAEL DIBIASIO

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Mock Meat YI-SHENG NG

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Alvarado JUSTIN CLARKE

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Α Natural History: The Battle of'Harlem 72 Heights, September 16, 1776 MARGOT POLLANS MARYKATE

J.R. HUMPHREYS 1918-2003

Triplets 73 LOCANTORE

Kente Spun 78 ESINAM BEDAIKO College 79 ARIEL SCHRÄG

John R. (Dick) Humphreys taught creative writing at Columbia University for 44 years, the last 25 as Director of the Creative Writing Program in the School of General Studies. After his retirement in 1988 he divided his time between New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Bom in 1918, he served in England and France as a First Lieutenant during World War Π and came to Columbia soon after the end of the war During his time here, he won several awards as a "Distinguished Professor " and contin­ ued to publish fiction and non-fiction, most notably the novels SUBWAY TO SAMARKAND and MAYA RED, and THE LOST TOWNS AND ROADS OF AMERICA. Dick and his wife Peggy kept in touch with many of his former stu­ dents and colleagues until the end of his life. He died in Santa Fe on August 25, 2003 at the age of 85.

-Austin Flint

UPTOWN

by MICHAEL AGRESTA O N E MOMENT OF Peter Reznick's life passed on that subway platform much hke all the others. He did not know then—and, indeed, he will not ever know, because some things are outside of his comprehension—^that the moment had carried any particular significance for either his body or his mind. It is possible, however, that one might have noticed a sadness in his gesture as he picked up his bag and stepped into the half-full train. The girl whose gaze he accidentally met as the train lurched and started forward almost certainly understood him as a troubled or moody type, and perhaps this impression drew her curiosity. As he surrendered to vanity and watched his ghostly reflection in the dark window on the other side of the car, the truth became manifest—^not yet in his eyes, but somehow eminently visible to his observers— that a moment before, or two, Peter's body had reached and passed a peak in which it discontinued all extraneous operations of growing and extending itself into the world and unhesitatingly began the slower and more monotonous business of contracting back into nothing. Like a story of mystery or intrigue at the point just after the crucial revelation has been made, Peter had ceased his process of vmfurling into life in the world; all that remained for his considerable energies was to find an appropriate ending.

This girl across the car from him, and to the left: her name was Sarah, and she could see him watching himself in the window, not because she cared intently, but because she was avoiding her own reflection with a deeper determination than he, and so she had to latch on to any overheard conversation or glimpse of facial emotion that might pull her attention away from herself By making this her practice on both directions of her off-peak commute, Sarah had come to be an excellent observer of people on subway trains, whereas in all other locales and spheres of her life she was more or less oblivious.

She watched Peter, though, and allowed herself, absently, to wonder what went on behind those troubled eyes.

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And behind those eyes? There is the temptation, of course, to say. Who can know? But someone does know, and though it might be later lost to an indifferent memory, Peter could have then attested that he thought about his mother, and his German class, and a girl he knew who was trying to make him her boyfriend, and the awkwardness that sometimes comes from proximity with strangers, and the woods behind his house in New Hampshire. He didn't think of them all at once, or even in that order, but one at a time, because his eye-con­ tact with Sarah had made him feel awkward, and he felt the same way in German class when everyone was watching him and he didn't know the vocabulary, and because this difficult girl was in his German class, and because she reminded him too much of his mother for him to get involved with her, and because his mother went together with those woods, not because she ever walked that far but because he could always hear her voice calling to him in there, telling him that lunch was ready or that it was too dark for him to be out.

The thing about mothers is that everyone has them, so Sarah, close to Peter but already out of his head, could also think about her mother, but think of someone completely dif­ ferent. It might be that she did subconsciously divine what lay behind Peter's eyes and let her thoughts travel along the same path. Or it might only be that she was angry with her mother, that she was young enough to still have to live vwth her, and that for most of the day she had let her mother dominate her thoughts. In either case, they sat there mother-thinking as the scar filled up in Midtovwi, unknowingly sharing in the most intimate experience in which either had engaged all day.

Theoretically, everyone in the car could have been doing the same thing, but no one was, except Peter, Sarah, and the babies.

Thirty blocks were spent in quiet contemplation. They did not make eye contact again. She got off at Seventy-sec­ ond Street, he at One hundred third. The train continued in the simple, straight direction of Uptown as the island nar­ rowed and seemed destined to break off entirely into water.

The train curled over and under the plane of the city streets, and at One hundred forty-fifth Street it was as empty as it had been when Peter stepped on.

Here a man named Davis, called Dave, mistakenly enters the train. His back curved, arms up as he examines the map, he curses. He is in town to visit his aunt, and he had meant to go Downtown. Quietly, because he is polite, but resolutely, because he is not religious, he says, "Fuck."

This is what is happening now.

Also now at Peter's apartment Sanchez pees on Peter's leg. Sanchez is new, and someone else's idea. He also tries to lick Peter's face but fails because he can't leap high enough. Peter never swears; no one in his family swears.

Sarah will never get to know a boy like Peter. She will never live anywhere but the Upper West Side of Manhattan, except for four years when she goes to college outside Boston.

Her concept of all other parts of the world will be forever boxed inside her notion of vacation, for which college, fast approaching, now sjTnbolizes a major development. She'll never meet a boy like Peter because she doesn't talk to the boys on the subway, and to his credit, neither does he talk to the girls. Which is why he will never meet her. The two will never meet. Never will they meet each other, Sarah and Peter.

Davis will exit at the next stop. Peter will cook himself spaghetti. Sarah, who is already by now taking a bath, will continue to avoid her mother. The people from Midtown have been thrown back out into the world, going wherever they go. All these things are bound to happen.

Earlier this morning, when Peter was a younger man, he dreamed. He got up out of bed when he heard a knock at the door. He was expecting no one, but still he rose to answer it, because he held in his mind the secret hope that this unex­ pected knock might be the beginning of something important.

He looked through the peephole and saw no one. He sounded his voice and heard no response. Cautiously, he opened the door. He looked first one way and then the other dovTO the long corridor of apartment doors. Everything was stillness; emptiness filled the hall in both directions. On a lower level, he heard a door slam shut.

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At seven o'clock this morning Sarah came around the cor­ ner from Seventy-first Street to Broadway, and there was a change. It was Hke everyone stopped breathing and started just whisthng at that exact moment. The silence took a shape and a form, and swelled into a noise. She looked up, expectantly, and then around at the other people in the street, who moved like they always moved. She kept walking and told herself that she was nuts and only hearing things, that her ears were mis­ firing. She kept walking on and eventually the whistling faded to the background of her mind.

Sitting in her bath, Sarah is fairly certain of what the future holds. She knows, for instance, beyond a doubt that she will marry. Often, she uses phrases like "When I get married . . ." or "At my wedding . . ." or "The man I marry . . ." and she knows which dress she will wear because it is in the attic in Pound Ridge. If it had to be reduced to a necessity, it would read: If Sarah marries, she will wear her mother's dress. But it is already certain enough for her without the reduction.

She knows other things—she will go to college in the fall.

Neither she nor her parents will die young. They are not the type. There could always be, of course, for instance, the Bomb, which was created to make her feel uncertain—^but she is certain anyway. Being certain is an inextricable part of being Sarah. So she knows she will go outside and take a walk in the Park when she finishes her bath, because she resolved it a few moments ago. This will allow her to brush easily past her mother, who has placed herself stubbornly on the path between the bathroom and her bedroom; it will allow her to get dressed more quickly than she otherwise might; it will pull her down the stairs, not the elevator shaft, and out into the street. Certainty is the motor of Sarah, and if it must be abandoned, a new certainty can be counted on to spring up in its place. It is as subtle as the change of gears in one of her night taxis, speeding her through the dark interior of the island, away from her new lover's (to call him that! Ha!) bed.

She feels for it, the change, because her father told her once, in his car in the country, how automatic car motors work. But from the back of the taxi she can't see the dashboard and she

can never feel it, can never feel anything except the obvious accelerate, decelerate, push, pull, and the winding-out of the road as it cuts through the wilderness cross-town.

If this seems like a detour, bear with it. It is a telling social phenomenon that as soon as a child is able to walk about comfortably on her own, the first toy she wants is a sfroUer, to push around and make believe that a doll or a soccer ball is the baby and that she is the mother. This consistent occur­ rence, witnessed by a million mothers each year, has not received adequate attention from students of human develop­ ment. It is not, as some people who call themselves experts in child-rearing suggest, an imitation or sincere flattery of the mother, nor is it, as some idealists propose, a testament to the human need to nurture and love things. More likely, it is a game the child plays with herself. Having identified her motor as something behind the handles of the stroller (and, one must admit, mixed up with that woman who gives her milk), her first instinct is to seize control by putting herself in the same space as that motor. The child, then observed, will usually walk around banging the stroller into trees and stair­ cases and storefronts, or pushing it up impossibly steep angles to watch the ball roll helplessly away into the stteet.

Unlike Sarah, Peter no longer thinks of himself as a child.

He passed through something on that subway platform, or something passed through him, which was enough to make him want to give up childish things. He is trying now to grasp on to some certainty and to anchor himself in it, but all the things that Sarah is sure of he still holds in doubt. This is not to say that he is sure of nothing. He knows, for instance, that he'll never be happy forever like he is sometimes. Is this enough to orient himself, a pattern? A phrase that has occurred to him a number of times in the last few days strikes him again. "Beauty moves in spirals." He is thinking this, remember, as Sanchez pees on his leg. It will stay with him throughout his dinner, and he will try to decide whether it means that there are little spiraled corpuscles of beauty, col­ liding like free particles in his aesthetic reception field, or if it means that beauty is an internal experience that waxes and

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wanes in ever greater cycles. If he feels at peace now, does that only mean that he's on the way up or the way down? And which direction is he moving on the spiral, in or out? They are just four words that occurred to him, but he lets them bother him, because he is excited by the idea that they hold some secret satisfaction. And this, he will never admit, is the real reason he knows he will never be happy all the time, because he takes so much pleasure in frustrating himself The thought will finally come to him late that night, as he lies in his bed with a book that cannot hold his interest, that he will never meet a girl like Sarah. This is the first time she has occurred to him since Twenty-third Street, but, perhaps because of the physiological climax he endured only moments before their inadvertent eye contact, her image will spring readily to his mind. He will let it trouble him, the knowledge that he will never meet her: is it something he is doing wrong, or something she is doing wrong? Why is he always seeing people and never meeting them? What did that look mean, what did her eyes, or his eyes, say, that made them both look away so fast? Questions like these, on and on into the night, turning over on themselves and spilling into bigger questions. He will do this for hours sometimes, tossing and turning. Now that she has become a symbol to him, she will never leave him. Because symbols are everything to Peter— the spiral, the subway, the hands behind the stroller. Now that Sarah is in them—she wasn't before, but she is now—^now he will be defined by her. He will look for her everjTvhere; his wife will be someone like Sarah.

Sarah's new lover (new, not newest, because he's only her second) lives on the Upper East Side, down one long, windy road through a darkness that Sarah has never walked alone.

She hardly knows him; he is a young but successfiil writer who was her teacher in a three-month workshop paid for by her mother. He does not know how young she is or where she lives. They have met each other privately for nearly two months now, but Sarah has learned very little about him out­ side of his professional philosophy, which (he knows) is what she finds so attractive in him: Action. Intrigue. Come out

strong and then sustain it.

She will sit in Central Park, on a bench by the side of a circular track, watching a little Chinese girl run her toy stroller into the fence surrounding the lawn for only half an hour before she goes to see him. Sarah won't think of the girl, only watch her and participate; she won't interpret like she does on the subway. She will think of Peter, maybe, but only so much as his mysteriousness is subjected to the mys­ tery of the man she is about to visit. Runners and walkers will continue around, passing every now and then, but the little girl and her eager mother always stay in the same place; they will still be there even when Sarah leaves.

Sarah will knock hesitantly on the door of her teacher's apartment because she is never sure that he will be alone and she doesn't want to learn otherwise. He will offer her a drink and the first time he kisses her will be against the wall outside his bedroom. In her last moments of sobriety, before the wine has made such pleasantries imnecessary, she will ask the question: When you're working, how do you know what's going to happen next? To which he will reply, if such minutiae can be forecasted: It's not you that tell the story, but the story's telling you. I have to get it on the page, that's all, before it rolls on without me.

She will make love to him twice and fall asleep in his bed.

He will pass his hand along her face and retire to his office, where he will work late into the night. She will wake up alone at some dark hour before morning; she will open her eyes and think immediately of Peter. She might have dreamt of him, or maybe the glance they shared has made the sort of impression that gathers depth with time. She will not be awake for long enough to hold on to the thought, but she will realize then that Peter has given her a great contentment. She will never meet him, absolutely, but she could have, and that alone is enough to deflate any suffocating certainty, to detonate a whole city of enclosing edifices built up against each other to lock her future inside a narrow grid. She will nestle herself into the strange man's sheets and forget herself in sleep. There will be no night taxi. It will be the first night since childhood sleepovers that she doesn't come home to her mother.

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Does she know this now, sitting in her bath? If she does, she holds the knowledge more in hope than in assurance.

She is always having these fantasies; it is only now that they are starting to come true.

M Y MOTHER EXPLAINED THAT BEFOIΠH I S LOBOTOMY hy MARGOT POLLANS

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Just before midnight tonight, Peter's contemplations will spiral out into sleep. In his dream, time moves backwards. The tension of tenses is released. A train hurtles down the wrong track from the Bronx; dried urine gains moisture on his pants and flies up between Sanchez's legs. "Kcuf," says Davis, as he determines that he is moving Downtown. The train sucks in Peter, then Sarah, and they take their seats among the mass of people. In Midtown, most of the people file out; Peter begins to watch his reflection, and Sarah begins to watch Peter. Peter thinks of the woods behind his house, his mother, a girl in his German class, and social awkwardness. As Peter gets up to exit the train, for a moment his eyes rest on Sarah. A look passes between them, and a shared confession, which is: I have been thinking about you all day. I can't get you out of my mind. Will I ever see you again?

And as soon as it passes, he is gone, he stands still on the platform, the train is leaving, Sarah is nowhere to be seen, and Peter is alone out there, his body turning carbon diox­ ide into sugar and oxygen, as always, and passing a mile­ stone, unbeknownst to him, except by the air of grace that surrounds him, and the unusually fond looks he might receive from strangers on his way to work.

her grandfather Morris, leida Baum, sold insurance door-to-door and stopped at the Market Street Automat everyday to make free lemonade from the tea condiments.

