The Galvanist

Divided, how can one pray? How can one pray when another oneself would be listening to the prayer?

That is why one should only pray in unknown words.

Render enigma to enigma, enigma for enigma. Lift what is mystery in yourself to what is mystery in itself.

There is something in you that is equal to what surpasses you.

Editor’s Note In the Plural

~ Lena Rubin

.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....

... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....

A Visit to Mark Twain’s House ~ Eli Clemens

Cold Sheets and a Locked Door .. ~ Natazsa Gawlick

The Moon is a Baseball. ~ Elie McAfee-Hahn

Ridley

.... .... .... .... .... ....

.... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....

~ Alex Geisel

Boys (A 7-Part Dance About Queerness) ~ Jack Petersen

And the House Is Never Built.. ~ Dylan Cloud

About the Contributors

.. 3 9 13

.... .... .... .... .... .... .... 19

Where The Animals Are .... ~ Michael Tingley

.... .... .... .... ....

i

21

.... .... 32

.... .... .... ....

33

.... .... .... .... .... .... 49

.... .... .... .... .... .... ....

89

Visual Art Featured

Amy Greenspan (1, 2, 87) Leah Jacobson (6, 7, 8) Ko Takasugi-Czernowin (12) Bea Korsh (17, 18) Aida Hasanovic (30, 31) Dante Capone (34 ... 48) Zuzia Czemier (79, 80, 81, 82) Olivia Hamilton (83 ... 88)

There’s a weird kind of post I see reycled on Twitter every few days. The poster picks some months-old meme or woke-joke-of-the-day made in the past year, then adds a caption saying, basically, can you believe this wasn’t that long ago? It feels so long ago! And I can never tell whether or not it really does feel that long ago. I remember the original post, but more than that I remember its stuttering retweets and double-back permutations and shit-post-photoshops. I make an index in my head of my life since that first post—I have run X number of miles, written X number of pages, had X number of experiences apparently worth remembering—I reassure myself that the time between was really there. But there’s something unconvincing in that; here I am, after all, still looking at the same post.

When we started work on The Galvanist, they had just done surgery on a grape. Between then and now, maybe one hundred times, I was woken up by a stress dream, resolved to finish the magazine tomorrow, and then fallen back to sleep. We read pages and pages of submissions, sent out rejection letters whose wording I now would probably change, fell out of contact with people we probably shouldn’t have. I made promises to people I wish I hadn’t, reassured people of things that I was wrong about. I wasn’t transparent. I wrote two stories and scrapped them; then I spent the summer writing the sixty-some page story at the back of this magazine that part of me suspects should still be scrapped. Three different layout artists came and left; one stayed. I worked with talented and understanding contributors. My friends wrote amazing stories. They created amazing 3D artwork, amazing comics and drawings.

Slowly, suddenly, there was a magazine.

The grape, now isn’t funny. Although it recently appeared again on twitter, as old posts that have left a lasting impression sometimes do. The posts are recycled for a third time, now with a smirking veil—can you believe this is what we used to think was funny? The joke has curdled, its very invocation is cringe. But the cringe reassures me: something happened while I wasn’t looking; I am a different person now than I was then. But somehow it doesn’t feel that long ago.

Special thanks to: Aurela, Dante, Niclas, Andrew, Leah, Lena, Natasza, Sophie, Floyd, Alex, Jack, Elie, Olivia, Aida, Ko, Amy, Ben, Zuzia, Joohee, Marcelle, Nicole, SJD, Hannah, and Michael. See everyone in 2022 for the second issue... ~ Dylan Cloud i

01

AMY GREENSPAN `(( ~

/~

left, right `((

02

~

In the Plural

by Lena Rubin

It feels like fishing.

Well, it feels like there’s a lake, and there’s a bunch of people fishing, casting their fishing rods over the length of the pond, and the pond is my brain. An endless array of fishing rods, thin as gossamer, being cast from end to end of the pond. It seemed like a bad day for fishing before, but everyone decided to go fishing anyways, to test it, and lo and behold, everyone has realized it is a great day to go fishing. Everything’s biting.

name is unspecified. The second name is all the other times I have tried. Maybe trying is the problem.

The bell rings. We are done.

Chris is ringing the singing bowl and lighting the candle and bowing to us. We recite a series of phrases. I have never been taught the phrases, but I have been able to pick them up, sort of. The first one is:

Caught in a self-centered dream, only sufI think of the phrase “synapses firing,” which fering. has always reminded me of the way that sticks of dynamite are portrayed in old cartoons. I’m The second one: pretty sure that sticks of dynamite don’t actu- ally exist, at least not anymore.

Waking to find a dream within a dream.

It’s impossible to catch anything, I realize, The third one: completely muffled. The fourth if you presume that there is always-already one is muffled in the beginning, but I can nothing to catch, no reason to extend the rod make out the last two words: in the first place.

Compassion’s way.

I begin to think about love. If my thoughts about my mind and the pond and the fish- We bow, fold up our cushions, bow, walk past ing rod are regular letters hand- written on a the bamboo screen and crowd in the vestipage, my thoughts about love feel like three bule to lace up our shoes. We’re all confused dimensional writing: the magic of first learn- about how to interact with each other after ing in childhood that you could shade in the meditation; sometimes we talk, sometimes letters a certain way thus raising them to a we simply say goodbye and go into the night, different plane. back to our lives. Chris sits there in his sock feet still with his right ankle crossed over his Eternal return, I think, in italics. left knee and writes something in a notebook with a look of great care on his face. SomeI imagine writing a list of all the people I have times I wonder if he is taking notes on us, loved. It has one and a half names on it. The evaluating or grading us. first name is the asymptote. The second 03

Framed by the door is a poem by a Zen-inspired poet from California named Philip Whalen. I commented on the poem once, referencing my passing knowledge of the San Francisco Renaissance scene, and Chris got this startled look on his face like he hadn’t noticed the poem before. The next time I came in, almost two months later, he said, “Hey, I remember you. You like poetry, right?”

I don’t know what he does before and after leading the meditation practice. I once heard him say something vague about “coding” or “data.”

with Chris about his recent visit to a town upstate called Margaretsville. He loves the colors of the Catskill mountains in autumn, he says. “But I can’t move there for good, because there is nowhere—nowhere— to get a decent bagel.”

Chris nods sympathetically. “April fools day is coming up,” says Cameron, apropos of nothing, though by her tone it sounds like she is responding to Leonard.

“I remember last April Fools, oh boy,” recalls Leonard fondly. “It fell during sesshin. We went to Gray’s Papaya down on 86th street, got into a booth and ate our hot dogs with mustard and discussed the Eighth Noble Truth.”

There is a tall woman putting on her jacket who earlier introduced herself as Cameron.

She wears slacks and a checkered red button up shirt. I can’t help but notice—though I chastise myself for it—that she has a sort of (Sesshin is a word that literally means “touchsmell. ing the heart- mind,” and it describes a period of intensive meditation study that lasts severIt’s not that she smells bad, but it is the case al days. I have never attended sesshin. I have that there is a smell emanating from her, and never touched my heart-mind.) it isn’t a good smell, I’ll put it that way, and it puts me slightly on edge because, beyond the Chris laughs briefly. Cameron suggests that, obvious sensory qualities of the whole thing, for April Fools Day, she might somehow steal the slightly unpleasant interaction with the the chanting sheets that have printed on smell molecules and the air and my nose, I them the four phrases that we recite at the also wonder whether maybe she doesn’t real- end of meditation. A good April Fools joke, ize she has a smell. I suppose it’s preferable she proposes, would be to reprint the sheets to the opposite, i.e. her knowing that she has of paper so that the phrases on them are both a smell, but then again, is it? upside down and backwards. No one quite

knows what to say to that. I never knew that This set of questions opens up a sort of ka- the phrases were actually written down on leidoscopic vision in my mind of all the things a piece of paper anywhere. I actually could that might be wrong with me, things that could learn, if I wanted to, what comes between be glaringly obvious to those around me, but “dream within a dream” and“compassion’s of which I could be hopelessly unaware. Yes, way.” I wonder if I’d even want to. I think I like yes, of course this is correct, I hear myself the mystery. thinking. Of course there are these things, these blights, of which I am hopelessly un- “I have some things to finish up,” says Chris, aware. and this is the cue that it is time for us all

to leave. Leonard very quickly ties his scarf There’s another man I haven’t met before, who around his neck and exits. I hold the door for introduces himself as Leonard. He’s chatting Cameron, who seems to be headed the same 04

direction as me. I put on my backpack and she zips up her coat and we go out through the door and out onto Columbus Ave.

I ask her what she does. I mean, outside of the zen center, I add. She simply answers, “Math,” and I simply answer, cool, having no idea what else to say.

We begin to walk. I notice she is making a conscious effort to maintain good posture as we walk, posture being perhaps the most important part of proper meditation practice, after the breath. I envision her mind trying to bring her meditation-self out of the meditation-world and back into her real-self in the real-world, and her mind also thinking that all of this might be in vain, but maybe I am projecting. Her spine rises, curves, and falls; I imagine I can see every vertebrae shifting.

It looks like if you typed a bracket into Microsoft Word and then kept cycling through different fonts, each one a slight adjustment of the one before.

The first and second “e’s” on the Duane Reade sign on the street corner blink in the darkening night. A man walks by carrying a bouquet of roses, speaking into a bluetooth headset.

We’re silent.

Finally I ask her what kind of math she does.

“Oh, you know, differentials, and matrices.

That kind of thing.”

“I could never do math,” I say, and immediately feel bad for saying this, because she probably hears that all the time. What I really think about math is that I am terrified of it, that I have always been scared of people who acknowledge math as a real thing, have thought of them as alien beings somehow.

I watch Cameron’s back as we walk and I become deeply sad. I wish I could connect with her.

05

The other day in a cafe I heard a man say to his friend, “you know, sex doesn’t really make you feel good.” He added, “it feels good while you’re doing it, but after?” He shook his head, as if to replace the word emptiness. I think about this now.

That night after meditation class I had a dream that I was being asked to take care of two different children in two different towns in upstate of New York. I was supposed to be taking care of both children at the exact same time. I don’t know how I got into this situation but I felt equally obligated to both of them.

I got into my car and sat there, paralyzed, unable to decide where to drive, unwilling to care for one if it meant I couldn’t care for the other.

One of the children lived in Margaretsville, where there are no good bagels. The second child’s parents wouldn’t give me the address of where they live or even the name of the town. I kept asking them where they live but the message kept getting garbled, like it was written in Wingdings. I asked if they could call me and tell me over the phone and they said, no, sorry, we can only use Facebook Messenger at the moment. Ultimately, I decided to go to Margaretsville. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was only 38 minutes away via Google Maps.

I arrived in Margaretsville and met the child’s mother, who was a Modern Orthodox woman named Yve, spelled Y-v-e. “Hello,” she said, “our child is very special, I think you will get along well.” She lived in a sort of barn. There were two men already there. One was baling hay. One was wearing a yarmulke. They seemed friendly and hardworking.

“How was the drive?” she asked.

“The drive was easy,” I answered, “and the leaves are beautiful.”

Leah Jacobson

06

07

Leah Jacobson

/~

left, right `((

~

08

A VISIT TO MARK TWAIN S HOUSE

By Eli Clemens

Within our tour was a Chinese couple. The woman I noticed first. Her face was round, her glasses rounder. She was slim, and wore jeans that, despite a kind of artful distress on the knees were elegant, maybe the most elegant pants anyone in the tour group. One of her ankles was wrapped in bandages which continued up her leg and disappeared underneath the jeans; she walked with a graceful limp, never showing pain, but clinging to her presumable husband’s arm each time the tour guide led us to a new room. The way she leaned against her husband seemed only half for stability: the other half was out of love.

Her husband stood with an almost mechanical posture; he wore a loose sweater and plain jeans, and his haircut looked fresh, although the bottoms of the hairs on the back of his head occasionally were grey. Whenever the tour guide would explain some contained detail, say, the split flue in the fireplace— a technical innovation for Mark’s time— the husband would turn and explain to his wife what had just been said in quick, quiet Mandarin, too quick and too quiet for me to catch any of it.

The wife at one point received a phone call.

The tour guide stopped in the middle of her explanation of some minutiae regarding the Mississippi steamboat pilot exams of the late 1850s to tell the wife harshly that no one was allowed to take phone calls during the tour.

Realizing that the wife did not speak English, the tour guide turned to the husband and told him, again quite harshly, that his wife could not be on her phone. At this point a feeling of grimace radiated outwards from the wife to all us in the group and, despite a lack of 09

change in her facial expression, an acquiescent hanging-up of the phone.

The couple conversed and I heard 工作, even 单位. She stepped away from the group and started texting. Later, she drifted off from the group; I think she was calling her boss.

The tour guide, however, apparently perceptive, noticed her absence and said to the husband, “I cannot allow any of the group to leave.” She waited for the husband to retrieve the wife and then continued with the tour.

The pair seemed melancholy, and I wondered what they were doing there.

Did the husband read Mark Twain? Perhaps they were visiting the area and had decided to check out Hartford’s biggest cultural landmark, or maybe they lived in Connecticut--but then, why did the woman speak no English, yet the man knew enough English to translate the tour guide’s New England accented and hurried explanations? And why was she limping?

It was suddenly dire that I found out. I guess I could have made the answers up. Or I could have asked them, “请问，你们怎么在这 里呢?” But, really, I knew I’d never know.

After the tour, I would watch the husband take a picture of his wife in front of the house.

Squinting, she would put weight on her good leg, seemingly smiling, although I couldn’t really see her face. She’d limp back to her husband and he’d show her the picture. And then they would walk and limp away.

Later I’d think: had she been wearing a blue shirt, or a purple one? Had her Mandarin included the northern 儿 suffix?

I had liked the two of them, and had been able to see myself in their place, or rather, a

version of the wife and husband I could relate to in imagination and scope...a similarly hairgoing-grey man in China in the 2020s, in the 2030s, following a tour guide through some great writer’s house, within a group in which we were the only non-Asians, me stopping to translate to she: slender, beautiful, unsmiling she, except when we’d pause to exchange an observation of Cao Xueqin’s writing desk and luxurious bathtub. Here, she’d turn to me and smile—the smile fainter than it was in the late 2010s, but just as sweet—and she’d be walking with a limp by then, likewise her bones would be jutting out of her face even colder than when we’d met as teenagers. I could see it clearly: me and her lost in the big old world, not knowing where to go but somehow stuck in China and resolved to stay put until something changed...a Jessica and Roger Mexico with all the “fuck the war, we’re in love” attitude, but also changed by the war. And by that point we would already have been in China so long that it felt like what came before was but a half dream, one of the ones where days and months are passed, each different but only half remembered in the next, altogether forgotten except for when we were just waking up, or when we look at the writing and the pictures they did back then, figuring them to be as fragmentary to their time as Mark Twain’s refurbished and furniture-replaced house was to him and his celebrity’s life...where was Sam Clemens behind all this Victorian furniture, anyways…?

We must have been only on the third room in the tour when I found myself lost in concentration, trying to translate what the Chinese couple were saying, blocking everything else out as my mouth formed an impassive countenance that verges, as I know from others’ reactions, on a glare. Upon completing my translation, I found myself staring or glaring through the face of the lecturing tour guide and then, changing my face and coming back to three dimensions, I slid my gaze to the tour guide’s right, where my mother’s eyes were

looking sadly at me. Her sad stare turned into a smile, so I smiled back at her.

My grandmother walked over to the bathroom, gave it a cursory glance, and, seeming to disprove, left quickly. Once I had asked my mother whether I took more after her or my father. She thought a minute, then said that she thinks I take after each of my four grandparents equally.

As we went up the stairs, my grandmother’s hand warm in mine, the tour guide began to tell us that the stairs were built with low banisters— not because people were smaller then, but because Mark wanted his house to seem bigger than it was— and feeling the lowness of the banisters, my grandmother and I climbed with both feet placed on one stair before attempting the next one.The people behind us were old, but not older than my grandmother, and when my grandmother would apologize to them they’d tell us quickly no, it’s all right, we aren’t in any hurry.

At the top of the house we reached Mark’s writing room. There in that grand airy room, the tour guide planted her feet and began to deliver the lengthiest speech of her tour, and what seemed to be a monograph on Mark Twain in general. Starting from some nearby details, she noted that if a project hadn’t been going well, Mark would shelve the manuscript or rather put it in a strange cubbyhole to the right of his desk. Going on and on, the tour guide extrapolated from this fact a number of insights into Mark’s writing which led to insights into his psyche and influence, even his propriety. While it seemed clearly rehearsed— the same tour she’d given maybe a thousand and more times before—there were certain words at which she would pause, as if she was almost...using synonyms?

She told us how in this room Mark had written his most famous works— Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court -and then she had moved into an anecdote of how Mark had 10

shelved dear old Huck for most of the seven years it had taken him to write it, only coming back to it near the end, and then there was something about how people had been surprised by how different it was from Tom Sawyer; it was, after all, a sequel, but it dealt with more mature themes and seemed the work of a writer much more than seven years older.

The tour guides’ rhythm was deceptively complex and even sly, she was a master of moving from biography to history to criticism to anecdote all at some time signature I had yet to crack and probably had never heard before, along with an equally confounding sequence of synonym hunting...opting for?...contemplating?...on top. Why had Mark changed in those seven years it took him to write Huckleberry Finn? The change was the result of seven years of reflection, reflection on Mark’s childhood in Life on the Mississippi, reflection on race in America in The Gilded Age, and reflection refracted through a comedic allegorical turn as demonstrated in The Prince and the Pauper. The tour guide’s favoritism for Huck had emerged from the shadows, and she had likewise arrived finally at her thesis.

Could our group sense that she had already stepped out of her role as tour guide and into that of a literary critic — a role for which she evidently had more gusto? “You know, you can also think of this shift in his literature as analogous to his life, how he constantly was reinventing himself, was constantly revisiting his youth, was constantly incorporating new elements of his life into the one he already had”-- as she said this, I stared around the room, seeing the reaction to her thesis take the form of a newfound focus upon the faces of us in the tour, even a newfound expression that altogether, you know, could be analogous to showing agreement with the tour guide’s thesis of change, if you really want to boil it all down to that.

And as I crept through the big house, creeping like a toddler, I found over and over that Mark—or at least the tour guide’s version 11

of Mark—held many a similarity to my father, with his eye for interior decoration, his affinity for cutting edge technology. Perhaps most reminiscent of my father was the tour guide’s anecdote—the twelfth one, if my count was right—of Mark buying a bed that cost two hundred dollars, equivalent to the yearly wage of George, Mark’s top servant. The bed had carved in its headboard one of the most ornate wood carvings I’d ever seen and apparently even used to gleam even in the dark room where Mark would smoke his cigars.

You couldn’t get a bed like that for two hundred dollars today. Yet when Mark discovered that the bed he’d bought was not, in fact, the antique he thought he’d paid for, he made the decision to put his pillow not at the natural head of the bed, but at its foot, all so that that he could admire just what it was that he had bought.

In my father’s blood and in our name of Clemens runs the blood of Mark. And there, at Mark’s house, we—indeed I, too—had come many miles to view our… heritage. I had found an elaborate puzzle: a meandering man with a great self humor. I saw him, chuckling at himself, chuckling at his books, and even though I saw him I knew it was a trick, a trick of his writing, and even this, this house-museum: it had all been designed to trick us, to trick his readers—not to mention his distant relations.

Ko Takasugi-Czernowin

12

COLD SHEETS AND A LOCKED DOOR

by Natasza Gawlick

One by one, lanterns bathed the street in a pallid green glow. The lamplighter, his hat askew, shouldered a wooden ladder. He whistled softly as he walked, tipping his lighting pole against each lamppost, and the gas hissed, and it ignited a warm flame. The light, still pale in the presence of the setting sun, urged those who passed to quicken their steps home. Kazimir, walking in the direction of a café, nodded to them, and did not notice the lamplighters.

In the wake of their trail, however, he noticed a solitary woman who stood on a pier facing the sea: the way she pinned her hair back on the right side, just above her ear, the way she stood, her right hip always jutting out. Kazimir knew her.

“Maria!”

The woman turned, brows knitted together, not recognizing him.

“It’s Kazimir!… Anton Kazimir. We went to high school together.”

“Of course!” she cried, suddenly beaming, and pulled him into an embrace.

“But, what are you doing out so late?” Kazimir asked, and stepped back, holding her at arm’s length. A smile danced at the corners of her lips, lighting her dark eyes with a playful fire. She looked at Kazimir now as if he were the only person she wanted to see.

“I take a walk each evening,” Maria turned once more to the sea, the fire flickering.

“Somehow I always end up here…”

Kazimir looked out at the horizon where Maria’s gaze had fallen. The sun was bleeding gold to red.

“Did you eat yet?” Kazimir asked; his voice seemed louder in the new dusk. “I was on my 13

way to Pani Gdynia’s, if you’d care to join me.”

“I’d like that very much,” Maria said. And Kazimir suddenly was in the eighth grade, carrying Maria’s basket at the picnic, helping with her geography homework, walking her home half a mile in the wrong direction. It wasn’t just Kazimir, or even just the boys—all of their classmates had always done everything they could to please Maria.

“What are you doing back in Lwøw, Anton?”

Maria spoke in a way that made his name sound foreign, intimate coming out of her mouth. She linked her arm through his, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“I visit my mother every few months; she has been ill this year.” A pressure on his arm accompanied Maria’s grimace. “I’m returning to Warsaw this Wednesday.”

“What do you do in the city?”

“Business—money matters—it’s all very tedious and boring.”

She laughed softly. In truth, Kazimir hated his work. He hated dealing with petty investors and their spoiled, wealthy offspring who spent money as if it reappeared like stubble on the chin. There was a pause— At the café, she sat across from him with hands folded in her lap, thick hair draped across her shoulders. He felt a sudden desire to reach out and touch it. Instead, Kazimir turned the conversation to her.

“And you, Maria? How is your family?”

Kazimir watched as she spoke rather than listened. Like many of the schoolboys, he had loved her from afar for years. The movement

of her gesturing hands, the loose wisps of hair twirling in the air above her head—years ago, he wouldn’t have dared to get this close. How strange, then, for them to be sitting across from each other now.