But the surgeons at the Cherry Street Hospital scraped away too much as they removed his tumor, so he started each morning with the Inquirer crossword puzzle and devoted afternoons to solitaire.

GHOST DANCE

by TIM BEAN blue sky and rocky shore, I will return once more T H E LIGHTS SEEM to go on forever here. There's an Applebee's on the far comer at the intersection, two gas sta­ tions, and the Twin Fir Mall; every avenue ventures its glow into the darkness of the Minnesota night. Our light was red.

Last night I dreamt about the Sioux's Ghost Dances. In a few crazy months before Wounded Knee, the Lakota learned a new dance from Jesus himself This one Indian was out by a lake in Utah, alone, and he looked out and there was Jesus standing right in the middle. He promised all the Lakota a cleansing flood, and the return of their family and hunting grounds, if they did his dance. After that, the Lakota spent every hour of their waking days Ghost Dancing; in my dream, I was one of the lucky ones who fainted and had a vision.

"They looked at me, lying on the ground, and begged to know what I learned."

Janet smiles. She pats the emergency brake to the rhythm of our turn signal. "You want to get some pizza?" she asks, looking out her window in the direction of the gas station.

"Don't you want to know what I saw?"

She looks at me in silence, maybe sadly, but mostly with­ out expression. Janet Brings-Peace is half-Lakota. Her mom was raped by an outsider Bureau of Indian Affairs employee who had nothing much to do in Pine Ridge on a hot, vacant July morning. Janet and her mom moved to St. Paul a few years ago. Sometimes she really likes talking about being Indian, but other times I'll ask her a question and she'll just look at me quietly. Her eyes are dark gray and green.

"I just heard this voice," I continue," that said 'ye shall find.'"

I don't remember the first time I met Janet. We didn't go to school together until ninth grade, but sometime since then

we started talking. Janet had to start over again in school when she got out here, so she's a year older. I remember once I was sitting behind a bookshelf in the library reading and she tripped over my foot. She said I was reading one of her favorite books, but I don't remember what it was. I asked her why she was in the library instead of in English class and she said she could ask me the same thing. I never really liked hav­ ing a class where we got told what to read. She said the part she didn't like was the teacher telling us what the books were about. I told her she could always speak up if she disagreed.

"Yeah, right," she said and disappeared behind a bookcase.

Janet likes to write notes in the margins of all the books in the library. I've never seen her do it, but almost whenev­ er I read one there's always something in there with her handwriting. I made fixn of her for quoting The Cure in one but she denied it. "Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick?" I asked accusingly. She pretended not to know what I was talking about, but she has one of their tapes in her car.

Another time, I found something in the back of a book, "a dream from the black hills," she had written. Watching the sky roll in orange like a fiery lake, listening to crows scream at the red sun, she saw the needles on the rim of the hay shaking vio­ lently in the wind. Snow in winter covered them with piles of white. A crow landed on a dead tree next to her and cocked its head to the right. "Little girl, get up!" it cried, and flew diago­ nally up, swam through the air and curved over her trees.

As she makes her left-hand turn, between the gas station and mall, I tell her that sometimes it's hard to think about her in the Black Hills. I think it's because I've never been there, so she asks if I can picture St. Paul covered in trees and I say I can't. "But you've lived here your whole hfe," she says, "where's your imagination?"

The streetlights reflect off the yellow lines on the pave­ ment, which stretch out to both coasts. It almost looks like the lines are shifting past us, and we're sitting still. It's 6:30 and the streets are filled with cars. In two hours, they'll be deserted, but for now people have places to go.

Janet asks me if my dream has to do with me wanting to

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run away. I say it probably does in some way. "Peter," she says, "you have been trying to leave since July. Why are you still here?"

I tell her it's because I can't drive and she says that's ridiculous. I think it has to do with my parents, I guess. They want me at home, or maybe I want to be at home to see that they're still together. "I worry about my mom. I think she would get really lonely if I left her. I guess she wouldn't have any reason to stay in our house any more, but I don't know where she'd go."

In the winter in St. Paul, it's hard to walk anywhere because the air is so cold. Even in summer, though, every­ thing's so stretched out that you can't get from one place to another without driving.

"Do you think it's lonely here?" Janet asks me.

"I think so at night."

The yellow fluorescence of parking lots floats by as Janet drives on. Joe's Pizza is only about a mile away, but the streetlights are so endless any destination seems distant.

Another red light. In the car next to us, there's a man scratching his neck. It looks like he's picking at something.

He closes his eyes. "Look at him," Janet says. "Where do you suppose he's going? Home for dinner, or probably he's meeting his wife at some warm restaurant, right?" I nod.

"Do you think his life could be different?" I look back out the window at him, trying to picture his linoleum tiled kitchen, and brown-carpeted bedroom. Later that night, he would go into his closet, take off his tie—his jacket would already be hung by the door—^his shirt, his pants and socks, take off" his undershirt and briefs, get into bed, he and his wife would turn off their matching bedside lamps and fall asleep. "Goodnight," she would say. "Goodnight," he would mutter, turning over. The light turns green.

I think about last July—^the moon when the wild cherries are ripe, Janet said—^when I knew that I couldn't stay here. I had been having dreams about my final exams in school. I had failed half of them, and in my dreams I would go and have to take tests about the prairies. I'd never been there, but Janet says they don't exist any more, anyway. It used to be, her

grandmother told her, you could stand in the middle of the prairie and it would be like an ocean of grass. Her grand­ mother told her that it got hard walking through the prairies because you could travel all day and feel like you stayed in the same place. Everything was the same, except every once in a while you'd come to a savanna of oak or willow or cottonwood trees. It wasn't like a forest, Janet said, because it was sunny under the trees, but cooler, and a good place for her ancestors to stop for the night. When Janet told me that, I started to write that on the exams in my dreams, but I'd still fail.

In June, my mom said that she was moving out, but never did. She sometimes slept on the couch. When I was yovmger, I always wanted my mom to get a divorce so she could take me off" somewhere else and get all my dad's money and spoil me. Janet thinks I take my mom too seri­ ously. She says I should listen to both my parents. I started paying attention to things my mom said and noticed all the things she lied about, and I began to feel sorry for my dad.

"He's so inconsiderate," my mother used to say. "The easiest thing sets him off." But when I looked, she'd be tak­ ing things from his desk and putting them out of order. Once I tried calling her at work, but they said she wasn't there.

Janet laughed and said my mom was having an affair, and I laughed, too. We called my mom's lover Steve and joked about him all the time. I was convinced that she was too old to actually be cheating on my dad.

In early July, I told my mom that I was sleeping at Janet's, and instead Janet and I drove around all afternoon until we came to an old cherry orchard. Janet said the moons were always right and that the cherries would be ripe. The sun was just burning old that afternoon when we got out of the car, and the heat was thick but dry. We walked out to the middle of the field and picked cherries and ate them and spit the pits at each other. It was too early to be night, but too orange to be day. That was when I realized that I had to leave my house. These trees and Janet made more sense than school. I had stolen a book from the library that was filled with underlines, mostly Janet's, and I was reading it all the time.

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We stayed in that orchard all night, mostly sitting near one another and not saying much. Janet had her eyes on one thing and then another and I didn't want to interrupt her.

And anyway, my heart felt fierce and wild and the only thing I could do to calm it was sit and feel the wind go through our cherry tree and watch Janet think, and hope that I could get up enough courage to get on a bus.

When I got home early that morning, I found my mom sleeping in my bed. I crawled in next to her, and she held my head against her chest. We didn't say anything. I never men­ tioned that to Jand.

Joe's sits between a Blockbuster and a dry cleaner's, which is closed. Janet steers her car into a parking space in front and pulls on the emergency brake. I close my eyes and listen to the crunching noise it makes.

"My mother's car makes that same noise."

"Every car makes that noise," she says and turns off the ignition. The roar of cars on the avenue behind us comes in clearly now, over the quiet of Janet's sleeping engine. I once told her I was the only person I knew in the eleventh grade who didn't have a license. She said I must not know many people.

She gets out, and looks back in at me. "Aren't you com­ ing?"

"In a second," I say, eyes still closed.

"Lock your door," she says, closing hers.

Sometimes I think that flood really did come, and washed all the bad Indians away. Janet says that God sees it that way. Somewhere in another universe, from another big bang, she's still living in the Black Hills. She once said that it's all like time traveling; that stupid thing about going back in time and breaking a branch and you come back and everybody has three arms. She says somewhere there has to be room for all those options, and God sees them all. We're just one of them. Somewhere in another universe, I'm living in a St. Paul covered in pines, and the Lakota are sleeping in savarmas like Eden.

The dance goes around. Beat my feet, bow my head. My knees hurt from kneeling. Today, the clouds move to our calls;

they drift and dance, they color the sky with white purity.

Someday soon, all us bad Indians will be washed away and the bison will return. Someday. The heat races down the hills, col­ lecting at our feet. We pick it up and share it, then let it go.

Janet knocks on my window, and I open my eyes. "You fell asleep," she says, as I get out and shut the door.

"No I didn't. I was just thinking." Η "About what?" she asks, laughing.

Inside is bright with fluorescent. I rub my eyes and GO yawn. Janet sits down at a two-person booth and resumes > 2; eating her slice of cheese. I buy a Coke and sit down.

"My mom says we might have to move again," Janet 25 says, holding her pizza in two hands. I look up at her dark gray and green eyes.

"Where?" o "My uncle Ray lives in Wyoming. He says that he and my mom could pretend to be married, and they'd get more a money from the government that way."

"Wouldn't the government know they're brother and sis­ ter?"

"Ray doesn't think so. He says people on his reservation do that kind of stuff all the time. The ΒΙΑ governor doesn't really pay too close attention. He takes most of their money, anyway."

I look down. "Oh." "You could come with me, you know," Janet says.

"And what, pretend to be your brother?"

Janet says that if I'm willing to work, I could earn extra money for her mom and I could live with them in exchange.

I tell her it would be the same as going to school, only in a different place.

"I thought that's what you want," Janet says. I don't want to leave just to get a job. I want to leave so I can find other orchards. And I want to leave to find them with her, I guess.

Janet knows this, too.

"My uncle Ray was a close personal friend of Leonard Peltier before Leonard shot all those FBI agents," Janet says.

My father has a drawer frill of old postcards from the days when America toured the country in automobiles. He has

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postcards of Devil's Tower, and Old FaithfUl, and Little America, and the Continental Divide, but Janet says that the reservation she's moving to in Wyoming isn't like any ofthat.

She says there are antelope, though. She says she doesn't think there will be postcards, but she'll send me one if there are. My eyes and cheeks start to feel warm.

"Let's pretend it's summer," Janet says, throwing her pizza plate in the trash.

"It's a Wednesday night," I say. My mom thinks I'll be home by eight.

"I'm leaving on Friday," she says.

"What? When did you find out?"

"Last night."

"But that's so soon. How are you going to pack? I thought your mom only said it was a possibility." Janet looks at me quietly and goes back to the car. I throw away my Coke and leave.

On the highway, we are again following the endless river of orange streetlights. I can't think of anything to say. The lights and parking lots start to stretch farther apart, and sometimes are separated by patches of pine trees. I realize where Janet's going.

"That pond is probably frozen," I mutter.

"I don't think so. The outlet is swift enough. Besides, if it is we'll throw rocks and break through." I don't know why we'd have to. She clears her throat and speaks quietly. "I'm taking you to a St. Paul covered in pines."

I look out the window. The landscape grows dark.

Running quickly past the silhouette of pines, the moon shines white.

"What moon is that?"

"The Moon when the water is black with leaves," she says, her dark gray and green eyes pointed up toward the sky, her shoulders hunched over the steering wheel.

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"About moving?" Janet asks.

I nod. Janet says that she only found out this afternoon when she got home from school, right before she came to pick me up. She says that her mom wanted her to stay and

talk, but instead she just walked out the door and came to get me.

The moon grows brighter as darkness envelopes us. An hour goes by, but we have little to say. We pass a dark motel, set back from the road. It probably closed on Labor Day. I wonder what it would be like if I checked me and Janet in, nosmoking, queen-sized bed. Janet looks over at me gently. I Η look down at my feet. I wonder if she ever thinks about hav­ 2 ing sex with me. txi The roads we drive on spread out from the city like m snakes or rivers, falling out into wilderness. Janet's car end­ lessly falls with them, dragging me and her to darker places.

27 The trees are like walls, blocking out the light of the city.

They stretch for hundreds of miles north of here and even at the edge give offa deep pull towards their center. They blan­ o ket the car with warmth like loneliness. The yellow line in >! the middle of the road reflects Janet's headlights bravely, b unrolling itself forward into the void but back towards St. a Paul. It is my anchor. Janet drives on for forty-five minutes, TO an amount of time that lies somewhere between less than four breaths and more than a thousand years.

Finally, Janet slows the car into a dirt pull-off and stops the engine.

She sits silently gazing at the windshield. I look at her cheek. It's smooth and as I stare at it I lose focus: her cheek is an endless plain, one part indistinguishable from any other. I could travel for days over the soft curves of her face and stay in the same place. In my head, I can will her to say to me any­ thing I want her to, but she continues to stare out silently.

I resolve myself with a deep breath in my stomach.

"Why do you like me, Janet?"

"I don't like like you, Peter." She looks into my eyes, and I stare back.

"But why are we friends?"

She looks out the window and pauses. "So what are you going to do this weekend?" Janet asks. It hits me: this Friday, she'll leave and I won't have any plans. I take out a piece of paper from my pocket. Janet steals a look and smiles, then looks away. A month ago, I wrote down all the times during

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the week that the bus leaves St. Paul for Albuquerque.

"There's one that goes Saturday morning," I say. Janet looks back at me to see if I'm serious. She looks into my eyes, but I can't answer her. I doubt it, though. One time I took a cab to the bus station with my bag packed. I called her to say goodbye, and somehow during the conversation she either convinced me to stay or I decided not to leave, and she picked me up. Even if I thought I was leaving now,

by Saturday I probably would sleep in, turning over only long enough to think about leaving next week. She is still looking at me.

"I don't really have any reason to stay if you're leaving," I say and look out the window. When I look back, Janet is staring at my hands. She lets two tears roll down her cheeks, one on each side.

"So, Peter, why do you like me?" The car, turned off, has begun to let small wisps of cold in between us. "Is it because I'm Indian? What is it about me?"

She takes the keys out of the ignition and opens her door.

I watch her walk back into the forest.

I try to breathe some weight into my stomach, then get up from the car. Outside, my breath floats up into the trees.

I follow her in.