“How is your mother’s shop?” Kazimir asked.

“It’s doing well, although we had to buy a new sewing machine a few months ago… we’re still trying to make up the cost of that… but, luckily, the stitching is more precise and fewer items have been returned for repairs due to loose threads. And we recently hired a sweet new girl from the country–” she broke off with a laugh. “I’m sorry, this all must seem terribly boring to you.”

“No, no, though I’m afraid I don’t know much about sewing.”

Maria shook her head as though she’d had this conversation before. How many men had sat across from her, enjoying her presence but never caring to fully listen, never trying to have a more serious conversation?

Kazimir wanted to be different, but there was something pleasant about spending an evening with a woman who demanded nothing, who took everything he said in stride, with a slow-spreading smile and attentive eyes.

Plates of breaded pork, pickled cabbage, pierogi of all kinds – potato and onion, ground beef, mushroom – began to arrive at the table.

“You were so sweet as a young boy… I remember you took Magda out for ice cream when she was upset at school one time.”

“I think, probably, I just didn’t know how to respond to a crying girl – the ice cream shop was the nearest distraction.”

“And would you say you’d know how to comfort a girl, now?”

Maria was smiling again, but there was an intensity to her gaze he hadn’t seen before.

In that moment, he saw in her eyes years of suffering, a desperate yearning for genuine companionship. She lived in the type of solitude that momentary attention or fleeting

friendship could not remedy. Kazimir had to swallow and blink – anything to be released from the depths of those eyes.

“Mmm!” she mumbled, somehow smiling close-lipped through chews. Kazimir marveled at how comfortable he felt around her, how purely and wholeheartedly she gave herself to everyone she met. She was like a crystalline statue held gingerly in the palm of his hand.

“So, tell me,” he asked, trying to forget how lovely, yet fragile she seemed to him.

“Are you still reading much?”

Maria looked at him in surprise. “Well… no, I guess not. I don’t read much at all anymore…”

He waited for her to say something further.

She didn’t.

“Why not?” he pressed.

“Ah, there’s always something more important to do. And anyways, it always puts me to sleep.” She shrugged and smiled, as if remembering a story, a moment Kazimir couldn’t possibly have known.

Kazimir frowned. His mother always said that disinterest in literature meant breeding an inactive mind. He dropped the subject.

They sat a while in silence only interrupted by Maria, whose sentences all started “remember?” Each time, Kazimir nodded, remembering, and he grew tired of reminiscing.

“Does Elzbieta still run the gallery on ul.

Karwowska?” he broke in.

“Oh! I believe so.”

“Has she added any new paintings or artwork to the exhibit? I know she used to ask university students to send her their unwanted pieces.”

“I wouldn’t know, I haven’t gone in several years.”

“So you don’t like art either.” It came out more as a statement than a question. He wondered for a second whether Maria might see her sewing as a form of art— though simple, her dress was sewn tastefully. Observing her, however, he realized the puffed shoulders were not meant for style, but rather to allow 14

her arms and torso to move freely.

“It’s not that I don’t like art,” she said. “I just don’t understand it. But I do admire the stained-glass windows in church. And the frescoes are both lovely and inspiring.” She said it as though she expected him to be proud. He smiled gently: the puffs on her shoulder allowed her arms to move freely, the bodice allowed her to bend over a sewing machine without the fabric catching.

“What do you like about the frescoes?”

“How evocative they are – I can feel Christ’s suffering just by looking at the ones depicting his path to crucifixion. Or the joy and reverence in his birth.”

So Maria’s devoutness, present in her youth, had only strengthened with age. Perhaps it was her faith that made her seem so pure, he mused, although, looking at her face, which had looked serene and smooth a few minutes ago, now looked tired, wrinkled, and dull in the dim candlelight of the café.

“I recently visited the Holy Cross Church; the frescoes – painted by a man named Vincenzo – truly took my breath away. He painted numerous interpretations of the pieta, as well as many of Christ’s miracles… the level of detail astounds me. And the process! Apparently, you must paint over the designated area with plaster first, wait for it to dry for several days, sketch the drawing onto the rough surface and only then paint over it… God forbid you make a mistake – occasionally the entire fresco would have to be redone, simply because of one little error!”

Maria nodded politely as he spoke, but she seemed more absorbed in a piece of pork.

Conversation petered on, until it flickered like a suffocating flame, needing air.

Out on the street she asked where he was staying.

“Not at home, there’s not enough space. I have a room at the Olceznik.”

“Lovely place,” Maria commented. They walked in silence for several long moments.

“May I ask you a question?” Kazimir said 15

suddenly, his voice loud.

“Of course.”

“Are you still with Marek?”

She did not reply straight away. He looked down at her to make sure she had heard him.

At last, she began. Her voice was soft: “I don’t know what I am… The easy answer is no. We were meant to marry two years ago.

His work, in the navy, often took him far away, and for so long, but...still, I thought everything was fine. I wanted to call him mine even when he was miles away. He was summoned to Spain, and his his platoon decided to travel by sea. He said he’d return by June…”

She lapsed into silence. He did not know what to say. They walked past darkened apartment buildings, curtains drawn over windows illuminated by intimate light.

“After a few months, I was no longer alone.

I was… you can’t blame me for not refusing their advances. Jan came to me first. Kind words, bringing all sorts of gifts, visiting me twice or three times a day at the shop. You can’t blame me... But Jan left, too. He met a girl from Kobylanka and just knew she was the one he had to marry. What could I do but wish him well?” Here she stopped and laughed once to herself. “But that’s enough of that talk.”

They arrived at the hotel and stood across from each other. There was something unfathomable swimming just beneath the surface of her brown eyes. Though he knew it was futile, that nothing would come of them spending more time together, Kazimir couldn’t part from her just yet.

“If it’s not an imposition for you, would you care to join me inside for some tea?”

In his hotel room, Kazimir rang a little bell.

The porter scurried in, carrying a fresh pot of boiling water, two mugs with black tea, and an assortment of jam-filled pastries.

“Tell me about the city,” Maria said. So Kazimir did. He talked about the bustle, the buildings, his coworkers, the people at taverns. He was enchanted by Maria’s smile, the way she

threw her head back and laughed with her entire torso, until tears came to her eyes. His heart raced each time her hand landed, fleetingly, on his knee.

They sat at the window overlooking the sea. In the dim moonlight, the ships rocked and bobbed on silver-crested waves. The tea cooled. Kazimir looked over at Maria; she had fallen asleep. His own eyes drooped, but he felt rude going to sleep in his bed while she lay, angled and constricted, on the sofa. Kazimir picked up one of the teacups and placed it down onto the tray. It clinked gently. Standing, he walked to the door and back with heavy steps, half-hoping she would wake and see herself out. But she did not stir.

He studied her. From this angle, her cheeks looked almost hollow and the mouth pouted, like a child who had been refused candy. He thought about Marek and the other men who had been in this same position, perhaps had lain in bed with her; he understood why they had left her. Her charisma soon lost its inviting sheen and was replaced by her suffocating complacency. Kazimir looked once more at her profile and suddenly felt a profound disgust at the arch in her nose.

Kazimir gathered up his belongings, his small suitcase, and crept out of the room. He left the key inside and shut door behind him with a soft thud.

16

17

beA korsh

/~

left, right `((

~

18

The moon is a baseball

by Elie McAfee-Hahn

It was happening fast. The moon was a baseball and all the stars were smaller baseballs.

Devised of my sidereal time, I kept a perfect score. It was truly chaotic. “I’ve developed quite an appetite for letting go,” said Stephen in a soft gag because his throat was made of cloth and speech was effortful, and he then continued his long work in cleaning his green felt extremities. “Let’s make a deal,” said Mindy, in large glasses with mylar lenses and a very tall cylindrical hat, “my taste for green has been pinpointed and affected.” I checked the clock: the vertical screws spun wildly in their casings keeping precise mechanical time with all our decisions. The sounds of cloth, and the sounds of crinkling reflectives are submersive and submerssible, i feel each catch, break, and friction, as dry skin runs along fuzzy fibres, on the back of my tongue.

The time is rote. We are in the wrong place and only I realize. As Stephen is pulled away from us, I hear him shout “I am quite ok with this outcome!” it happened in a swift way. The moon was a baseball and all the stars were smaller baseballs.

fixed and affected by those who are outside of my control.” I check the clock: Vertical screws roamed wildly in their kyzing, keeping time with all the mechanisms of all of our decisions. Sounding cloth, and reflective wrinkles are the submariner’s, I find every catch, break, and friction, because behind my tongue, dry skin runs with fuzzy fiber. Interested in time, We are in the wrong place and it realizes only me. Even as Stephen pulled away from us, I shouted to him, “I’m fine with this result!” new words: Kyzing , Dall’el It had happened rapidly. The moon was a baseball and all the stars were smaller baseballs. My sidestery idea has been rated to perfection. It was really chaotic. “You have developed an appetite for dall’el”, said Stephen in a crash-bandage since his tiles were made of smaller mosaics and tiles, and he continued his long practice of cleaning his green knitted ends. “Make a treat,” said Mindy, in a large bell jar lined with a cylindrical lattice, “my taste for green has been identified with affection.” Escape the relief: vertical winds find wild beaks in their casings, all keeping precise mechanical time with our motives. The sounds of glittering and, the appealing reflexes are on top of it, I have taken care of every discount and the cold, that the dry pelt goes through with fuzzy fibers, on the backs of my tongue. The time is broken. There is no wrong place and I just did not understand. While Stephen was pulled by us, I heard about, shouting, “I am well enough with this result!”

It was happening quickly. The moon was baseballs and all the stars were small baseballs. Developing my sidereal time, I kept a full score. It was really chaotic. “I am very hungry to let go.” Stephen told in a soft gag that his neck was made of cloth and that his speech was striving, and then he became green. “Let’s make a deal,” Mandie set her big glasses against a mixer lens and a long cylindrical cap, “My taste for greenery has been It’s happening quickly. The moon is baseball 19

and all the stars are small baseballs. In my early years, I kept a perfect deficiency. It’s a real disorder. “I have been very happy for giving up.” Stephane said he had a sore throat because his throat was worn and any word was an attempt against, and then he continued his long-term job in maintaining his skin with cold, cold bones. “Let’s do what you did,” said Mindy, in glasses with the movable lenses and telescoping luggage. Timing all my resolutions. Exercise, and the intriguing objects are what you are breathing, I have every guarantee of rest and relaxation. Time is Time. We are in the wrong and I know, only.

Just as Stepped away from us, I heard him. it happened in a swift way. The moon is a baseball and all the stars are bright, shimmering diamonds.

20

where the animals are

by Michael Tingley

I was already ten minutes late when I turned into Shady Vale, past Paradise Terrace and one turn before Dove Wood. Hidden Haven past by, then I turned down Wandering Trail. I reached a cul-de-sac and turned around again. I went down another street, Meandering Trail, and then another, Paradise Bungalow, until I found the right one—Halcyon Hideaway. His house had the tan jeep in the driveway. He had drilled a hole in the roof gutter and stuck an American Flag through it.

The flag’s shadow fell on the right side of the jeep’s hood, as if draped there. I hadn’t spoken to my best friend, George Castor, in almost four years. When he graduated boot camp, I sent him a graduation message, thanking him for his service, telling him it had been an honor being his friend. I told him to go over there and give those bastards hell.

He responded in an hour, “Kill man! That’s awesome thank you so much. You’ll always be my friend and if there’s anything you ever need from me let me know.”

There have been many times in college when I wondered if I did need him. But he was in Afghanistan, and when he got home he got married to a girl we knew in high school. They didn’t speak when I knew them. Her name was Katie. Everyone called her Katie, not Kate or Kay or Catherine. Katie. She stage-managed a show we were all in, The Crucible, which—I guess—is how we all became friends. And how George met Katie.

Our other best friend, Ed hooked up with her a few times. He was smart and pretty artsy so everyone figured he was forward thinking enough to fuck. Most of what I knew about Katie I learned from him. All I remember was her 21

relaxed Californian style—tight tank tops and short shorts—and sometimes on Monday and Tuesday she’d wear a scarf to school, even on hot days. It was always Monday and Tuesday, never Monday or Tuesday. By Wednesday the scarf would be gone, but her neck would be a slightly different skin tone. And she loved kids, I remember that. She liked to drink and party and go to the beach. She’d go to the beach at lunchtime, skip Economics, which we had together, and be back in time for last period. When you sat next to her, you could smell the salt in her hair and the tangy suntan lotion still clinging to her skin.

So when she invited Ed to Palm Springs, only two hours away from our little beach town in Southern California, Ed said yes. Of course he said yes. That was the first time they hooked up, when he went over to her house to pick her up for Palm Springs. He went in to help her with her bags and the left a few hours late. Ed told me she had shafts of bamboo in her bedroom and this great golden Buddha plopped on her dresser.

The Monday after they got back, Ed said Katie bruised easily. He had also said she invited him because a guy had just dumped her and she thought Ed wouldn’t mind. But when he realized what was going on he tried to comfort her. They were really getting somewhere until she popped a couple Xanax. Then she wouldn’t talk about it anymore. She’d only talk about how she couldn’t wait to be a Kindergarten teacher and make paper cut-outs with her kids. He said, like Matisse; Katie said, like snowflakes. After that he just couldn’t fuck her. So they fell asleep. I don’t know if George knows any of that. That was the kind of guy

Ed was though. At least back then.

Anyway, it was Katie who texted me last week and said that she and George were reminiscing about high school. She said they missed me and hoped I was doing well. She invited me over for dinner and started talking about the Economics class we took together before George grabbed her phone and said he was sorry: she was drunk.

I didn’t hear anything the next day, or the next. I thought maybe they’d forgotten the whole thing Katie texted me a couple days later and gave me their address. She said she couldn’t wait to see me.

I rang the doorbell and George opened the door. He still had his tanned skin and his hair was just long enough to bend to the right.

“You’re late,” he said and his face did not move.

“I got lost. About five minutes in I started thinking whoever named these streets was lost too.” He smiled.

“It’s good to see you, man. Really good,” he said. I shook his free hand, the other was holding a beer. I think that was the first time we’d ever shaken hands. I wouldn’t have forgotten that grip. He put on about 40 pounds of muscle over the years and turned the other 180 pounds to muscle too. Still I think his t-shirt was a size too small.

Katie came up behind him and put her arm around his waist.

“Costa!” she said and gave me a hug.

“Holy shit dude. How are you? It’s been a minute. Oh my God. Your hair hasn’t even grown!”

“I’ve been cutting it.”

“That doesn’t sound like you,” and she laughed, “Come in dude.”

Through the door and on the left was a side table with pictures. One was Katie and George at their wedding. George was holding her from the back. Next to it was another picture of them dressed up as Lilo and Stitch from last Halloween. He had let her paint his arms blue but not his face and had worn the

ears. She was in a little dress cut short and had a hibiscus flower in her hair. Another picture on the table was George in Afghanistan with a gun and sunglasses and another man, dressed the same. I don’t know who the guy was.

We walked past the pictures and the staircase on our right and into the living room. In the living room that bled into the kitchen was a large wooden dining table, set with silverware.

Everything was in place. Past the kitchen was a hall that led somewhere else. George and I sat down on the leather couch in the living room.

I found the place the arm rest meets the cushion, leaned back, and put my leg over my knee.

He sat next to me on the couch, straight, and turned his head and watched me.

“Still wearing all black, huh?” He said.

“Well, I’ve heard it’s slimming.”

“Slimming? What do you weigh? 130?

135?”

“468, but I told you, it’s the black.”

He smiled again. “It’s good to see you. It’s been like four or five years. I feel like I’ve changed so much, and then I see you and I don’t know.”

I don’t know where Katie had gone but when she came back her hair was pulled in a ponytail and I realized she’d gained weight.

Then I realized she was pregnant.

“Katie!” I said, “Congratulations!” I kept my congratulations ambiguous in case I was wrong.

“Oh!” She said and put both hands on her stomach and rubbed them around, “Thank you. We’re so excited.” I looked at George and he was smiling bigger.

“Please don’t tell anyone yet, Costa. We want it to be a surprise, for now.” Katie said.

“Well I think you have changed a little, man.

You’re going to be a Dad!” “I am a Dad,” George said.

“Can I get you boys anything to drink?”

George downed his beer so we could drink 22

together.

“Sure,” I said, “I hope you don’t mind Katie but this calls for whiskey.” I slapped George on the back, “Our old celebratory drink.” From the look George gave me I knew not to touch him again. Katie stopped smiling.

“Oh, well, the thing is,” she looked at George, “we got rid of all the hard liquor because we’re sorta doing the thing where we’re both pregnant, you know?

“Oh yeah, no, I totally understand. Then just a beer for me.”

“Two, Babe.” George said.

“Two it is, coming right up.” She walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

I lost sight of her.

“So how l are you, man?” George asked, “Catch me up. What’re you up to these days?”

“Nothing much man. Honestly.” I looked away, “I’m just at UCLA now and—“ “You’re not still in community college?”

“No, no. I got into UCLA for acting, so—“ “Still?” He said.

“Yeah, I mean it’s my passion. I’m starting to audition in LA and stuff.”

“Get anything?” George said.

“No, not yet. But the Greek community there is great and they’ve been helping me with connections and stuff.”

“Didn’t’ you just get back from Greece? Katie mentioned she saw pictures or something on Facebook.” George said. The questions were beginning to sound scripted and like the script had been written by someone else.

“Yeah! I did like two weeks ago. It was great. I saw Ed while I was there. He was in Paris and came over. We hung out for about a week.” It felt like I was extending my hand again, a chance to talk about old times and old friends and old memories.

“What’d you do in Greece?” He said.

“I mostly saw a lot of my family there. I hadn’t seen them in years so that was really great to catch up. Went to the Parthenon of course. I stayed in Athens but also went to Hydra, this island off the coast.”

23

“Make it to Sparta?” he asked and smiled.

And then we were back in high school at his house for a sleepover, me the Athenian, him the Spartan. We watching 300 and reading Gates of Hell out loud. We talked about the Persian-Greco war. Honor, he said, then we’ll fight in the shade, he said, then come and take them. I taught him how to say those things in Greek. He said those have power. I agreed they pulsed with power. He said, like muscles after lifting. Yes, I said, exactly. We would wrestle, shirtless, on his carpet in Corona, in a suburban mansion that was a desperate housewife’s wet dream and before he would pin me he would speak the Greek I had taught him: μολὼν λαβέ.

“No, I never made it to Sparta, not that much to see or do there anymore.”

“Yeah your country isn’t doing so hot. Not for the past—what?—two thousand years?” I wanted to ask, how’s yours doing?

“It’s pretty sad sometimes but there’s some good things happening there. And there’s a lot of hope.”

“Yeah, Hope. Great thing for a country.” He smiled and nudged me.

Katie came back with the beers. She sat in an armchair across from the couch.

“So how long have you guys been living here? It’s a beautiful place.”

“Mom helped us get this after I got back from my tour.” George said, then stood up and went to the bathroom. I looked at Katie.

“We love it here, but we’re thinking of moving. George wants to go to Arizona or somewhere with no income tax. I don’t think this is a great place to raise a family. There’s so many mountain lions in these hills.”

“Really?” I said.

“There was an attack like last week in Big Sur. A little girl was hiking by herself and this mountain lion comes out of nowhere she barely survived. I just thought ‘Am I really going to start a family here?” she looked at me and I nodded.

“But, otherwise, married life has seriously

been amazing. I’m so happy, Costa. I really am. I can’t believe George and me never dated in high school. Would have saved me a lot of...a lot. Every time I joke about that—like what it would have been like in high school— he just kisses me and does this sort of eye roll and says, ‘why think about it?’ Still, this other night I was high and started joking about it and I just had to text you.” She smiled and her eyes were rounder when she smiled. Most peoples’ eyes don’t do that. I thought about that night and how George had said that she was drunk and he was sorry. I thought about what he was sorry for. George sat back down on the couch with two Coronas, opened one, and left the other on the glass coffee table in front of us. Katie got up and put a coaster under each of them.

“I was just describing to Costa how fun it is being married to you,” she said.

“Oh it’s incredible. Definitely not underrated,” George said and then looked at Katie, “if you find the right person, like me.”

“You’re going to have to elaborate a little bit for me. What do you guys like to do together?”

They looked at each other. Katie started talking while George looked up at the glass cross on the wall.

“Well we wake up every day. I guess that’s obvious. Well, usually we make coffee and then George goes to the gym. I don’t even know what I do. Pretty much just chill. Clean, mostly, wait for him to get back. Then we eat breakfast and cook together. Cooking is my favorite part of the normal days with him. We have so much fun. Then he drives me to work. I work as a like a secretary right now. Then he goes to a Time Management company. Well, it’s called Time Management that’s its official name. Do you want—?”

“Yeah it’s like a payroll module. It’s awesome. A good product so an easy sell. They made me manager,” he said to the glass cross.

“Yes! And then after work he picks me up.

We come home. Make dinner together,” her eyes got brighter “we plan a few days before what we are going to make and on the way home sometimes we stop for ingredients.

We eat dinner, I mean, if we make it we might as well, right babe?” It was like the sides of his mouth had two strings attached and on hearing ‘babe’ those strings were pulled violently upward and then immediately released.

I wouldn’t call it a smile.

“Sometimes after dinner we watch a movie. Then we go to bed, or actually a lot of times we watch the movie in bed. Then we go to sleep.” She leaned back in her chair, resting. I was trying to pick a spot to stare at when she rushed forward, “Sometimes we have people over for dinner. It’s been hard, like—a lot of our friends are married because they understand.

Like we can’t really go out anymore or party. We’re married so—so they get that. They come over, we all make dinner, drink, have a coffee. You know, a lot of our single friends think it sounds so boring but it isn’t. It’s really fun!” she said. “It really is,” and looked at me and her eyes weren’t round anymore.

“This is just crazy to be meeting you guys together for the first time,” I said, “and you’ve built such a nice life here and a beautiful house.”

George took a drink, “We have. Listen, Babe I’m going to show him the patio. Do you want to check on dinner?”

George and I walked out of the sliding glass door to the patio. It was small with only a few tiles, a seating set, a bright red plastic cooler, and a stainless steel barbecue. There was a patch of well-maintained grass next to it.