There is darkness here, and a softness to my steps in the dead pine needles. Above the trees, there is a deafening light from the city, hours to the south. I don't know how it could have followed us here, but it's there, orange and angry. I don't want to let Janet out of my sight, but I need to pause. This is where I will be when she goes, beneath the branches, among the pines. I wonder about building a shelter here, like I learned at summer camp six years ago. I could live here for­ ever, and crowd out the city. I could get lost and Janet would have to leave me out in the forest. I wonder if she'd search for hours or if she'd leave right away, happy to be done with me.

I'd be hiding behind a tree right next to the car and she'd drive off, and I'll shout and run after her, but she won't even see me, not even in the mirror. Once she's gone, the cold will rush out from the trees, from every needle and seize my hair, then face, then feet and hands.

This place, far north of the city, feels like it stretches out to the Arctic. Nothing could stop me from walking for days and visiting polar bears. Colder than the city, the air feels like it comes straight from space, the northernmost part of our hemisphere, from stars.

"Peter," she calls. She says my name and it pierces my stomach.

Our pond lies five minutes from the highway. It's about twenty feet wide, and mostly round.

"Looks like we were both right," Janet says.

The pond is frozen on the northern side, but open by the sfream that flows out of it. The ice, though, is endlessly work­ ing to freeze the rest, to gather the flowing water to itself and make the pond whole. It yearns to slow the rush of the sfream, to settle it and hold it tight.

Janet unzips her coat and pulls it off. She removes her hat, and sweater, then kicks off her shoes. She shivers. I put my hands in my coat pockets. Janet refiises to look at me.

She unbuttons her pants and takes them off, pulls her T-shirt over her head. She's not wearing a bra.

"What are you doing?" I shout. She pulls down her underwear.

"Stop it!" I cry. She shivers again, turns and walks into the water, black with leaves. My cheeks begin to feel warm again. The warmth spreads to my ears, and down my neck, over my chest and into my legs.

"It's not summer, Janet. You'll freeze to death!"

Janet lowers herself to her shoulders and pushes over to the shelf of ice. I think 1 see her pause for a moment, but she doesn't. She does it instantly, unaware of the ice. This cold is overwhelming and proud, and I don't understand it. I tighten my muscles, trying to fight this wild frost. We are too far from the city to ever be warm again, but Janet brings her bare legs up.

She spreads her arms and floats on her back. I walk to the edge of the pond.

I want to tell her that she's killing herself I want to give my stomach to her, ribs and heart and stomach. "You'll die," I whisper.

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"Did Ι ever tell you about Crazy Horse?" she asks, quietly.

"Not really," I say, but this is all going too fast. I want to drag her out, but there is a force around the dark water. I want to pull her out, dragging her by her armpits, but I can't reach her, and I've never touched her skin.

"Crazy Horse knew we were living in a world of shad­ ows," Janet says.

She's shaking.

I sneeze, or cough; my body shakes and tears erupt from my eyes, a terrible groan creeps briefly from my mouth.

Janet can't, or won't, look.

"He could get to the real world, though, by dreaming, and when he was there everything seemed to float or dance.

Even his horse danced, which is why he called himself Crazy Horse." Janet adjusts her tiny wrists to keep floating.

She's still wearing a bracelet, made of suede and beads that her mom gave to her. There are small crystals of frost form­ ing on it. It makes the rest of her beautiful; it gives her end­ less skin a context, round and perfect.

"Before every battle, he dreamed himself to the real world and when he fought he could endure anything."

She closes her eyes, and it begins to snow. Each flake seems to pause in the air then fall to the ground. They land on Janet's endless prairie skin. Janet looks at me strangely, like my father looks at my mother. When I read a book from the library, and find Janet's handwriting, and it says "I'll run away with you. I'll run away with you" and I think about me, and her, I want to look into her eyes with a tenderness that she shares with me now. I think she wants to cry, and I don't know how much longer she can stay here, but I unzip my jacket.

SEVEN SECOND DELAY

by JOSHUA BOOTH / think we 're lost, Gately says.

And I say. Thanks a lot.

Gately seems a true great friend in the face of perils yet to come. / got lost in DC, Gately says Another time just like this.

The DJ on the radio says Welcome to the show, and I say Good to hear, while the caller says. Thanks a lot.

Then Gately says. Do you have a problem, òro?

And by the way he's leaning back I can see he means it, but the goofy ballsy voice of the radio says.

This is the hour of peace, love, and understanding.

I say Ijust want to hear "Pithecanthropus Erectus."

And maybe it's the drugs but Gately nods so slow and earnestly that I believe I hear his thoughts subliminate those sculptural rhythms, the caller says Good to hear.

The radio DJ says We 're taking requests.

And Gately says / think I know where we are now.

The caller says I just want to hear— I say OK— "Pithecanthropus Erectus."

The DJ says Cominatcha.

The caller says OK, and Gately says Thanks for listening, anyway, as I turn the music up.

EXCEPTIONALLY PRETTY

by ALEX ORBAN I CAN'T LIVE with you so big. I need to knock you down to understandable and sift you into your powdery start.

From hearing us talk, you'd never guess I'm taller. We met at a party with too many people in one little room, squeezed by the walls and thumping drinks against their legs, dancing and throwing their numbers around, and we were the only two sitting still. We stared hard in the looking game of two grownups, consenting and legal and barely able to walk straight since midnight, drinks held by our knees, smiling at the music and bobbing our heads. If you said something to me, I forgot it before I went home. That night, I just got the seeing you part out of the way. You wore pants that fit. Your hair stuck up in the front. I thought about you the next time I masturbated.

I'm feeling a little too emotional right now. A little slick.

I haven't eaten in fifteen days and I'm reading this true crime novel that has me scared of my closet. I'm itchy from red, swollen bug bites all over my calves. My pillow can't hold your shape. My hair hasn't been washed in a while. It started falling out. I've had better days.

You know the story; you just repress it. You got my mraiber from whoever had that party, he got itfi-oma fiiend of a friend and it was just chance that you got through to me at all. You keep telling people we met at a bar. You just like the idea of bars and get off on lying.

That's not fair.

I'm sorry. I'll talk like my mother and we'll make sense of this. I recognize that I'm occupying defensive space and self-victimizing. I'll construct and not project. I'll shape my thoughts in "I think" terms. I think the fruth is that you're sad. I think you're lonely even when you're full of yourself and making lots of noise. Now I think that every time you looked at me, you were checking your reflection in my eyes.

So when you called me, you told me that I was the most exceptionally pretty girl at the party. I'm so pretty, you said.

and so sweet looking, you just had to call. I looked like the kind of girl that your mother would like. I looked like the kind of girl that would meet you for a drink.

Girls like being told what they want.

I met you that night.

I should mention that I don't look as pretty anymore.

Today I filed off some hair and taped it to the wall. I fingerpainted in my own vomit on the floor.

One night three months after that first date, you woke me up with loud sobs, you still asleep and somehow run down on the floor by my bed. I stroked your sweaty neck and said your name over and over until your eyes opened.

You got back into bed and grasped me hard and I made sure you were asleep before I let my eyes close.

I told myself that night that it was love with us.

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δ' I slept twenty-one hours yesterday. I woke up long enough to stretch and carve a little heart into the wall with a butter knife. There are hearts and more hearts all over the headboard, our initials in the door. My story is going to be all over this room.

You drove me somewhere last year. It was hot, too hot, and you pulled over on the shoulder of a burning interstate.

I had my window down, my shorts tugged off, and I was spread across the seat trying not to feel the air. I wanted to cry I was so uncomfortable. We were far from wherever we were going and the day was in that mid-afternoon squalor where heat gets trapped and the sun won't quit. You pulled over and you looked at me and you started singing loud with the radio. It was Top 40 since we were in-between towns and you filled up the car with your sound and then you leaned in to me and started blowing. You started on my ankles, you held them up by your face and you blew the coldest you could manage and you came up my legs and you blew along my thighs and I lifted up my shirt and you blew on my breasts and my neck and all over my face. The whole thing took about a minute.

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Flies keep coming in the room, envoys ifrom my mother, whose calls I won't return. All they do is hover by the win­ dow, desperate to get out again. For all the noise they make, they just end up piling on the sill. I've drowned myself in water. I drink twenty, sometimes forty cups a day. I'm near­ ly overflowing; poured out and sloshed over my edges, I'm swimming all the time. I'm not hungry anymore. I've heard it takes thirty days to form a habit. In my case it only took fifteen.

Most nightsyou came over would be too dark to see you right. To override the blackness you opened me up on the edge of my bed. Slit me apart with your tongue and your words and my end came there. Why is it, you asked me, that every time I see you, I want to see you deeper, want to get inside you, want to taste your insides. And the times between the times with you, the small bits, the unimpor­ tance's, why is that the time I can't sit still?

And I was thrilled.

I placed my feet where they'd never been and matter shifted to give me sense. There are no guidelines in new ter­ ritory. I had nothing but my hope and I let your words arrest me completely. I can never be loved like that again.

Everybody gets just one right flavor and I got you. If I kept going and fed myself it would be to finger new causes while all I'd want is your flavor back. Please. Please, remind me what you were.

Your sister called me on a Thursday morning and woke me up. She said, "mybrotherwaskilled and this is the way to grieve: when the shock slides over to make room for the pain you let it out, you call me, you make sure someone's with you."

I said, "I wish someone had been with him."

She said you weren't alone.

Big things need space to be told. They need swords, not butter knives, to illustrate their tragedy. But I take what I can get. At your funeral I was so stoned I couldn't stand up.

At your parents' house later, women kept hugging me, whis­

pering that I would love again. They must have decided in a back room to deny me your scandal. They shook on it, swearing that they would paint me up the derailed ingénue, proud my man perished righteously.

When I hung up on your sister, I figured it out.

You were in a bar sitting across from some girl. Hands folded over hands and knees kissing, the table was full of empty glasses. Some girl stood up to get a drink or go to the bathroom and some guy walked up to her and stood too close. And you were watching. The floor and booth were bar-sticky. They tried to keep you down, but you stood up because maybe her breast got grabbed. When you tried to start some trouble, you found out how much blood you had inside. He shot at you and ran out the door and you saw all your blood fall out, and how silly it must have seemed to stop up that much liquid with such thin skin.

And at the time, I was sleeping. I was at a movie. I was talking to my mother. 1 was reading in bed, drinking orange juice. I can't remember. Every answer seems wrong.

And you were scared and dying on the floor of a bar I told you before I'd never step inside. And now I'm way past throwing up stomach acid, lying on the floor of my room, losing all my patience.

This morning when I woke up, I tasted your flavor in my mouth. I'm almost done.

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AQUIFERS

by ELENA PEABODY I George Peabody's hands Callused as they unraveled By the line.

Birches swung He opened his palm Four closed-hand hills, sinking, In the workings of rods and channels.

He began to maw Tilted his sack flour head Then keened III

Raking chip ware across the kitchen counter, Bent to kindling fires and tending plots.

The tinder-stick protests, Of the brewing quiet people: Vermonters digging their own cellars.

What did his family catch In his tin capped kiss?

Lucky he died.

Before the double-handled tins spiltâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; The healthy white tide Drowning com Unearthing potatoes.

Bringing people Who milked goats And didn't know how to use wood stoves.

The day it Stuck him down He ran and thundered through the family campground.

Cousins sleeping and he hollering at the youngsters Protective, Furious with them.

(What was it they smelled from their tents, in the muggy nylon morning?)

IV I've recognized you on my father In maple plaid, and coarse light.

II George Peabody knew about water.

He looked at a mountain and knew its water whole.

He looked at the sky.

I I Îż

Grandpa had secrets hid: In the comfortable smell of metal scrap and oil, Under the loud seat of the rumble-truck.

In the musty comer with tubers.

On the mountain they could smell the storm

Lucky in death: Grandpa is preserved in words like latch and teat.

W

Young feet Follow you quick down the six foot dash.

Granddaughters with carefiil gifts and giant hands Will never taste your codeine nipped kiss Or brush a cheek against its source.

37

REFUSING THE BUDDHA

by BRIDGET POTTER I GOT MY first job the summer that I turned nineteen.

John Kennedy was President, no burgeoning feminists had yet burned their bras, the Beatles were still in Liverpool. I had spent the spring at a secretarial school on the 34th floor of the Empire State Building, which advertised in the sub­ way cars of the 7th Ave IRT. They charged by the week.

When I could t5φe 60 words a minute and write a legible 120 words a minute of shorthand, I was issued a certificate with which I could try to get a job.

Rodney Chalk, a producer who had made documentary films for the British Government's propaganda oiîice, was to run that office for the rest of the year. He was filling in for the British Information Service bureaucrat who was completing a tour of duty at home. As a favor to a friend of my father's, I was interviewed and hired to fill in as Rodney Chalk's secretary.

The office was in Rockefeller Center. Outside, a muscled and naked Atlas held up the world. Inside and twentyfour floors up, I sat on a gray steel chair on wheels in an outer office at a gray steel desk. I had a gray steel typewriter table with flaps on the side, and a black Underwood manual typevmter that required so much effort on the keys that the table rattled like a milk cart when I typed. Rodney Chalk sat in the iimer office behind a brown wood desk, on a brown wooden armchair. There was a brown upholstered couch and a matching guest chair where I would sit to take dictation. On the wall wearing ermine and an enigmatic smile was the famous Antonini portrait of the young Queen of England. She watched our every move.

Mr. Chalk was a tall, long-legged, rangy man, twice my age at least. He wore suits made of fine fabric, lawn thin cotton shirts. His ties were wonderfiil, bright jewel colors, cut straight across the bottom, all one width. I learned later they were made from raw silk from Thailand. His hair was dark and thick and long, and he brushed it straight back

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from his high forehead. He seemed too tall, too handsome, too loose-limbed, too brightly colored for the drab government office. He seemed caged there.

My first day on the job I wore my suit. I had won the fight about the little gloves my mother thought I should wear but we had agreed about the suit. It came from Lord and Taylor. I imagined that Jacqueline Kennedy might have chosen the little boxy-jacketed, short A-line skirted soft blue greenish wool suit with the peter-pan collar if she had been in my place. I loved that suit.

I loved the idea of being proficient as a secretary but I bungled the typing of even short letters, erasing holes into the stationary, throwing out thumb-stained efforts. I would type the same thing over and over again until I thought the work would pass muster. Sometimes it didn't, I'd be humiliated, and then I would finally get it right. I answered the phone crisply the way I had seen it done in the movies. It was a real job and the days flew by. But it wasn't the job that engaged me; it was Rodney Chalk.