“Wow,” I said, “look at that view.” Through the glass fence that surrounded the property, you could see the canyon. I could see the plants and plentiful mesquite that grow in California canyons. They are small, usually thighhigh and from a distance look as though the hills would share the texture of a miniature model spruce.

24

The view is of the hills turned away from the ocean. They go on for miles before a let off into desert. In these hills are snakes, lizards, bobcats, coyotes, rabbits, hawks and—supposedly—mountain lions. Along with all manner of escaped or lost pet dogs and cats and guinea pigs that do not last the week.

“Is that a trail?” I ask.

“Hiking trail. Goes around those hills,” he pointed, “eventually you can get to a waterfall if you walk far enough, but it’s been dry. It’s an awesome waterfall though.” He was sitting on the patio. When I turned he was drinking the other beer he’d brought.

“See any mountain lions out there?” he asked. I shook my head.

“There was an attack pretty recently in San Bernardino county. Jogger stopped to tie his shoe or something. Thing just pounced out of nowhere. All that jogging and he couldn’t run fast enough. Kidding. But they found the mountain lion. Put it down obviously.

“How do they know it was the same mountain lion?”

“I don’t know Costa, maybe they found a running shoe in his stomach or a shoe lace was hanging out of its mouth. They just found him and put him down. Christ are you going to side with the mountain lion, UCLA boy?” I didn’t know if this was going to become a ritual term of endearment.

“Well, I am a vegetarian,” I smiled.

“Not tonight you’re not. Should have said something earlier before I barbecued steaks.”

“I can just have—“ “Oh come on, it’s one night and I haven’t seen you in forever. It’s just steak, it won’t kill you.” He smiled but there was something behind it.

He continued, “When the hell did you decide to do that anyway? Has all of Greece disowned you?”

“College. About two years ago. I don’t know.”

“Why? Please don’t give me some ethical 25

bullshit reason.”

“I might have to give some ethical bullshit reason.”

“Then don’t. I’ve heard them. Jesus. You though? Jesus.” He shook his head, “Listen, we’re meant to eat animals. You’re going against natural instinct, or not instinct but, the way we’re supposed to be.”

“I just think that because we don’t have to eat that way anymore, we shouldn’t. I mean, man, there’s a lot we do that isn’t the way the hunter-gatherers did it, and you can’t exactly give me a list of primal instincts. We agree they’re there, but I don’t know exactly whihc are primal and which are something else, y’know?”

“We’re still the same though. Deep down.

We still have that instinct, every one of us.

But I don’t pretend like I don’t have it. That’s the difference. That’s why we live out here in nature,” he said. I looked back out at the hills through the glass fence.

“So Costa. I’ve got a question. Imagine, you live out here and you’ve decided to start a family. Or not even really decided. You’ve started a family. And through that five-foot glass fence you see a mountain lion.”

“Okay” I sat down with him at the table.

He finished his beer and stood up, “So imagine,” he walked to the cooler next to the barbecue and grabbed another beer, “want one?”

“I’ve got to stay focused to answer this question.”

“Jesus. Through the glass you see a mountain lion looking at you. Watching you. Especially when I’m grilling that could totally happen. It smells meat. So it comes. Easily could clear that fence. That fence isn’t even a hurdle to a mountain lion. What would you do?”

“Run inside I guess.”

“Then?”

“Call animal control? I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh! Animal Control!’ He pulled out his chair and the metal grinded against the concrete. He stopped for a second and sat down.

“Okay, animal control is on its way. We can all relax. Do you know the average response time of Animal Control?”

“I—“ “No, nobody fucking does. I sure as hell don’t. Meanwhile, that mountain lion has eaten my steaks and—“ he stood up suddenly and the chair fell over. The metal clanged over and over as it shuddered against the concrete. He walked over to the brick wall on the right, built with large brown bricks three-feet wide.

The wall was about six-feet tall at the top of a sharp dirt incline. Flowers were planted, “I know my neighbors. The ones over there have two little girls. What happens when they have a birthday party or—“ he jumped over the divider and onto the dirt, avoiding the flowers, “or they’re just playing outside? A mountain lion--“ he strode up the small hill, “could clear this. Easily. Jumps over, they don’t see him coming. Then who’s responsible? You wanna go over and tell my neighbors you did your best to save their daughters? Because you called Animal Control?” I looked at my cold beer, “I would try to call the neighbors.”

“They’re on both sides and what if they don’t pick up?” he asked, his hand still on the brick wall.

“I don’t know George. Jesus, I don’t know.”

“Yeah. You don’t know.” He paused after this. I don’t know if he was looking at me. But then I heard him moving, trying to get down the hill. I turned my head and saw him lose his balance and kick two flowers and almost hit his head on the divider between the concrete and the dirt. He saved himself with one hand.

I looked down, but his stumble embarrassed him even though he did not know I saw him.

“You know what I’d do Costa? You know what I’d fucking do? I’d run inside too, just like you, but I wouldn’t grab the fucking phone to call Animal Control” his voice raised in pitch when he said ‘Animal Control’, “I’d grab my AR-15 and put the thing down. I’d shoot it.”

“Is that legal?”

“Jesus Christ Costa, what is up with you?

Is it legal? No one gives a shit. I was defending my home from a mountain lion. And I was defending my neighbors. The whole neighborhood would thank me. Only some college kid would try to pull some shit on behalf of the mountain lion—that I was in violation of the thing’s rights.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“I am. We’ve got a saying in Afghanistan: simplest solution first. And getting Animal Control involved when you could just shoot the thing in the head?” He finished his beer and smiled.

“I really didn’t think about it like that,” I said.

“It’s okay man,” he said and leaned forward, he had softened with the beer and hearing he was right “you don’t live out here. You don’t have to think about this stuff.” He patted me on the back and my chair clanged against the concrete.

Then he said, “If it helps, think about it like this: they probably don’t even hear the shot just—BAM” he pounded his fist on the glass table “and it’s done. Everyone’s safe. If you know how to use a gun. You ever shot a gun?”

“Not really.”

“Well,” he shrugged his shoulders, “see that’s a problem. Yeah some people are more afraid of the gun than they are of the intruder or the fucking mountain lion. Better luck beating the thing to death than actually shooting it.” He turned his head toward the canyon. We sat there for a while, looking out.

Then he said, “And what the fuck happened?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“When we started going out, all Katie wanted to do was be a kindergarten teacher. It was all ‘Oh,’” his voice went up in pitch, “‘I love kids at that age they’re so curious’” his voice went up, “‘I love how much fun they have over the littlest things. Like cutting out little paper snowflakes and hanging them around the room for winter. Just a regular piece of white paper 26

can become a snowflake with a few folds and a pair of scissors!’ Trust me, I’ve heard that speech a million times. And then there was a school shooting. And then another and another. And I start to have dreams. Got worse after each. Bullet holes in little snowflake cut-outs. Seriously Costa, what happened?”

He asked like I had let it get like this, like a slouched off on my watch. I shook my head.

He went on, “I know I can talk to you about this stuff. Serious stuff. I know you think about it. Things like this.”

“Yeah I guess, but I don’t have a solution—“ I said.

“Oh bullshit. Don’t lie, you think they should take the guns away.” I was staring at the canyon and I imagined what it would take to fill in the canyon like it used to be millions of years ago. But I couldn’t imagine what it would take.

He kept going, “I go back and forth. I think I’d feel safer if Katie was armed and could at least attempt to defend herself. But then I take her to the shooting range and think ‘Nope.’ She doesn’t even want to learn. Does it for me, I think. Still.” He looked out at the canyon and finished his beer. He shook his head and looked down.

“I felt like I understood things better over there. You had to do hard things but you knew what you were doing was right and you knew where the animals were.”

We heard the sliding glass door and we turned to see Katie coming out.

“You boys hungry?”

“Starving.” I said and smiled at her. She was so much more beautiful than I remembered in high school.

“Yeah babe. Let me get another beer,” he turned to me, “want one?”

We all went inside. Katie put on some Jazz instrumental of popular songs. It was nice and almost funny taking some simple song and making it complicated with a saxophone and a few piano riffs; they made it unique and beautiful.

We sat around the wood dinner table and 27

ate steak. It was chewy and heavier than I remembered. When I took my first bite George laughed and slapped me on the back.

We talked a little. I made a joke asking where Katie was keeping her golden Buddha.

She said she didn’t remember having one, but threw it out when she moved here.

After dinner, Katie asked if we wanted coffee, I said yes and George went for another beer. She made coffee for us and poured four tablespoons of sugar in hers I made another joke. She responded that she liked sweet things and nudged George, who smiled lazily.

We sat there listening to the jazz covers.

I realized, as the coffee cleared my head, I hadn’t asked about his service.

“Hey man, I know I messaged you after boot camp, but that was before. Thank you so much for your service. I wanted to say it in person.”

“You’re welcome. I did it for you two. And all my friends. America, of course. But when you’re over there sometimes you can’t just think America, y’know? You gotta think about what that means. And I thought about my friends and family. Not high school really either, but the good times there. I want people to be able to have the good times we had.

Just like we had them.” Katie was sitting next to him on the couch and I was in the armchair.

She started rubbing his leg.

George continued, “My contract’s coming to an end though. I made it up a little too high.

Now all I do is yell at people to do things. I won’t be able to have the times I had again. I don’t feel part of it.”

“He got medals” Katie said, massaging his leg.

“Jesus Katie,” George said.

“No! Come on. You should be proud.”

“George,” I said, “That’s amazing. For what?”

“They’re over there.” He pointed at what could have been a bookcase but instead had pictures from Afghanistan and medals against black foam and another glass case,

boxing a metal object inside that was singed around the edges. I stood up and walked over to the case. I looked at all the medals. Three of them and he wasn’t even out of the service yet.

“George, you’re a fucking hero!” I said.

He laughed. “You just realize that Costa?”

“I mean it. You’re destroying the Spartans.

Battle of Thermopylae, never heard of her!” I laughed and turned to them.

“Fuck Thermopylae. The Spartans should never have even been in that battle and you know it. They didn’t even win. If the Persians that were there knew what a big deal we made out of it they’d laugh.” George finished his beer and looked at me. I think he saw something on my face. “No I’m serious Costa, come on. Losing isn’t a great military strategy. Getting all your men killed and barely slowing down an army of thousands is a bad military strategy.”

I looked at Katie. She was looking at the the glass coffee table and she had stopped rubbing George’s knee. Her hand had fallen on it.

“I guess,” I said, “But hasn’t stupid and brave walked hand in hand for a while now?”

“Brave is living to fight the next one. I watched a lot of people die and killed a lot of people. No one would talk about the glory of dying in battle if they saw it.”

Katie rushed forward, “Oh, I just watched a lot of people die and killed a lot of people. No big deal.” She kissed George quickly on the cheek. He didn’t flinch or look at her. He had started staring at the glass cross when she started speaking.

“What’s this?” I asked and pointed at the case with the metal object inside.

“That,” George said and started to get up but then decided to lean back, “is how I got my first medal.”

I had expected him to go on with the story, but he stopped. We were looking at each other. It seemed important that I didn’t look away. Somehow it felt like we were trying to

get on top of each other’s eyes; that we believed a look could change a person’s mind or make them forget something. I could see Katie looking back and forth. And then I felt a tightness all over my body I wanted to break out of. I took a step forward. I was radiating heat, my breathing faster. I took a step closer. My knee was an inch from the glass coffee table and if I pounced it would be the first thing that would shatter.

Then I said, “What, George. How did you get this.”

He leaned forward. His eyes stayed exactly where they were on me.

“We had a target on some ISIS members in the hills. We had a visual on a tank. There was a lot of talk about this new missile they’d never tried out before. Everyone was all excited.

They came asking for volunteers, who was going to be the first one to shoot it? Y’know because they didn’t know what was going to happen when they did. Well, they knew, but they still needed someone to be the first. Something might’ve backfired, they didn’t know. I volunteered. We got to watch it, like a video game. At first I thought it didn’t fire at all, but they told me only to push the button once and just wait. So that’s what I did. Then it blew up.

The explosion was fucking epic. Their limbs and bodies were flying everywhere. People ran around on fire. It was—There were two explosions, like a delayed detonator to take care of anyone who managed to survive the first blast. The shit they come up with these days.

But I mean the feeling. The feeling of knowing you did something that mattered and that it was ISIS—after everything I’d seen them do.

Knowing I did something for my friends and my family and America.” He smiled and shook his head. Then he looked at me, “Hey, you told me to give ‘em hell.” Katie rubbed his leg.

We said our goodbyes. They said they’d invite me over again soon for dinner or a barbecue. There was a barbecue they were going to with a few of George’s friends from the gym and their wives. They’d love if I could 28

make it. I got in my car and drove. Somehow I wound up deeper in the neighborhood than I wanted to be. I kept looking around but everything looked different in the dark. As I turned again, this time on the outskirts of the neighborhood, I remembered that just on the other side was the canyon. It felt far away. We used to hike those hills or ones around them.

I would wake up first and roll over and push George’s shoulder. He slept on his stomach and he’d moan into his pillow when I tried to wake him up or he’d say something funny, or, if he was really tired, he’d threaten to rip my arm off and beat me with the bloody end of it. We’d get up and get dressed. Put our boots on, make oatmeal, and drive a little way out, just passed where his neighborhood ended, to the foothills. Then we’d get out of his jeep and climb. Dust was always in the air—from us kicking it up, racing up steep trails, or maybe it only seemed like that to me—we’d hear the early morning birds whose calls remind you that California is, at heart, a desert, and after a few minutes we’d get bored and begin talking. Then, after conversations about girls, teachers, working out, movies, and Greek history, he’d say, “I think it’s just up there.” Only he knew where it was, I was just walking. On a concrete slab that had been the foundation for something else, we’d watch the sunrise.

I think about that.

29

aida hasanovic

30

31

aida hasanovic

ridley

by Alex Geisel

The office of Clark Lerner was small. In its early days, Atlas Studios didn’t have the funds to build walls sectioning off the space into actual rooms; instead, various stands and curtains were repurposed from the set of Useless Noise (1946) to sequester about forty square feet of space in the middle of the office. As most of the company’s clerical work had since been moved to the Stockholm office, the board never thought it necessary to renovate Lerner’s space, which they saw solely as a financial asset awaiting liquidation.

Whether a result of the tight quarters and the general malaise of character that had overtaken him since Soyinka’s arrest, Lerner sat in sweat and anticipation, awaiting the arrival of Ridley Rowe. The silence of the office deafened the man; desperate to stir up some bustle, Lerner decided he would fetch himself a cup of tea. Just as Lerner began to stand up from his too-small desk, Ridley Rowe slinked through the blue and red curtains and froze Lerner in place.

“Pardon me,” murmured Lerner without moving, hands on table, legs bent, back arched. He could feel Rowe’s stare boring into his forehead as he slowly retook his seat. In a slightly louder but equally timid tone, Lerner thanked Rowe for stopping in on such short notice. “As I’m sure you’ve heard, Mr. Rowe, sir, your colleague— “Yes, yes, that loaf Soyinka,” interrupted Rowe. “It seems he has delivered himself in absolute submission to the whims of the penal system. I always took him for a weak man.”

“Well, sir, that’s exactly the problem. For whatever reason, and a very illegitimate rea-

son it might well be, as you suggest, sir, your colleague, Mr. Rowe, that is Mr. Soyinka, sir— “Please, Clark, take a breath and calm yourself. Do you need a sedative?”

“No, sir, thank you, that will not be necessary. Mr. Rowe, it appears… and it is very difficult for me to have to say this to you, my long-time friend— “That I must resign from my tenure with Atlas studios at once, yes, yes, I am well aware of that necessity, Clark.”

Ridley began to remove his belt.

“Did you really call me here just to fire me?”

Ridley raised the belt in his right hand and slowly brought it down upon the desk, the leather strap descending limply and lamely.

“Didn’t you schedule any leisure time into our little itinerary?”

Then, in a sudden wildcat pounce, Rowe vaulted over the child-sized desk and whipped the belt against Lerner’s forehead. Lerner let out a small yelp and then became silent.

Perched still upon his boss like a paperweight on a forgotten periodical, Rowe murmured something inaudible to himself and then, louder, crooned, “Clark, my dear Clark!

One day you will finally get the respect you deserve. You poor fool.”

Rowe knocked over each curtain on his way out, using his feet for the task as his hands worked to re-buckle his belt.

32

BOYS (A 7-Part Dance About Queerness)

by Jack Petersen

~ Comics by Dante Capone

I Lawrence was tall, flat-faced, with bleached hair and a hoop earring; I met him when I was in kindergarten, long before I learned the myth of the “gay ear,” long before I learned that men could love other men, long before I knew what it was to be queer. He was a student in the English class my mother taught at a public high school for Piedmont’s at-risk kids. When she could, she took me to performances at the school—plays, art shows, concerts. The first time I met Lawrence, he had just performed a dance on a flimsy stage set up in the school’s gym, walking and gesturing mostly in horizontal lines before a curtain that left him little space to move. My mother introduced us afterwards; he was overpolite to me, moved by her praise.

I only ever heard his name mentioned in passing, or else in eavesdropping on my mother, talking about one of the few times he’d broken down and accepted one of her offers for a ride home. To my mother he must have seemed fragile, the body I’d seen and undulating onstage victim to a sadness I couldn’t know, borne from someplace I would not have words to describe for a decade.

I canonized Lawrence quickly. The few times my mother took me to her class, I made sure the two of us said hello. At home I daydreamed about how he was; I told my mother regularly to report back.

On the red rug in my family’s TV room, I took to mimicking his choreography: I (he) started head down, shins and tops of feet against the floor, head tucked near knees, hands interlocked on nape of neck. Then, a hatching upwards, and where he moved with a wise kind of grace I flailed childishly. By the end, I (he) ended up on the other side of the room. We were where we had started, crouched, protective, a scared rendition of child’s pose. Red fibers, darkened by the walls my elbows created, filled my (our) field of vision, both at the start and at the finale.

33

34

II Ben was the only boy in sixth grade with painted nails and platinum hair. His voice was high—higher than mine—somewhere between a young child’s and a girl’s. He wore tube socks, had chickens and two moms, one of whom was the librarian at our elementary school. If I’d met him years later, after I’d discovered Radical Faerie communes and Short Mountain in Tennessee, I might have described him as an honorary member of that crunchy faction of queerdom. But then, he was simply different than any boy I’d ever met.

Immediately after my 11th birthday party, my mother asked me if Ben was gay.

“I don’t know,” I said pointedly, her question the next rung on a ladder of irritability preceded by that same question and answer every year or two since the third grade. “But he spends most of his time with girls,” I offered. The year before I’d learned the dangers of spending time around girls myself, when I was suspended from sitting with Cole and Jake and Lucas and Ian for that same reason; the athletic terminology rang loudly. Ben, though, was at home in his androgynous squeak, as comfortable as he was peroxided. He moved with a cool bandiness—his walk a funny strut, residue of baby fat on his cheeks and arms twitching in step. He danced without knowing how, unencumbered by the limbiness that held me back. Secretly, I wanted to become him.

And so, the first day of seventh grade I wore a textured white v-neck t-shirt with a pocket sewn into the collar, the first step of a private vow that this would be the year I “explored myself.” But the years I knew Ben were the same years I learned with relative ease the art of closeting, of hardening my outer layer before the softness of my stomach thinned, all stretched out with height. A week or two into the school year, I reverted to the Under Armour compression shirts and Naval Academy football jerseys my father’s friends sent me. In private, I castigated myself for recanting. Ben remained effeminately faithful.

35

36

III Nobody at theatre camp ever thought to question the first night’s ritual cabin introductions that happened each year—Name? Age? Sexual orientation? How far you’ve gone?—nor had they believed me when I described myself as “questioning.” The last few summers there I’d spent jaggedly voguing and assuming messy, masculine drag personas with polyester Victorian Dresses from the camp’s costume bins. Then, a few nights in, after conceding to the boys in my cabin that I was, after all, interested in men, I laughed as they trashed the makeshift plaque that hung above my bed, a sheet of paper with a question mark composed of badly-abstracted penises. It was meant to be temporary, a signal of the looming end to my straightness, a question mark which assumed an answer.

“I’m bisexual,” I said. “I’ll just wait until I realize I’m gay.” Kevin, who slept in the adjacent bed and whom I’d heard the night before giving a sleeping-bagged hand job to Jared, was the model for my trajectory. He was two years older. His first summer, he’d been straight, the next, bisexual, then, gay. Ladies, I thought, laughing into the safety of my sleeping bag, enjoy it while it lasts.

The real reason for my admission was Grayson, pale, with grimacing eyes and a 1920s coif.

I’d spent the previous five days angling my way into being anything I could to him—a friend, a mentee, a queer son of sorts. Around him, I punctured my straightness in little bursts, laughing too hard at his jokes or making comments about the fullness of his lips. I looked for blips of love coming back at me: touches on the arm or squinted eyes, signaling something. I had hope, even if the imagined moments outnumbered the real ones. Worse still, he had a boyfriend: a preppy Mormon boy named Talmage. My concession was a Hail Mary.

From beneath the lilted yelps of gay congratulations, Grayson cut through. “Aw, yay, Jack!” he said, muted, the quiet homosexuality with which I’d all but fallen in love. I had hoped for something more explosive: a descent from his top bunk, maybe—the metaphor of the stacked beds clear and pulsing in my mind—rushing to hold me, to worship me. But the cabin returned to silence. Staring at the slats of the bed above me, lit red with rhythmic blinks of an alarm clock, I regretted coming out, the first time of many.

37

38

IV As I crossed the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge en route to Berkeley, the sky, as it always did on this route, changed from blue to grey. When I got off the bridge in Richmond it was sprinkling, and by the time I’d taken the Albany exit in an urgent search of a gas station it had begun to pour down in thick globs. It was late afternoon; I was on my way home from play rehearsal at my high school in Marin. Under the shelter of a roofed 76, I filled my tank. A homeless man with a beard and a shredded coach’s jacket limped towards me from behind the convenience store.

“You got a dollar?” he sneered at me, and mumbled something. I lifted my hands.

“No cash on me,” I said. “Sorry.”