He never closed the door and I always listened. He was married to someone called Ginny who worked at the United Nations part time, arranging receptions and "functions." I listened and leamed that Ginny had been widowed, and had two children from that earlier marriage, older children, away from home. They seemed to worry her. She and Rodney lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania. To do this job he stayed during the week in a cheap-enough room at the Beekman Towers hotel near the UN. She stayed in New Hope unless they needed her at the UN. To me, the arrangement seemed bohemian.

One Friday, Rodney Chalk invited me to lunch. He took me to a little bistro in the theatre district and we ate Real French Food. I had my first tiny cup of café filfre and he showed me how to turn the pot quickly upside down. As we waited for the water to drip through the powdery ground coffee, I felt a visceral surge of ambition.

I don't remember how much later we first made love but I remember that it was in the cheap room at the Beekman Place hotel. He thought it would be best if he gave me a key so that

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we weren't seen crossing the lobby together. I walked around the block. I remember crossing the lobby looking for the ele­ vator and feeling every eye on me. I was sure that those eyes could see right through our ruse, and I felt a tremulous mix of fear, guilt and excitement. The room was small with a single bed, a bedside table, a dresser, one chair and a little window with no view. It was Indian summer; the room was warm and airless. I remember the spicy smell of his sweat on the tangled sheets and a feeling of wonder and worry that we were naked together. I remember his long lean body and his tenderness.

He explained to me gently that no one could know that we were lovers. As far as I know today, nobody ever knew then. .

We worked together all day, and several nights a week we would go separately to the cheap little room in the Beekman Towers. After we made love we would smoke Benson and Hedges cigarettes and he would talk. I would ask questions.

Who was Adelai Stevenson at the UN, what did Ernest Hemmingway write, what was it about Frank Lloyd Wright that made him an innovator, where is the Midwest. He would tell me about Stevenson's campaign and the hole in his shoe, about the fire at Taliesin, about how the Midwest is a state of mind. Am I a good lover? I would ask. You will be, he would answer. He would run his fingers gently over my shoulder. I would watch him look at my breasts.

Soon it would be time for me to take the 49th Street crosstown bus to Grand Central and run for the last train back to Bronxville where I lived with my parents in their rented apartment. They were so glad that I had so many friends and was having such a good time running around the city. I had become a great liar. My sophistication pleased me.

Rodney Chalk had grown up as the son of an intellectu­ al who had made his life as a British diplomat, serving first in the Middle East, then Asia where his mother had con­ verted to Buddhism. This had caused a painful rift in his family that had not been resolved until his father was dying.

I devoured his stories; we devoured each other.

One day he returned to the office from lunch, pulled his right hand from his pocket and dropped a tiny silver card­ board box on my gray steel desk, nodded silently and went

to the brown inner office. Inside the box was a pair of deli­ cate earrings with a pale blue tear-shaped hanging stone set in gold. I was breathless. I had never received an impulsive gift from a man before and it was conftising. Did he feel he owed me something? Later, when we were alone, he told me the stones were the color of m^y eyes.

Soon he wanted me to know more, to see more. I was eager. He took me to a building in the East '50s, up in an ele­ vator to the third floor to a showroom frill of Asian antiques, textiles and jeweky. There were colors, shapes and textures that I had not known existed. This was where he bought his ties. He was known here. He didn't introduce me. The tiny Thai salesgirl asked for Ginny. He bought me a scarf of raw silk, woven with many different colored shades of green and blue. I still have it. It still changes color as the light hits it.

I met Daphne, his older sister. It would be "safe" for us to be seen together out of the office if there were someone with us, he said. She had followed her mother into Buddhism, Rodney had not. They had been estranged for many years and lived on different continents, but now that she was in New York they were reconciled. The three of us went to dinner in a place with a tented garden called The Left Bank (he explained the Rive Gauche in Paris to me) dovra a flight of stairs on Madison Avenue in the '70s. They reminisced about their exotic wandering childhood. She was strangely calm, as distant as an ancient maiden aunt. He seemed boyish in confrast. She seemed to know that we were lovers, but she said nothing. She was the discretely kept mistress of a well-known New York society miUionaire. She lived in a studio apart­ ment, which had once been two maids' rooms in a Park Avenue co-op. It had been paid for by her millionaire. She worked for his Foundation and traveled with him around the world. She had beautiful tailored clothes. "It's couture," she said when I asked, and then she explained what that meant.

As sophisticated as she and the arrangement with her mil­ lionaire seemed, there was a sadness about Daphne. She seemed lonely, even with the two of us as company. She was childless, at the beck and call of an older man. Nobody knew they were lovers. I was uneasy.

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The house that Rodney Chalk and Ginny owned in New Hope, Pa., had been designed by a Japanese architect. Until then I had thought of a house as a roof over one's head. His passion for this place was exciting. He drew it for me once as we lay in the tangled sheets in the Beekman Place hotel. It was a glass rectangle with all four inside walls facing a pool.

He and Ginny were building a Japanese garden on the weekends. There were lilies and fish in the pool. He talked to me about the Asian art and the Modem fiimiture they were collecting. Charles Eames chairs, a Mies van der Rohe daybed, George Nelson lamps. He wanted me to see it all. Perhaps Ginny would go visit one of her children.

As time went on, it became clear that if I were to see the house, Ginny would have to be there. So on a Friday night in the fall we drove out, he and I, two hours on the New Jersey Turnpike, then another long stretch on country roads.

We were subdued in the car. I was having second thoughts about this visit. I am sure he was too.

She seemed old. Her children were older than I was, she was older than my mother, which suφrised me. She had long blond hair wrapped around her head and held with a tortoiseshell pin. She had lines on her face. She was stocky, solid. With her, he seemed like a nervous boy. I wondered if he was always this way with her. He offered me vodka, which they kept, in a block of ice in the freezer. "Are you sure, dear. It is very strong," she worried. We drank it straight from tiny frozen glasses. It was late. "We'd better feed her, dear, before she comes undone from the booze," she said to her husband. We ate pasta, (spaghetti to me) and had a salad at the end of the meal from a wooden Dansk salad bowl. "So, tell me about yourself, dear," she demand­ ed. I felt I had nothing to say.

I spent a sleepless night on a bed in a room that shared a wall with their bedroom. She had arranged her Art books in huge piles around the room and on the bedside table. They were a looming reminder of my ignorance. I didn't sleep, yet I couldn't open one of those books. Were they making love on the other side of the wall? If they did, would I hear them?

Could he actually make love to a woman older than my moth­

er? I was not in love with him then or ever. I imagined that per­ haps she knew and was amused and accepting in some sort of European way. But if I put myself in her place, I hated myself.

The next morning Rodney Chalk drove me quietly to the train at Princeton Junction. As I rode back to the city, exhausted, himg over, my body aching from the tension of a sleepless night, I wondered what would be next.

I don't remember how it ended, but by the end of the year the bureaucrat was returning from England and the job was over. Rodney Chalk introduced me to David Susskind, a television producer who hired me to work on the switch­ board because I had an English accent, and he went back to making documentary films. I've wondered sometimes what he told David about me. It certainly wasn't that I was such a good typist.

I didn't see him again for ten years. By then I had tuned in, and turned on. I had marched on Washington innumer­ able times, been married and divorced, had my conscious­ ness raised, become a rabid Knicks fan. I was ten years into my career in television, and it was going well. I was cur­ rently a Writer and Segment Producer for a hot late-night talk show hosted by Dick Cavett, booking, researching, meeting and interviewing guests for the show. The office was on Broadway between 50th & 59th Streets and each evening we would walk around the comer to the ABC Studio on West 58th Street to tape that night's show.

As I was leaving the Studio one night in the dark, there was Rodney on West 58th Street. We were startled, tmly happy to see each other. He asked for my number. I gave it to him. He called. We agreed to meet for a drink. I suggested the Russian Tea Room. We sat at the bar. As he lifted his glass in salute, his hand shook a little. We were both nervous. He was still married to Ginny who had recovered from a bout with breast cancer, he was still making documentary films, yes they still lived in New Hope, he had rented a small apartment as an office on the same block as the studio.

I started to tell him a little about my work, which I was very excited about, but I heard my enthusiasm, my new

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expertise, as being boastful, inappropriate. He was the expert. As we talked in the dim light of the bar, I was wait­ ing to feel something other than fondness, something sexu­ al towards him. He had been the first assured lover of my young life, my first teacher-lover. I wondered whether we would make love again.

He was eager to show me a cut of the film he was work­ ing on, a wildlife documentary that he was making for the Government of Kenya to promote safari travel. He had a projector in his apartment around the comer, so we went there to see it.

As I watched him set up the projector and wind the film through its sprockets, I noticed that he still wore beautifiil clothes, but that the cuffs of his shirt were frayed. I wanted the film to be wonderftil, a glorious National Geographic spectacu­ lar with hoards of wild animals, panoramic landscapes, glorious sunsets. But it was mundane, seven or eight minutes of standard photo-safari footage with overwritten narration. And it was unfinished. He had hoped to get better footage, he said, but it was hard to move around in the National Parks of Kenya and he had been there at a bad time of year. What did I think?

I was happy that he was making films, I said. It was hard, he told me. He had broken up with his partner who had brought in most of the clients, and this was the first assign­ ment he had gotten in a while, the film had cost him more to make than he had budgeted, he wasn't sure how to finance the rest of it. Eventually he would be able to use the footage in other films, and then he would come out ok, but right now he had a problem.

I wasn't prepared for him to be in trouble, and I was even less prepared for him to press me for help. Could I lend him money, anything. I thought "anything" was way beyond my reach. My net worth was exactly twelve hundred dollars in a savings account. But when he said a thousand, I couldn't refuse him. I never had.

The next day we met at lunchtime at his apartment. He was raw, emotional. He held a small brass statue of a Buddha in his hand. It had belonged to his mother, he said, and it meant a great deal to him. He didn't know what its

real value was, but he was sure it was worth more than the thousand I was lending him. Would I please take it. If I did­ n't want to keep it, I could give it back to him when he paid me back. He took the bank envelope. For an instant I was afraid that he might open it to count the money. He held the ω δ Buddha out to me. It was burnished bronze, seated crossσ ο legged with its arms outstretched, palms facing the sky. It en Η was intricately made, and very beautiful. His mother's Buddha as collateral seemed cold and hard but that's not Η why I turned him down. Had I kept it, I would have worried W that he would be back, and it would be a constant reminder that I couldn't deny him. I didn't want him to ask me for anything else. I didn't take the Buddha because I wanted to 45 be done with him. But I wasn't quite yet. ?0 For weeks afterward, each evening as I passed the win­ dow of the ground-floor ftont apartment on West 58th Street S' on the way to the studio I would check to see if there was anyone inside. For a while there was a light, but eventually Sthere was none. A month or two later I dared to step into the fco foyer to check the mailbox. His name was gone. A few κ months later it was replaced by another. From time to time I would think about how nice it would be to have the thou­ sand dollars or even the Buddha. I was never angry, just a little sad. I didn't need anything more, and I never saw him or heard from him again.

MESSAGES AND MESSENGERS

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Translations of Poems by Yu Xuanji

by ADAM KIELMAN

Out of its precious box, a confused mirror shows me my hair thinning at the temples.

Yu Xuanji was a contemporary of the more famous Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai and Du Fu. At a young age, she became the third wife afa lesser official named Li Zian.

Perhaps their love faded, or perhaps she grew weary of her strict life and ran away, or perhaps she was banished from the house. We only know that she would write to the husband she left behind.

Smoke wafts from My incense burner.

The ft-agrance warming me, While wealthy gentlemen.

Full of affection.

Leave messages on my door.

A MESSAGE FROM ACROSS THE H A N RIVER

They leave their thoughts, poems, and paintings Only to be crushed like a fingers in a heavy door.

I do not pity those desperate sheep Or even try to count them.

Gazing across the river at you hopelessly, Longing for the emptiness we shared.

Two fat ducks lie in the sand at the stream's edge, One lifts off and flies through the tangerine grove.

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The flowers of the drooping willow branches Fall to the ground and burst with fragrance.

At least the smell of plum blossoms is honest.

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In the smoke, the faint sound of birds singing.

The ferry landing illuminated by the dismal moon.

Our love could be separated by miles or inches And still I would only hear the pounding of laundry.

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'is Yu Xuanji s surname, Yu, means flsh. Xuanji was probably a nickname; it is a Daoist term meaning "profound and abstruse principles."

Having left her husband, she moved to the city, where she found work as a courtesan.

FOR THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR

A LETTER TO A FRIEND

You should know now: It's easy to seek the finest gold.

But hard to find a man with a heart.

Boundless are the streets and Ignorant are the people For whom dusk comes and dawn goes.

Why must I pawn my embroidered dresses?

Embarrassed by the sun, I cover my arms in silk sleeves.

With spring so bleak, why put on makeup?

So submerge your tears in the pillow, And hide your broken heart among flowers.

TO

2

If the future holds kings, Why regret the sailors?

FAST

by AMBER MEADOW ADAMS

Too old to work as a courtesan, Yu Xuanji left the city and devoted herself to Daoist practice. A few years later, she was executed in the temple where she was a nun for beating an acolyte to death.

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ORCHID'S MESSENGER

Dawn and dusk drunk remembering your body longing again for spring.

In the rain rides a messenger. s;

Under the window a lady grieves.

In the mountains she rolls up a pearl screen to look out.

Worries smell like grass freshly cut.

Parting at a still and quiet banquet: dust seeps piecemeal through the roofbeams.

T H E CONSTANT, FINE needles of rain fill their eyes. They find the cave some days before. Night and day pass before their clouded eyes unnoticed; it is always damp, slow dusk inside the cave. Somehow they find it, in their long, harsh exodus toward people, a town, food. They become lost, the jungle opening her mouth and swallowing them live, the basins and hillocks covered in leaves and growth—so deep they carmot not judge distance, too thick to penetrate, wriggling underneath the bracken like vermin —and then Henry finds the cave. When they find it, and enter it, and choose to sleep in it that night, it is the end of their march. They silently quit thinking they will not die.

It isn't far from where they grew up. Sticks and stones for playmates, dirty Barbies that Jenny loses (she loves their plastic yellow hair), then finds in the grass behind her house, the three of them are bom in an old Yup'ik fishing village east of the Aleutian Islands. The trees always surround them, pressing the people against the coast. Rain is constant and coats the rooftops with a slick of lichen, rusting out the B.I.A. school's playgroimd, Michael is the only white kid who passes through the school—^kindergarten through twelfth grade— in thirty years. Jenny and Henry make friends with him first, when they are babies, when their bored, tired mothers push them all together and tell them, here, go play.