The tank was full. I put the nozzle back quickly, slid into my car, turned the key. He walked violently away from me, battling his own body, straining his neck to turn back, yelling some indistinct epithets. Then, muffled by the windshield: “You fucking faggot.” What gave it away, I wondered. My hair, stiff with pomade? The tightness of my jeans when I bent to twist the cap on the gas tank? As if there really were some kind of sign, as if he knew something I was loath to witness in myself. And yet, he’d crystallized a feeling I’d been trying shamefully to put into words for years. In his body, stiff with rage, it was effortless.

I inched the car out from under the roof and began to cry, rain slapping the hood, then the windshield. I turned onto a frontage road and pulled into the next parking lot, my eyes too wet to see the road. The windshield wipers taunted from the other side of the glass.

39

40

V Daniel was nice enough. He worked at the acting school where I took classes; I’d revered him after watching him as Queen Victoria and Reagan and Hitler all in the same play the year before. At a coffee shop in the West Village he spent his time flattering me, lisping invitations to his childhood home in Texas and to every jazz club in Harlem. I spent my time mentally arranging par-baked ideas of how much lilt to add to my responses, how my body might fit with another man’s, how unworthy I felt opposite him.

We finished our drinks and he asked to walk me home. I replied that he could join me if he wanted to trek a mile and a half through the snow to a dining hall, hoping he’d catch the red flag and draw the logical conclusion that no one on a college meal plan could be right or ready for a grown up relationship, let alone the elegant, queer one I figured he had in mind.

But Daniel, persistent, stood up, put his coat on over his wiry man-arms. “Sure.” He flashed me a bony, knowing smile. I stood up after him, knotted my scarf tightly around my neck, and walked through the door, which he held open wide enough to hammer home his intentions.

The air was frigid when we left the coffee shop. In my head I begged Daniel not to light a cigarette, knowing how worn—how at home—his hands would look around it (I looked at mine: soft, young). I did my best through our ten-block conversation to match each of his laughs with ones just a little less hearty. Quantitative equals, I reasoned, that would let him know slowly, subtly, humanely, that I was not someone capable of dating a real, adult man. As we approached Union Square my boots skidded on a subway grate. He put his hands on my back to steady me.

The next week I didn’t respond to any of his messages. After a month he stopped trying.

41

42

VI At 7:30 AM, I wept on the corner of Greenwich and West 11th, February wind drying my face as I gripped a streetlight pole. My knuckles reddened and pruned, shaking from the cold.

I had worked on Bent for several months, had fallen asleep reading it on the floor as the clock hit midnight on New Years, a full season before. In the play, two gay men, Max and Horst, meet on a train to Dachau and find themselves moving rocks back and forth from pile to meaningless pile into a virtual eternity. Standing side-by-side during stiff-backed breaks, never making eye contact nor touching, they bring each other to climax with sparse, emaciated words, quarrel with married-couple pettiness, and struggle to finally eke out admissions of love. By the end, Horst is dead, murdered by a Nazi officer. His final moment of consciousness he spends rubbing his left eye, a sign language he has created to tell Max he loves him.

For months, I staggered under the weight of impossibility—of doing Horst justice, of finding some vacuole within myself as available for love as his body was, all but a hamper of bones.

I, who had forced my voice into a fry before it dropped, who had wept being called faggot, and who had failed to respond to a man that only wanted to get coffee and see jazz uptown.

I realized, standing on the corner, that he wanted only for someone to see his queerness not in statistical terms, nor in some ranking of immorality, but for what it was: a yearning for love, for touch from any good man who wanted the same. I looked up, saline drying in narrow lines on my cheek. Horst was still too large to be conceivable, but he had given me something to latch onto, a place to bite into my own queerness in a way I didn’t know existed.

Months later, in our final performance, I rubbed my left eye and let my body hit the ground, pierced by the SS officer’s bullet. I laid, limp. The actor playing Max picked me up, supported me, hands on the soft flesh between my chest and shoulders. He held me, queer mass, unhindered.

43

44

VII The two of us barely knew each other, but Elliott asked if I might like to be his partner for a class project about a theatre company from Australia. From across the room, short-ways, I nodded yes, of course. We had spoken a few times, when I’d told him I liked what he was wearing: a colorful flight suit one day; the next, a sweater with sleeves too short for his long, charmingly-flimsy arms. It was a way of being I had avoided for myself, opting instead for tucked-in t-shirts and loose jeans with black Chuck Taylors—always the same, stilted with control, allowing me to move through my day mostly unnoticed. A week later, we set a date to get coffee and plan for the project. We walked on West 4th Street in search of shelter from the first blisteringly-cold day of Fall. Inside, he patiently nursed an Earl Grey and I drank a latte. We said little about the project; instead, we lauded Caryl Churchill and A Little Life and the Pacific Northwest, for which we were both strangely homesick. He flopped around in excitement; I tried flopping too. When it was time to go, we hugged goodbye. I tensed my stomach and walked back to my apartment, head down against the wind.

We planned to meet again. Elliott suggested the next Thursday, after class. I agreed. Two days before, as I sat at my desk, he reached out to grip my shoulder. “I’m excited for coffee,” he said. I grabbed my bag, ran down the stairs, and then to Broadway where I cried, disoriented, and speed-walked uptown. That night a canker sore opened wide in my mouth. The next day my cuticles cracked in the cold and leaked little pearls of blood. On Thursday morning I broke out on my forehead. If my body falling away didn’t signal some coming end, I hoped it might at least repulse my date. It did not.

I did my best not to pace on the jute rug in my bedroom too much; my feet were pink and scored enough by its fibers already. In class, I felt nauseous and wished the lesson that day, about a performance artist who had shaped her life into a self-inflicted tragedy of Greek proportion, might go on forever. I laughed quietly in my seat. The ridiculousness of it all.

45

46

We headed to a cafe on MacDougal Street where we sat in dim light at a small table. He ordered a piece of carrot cake; his elbows jutted from the table as he held his fork. I ordered another latte and tried hard to match my arms to his. I paid, accidentally, shaking my head to mean “that’s fine,” and exhumed money from my wallet, sending him a message that I may have the space within me to go through all of this again.

Two weeks later he came to a show I was in. When I emerged from the dressing room, he stood in a corner of the theatre lobby, dressed brightly, a badly-hidden easter egg. We hugged hello, and I thanked him loudly for coming.

“Do you want to go get a drink?” he asked after some biased praise.

“Yes. Yes. Okay,” I said, straining pointlessly to let my breath reach somewhere deeper than my upper chest.

We trudged through the snow, wearing the same Chelsea boots, laughing at our little mutual recognition. I held my umbrella out, evenly between us. My legs, my arms, my stomach all as loose I could make them. At the bar, somewhere underground in the Village, warm with yellow light, my knee hung freely from the stool. He touched it with his under the counter, above it paying for my glass of red wine. I breathed, slowly, softly.

His sweater was red, loose-necked, knitted with thick yarn. I studied it from my seat’s distance, scared to see too closely the crimson fibers, flailing through their stitches.

47

48

AND THE HOUSE IS NEVER BUILT

by Dylan Cloud ~ Graphics by Zuzia Czemier

pt.1 Five months earlier, in late March, Claire was disembarking a cruise ship docked in St. Maarten. The tickets had been a Christmas present from Aunt Nora to the whole family, and while the early spring travel dates had meant cheap fares, they’d also meant that Claire would be in the Caribbean for the groundbreaking day of her future home.

“It’s no big deal,” Ray, her contractor, had said over the phone. “I’ve done this plenty of times. This is the best day, trust me.”

Uncle Steve, unable to help himself, had brought it up one night at dinner: “Isn’t that supposed to be bad luck, Claire?” But a kick under the table from Nora had made sure that was the only time it had come up.

So, without Claire, Ray’s crew had set to work, first clearing the empty lot at 272 Oakwood Terrace of brush, grass, and bush, then peeling back the topsoil along the foundation’s measurements, leaving an outline of the house whose absence was marked in neon-orange spray paint. Trenches were cut for the form-boards and Xs sprayed around the property where a crew of laborers was brought in to dig holes eight inches deep and sixteen inches wide to be filled in the coming days with concrete for the house’s footing.

One of the men digging these holes was Miguel Gustavo, a Venezuelan laborer who Ray had picked up in the parking lot of Home Depot on Thursday morning. “Excava,” Ray said, pointing to the Xs, “para la foundation.”

Miguel Gustavo nodded, and set to digging.

The ground was hard at first from the March 49

morning frost. As the sun rose the earth softened, and the digging became easier. Three men worked alongside Miguel Gustavo, men he recognized by sight but whose names he didn’t know. They wore baseball caps low over their eyes and sometimes stopped picking at their Xs to reach into the ground and pull out small slabs of concrete left behind by the house that had stood here before.

As he dug, Miguel Gustavo became lost in thought, slipping in and out of daydreams with the drone of heavy machinery, the rhythm of his pick and shovel. He imagined what it might be like to be a speck of dirt in one of the holes he was digging: a sudden light pouring in overhead; a shovel sliding into the ground beneath his feet; a thunderous rush of noise, and the fear, at being flung through the air; landing on the uncrowded lawn where after all this time he could stretch out his arms and make his fingers wide again; he’d forgotten that there were colors—that there were trees attached to roots, and leaves attached to trees, and leaves were green.

He stopped digging a moment to wipe the sweat from his temple, and checked to see how much he had left. At the bottom of the hole something flashed, gold and half buried in the dirt. Miguel Gustavo thumbed his ring finger, and, finding his wedding band still there, looked over at where the other men digging, half buried in their own holes. He reached down and grabbed it. The thing was a small gold rectangle made of plastic, caked in mud and covered in scratches where dirt

and stones had scraped at the paint. There was a button on the side that, when pressed, released the end of a USB flash drive. Not thinking too much of it, Miguel Gustavo put the USB in the little pocket of his pants next to his lighter, and resumed digging.

ed him straight out of school to their Cambridge offices, promising free rein to work on whatever project or product he had in mind.

Lemyre accepted IBM’s offer, and agreed to start at the end of the summer. He spent June, July, and August in solitude on Cape Cod, writing poems that on Labor Day he’d thrown into the ocean after a passing remark The flash drive had been made in 1998 as from his father that he’d “really gotten his part of a promotional tie-in between IBM and money’s worth for that thesaurus.” the Nagano Winter Olympics. “Gold Medal” gift baskets had been sent out to department heads and executives at IBM in celebration of Lemyre showed up September for his first the world records set by the games’ IBM-de- day of work wearing a suit he’d borrowed signed website: “Most Hits On An Internet Site from his father; the arms were too long; evIn One Minute” and “Most Popular Internet erything else about it was too small. An HR Event Ever Recorded.” The gold drives includ- Representative gave him a temporary ID card ed in the baskets had only been prototypes, and a brief tour of the building that ended at however—it wouldn’t be for another two and his new office, a yellow room with nails from a half years, in September of 2000, that flash old pictures still in the walls and windows drives would be made available for commer- that looked down onto the Charles. The HR cial sale, a slow rollout due in part to the ap- rep left without giving Lemyre any work to do, parently-tepid response of gift-basket recip- so he waited at the window and watched the ients to their 2MB drives. In fact, the drives splashing of geese as they landed in the filthy had mostly been looked at confusedly for a river. few seconds, then put to the side or in a desk After a while, there was a gentle knocking drawer and forgotten about; the Nagano/IBM at the door behind him.