People say Henry is a half-breed. His bones are slender.

His face is fine and thin, and his eyes gleam dark from their fat-slanting native squint. But his skin is tender and watery, gray veins pooling in the hollows and shadows of his skull.

His blood stands out dark underneath. He wears his hair parted at the side, sfraight and short. His mother won't say who his father is. It's nobody's business, she'll tell herself, quiet and fierce.

Give me a smoke! Heruy says behind the school building.

Jenny says no.

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Gimme one! Why not? , This's indi'n country, Big Skin. Can't have somethin' for nothin'.

I got nothin' to trade.

Her unkempt little teeth mash into a smile. Nothin' I want.

Henry makes a rude face. Jenny frowns. She pulls a breath from the butt-end of the cigarette, and holds it in her mouth, cheeks full as a nursing baby's, and says: Tell me a story.

You always s ^ that, Tell a story.

Tell one!

I don't know none.

Yes you do. Tell the one about the snake. That's a good one.

Henry holds out his hand, and Jenny gives him the ciga­ rette, damp and acidy with her spit.

Tell it.

Smoke from the tobacco burning swims like otters around their heads in the early sunlight. Henry sits down next to her: There was this woman in the village with a soft heart, eh?

Every day, she goes fishin' in the river. One morning, it was real cold, frost on the ground. She sees a snake lyin' by the river, stuck frozen to the ground, almost dead. The woman picks up the snake and takes it home. She puts it next to the fire, feeds it, lets it sleep in her bed. Next momin', the snake was all better. Oh! Yer beautifiil! says the woman. Henry makes his voice high and syrupy, and Jermy slaps at his thigh.

The woman's so happy, she swoops down and picks up the snake and hugs it tight. Henry cuddles his arms against his own thin ribs, and his hands grab at a pair of thick, warm tits bouncing invisible against his chestbone; Jenny moves to slap him again, but stops, listening. And the snake bites her on the neck! Why'd you do that? the woman yells. Why'd you bite me? Your bite's poison. I'll die now. And the snake slithers off her and curls itself all up comfortable on her blankets. It looks right at her and says, What'd you expect me to do, eh? Stupid bitch, I'm a snake.

Jeimy runs, swims, founders through the snow.

Michael blinks, sitting hunched at the back of the cave over Jenny's limp body. He doesn't know whether she's alive or dead.

He sees her, the three of them battling up snow hills, she leading, laughing; the two boys behind her tired and wary.

The snow shines flatly in the sunlight. The buck is wounded; she's ahead, fracking. 1 see the blood, he's dripping blood! she yells back. The light rifles are strung across their backs, cocked. Their first kill alone. They hunt like wolverines.

Jenny!

Jermy!

She's nuining ahead, leaving them, losing them. She wants the buck, wants to slit its throat, bleed it out so they can carry it back. Michael wants to be first. He sees Jeimy stringing between the naked trunks, light, live. He wants the buck. Henry's the one who wounds it. Michael charges, heavier, running her down. Space closes between Jeimy and Michael. Michael chasing Jenny, Jenny chasing the buck.

Michael! Henry yells. He sees Michael an instant before Michael reaches Jenny, knows suddenly what Michael is going to do.

Michael pounds into Jenny, hitting her down with the full weight of his body. They slide down a valley in the snow, ruining the track, leaving the buck. Michael pins Jenny, her arms to her sides, the rifle stuck up behind her back. Jeimy's rifle goes off into the air, the bullet running hot, melting deep into the snow. Jenny and Michael sudden­ ly paralyzed together, Henry alone; they freeze.

Jermy sfruggles out, trembling, violent, she throws her arms at Michael. Fuck you! she yells. She runs, away from Michael, toward the deer.

Michael blinks. Henry is sitting at the far end of the cave, near the mouth. His body is silhouetted against the frail daylight. The sun turns fishbelly blue.

The smell inside the cave makes Henry sick. Jenny has died, he thinks, but he can't go into the back of the cave to touch her, to see. Michael is back there, squatting next to her like a dog. Henry thinks, Michael has lost his mind.

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Henry doesn't know if it's years of booze or the hunger.

Michael looks inhuman, his jaw long, the bone and teeth bare like a pike's. Michael's eyes flicker back and forth, fever-bright and sly in their hollows. Sick animals, unless they're almost dead, are the most dangerous, Henry thinks.

He wonders whether he might have to kill Michael.

Michael looks at Jenny. His lips are split and bloody from thirst. The canopy hoards water; no streams, no run-off beds. Nothing catches the rainfall so they can drink. They leave the gas can in the car. They lose their water bottles, the cheap little plastic jugs they buy in a gas station. Palmfuls, shallow puddles they lick from the lip of the cave are not enough. It takes about a gallon of water a day to keep a person alive. Henry and Michael walk out under broadleaf trees and shake them over their open mouths, to drink the water the leaves cup and hold in the constant rain. They bring their mouths trickling half-fiill in to Jeimy, who pulls apart her lips enough to drink, first from Michael's tongue, then Henry's, then she's too weak. She caimot swallow. She chokes. Michael will not go outside, away from Jermy. She screams when they try to move her; the pain in her belly is too bad. It's why they decide to stay in the cave. It is her fault, Michael thinks, that they are starving.

Her face has turned purple. Michael thinks about her skin, iridescent brown falling like water over her bones.

Jenny sees Michael lying in a drainage ditch, dirty with rainwater, mud and shit on his legs. He makes her ashamed; she cries at the sight of him. He rolls over onto his stomach, face-down.

Go away, he says into his arms. She cries.

Michael, no. Come to your mother's house. She pulls him by the shoulders, trying to make him get up. He's too drunk to wrestle her.

Bitch, he says into the ground.

No. Come back with me. Her voice hoarse; her throat is thick. Drinking has taken away Michael's pretty looks. Milk skin, mink-black hair curling over his forehead, teeth set in lips too red for a man. Filthy ancestry behind his bloodâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; drunks and cranks on both sides of the family.

She tries to roll him over onto his back so that he faces her. He is weak, but he still won't look at her face.

I can't leave you here, you'll die, she says.

Michael slurs that he wants to die, and pushes her off him.

Jenny's body shrinking, her belly growing. You're not eating nothing, her mother says. Jenny throws up first thing in the morning and whenever she tries to eat. She is sick.

Thick, dark moons hang low under her eyes. She sleeps. The doctor is a long way away. She is scared to go.

Michael looks at her nails, still oyster pink in their beds.

Her hands curl into fetus' fists, her body coiling up tight as exposure finally carries her off. Michael fries to straighten her, pulling on the softened tissues in her legs and on her head and shoulders. (He remembers her muscles hard, like a lynx.) He wants to lay her out flat. Henry sees Michael moving where Jenny lies, his hands scuttling over her body, and scowls. He tries to stretch his tongue and open his mouth to say, "What are you doing?" but his mouth won't move. He stands, weak and uneasy, looking. The back of the cave is dark.

I love you. I love you, Jenny, Michael says, huddling over

Michael looks at Jermy again. She climbs the snow bank from their hunt towards home, wet and embarrassed because she says this is the surer way and she falls, slips. Hey, Jeimy, you got us lost! Michael shouts. Her eyes stare. She looks at him fiercely. They go inside the farmhouse where she lives, away from the village, pine sides and floorboards swollen and creaking in the wet cold. Her mother makes them food. They sit and eat, hot in the firelight, while their clothes steam and drip and cling to them. Jenny running ahead, Michael thinks.

Wet and strange from her fall inside Michael's arms. She loses the deer, following him slow as he dies, his blood darker. Organ blood. Jeimy spent, frusfrated because she caimot kill the deer or take the bullet out of his hide, the muscle and kidney.

Wolves'11 get 'im, Michael calls outside, thirty paces back.

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wincing floor. Jenny closes her eyes against the sound. She doesn't want to cry any more. She is too angry, too fright­ ened. Fear is eating her guts: a cold, ugly fear that crawls up her asshole, sits cross-legged in her stomach, shivers down every nerve reaching into her fingers. She is afraid of staying sick, afraid of dying.

Jenny's body. In the dark, his hands hover over her Hmbs.

She opens her eyes, gUnting and melting in the half-hght coming in through the small trailer window, and unfiirls her body against the sour sheets on Michael's bed, the cup of her hips and her wet, tangled cunt hair purplish in the deep, curtained shade. They have sex and then fall asleep together like brother and sister. They keep it secret from Henry. Michael's eyes catch Jenny's cat-face sleeping. Still.

Henry walks to the back of the cave. He sees Michael crouching beside her, rocking back and forth on his heels.

Michael grunts quietly, letting the breath out from his nostrils in plumes. Rain drips, tiny beads, off the rim of the cave's mouth, and the small sound of water falling echoes inside. He looks up at Henry. I think we should eat her, Michael says. Henry walks out of the cave to vomit.

Henry trembles when he sees Jenny outside, the cold bathing her face, the storm in the air ringing and dancing through her hair, long and horse-wild. Her clothes flatten against her thighs in the wind. He is afraid, that night, when he lies down in his bed with Jenny, that she will feel him tremble across the mattress and know, his body shifting and breaking on the old springs like cracking ice. He thinks of Michael alone and sick in a cabin on the other side of the village. Michael, looking like a winter wolf He is feral.

Henry thinks of old stories he's heard, uncles telling them sometimes at nights. Darkness surrounding the outside fire with two arms, the old men frightening the circle of people with the night at their backs. Good that Jeimy's here, he thinks, shuddering for her, shuddering from his gut.

He cannot put his hand out to stroke her, lying on top of the blankets in her outdoor clothes. He cannot turn his body to see the back of her head. Jenny has been dead to him a long time, he thinks. Ever since Michael. Ever since they were young, and sex was still play. Jenny looks so sick.

Sometimes pregnancy does that to a woman, early on. They haven't told him. He will not ask her.

Henry hears her breathe. It is not the breath of someone sleeping; it is held, hard, in the bottom of her clenched lungs. We'll go tomorrow, she finally says, into the dark.

The three of us'll have to drive together. I'm not going alone with him.

They drive from Kodiak to Anchorage, ferrying the car across the gap of salt-ice water and then through the long, dark sfretches of the jungle. It is the fastest way. Jenny has to go soon. Her belly looks like four or five months. She is sick and weak. She tells Michael that she does not trust the old skin woman who gives abortions in the village, so she wants to go

We'll go tomorrow, Jenny says to Henry. No longer in her mother's house, she's left Michael's trailer. She stays the night with Henry. Henry leaves so she can have the bed. Just sleep here, she says shaφly when she sees him take a blanket out to the couch. He lies down uneasily, listening for the sounds of her breathing to change and deepen. She never sleeps. She lies there rigid all night and gets up before dawn to pace the kitchen and make him tea that has gone cold by the time he rises. Fitfiil, he spends the night in and out of dreams, open­ ing his eyes again and again to see her there, lying next to him. Her angry back turned toward his face.

She leaves because Michael is drunk. Jenny stands out­ side Henry's door in the warming light coming from the front room, smelling the fresh wood and soap on his hands. She asks if she can come in. Henry shakes as he opens the door and lets her past him. She sits on the couch, silent. She thinks about Michael, wailing, clawing at her, crawling over swamps of piss in the rug to the bathroom, nearly drowning with his head in the toilet, his body curled unconscious in the bathtub.

She looks down, her own belly swelling like it will burst, an alien thing sleeping, turning inside it. Henry sitting, quiet across the small living room. He hunches on the rain-gray rocking chair, jerking its bowlegs back and forth over the

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to Anchorage, to the free cHnic at the hospital. He doesn't want to go that far. He is responsible, she tells him, he has no choice. She wants him to go with her so that she will not be alone when they remove the tumor, which grows in the months since she first feels the bump deep in her pelvis, grow­ ing from her hip. The white doctor at the clinic in the village takes X-rays and sees the bone cancer that eats up her belly and sucks out all the blood from her marrow. You'll have to get it taken out, he tells her, at the hospital down in Anchorage.

Tricky, these tumors. Better go soon; it'll spread fast.

The car is stuck on the road, a ditch with tire ruts soft­ ened into black ooze by the rain; Michael's driving, swear­ ing. They try everything, they push and rock, they build beaver dams of sticks and deadfall under each of the wheels.

They have to abandon the car, the tanks of gasoline stowed in the trunk for emergencies useless, and they walk along the road they can barely see for all the new grovi^h blurring it. For miles it gets thinner, more overgrown. It forks and they turn into a clearer branch; it's the outlet to an old ranger's outpost. No ranger, no radio. They walk on, into deeper and thicker bush, trying to pick up the thread of the road or a poacher's path that will lead them to a village.

Jenny tells Henry, We have to drive to Anchorage. I'm sick. Henry shakes his head. Wondering, pretending: Her baby is his. He raises it, takes it out on the land. Fish they will catch inside the bend of ariver,where the big trout idle in the water, their bodies describing the current's supple arcs. Jenny asleep, arched, coming while he holds the soft flesh at the base of her chin gently between his teeth, Jermy awake and talking in the bed beside him; his wife, his child. Taking another man's family that night, for a while, while he looks at Jeimy. The man is his friend. This is a terrible thing he does.

He has no right. Taking Michael's life while Michael drinks himself sick and helpless, giving nothing in return. He sees Jenny picking at the rough plaid of his sofa. He'd taken it from a hunting shack that was abandoned. Jenny is looking out the window.

Jenny runs ahead when they're lost, blind in her fear;

reaching into the trees toward the hospital. Once they get there, once the doctor at the hospital says in front of Michael that she needs surgery, chemotherapy, Michael will have to stay with her. And Henry.

She passes people on the path into the village and they see her. They look at her belly and think what people will think.

No one says anything to Jenny. Michael tells her some old grandma in the dry goods store waits for the girl at the regis­ ter to give him his change, then says, Eh, Michael, yer girl's gonna have a baby, enit? Michael says nothing. He turns hot and famt, sick to his stomach, and gets in his car. He drives too fast out of the lot in front, and the store owner's wife runs out yelling, and throws a stone hard into his fender.

You could keep it. Henry says softly, looking down at his fingers. The baby would be a half-breed, like him.

Jenny looks off, her head turned away from Henry.

Slowly, she says to herself, No. I don't want anyone to know.

It's nobody's business.

Hell with them. Fuck them. You tell me what's going on, Michael yells. Michael's hot, watering blue eyes lean rough on Jenny. Jenny, wrapped in a sweatshirt to disguise herself, looks down, and lies.

When Henry feels her leave the bed he opens his eyes.

She is moving silently through the kitchen. So quiet. He can feel her feet on the sagging wood boards. The words come quietly into his throat. He wants to say them, finally. Jermy, I love you. He is afraid to say them. He lets them form on his lips, testing them, and lets them sink back down into the dark bottoms of his gullet. He shouldn't say them now. He'll tell her in the car. When they get there. Maybe he can pull her away from the hospital clinic, keep her outside and talk to her until she gets back in the car, still whole, not having cut her baby out of her because she's afraid of what Michael will do. He swells with the words, the life found and stolen.

He watches it all night. Jenny, he says into the empty room, gray and soft with dawn, I'm happy.

Michael eats her liver. She's been dead for two days. He

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worries about rot, bacteria that might kill him if he eats her.

Henry has been out of the cave for a long time. The sun has sunk low in the sky, coloring the trees livid and orange. He forces apart her belly skin with his fingernails. A thousand hunts, he has cut into a thousand carcasses. He knows what the inside of a belly looks like. Jenny's skin comes apart easily as bread dough. Michael sees a node inside her, a knot of bad flesh. He pulls her apart further down. He pokes into her womb. It is filled with cancer. Michael pulls his hands out of her gut. Her blood is deep under his fingernails. Jesus, he says.

Henry walks into the back of the cave, Jenny's tomb. His face is ashy. He falls, knees letting him down with his back upright against a stone, throwing his tongue onto the cave floor where it lands beside Michael. It lies there, a dull, graying little slip of meat in a small pool of blood. Henry won't open his mouth, but Michael knows it's welling, gushing up with blood from where the tongue used to root. The blood will fill his mouth and force his ragged lips apart, spilling out. He does it so he will not eat Jenny.

THE SITTERS

by ANNA BULBROOK asked us to cat-sit, we were happy to.

She had, after all, a nicer house than ours. So we moved in with the five cats and a dog. One cat had an infected eye that needed salve, but my wife could not catch that cat. That eye got salve on it maybe once, and after a few days it looked like a horror movie. So we took it to the vet who said to give it a pill three times a day. Well, it was the same story with the pills and that cat had maybe one pill after that. The eye got so large that we took the cat back to the vet, who put him down. When we called the woman she was upset. But she was more upset when she didn't tell us that she'd lengthened her trip for a week and we left the animals alone to shit everywhere. But my wife doesn't like me to tell that story, so let's not make a thing out of it.

W H E N THE WOMAN

A LUCKY SEVEN AND A GIRL NAIUED SEX

by MICHAEL DIBIASIO I WASN'T A high card in the poker games they played around this neighborhood, but I was lucky. I was a lucky seven.

A red seven. Red because I usually got my shit kicked before the cloud cleared. But lucky because after it did clear I usually stood up alone in the dust. I get shot a lot but I am good at spin­ ning, catching it in the arm. You can still slug a guy with a dead arm. Just looks fimny. My name is Rock and I guess I am a hit man. Used to be more of a bodyguard, or a goon, for old Johnny Paz, but I slipped up a couple of times. You see, Johnny's gone a little crazy in his old age and wasn't too pleased when I accidentally shot his favorite retriever. As far as work goes I guess you could say I had fallen on some hard times and so this job, well... I have a kitten. She's cute.

The waitress, a shapely girl named Stacey, came and asked me if I was ready to order yet. I gave her my biggest smile and pointed to the part of the menu that said "Breakfast An)^ime." Then I asked politely for a coffee, the pancakes, and the Age of Enlightenment. She started to smile sweetly but then— "Wait a minute—that line is from a movie."

"No way, angel, I made that up for you."

"Swingers," she said, and then told me she would be back in a minute with some water and to think harder next time.

Stacey smiled expectantly. While watching her glide around, I thought harder like she asked but my hardness hadn't helped much.

"I . . . uhh . . . I'm not as bad as I look. I have a kitten.

Her name is Suds."

Her smile dropped through her cleavage and into my water. My confidence dropped from my chest down into my sweaty socks.

Some guy brought me the coffee as the angel helped out some kid with a pork sausage in his nose. After a minute I started sobering up. I realized where I had gone wrong.

I didn't give her a chance. She turned from the sausage snorter and there in her face was me, Hard Rock, with two steaming Joes.

"My name is Rocco. Let's sit and talk."

She was startled at first but then laughed and said she was working.

"No kidding. I took care of it with your boss."

"What?"

"Let's talk."

I showed her all my teeth and she must have liked them because she sat.

"My name is Rocco," I repeated. Then I softened a little.

"I have a kitten."

She sort of giggled but to me it sounded like gold coins clinking down a small waterfall. She tapped her nametag with her fingernail. It was a nice fingernail.

"Stacey, I know you must be thinking the same thing about me but-what's a good lookin' kid like you doin' in a place like this?"

Her smile faded. I really didn't like how it kept doing that but this time I had set her up.

"That is such a crap line." Then the smile again. "And I don't think you are a good lookin' kid, buddy."

I grinned between some pancake. "Good."

Her brow furrowed. "How is that good?"

"You. You're good. You're smart. I like that."

"Well, I'm glad. Shouldn't you be getting back to your kitten?"

"Got a smart tush too, I see."

An awkward pause sneaked in while I was chewing.

Stacey, because she was smart, and by now probably a little curious about why I seemed so interested, pounced on it.

"My given name is Sex." She seemed pretty βυφΠΒβα that I wasn't surprised.

"I know," I replied, no smile and no pancakes showing this time. Just a tight thin line on my face that used to be Rocco's lips. I don't know why I murmured what I mur­ mured after that. I think it was sort of supposed to be a secret.

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"I've been hired to kill you." * At first I got the golden giggle but when she saw Rock's face set in stone she stopped and got a little concerned. I didn't feel so hot myself "But. . ."

"Nothing personal, honey. I think you're just fine but my employers . . ."

Her pretty eyes widened and I guess I got thrown off "Well... you see, I've fallen on some hard times and, and I'm in a little trouble and, well... my employers .. ."

Hit men aren't supposed to stammer in front of their marks. I think that's lesson zero. But maybe I wasn't a hit man. Maybe I wouldn't be one ever. I looked at her. Forget shapely. The waitress was beautiful, and she didn't look to me like she had done anything to deserve a side-order of lead. I had read a file on her, nice-looking girl, pretty straight, straight now, but no girl is named Sex because her parents were solid people but just thought it would be cute. I'm not sure exactly what she'd done awhile back or why, but what­ ever it was she hadn't been a nice little diner waitress when she'd done it. She hadn't been Stacey, she'd been Sex. "Well, what?" She interrupted my thoughts. And she hadn't run.

"Huh?" "Why do your employers want you to kill me?"

The answer didn't matter. The question had been enough. I was not going to kill her. Killing, well, you don't kill because a piece of paper tells you it's okay. I don't, at least. What the hell had I been thinking?

"Forget it," I said, getting up. I pulled a heavy envelope out of my jacket pocket. I took out a hundred for my trou­ ble and dropped the rest on the table.

"Here. For the pancakes. Get yourself out of here."

She stood frozen as I started walking out the door. I stalled and squinted out the glass, not exactly positive who I was going to be when I came out the other side. Suddenly, she rushed over and wrapped her arms around me. She kissed my cheek and the pancakes flipped in my belly. Then she didn't let go.

"There's a big car with two big men out there," she whis­ pered in my ear.

How I had missed them I don't care to know, but she was right. I caught them in the reflection of a mirror behind the counter.

"Follow me out back."

She rushed from me and slipped through the double doors in the back comer of the diner.

The girl wasn't in the kitchen and some Spanish guy looked at me with wide eyes when I came through. A little to my left, through a lot of steam, I saw a screen slightly ajar and went quickly through it.

When I made it out into the cool air, I stumbled into a circle of nice-looking men holding metal pipes with triggers on them. The girl stood behind them, smiling. I just smiled back.

"My given name is Roberto," I said.

"I know," she smiled. "You've fallen on some hard times lately. I've been hired to kill you."

All the pipes went chck. I put my right hand in my pock­ et and rubbed a playing card I kept there for good luck. A bullet grazed my right shoulder as I rolled to the left, wish­ ing I hadn't eaten so many pancakes.

Sex had fucked me.

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And like a surgeon, plucks out a perfect apple blossom.

I amfrightenedby his mouth, which makes the body out of bread.

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He makes milk from a grain of rice, butterfromcottonseed, cream from almonds.

At a lull in the conversation, he pauses to swallow the wine.

Beneath the silver platter, an eye of yolk gleams at me from a nest of tofii.

He laughs: with a wave of his hand, he summons a rooster's breast from an ear of wheat; the hind of a pig from a mound of garbanzo; a flurry of white doves from a rock of black fungus.

He wipes his chin.

From soy and onions: the loins of a calf, the liver of an ox.

Every forkfiil, blessed with a soul before passing his lips.

I amfrightenedof his mouth. ψΗαί monster are you, I whisper, thatdrinb no blood but of your own creation?

He grins, leans across the table, and cracks open my breast like an eggshell.

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ALVARADO

by JUSTIN CLARKE A T THE BEGINNING of the romance, we spent hours discussing geography: the names of streets, the length of winters, favorite bridges. We shared a special fascination for hidden spaces. We'd go out for coffee and exchange the details of old backyards and childhood streets. Scale was never an issue, and if anything, smaller was better. I told her about a perfect place for hiding behind the washing machine; she countered by pointing out a pocket in my jacket I had never noticed before. We fell in love smoothly and with equal conviction. We always had something to talk about, some unfinished topic, despite the fact that she was some years older and had come from very far away.

She had a terminal illness. I won't be specific because I don't want to indulge the cliché but I will say that it wasn't communicable. She told me far later in our relationship than she should have. The idea disturbed me, but we stayed together anjrway. I'm not interested in talking about it, about that part, except to say that it put a distance between us and the rest of the world. Of course, you'd expect us to be somewhat isolated—^we were different people, with esoteric interests, almost oblivious to our friendlessness.

We rented a cheap house in a terrible neighborhoo4 where we could work less and thus endure fewer uneasy separations. The walks we took through the city's vast smoggy chamber-down through the markets, to return a movie, to see her doctor—were so few that I can recall each perfectly. I'd look up at the sky and fantasize that it hummed like a refrigerator—a roar we were fortunate to have escaped, a distant outside.

The reason I rejected the world for her is simple: sentimentality. I've always been pathetically nostalgic about whatever is unavailable at present, not just for my family, gone, or for my youth, also gone. It doesn't matter if the object I desire has even existed in my lifetime. In the last

century alone I can think of four decades I'd rather be living in. And I don't mean that I'm a particularly negative or unhappy person, I have the average share of modem angst, and it is in my power to deal with it.

But for a while I searched for a place to hide from the here and now. Before her I spent all my spare time in thrift shops and libraries. All I wanted was a little authenticity, some proof that someone has made a life, has resolved their daily confusions into simple and worthwhile habits. In her I had discovered something substantive, even though I now recogiuze that she was prone to her own set of pretensions. She could speak with or without my response, ignoring all interruptions. I believe that has led me to doubt my presence ever since, and, indeed, that it is exactly what causes me to slip quietly away from parties, from other romances, even cities, to disappear and assume that I am missed.

And until the very end, she preferred to quote rather than take credit for ideas, despite her awareness that I hungered more for her originality than her honesty. In doing this she ultimately reached for an authority that was beyond us, that would protect our home's fragile shell even as we slept.

When she spoke, the coffee table would harden beneath my feet, the murmuring freeway grew audible, the living room and its contents became a museum of intelligence. She was author and conductor and mapmaker, the only authority I could ever respect, a decent to usher me past all that is scattered and gone.

Here I might give the details of the sex: the only justification for a narrative, any narrative, about lovers. I might write "cock" and "pussy" and "ache" and "sweaf and "tremble." I might explore those words in all their possible combinations and adjacencies, in every declension and conjugation. Did I rub the champagne bottle up her thighs? Did I rub the champagne bottle up her thighs? I might give you, the reader, phrases and images to retrieve during your own tired love-making—let the hero's cock be of plausible but unusual dimensions, let the heroine be inhumanly orgasmic, so that all who read this run their eyes over the sentences twice in disbelief.

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But why? There are, after all, whole bookstores of those words; we used to live right beside one. Every week I'd go in and buy some hack writer's fantasy. I'd come home, lock the doors, and we'd reenact it. I'd slip my finger in simulta­ neously with the protagonist. She'd groan if I read that she should, that the text permitted her the pleasure. She could struggle against her reaction, trying to disappear into Richard and Barbi for good. Yes, I fucked her doggy-style with the book laid upon her back, that that was my moment of authority, my contribution, her very reason for loving me.

Ultimately, however, you could cast better characters for erotic fiction. She couldn't deep throat me; I didn't want her to try. I wouldn't call us a notable example of heterosexuality. Neither one of us was very interested in calling attention to the details of our bodies. We made love with just enough light to read by. I remember our postcoital embrace, all oxir differences left out, unwritten. I can only describe a selfentwined mass, that some bits of it were decaying a little more rapidly Nevertheless, I choose to write about that mass. It is probably the source of all the fiction I've written since then, maybe everything I've ever said. In the interim, I've been involved in various seductions. I've talked my way into bed with younger, more attractive women. But if I make a good impression on anyone, I privately acknowledge her as the inspiration-a foolish hope that love comes again. If any­ thing here has appealed to you, she is the author of it.

I don't try to arrange the words so that you feel her breath, her moistness, but that is my wish: to send you into her arms for as long as it can be done, so that you are consumed in my place, and I can at last slip away, unnoticed.

This is the part of the story called the denouement. A trained writer, I have been taught to avoid melodrama, to desist from conveniently exploiting tragedy. But the ending must be told. She became delusional because of certain med­ ications that she took to control her ilhiess. Most of her delu­ sions made her even more paranoid and agoraphobic than she already was. She refused to see her doctor about it. Instead, she would just lose herself in whatever she could find. She'd

watch TV for an hour and glean a week's worth of conspiracy material from it. She argued, at times persuasively, that the government was dumping poisons into the tap water, the neighborhood was out to rob us. We had a routine. Every night I'd go out for dinner and her sealed bottles of water, and she'd twist the locks behind me, click, click, click, click, click.

Then, when I came back, I'd have to coax her into letting me back in. Open the door, darling, it's me. It's me. I promise.

There were worse things, too, but she was never selfdestructive, and so I told myself the situation would resolve itself, up until the day I got home from work and found her gone. She'd been in the house for about two-and-a-half weeks straight, and I had been very close to seeking some outside help. But I was afraid too; I was too soothed by her speech, too terrified by the prospect of its absence, to risk letting them take her away.

In those last weeks my desire to listen had only intensi­ fied. She would talk for hours on end, she would always find new remnants, new stories that she had never told me. She saw me fascinated in this. She needed me with her as she fled from her rotting body. With her in cities that she had passed through long before she met me. The hearts of businessmen on the subway, the portents of dreams she had in motel rooms, all in vivid detail, all that she could remember of her life before me, whose memory was driving her mad. There is no way for me to recall half of what she said. New turns of phrase that she picked up quickly and quickly discarded.

Original poeticisms that still continue to pop into my speech, always unexpectedly, that I rush to jot down.

Even her voice itself changed. It was the deep geologic stratum that my ear would furtively drill. It passed through all the accents of all the places she had lived. And the last days, her body was strangely contorted with old gestures. She told me something about that, some theory about the body remem­ bering itself, but I don't think that she herself ever noticed the alien motions of her hands. The good storytellers usually don't, they just tell the story, they cast away the events of their lives like water from a sinking ship. That was our daily labor.

I went through my own routine, when she went missing. I

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drove around all night, looking for her. I came back home again and again to an empty living room, to a flickering pilot light. I called her friends. I called the police and reported her gone. I called everyone we knew—I was surprised to learn how many old acquaintances had thought I was gone, living in some other city, in another country entirely. Some had even worried I was dead. No, I said apologetically, and hung up.

pushes her back against the cabinets and buries his face in her pussy. She can't stand it much longer, she's aching for him.

She's pleading. He straightens up and drops his pants, and in a couple of quick motions he's pumping and grunting away.

God, how it's so perfect to be inside someone, at last.

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And just as suddenly I discovered the quietness. I start­ ed spending hours after work just listening at the front win­ dow. In our neighborhood it is impossible not to hear gun­ shots a couple of times a night, and there is always a steady stream of frafific on the avenue. But somehow those noises diminished. The loudest of them struggled to penetrate our walls; I had to concentrate to hear them.

Then one night, focusing on those outside sounds, I hear this rattling from within the house. I ignore it for as long as I can. I focus on cars slowing into driveways, the sounds of water hissing from the sprinklers outside. But it becomes more insistent and continuous, a rapid teg-uh-teg-uh-teg-uh, until it's too disturbing to put up with. I start looking around for the source. It's not the dishwasher. I put my ear to the linoleum. I suspect it's the plumbing.

Then I find her in the water heater closet, where she's all drawn up and rocking between the pipes. She has been in there for four days, slowly rupturing. She is malnourished, going into shock.

I call the paramedics.

I force down her medication.

I hold onto her, I tell her I'm sorry.

I shake her.

She whispers for me to read to her.

He hoists her up onto the counter and rips off" her panties.

He can already smell her readiness. She wiggles her hand beneath his pants and grabs full hold of his cock. It is hard and she can tell that it's bigger than she expected, bigger than she's ever had or wanted. She tells him to fuck her. Instead he flicks his tongue across her nipples as she squirms. He brushes her clit with his thumb. She trembles. Once, twice, three times. He

71 2

A NATURAL HISTORY: THE BATTLE OF HARLEM HEIGHTS, SEPTEMBER I6, m6

by MARGOT

TRIPLETS

by MARYKATE LOCANTORE POLLANS

1.

ASKED ME if I wanted to drink tea with her. She said it that way: "drink tea with me." I think she said it that way to keep me from staying comfortable with her.

Maria: awkwardly endearing with words.

MARIA

When the storm drains run high, water overflows the system, and raw sewage spills into the Hudson River, whose largest tributary is the City of New York.

At 125th Street, where the banks are paved, men lean their fishing rods against the chain-link fence and speak in Spanish of their other lives.

Before the city grid was laid, Claremont Hill was cleared and planted; the northern base was swamp, an extension of the river that flowed inland as far as the Apollo Theater.

The battle was fought for the high ground, and, on suffering defeat, the patriot soldiers retreated by boat, as they had done in Brooklyn and would do again in Inwood.

An elderly man, on the glass-littered groimd, paints the underbelly of Riverside Drive, cast-iron arches that span the valley.

Tea reminds me of my grandmother: safe and weak-spirited and churchgoing. "Tea with skim milk, kiddo. My mother used to tell me she'd rather work for Italians than use a tea bag twice or peel potatoes with ειη apple-peeler. That's how she'd know she'd hit rock-bottom." Grandma gave me a cup of tea with skim milk and herself the same. I told her skim milk tast­ ed blue. It tasted like spit, and she told me I'd get used to it.

I told Maria OK, I'd drink tea, and I sat down warily, because spontaneous tea reeks of insincerity and secret motives. There is no such thing as tea for tea's sake under the age of sixty.

She offered me lemon, which I'd never heard of in tea, so I asked for milk.

"I held my head under water today. For three minutes. In the bathtub." I was tired of this conversation. I didn't encourage her. I stared at her, neither asking her why nor asking her to stop. It was silence for a while.

"I don't know why I did it."

"Neither do I. This tea is too strong." I got up and poured it down the sink and ran the hot water. I sniffed. "Steamy.

Clears my sinuses." I turned and stared at her, dared her.

She leaned back in her chair, and folded her hands on her stomach, across the little paunch she was growing. "I have cough drops," she offered. I shook my head. Silence again for a while. I stared at the mess on her head: dirty, tangled knots in her choppy hair.

"Why don't you brush your hair?" I asked her.'

She tosses it into the trash and breathes, expelling mint, a care, a regret, a boy or girl.

"Because I know it bothers you." υ ο

"I know that's why. What's wrong with you?"

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"I don't know. God. I hate you. I don't even know why I talk to you." She rubbed her face violently, her shoulders con­ vulsed and she jerked back suddenly in her chair. Maria picked up her cup of tea with lemon and poured it onto her lap. I gave up and pressed a towel into her lap to sop up the steaming tea.

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"I want to slap you, you know that?" I was yelling at her.

"But I won't because you want me to. I know how you want this conversation to go, but I'm not going to play your crazy-giri games. You're too smart to be crazy. You're not crazy if you know what you're doing. You're just pathetic and weak. You make me nauseous and I don't want to do this with you anymore." I pinched her thigh hard through the towel. "God, you make me so fucking mad. God." I flung the towel onto the floor and walked to the door. "I'm sorry for pinching you," I said on my way out.

2.

Infinity:

But it had lived, pinned her shoulders, claimed her years, for three minutes; tiny ticks unnoticed in sleep, swim, seven­ teen.

It: another reality swaddled snug in brown paper towel, lying carefully flat on her desk. It exists now and into her whole fiiture.

Our eyes flick from it to the window (fly) to the door (flee).

Three infinity minutes (one, one, one, one . . .) and she's safe, now and into her whole future. Sweetly imfettered.

M Ο

ο The question came, finally: "Who's my father?" And the answer: "A man who took my necklace off first and laid it on the night table."

/ keep my hands perfect: unbitten, white or tan (but never the color of filth), no hang nails or ragged edges. Because once you said I had pretty hands. I remember, it was the first compliment you paid my body, though I suspect you don't know that. I believe you wouldn 't recall you said such a thing that keeps me from chewing on nails and makes me steal doting glances at my fingers (thin, straight, easy) in subway car windows, in my grandmother's silver teapot. I believe you 7/ never notice my hands again, and I might believe you didn 't even notice them at the time. The hands themselves flit or rest or trace sweetly, clean, content.

All the time (tick. tick, tick.) between "yes" and "no."

She and I discuss it.

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This time he forgot to come talk with her. All her good words stay stuck in her throat until he struts up, and they escape and fly towards him. Maria is nauseous until he lis­ tens. And when he doesn't come like t h i s . . . she looks down at her hands. A bright river of red surrounds one nail where she'd torn the skin off earlier and left the blood to seep. She lied: she doesn't keep her hands perfect at all. Though it's one of her ambitions, and she believes that sometimes, an ambition is just as noble as its execution. Not everyone would think of aiming for hand perfection. The thought alone sets her apart, she feels.

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Lisette eut up some fruit for him and put it in a cracked bowl.

Pears and oranges. She brought it up to where he still sat looking out the window and put the bowl on the table in the comer, then jerked the table across the floor to him, allowing a pen to roll off into a huge crack in the floorboards. He glared at her (finally) and she conceded silently that she should have lifted the table and carried it to him before plac­ ing the bowl down. Wrong order again. She wasn't thinking again. Or thinking barely: fruit, red bowl, table, him.

"I made you fruit," she said, immediately realizing she hadn't meant that at all. "I mean, I cut up some fruit for you."

"I know what you meant." She felt foolish and slipped out, nauseous.

Lisette returned forty minutes later She had tried to wait an hour before returning but she couldn't stay away that long.

He'd finally abandoned the chair—^he was sleeping corpse­ like in his shirt and pants and shoes laced. He hadn't eaten the fruit she'd given him.

Lisette called me after months of absence. Only because the newest man (foohsh like her) had left and she wanted to walk with me past all the places they'd walked together She want­ ed to interrupt my thoughts with her memories: this is where he bought me mismatched gloves for a dollar after he dropped mine onto the subway tracks, this is the church he said he wanted to get married in if he ever found the right woman.

When I pass those places now, I think: this is where I learned to hate Lisette, this is where I realized I'd never speak to her again. One thing she said interested me, though: this is where I got him some cherries. He just carried them around for a while and tossed them into the street when he thought I was­ n't looking. I knew he hadn't eaten the fhiit she'd given him because he was a cannibal.

Lisette was tiny and striking and just smart enough. She pre­ tended to love food to the point of obsession, naming eating as a favorite pastime. The laws of chemistry belied this claim to anyone who cared to uncover her. The men who spent time with Lisette left me cold because liking her was too uncom­ plicated, so loving her was impossible. She's been lost to me for a year and I feel nothing lacking, though, once, I heard her voice on a message and thought it sounded sweet.

She said she couldn't go any further or carry anything more and I believed because her back was cracking and spilling into my palms, onto my fingertips. Jesus would have helped, but 1 adjusted my own load and continued on the way, leav­ ing her to become the dust that swirled around my feet.

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7.

She lays down her pen and wonders if she's gotten it right.

She thinks of the sound of an ocean. It is as vague as she is.

KENTE SPUN

COLLEGE

by ESINAM BEDAIKO

History, you have over written me on palm leaves in jungles, thudding against taut skin of drums, rhythm and war paint, hips gyral and wails leonine.

What of mother's morning sweep, midday sleeping beneath the heat?

What of the Keta school boys drying by the roadside after noons in the sun-bathed lake?

You have imder written me in silent lines on white pages, underlining where my breath meets the air.

Aim at least for the arch of my heel, for the space between my sole and the ground.

In turn, I, too, have made a yam of you, spun you so thin that truth leaks through, barely dampens strands of perception before pooling into earth.

Adwinasa—the pattern exhausted— Emaa da—^yet it has no precedent.

Crafted for the laps of queens, we are worn on the backs of men.

by ARIEL SCHRÄG I CAME TO Columbia College straight firom a flooded, windowless basement in Brooklyn where I'd been living on my own for a year. The college dorms were towering and brick and had actual doormen guarding the front. No more calling nine-one-one when I would hear crazed banging and "Lemme in 'is your friend" outside my basement door, and no more hiding in the bathroom at the sound of gunshots: here I was safe. On Move-In-Day, students' parents bustled around me moving hand trucks, lamps and TV's, while younger siblings hung off to the sides, gawking and sucking thumbs. I felt a bit awkward and alone with no one helping me, my dirty bag all flood damaged and a sign on my chest that said "Belongs in Basement" but my ID had swiped me in so I couldn't be making it up that I was a student. I found my room, number 26 on the 13th floor, and kept my door a iriendly open as I unpacked.

Although I wanted to be sociable, and really did sort of "feel the excitement" of "first night at college" it became pretty obvious that my role on the floor was "weirdo."

In Brookl}^!, I'd lived with a couple who spent their nights cooking, playing records and making merry upstairs while I went crazy in the basement drawing endless pictures of myself and muttering the words "cabin fever." The result was not a personality I could easily transform into eager college freshman. But it was who 1 was, and if I had to be a type I'd rather be the floor "weirdo" than the floor "hand-job" as the girl across from me soon came to be known.

Once my role of "weirdo" was firmly established and it was clear there was no going back, I began to work it for all it was worth. While everyone else gathered in the hallways to discuss the meaning of life and pair up for fucking I avoided all eye contact and took to answering each "what's up?" with the type of nod one might expect in the military. Other kids posted bulletin boards up on their doors where friends left messages such as "Where ARE you?!? Get your ass down to

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the West End" and I posted on my door an ambiguously pedophilic magazine ad for deodorant that featured a fouryear-old boy sprawled out asleep on a grown man's lap. At the end of Orientation Week while everyone was getting ready for the big boat cruise event, putting on makeup and tuxedos, I stayed locked in my room and spent the evening posting up photographs of my basement on the walls.

It was very important, however, that I was perceived as the right type of "weirdo." If I just confined myself to my room the entire time, never interacting with anyone, I might be mis­ construed as "nerd wdrdo" who spends all her time studying or posting on internet message boards. I did not want to be "nerd weirdo" I wanted to be "elusive-yet-suggestively-exciting-weirdo." So a few weeks into the semester, when I noticed that someone had posted an anonymous tally of the number of sex partners each student on the floor had had, I saw my opportunity and added my own "16" to the list of "2"s, "3"s and predominant "0"s. True, if you're gay the def­ inition of "sex" can be a little flexible, but I still felt fairly jus­ tified in my claim. Rumors started spreading and a few nights later I beamed with delight when "hand-job" knocked timid­ ly at my door, asking, awestruck, if it was really true.

But while being the floor "weirdo" my freshman year was fiin and all, I really didn't think it would end up lasting the entire four years of college. Apart from Magda, Eleanor, and Derek, three other freshmen who approached me over a bowl of gruel in the cafeteria because like them I looked gay, I never really ended up making any friends at school.

Part of the problem was that I wasn't really sure what I was doing at college in the first place. Whereas as everyone around me seemed to have some sort of undeniable pas­ sionate life-long career goal that involved getting in tight with their department and forcing themselves into highlevel classes of their specialty, I came to college with the sort of vague reasoning that, "this will make me a better car­ toonist . . ."

In high school my favorite classes were Science and English, but at college where I had to choose a major between the two, neither department seemed appropriate. When I went

to my first Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology class, I realized that I could literally not tell any of the students apart. They sat, one silent mass in a huge auditorium, their down-turned baseball caps leaning over laptops with chemical equation programs. As people began to talk and ask questions, it became clear that everyone was either a determined pre-med or pre-research scientist. There was no way I could tell anyone that I was there because I liked copying the drawings of mol­ ecules out of the textbook.

In my History of the Novel class, I figured I might feel a bit more comfortable. Cartooning is writing, I'm here to learn the craft. But instead, I found myself drowning in some discussion about the Puritans and their relevance to Robinson Crusoe's relationship to God. 1 looked around at all the students spouting out historical info and Biblical allusions and decided not to raise my hand and ask what a Puritan was. Instead, I stared back down at my ID card and wondered when it was going to wise up and stop working.

Still, I can't say I didn't attempt to make a few friends in classes. There was Leo, the boy in my History of the Novel class who I noticed noticing me drawing pictures of grids on my arm throughout the entire class period. I ran into him at one of my friend Eleanor's school art shows (Eleanor, who was an art history major had already within the first month formed a tight knit of fellow art historian best friends, called all the professors by their first names and started planning her thesis) and she introduced us. It turned out he liked to write and so we planned to get together and share stories and comics. This irmocent scholarly friendship however was apparently not what it seemed. After we spent the night in a cafe talking books and things Leo followed me back to my dorm room where he then proclaimed: "It's a bit late for me to walk back to my dorm, could I crash here?" A bit late for you to walk back to your dorm?

Not only that, but I'd spent our entire evening talking about how I was gay. What did this guy think was going on here?

"Where's the R.A.! We need more condoms!" a girl shrieked from outside my room.

"Uh, I think you should go home," I told Leo.

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After that failure I decided to try and go the gay route. I had ended up with Magda, Eleanor and Derek, and there must be other gays out there that I could force to be my friend. The only problem, of course, is that I hate gay peo­ ple. But as lonely as I was, and in need of someone to call when I lost the assignment, I decided to forego my preju­ dices and seek out some girls with shaved heads. The first candidate came by the name of "Fire" (self-given) a butch, confrontational thing in my Women s Health class that was offered at Barnard, the women's college across the street.

After not being able to decide on a major between Enghsh and Science, I had attempted to convince the Deans that they should let me make up my own major under the title "Disease." I developed a syllabus that included classes on the subject of illness in nine different departments, including such topics as The Molecular Workings of Cancer, Abnormal Psychology and Islam and Western Medicine. It had sounded brilliant to me, but they shot it down, "There's no hierarchy to the program..." and so I retorted by "concentrating in English" (the program the requires the absolute least amount of work) and tried to take as many of my disease classes as possible. As it turned out, however, the Deans maybe knew what they were talking about. For some reason, every class at Columbia on the subject of disease seemed to have borrowed its syllabus from the neighboring junior high. In Abnormal Psychology we traded off days watching the movies Girl Interrupted to understand psychosis and As Good as it Gets to cover OCD Meanwhile, Women's Health was an exact repli­ ca of my seventh-grade sex ed class. On the first day we learned the different stages of pregnancy. Then a woman came in to talk about how to give yourself a breast exam. Then another specialist came in and told us to exercise: "Instead of taking the elevator, try the stairs." It was unreal, and I needed a friend with whom to make firn of all the other girls who sat diligently and seriously taking notes. Fire had seemed my best bet, but when I shoved my shyness and just went up to her seat and asked to sit down, her response couldn't have been more apathetic. "Whatever" she said, moving her large army bag with the fist in a woman's symbol patch safety pinned on.

Every class I would go back to her seat and try and start talking but her disinterest was palpable. Why didn't she like me? I'm gay ... gays are supposed to love each other. The answer came from Magda when I told her about the Fire dilemma one night. Apparently when the two of them where talking Magda had mentioned some ex-girlfriend of mine and Fire had balked: "Ariel's gay?!" True, I had been growing my hair out to some sort of long blond Hanson-inspired disaster, but couldn't she still tell? Why the hell else did she think I kept coming over to sit next to her?! She was probably "weirdo" on her dorm floor too, and weirdos know, that no one just approaches them to be friends. So, as it turned out, postMagda conversation, the next day of class Fire came and sat next to me, immediately starting up a conversation on how she just could not wait to here the professors definition of "sex" today. But my heart wasn't in it. The moment for fiiendship had passed, and now here I was, just an ugly, weirdo dyke, sit­ ting next to another ugly, weirdo dyke, because people proba­ bly thought we feh safer in numbers.

After that, I decided to give up on making any new friends, and ended up just taking every single one of my classes with Magda. Magda, though also gay, and undeniably to the outside world weird (she on several occasions had brought her grayhaired-forty-year-old-butch-leather-daddy to the dorms) was still just too damn iriendly and social to have ever earned the title "weirdo." So we made our way through classes, her chat­ ting everyone up, getting the right assignments, sharing gos­ sip on the professors, and I clung to her side, no longer just "weirdo" but now, "Magda's weirdo sidekick."

Before I knew it. Four years had past and we were a week shy of graduation. The Big Event was the Senior Dinner where groups of friends made from major departments, school clubs or dorm floors joined at tables for a grand farewell. Since Magda had taken a year off she wasn't a senior. As a result, I had no one to sit with. Eleanor considerately asked me to join her table with her art history friends.

Before the diimer I sat in my dorm room listening to my floor-mates rush back and forth from the bathroom, same old makeup, same old tuxedos and realized that I might as well

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be back in my freshman year. I walked alone out of my room, passed the fancy dresses in my corduroys and T-shirt and felt a bit of self-righteous pride: "Weirdo till death." Once I got into the large tent set up for the occasion, however, my mood began to change. All the speeches, prizes, flowers and engraved shot glasses started to tug at my nostalgic side.

Sure, save Eleanor, Derek and a handful of other familiar faces, I basically knew no one in this room, but I was part of it and I belonged there. I looked up at the class Dean giving a heartfelt "I love you crazy guys" kind of speech and found my self actually laughing along at the jokes about how our class had littered empty forty-ounce bottles all over the cam­ pus steps. The Dean then took personal, loving stabs at some of his favorites in the student council, and as the rest of the tent roared along at the jokes, I chuckled a little too, even though I had no idea who he was talking about. Was I drunk?

Well, yes, but there was something more that that made me surge with a sort of pride and feeling of fellowship.

"You are all now Columbia Alumns!" the class Dean belted to a wave of applause and I found myself actually crying. As the dinner winded down, everyone in the tent was amply sloshed and they all started walking around chatting with all the friends they'd made over the years. I didn't real­ ly have anyone to go visit with, but I was feeling warm, and with a sense of community, so I hung around in my chair smiling and drinking more wine. When I was in the middle of making an art project out of napkins and the left over food on people's plates, a girl named Susie from one of my writing classes drunkenly stumbled over to me.

Unlike English and Science, Writing was the one subject where I actually did feel comfortable. While the thought of doing a problem at the board in biology was fainting-worthy, and the possibility of suggesting an opinion on the historical significance of some literature unheard of, in writing class I had filli rein. Here I could shoot my hand up, shoot down some guy's metaphoric poem where his lover is music, and then hand in my own verse titled "Demarcations" which made no literal sense whatsoever. Here "weirdo" was where it was at.

Even better than these fiction/poetry classes, however, were the writing classes listed as "Creative Nonfiction," which I always believed would be more appropriately titled as "Share yoxir Diary Hour." From the first day of class students would embark on a race to find out who could bring in the most crazy, true-to-life story to shock and amaze the rest of the stu­ dents with. When one girl started off the semester with her experience as a prostitute, Magda and I knew the competition would be close. Some students floundered, scraping up their experiences of "going on a date with an older man" or "the time some people did hard drugs in front of me" but Magda and I had no problem stepping up to the challenge. For her first essay Magda brought in a wild trip to Mexico she'd taken on a whim with a stranger she met on a Greyhound bus, I countered with punching a girl in the face for no reason at the prom. Without skipping a beat, Magda stepped in with a piece on the radical fairy commune she had lived on for three months, but I regained control with my account of sleeping with my professor. And so on. The best part about "Share you Diary Hour," however, was that after discussing all these events critically, objectively and always referring to the writer as "the protagonist" never by name, we then had to talk to each other after class as if we were still all normal people. The char­ acters in our stories, however true, were still characters, and we were the mild-maimered students, removed from the expe­ rience, reporting the facts. So when Susie from my "Creative Nonfiction" class walked drunkenly over and draped herself over the chair next to me to chat 1 was a bit surprised. Yes, we knew the crafted, edited details of each other's lives, but we had never actually spoken before.

From what I'd gathered from her stories, Susie was pret­ ty much the most typical college student you could come up with. She'd written about her Italian boyfriend during a study abroad program, her internship at GQ magazine and getting drunk in her dorm room with her friends. What on earth did she want from me?

"I really wanna hook up with you," she spluttered. "I've wanted you since the beginning of the semester."

I then realized that she was playing footsy with me under

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the table. Completely horrified by such an act I thrust my leg away violently as she continued to stammer on.

"I mean I'm just a dumb straight girl and I don't want to offend you or pretend . .. but every straight girl wants to make out with a lesbian and I just. . ."

Somewhere along the line I decided I would do it.

"Ok, let's go back to the dorms," I said and we got up and stumbled out of the tent together. I wasn't sure how attracted I actually was, and didn't know what I wanted to do with her, but I did know that I did not want her sticking her hand down my pants so that I could become a vagina for her to freak out about.

We got back to her room where she "set some mood lights" and soon I was on top of her on the bed. She kissed like an attack dog but I managed to not think about that by grabbing her tits, which were huge and straight-feeling. I wanted to get her into my room so I could fuck her with my dick but she seemed all set on staying there. We were sort of tumbling, going at it when she said, "I want you to treat me like you would any girl" and so I immediately slapped her across the face. She stared at me shocked for a moment and then we resumed making out.

Somehow I got her back to my room where I left her on the bed while I went to the bathroom to put on my dick. I was spinning drunk and didn't care if anyone on the hall saw me walking around with an erection. I came back to the bed where she was lying naked, and put a condom on the dick, making some comment about not wanting to knock her up.

"You just like me cause I'm cute and have big tits," she said.

"Yeah." I answered.

I tried to stick the dick in but it wasn't really working, so instead I went back to the slapping and then some punching and then some "you dumb slut"-ing. She started fighting back and for about 30 seconds it was a totally orgasmic fight scene.

But then she straight-girl freaked out and needed to process.

"I think I just want to cuddle," she said.

We tried it for a few minutes, awkwardly, and then she got up to go back to her room.

The next morning I felt racked with guih and desperately in love. Here she was, this sweet, typical college girl, trying to get in some last minute innocent lesbian experimentation, and instead she had got me. I imagined her telling her floor-mates all about it and cringed at thoughts of "plastic penis" and "hit me in the face." Suddenly 1 didn't want to be "weirdo" any­ more, I wanted to be Susie's girlfriend. I found the backing to one of her earrings under my bed and held it up to the light, treasuring it as a symbol of everything pure and wholesome and "college." I went to my computer and wrote her an e-mail profusely apologizing for my acts and asking if she was OK. When she hadn't responded a couple hours later I went to see if she was in her room, stopping at the box of condoms by the elevator and optimistically grabbing a handfiil. She wasn't there so I left a "hey, stop by if you want" note with a smiley drawing on her bulletin board. All I could think about was eat­ ing in the dining hall together, signing up for the same class­ es, and having late-night talks about the meaning of life and what teachers we hated.

That evening she finally responded to my e-mail with a curt: "Hey, don't worry about it, it's cool." I ignored the dis­ missive tone and wrote back, apologizing again and mention­ ing this time how I thought she was cute and maybe we could hang out tomorrow night after writing class. There were three days left of college, and I was going to milk this for everything I could.

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ABOUT THE 2004 QUARTO WRITERS a half-blood Mohawk, grew up aroimd the reservations near Niagara Falls, and has lived in England, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. After grad­ uating from Columbia this spring, she will pursue a doctor­ ate in the literature and political history of the Native American communities of her home.

AMBER MEADOW ADAMS,

is graduating from CC this spring. In the fall, he will be moving to Texas, where he hopes to combine his twin passions of creative writing and cattle driving.

MIKE AGRESTA

T I M B E A N recognizes that cold water can wreak havoc on the body, but hopes the reader can join some characters in tran­ scending physical constraints. He's a recent graduate moving away from this city.

ESINAM BEDAIKO is a junior in CC. She likes writing prose better than writing poetry but hopes you enjoy her poem anyway. Visit Ghana.

JOSHUA BOOTH is a junior in CC from North Carolina. He likes to write down all the things you say and then annoyingly recycle them in a way you didn't mean. has a biography which involves some schooling, some music, some words, some sights, and some very kind and tolerant parents.

A N N A BULBROOK

JUSTIN C L A R K E

is a Journalism student at Columbia

University. is a sophomore in CC from Cranston, RI. Despite the difficulties that come with holding his pen like a fork, he's been writing since he was very young, and is cur­ rently working on a screenplay.

MICHAEL DIBIASIO

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3

graduated CC this spring with a major in East Asian Language and Culture. He hopes to publish a book of his translations. He plays beautiful music.

A D A M KIELMAN

is a CC senior. Ask her what she's doing with her life, and she'll tell you she'll probably hang out, grab a few drinks. Then she'll say oh, I thought you asked what I'm doing with my night.

MARYKATE LOCANTORE

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Yl-SHENG N G is from Singapore and is a junior in CC. He is currently doing a niple major in Comparative Literature, Creative Writing and Coming Out. is graduating Barnard College in order to work in TV production and cook more often.

ALEX ORBAN

ELENA PEABODY

is a junior at Columbia University.

MARGOT POLLANS graduated from Columbia College this spring with a double major, a poetry manuscript, and a great pair of simglasses. is, at last, a Sophomore in GS majoring in Anthropology after a long, notorious, occasionally illustrious career in the television business.

BRIDGET POTTER

ARffiL SCHRÄG graduatedfromCC in 2003. She is the author of the autobiographical comic books Awkward, Definition, Potential and Likewise which chronicle her four years at Berkeley High School. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

"^

QUARTO AMBER M E A D O W ADAMS M I K E AGRESTA T I M BEAN

ESINAM B E D A I K O JOSHUA B O O T H A N N A BULBROOK JUSTIN CLARKE MICHAEL D I B I A S I O ADAM KIELMAN MARYKATE LOCANTORE YI-SHENG N G ALEX ORBAN ELENA PEABODY M A R G O T POLLANS BRIDGET POTTER ARIEL SCHRÄG