Gift-Basket Assembly Committee had stored “Edward Lemeah?” said a soft voice with the instructions for use in a README file on a thick Boston accent. Lemyre turned: a redthe device itself. faced man with thinning hair and a neck that The drive which was now in Miguel Gus- swelled over his shirt-collar was standing in tavo’s little pocket had at one point belonged the doorway. “How you doing? Christopher to Edward Lemyre, one of the handful of IBM Ward.” employees who had figured out how to use “Hi,” Lemyre said, and shook the man’s the flash drive. Lemyre was a genius, who in hand. “Uh—Edward Lemyre.” They stood the late seventies had been a regular fixture shaking hands a moment—Chris’ hand was on the child-prodigy talk-show circuit, divid- hard and gray—both waiting for the other to ing in his head eighteen digit numbers that say something. the studio audience at Donahue or The To“Yeah, hi. Christopher Ward,” he introduced night Show would take turns shouting from again. “I’m uhh, I’m gonna be kinda like your their seats. At 21, Lemyre had completed boss. But—they told me basically that I should his masters in Computer Science at MIT, and just let you do whatever you wanna do. Handswhile there had developed a cost-effective off.” Chris spoke quickly and quietly, his ac32-bit microprocessor that would help lay the cent so thick that certain words—his name, in groundwork for the personal-computer revo- particular—sounded painful to speak. “So, uh, lution of the late 90s. IBM, impressed, recruit- what were you thinking? I mean, any ideas?”

50

“I don’t know. I’m not really sure,” Lemyre said. “Or…I have one idea. But I’m not exactly sure yet.”

“Okay, okay—that’s great! Perfect. Don’t worry about it—you know what? You take your time figuring all that out. I’m gonna go get you all set up with payroll and everything. You put together an email and send that over to me whenever you’re ready, and we’ll get you going, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Great. Great.” Chris seemed nervous. “You all set here? Know where the coffee and everything is? Bathroom?”

“Yeah, I think I’m all set…

Chris lingered another couple of seconds, mumbled something Lemyre couldn’t make out, then turned to leave. But an second thought stopped him suddenly. “Listen, I, uhh.

I know it can be kinda hard at first starting at a new place. But you’re a smart kid, you’ll figure it out. And this is kinda weird, but, to be honest with you, I’ve never been anybody else’s boss before. So…” Chris’ hands were shaking. “Okay? Great, so… I’ll see you around, then.”

A phone rang far away. Somebody answered it. Lemyre looked out the window again. There were raindrops on the outside of the glass, but it wasn’t raining.

Lemyre spent the rest of the day writing his email. He hadn’t been sure of his idea at first, but the more he wrote, the more certain he became. He wrote furiously and effortlessly, the shape of the project revealing itself as if it were sitting on the desk in front of him. He finished the outline then added a section at the bottom providing a quick overview of possible future uses in schools and hospitals, and a conclusion emphasizing that this could be a “revolution” that would “change humanity as we have understood it to this point.” He sent the email at 4:15 then looked out the window for forty-five minutes, not sure whether or not he was allowed to leave before 5.

51

Lemyre didn’t see Chris for the rest of the week. He showed up on time every day and waited, nervous but bored, in his office with the door closed. Every few hours he did a lap of the office: through the kitchenette, past the office of the bearded red head with the charcoal drawing of a mermaid on his door, into the bathroom, and then back the way he came, scanning over the tops of the cubicles the whole way, never finding Chris.

Finally, Friday morning, Lemyre again heard the soft knocking on his door.

“Hey, Eddy? It’s me,” Chris opened the door a crack. “Mind if I come in?”

“Come on in, Chris,” Lemyre called back.

“Sorry, I don’t know if you like ‘Ed’ or ‘Eddy’ or whatever,” Chris said. “I used to have a buddy named Eddy, so…”

“Yeah, that’s fine, I mean, it doesn’t really matter to me.”

“Hmm,” Chris looked at the floor with a pained look on his face, his mind obviously somewhere else, then looked back at Lemyre and smiled. “So that was some email, huh.”

“Yeah…I hope it wasn’t too—” “No, no, It was great. Really good,” he said.

“I mean, way over my head, haha, but uh…

So, I showed it to Calvin and them—they’re my bosses, the guys who decide these kind of things—and they thought it looked good, I mean, you should be good to go.”

“Really? That’s it?”

“That’s it. Like I said, hands-off, right?”

“Right,” Lemyre said. He hadn’t realized until now just how much he’d been expecting them to laugh in his face.

“So, I just got a couple of things to go over with you here. This…” He shuffled through a bundle of envelopes he was holding. “Is your acceptance letter to the… Johns Hopkins Neuroscience PhD program,” Chris read from the letter in a sarcastic, haughty voice, then handed it to Lemyre. “Congratulations, by the way,” he chuckled.

“Johns Hopkins? In Baltimore?”

“I know—poo poo on Harvard, right? Just

up the road! But, uh, I guess Johns Hopkins is the best, so…”

“I guess so.”

“These…” Chris handed Lemyre the next envelope, “are gonna be your tuition checks.

IBM’s gonna pay for everything—you just drop those off at the beginning of every semester—there should be twelve in there.”

The checks inside the envelope were dated each September and January for the next six years, and made out to Johns Hopkins University for $14,700. The word “TUITION” was printed on the memo lines of each.

“And these,” he handed Lemyre the final envelope. “Are gonna be for your books, your pencils, whatever.” This envelope had twelve checks as well, dated the same way, but made out to Edward Lemyre, with “BOOKS” printed on the memo line. The amounts had been left blank. “Since you don’t know how much you’re gonna need for your classes, you’re just gonna go ahead and buy your own supplies, then write in however much you spent, and IBM’ll reimburse you. Sorry about that, I know it’s kind of a pain.”

“No, that’s okay,” Lemyre said. “Wait—so I’m just leaving? When?”

“I mean, today, if you can,” Chris said.

“Classes started two weeks ago—you’re gonna have some catching up to do already. You don’t wanna miss more than you have to.”

“Yeah.” Lemyre glanced at the Dr. Strange Love poster he’d hung up yesterday. He’d taken it from his room at home.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Chris said, “You said in your email you needed a Neuroscience degree. And this is the best of the best, I mean, come on…” Red splotches had appeared on Chris’ face; one next to his mouth was half-hidden under his mustache.

“No, I know. You’re right.”

“All right. Good. So…I’ll see you around then.” Chris shrugged his shoulders. “Study hard. And uh… Be careful. If you need anything…You know. I’m just a phone call or an email away.” He thought for a second. “You’re

gonna be great, kid. You’re my golden boy, right?” He clapped his hands limply.

“Yeah….thanks Chris, uhh, you too, I guess.”

“Hmm.” Chris stopped his clapping and frowned. “I—,” he croaked, but couldn’t find the words. “I’ll be seeing you, Eddy.”

Lemyre rolled up his poster and didn’t close the door.

Outside, he squinted back at the IBM building, the brightness of the September sun not fitting quite right with the coolness of the air, the few dead leaves already rattling along the pavement In elementary school, his mother used to sign him out in the middle of the day so the two of them could go out for lunch before his special math classes at MIT. As they walked to the parking lot, Lemyre remembered, the school would undergo a kind of transformation, the shadows of the trees and the classroom windows suddenly somehow different—he was at school, but not in school, but everybody else was still in school, but his mother was there, but his teacher was inside.

There must have been dozens of lunches on dozens of afternoons, but when he thought back to them it seemed like a single day. It was a day that had looked just like this, he remembered. Until now though he’d forgotten the feeling.

The Charles river was brown. pt.1.5 It was agreed that Lemyre’s father, Dr. Harold Lemyre, MD, PhD, would stay behind in Cambridge, then follow his son down to Baltimore once the house was sold. The two of them still lived together in the house Lemyre had grown up in, an old Victorian in Observatory Hill—the house was bigger than they needed, and although Dr. Lemyre often complained about the thin windowpanes in the house that in the winter let in drafts that made his toes cold, this was the first time any 52

talk of leaving Cambridge had been taken seriously.

In his heyday, Dr. Lemyre had been a brilliant physician with a career marked by two crowning achievements: the significant advancements he’d been responsible for in research of germline mutation-based cancers, and a brief period in the late 80s when he’d acted as Ted Kennedy’s primary care physician. In his old age, however, Dr. Lemyre had begun to have a hard time remembering things. The things were mostly small—phone numbers, open refrigerator doors, bath taps— and, for now, remained something that he and his son could joke about. But on Friday night when the two of them had sat at the kitchen table discussing whether or not Dr. Lemyre would be following his son down to Baltimore, neither one had brought up the afternoon last July when he had taken the car out to meet Lemyre for dinner in Harvard Square and ended up in Woburn, at the old house his uncle had given him as a wedding present.

A buyer was found quickly enough—the nephew of an old colleague of Dr. Lemyre’s who’d recently accepted a position at Harvard—and, with the furniture in storage and the mail held at the post office, the two Lemyres were united just weeks later on twin beds on the fourth floor of the Doubletree Inn in Baltimore.

While Lemyre went to class and did his lab rotations, Dr. Lemyre went out with realtors, hunting for modest townhouses not too far from campus with generous amounts of natural light. He found one after a few days that he deemed perfect—two bed, two bath, unfinished basement—and agreed to sign a renewable contract for a three-year rental that afternoon.

That sounds great, the realtor told him, the only thing was: the previous tenants had had some complaints about the plumbing—if they wanted to move in same day, that was okay— Dr. Lemyre would just have to remember to let the plumber in at ten o’ clock the day after 53

tomorrow.

“That’s fine,” he’d told her. “That’s fine.”

When Lemyre had first arrived at Johns Hopkins, he’d enjoyed a brief period as an object of interest to his professors and classmates who’d all heard the rumors of the MIT wunderkind shipped in on IBM’s payroll. He’d been courted by the first-year study groups, received bundled Xeroxes of notes from the second-years, and been held after class by professors to be reminded that he “wouldn’t be receiving any special treatment…by the way, you wouldn’t happen to know why my emails aren’t showing up when I click on them?” As the year went on, however, and the quizzes and the exams and the lab work piled up, interest in Lemyre waned, and it became increasingly apparent that, however brilliant a programmer he might be, as a neuroscientist, Lemyre was mediocre at best.

But he was a genius. The lessons, when he heard them, made sense. He understood the things that people said to him as long as they kept talking, the things he read in textbooks as long as he was on the right page.

Neuroscience was real. He thought about it constantly. But it was impossible to think when people were asking him questions. He didn’t know how to explain that to the other students, to his professors, to the librarians who smiled sadly at him.

The year passed slowly; final exams came with the shadow of summer lab research, and while Lemyre was relieved, at least, that there wouldn’t be any coursework for a while, the thought of three months in a hot lab studying hippocampal neuron death in major depressives didn’t bring him much comfort. He’d gone at the end of the semester for one final meeting with his advisor, who’d handed him a transcript with a dripping list of Ds and C minuses circled in orange sharpie. “You do know that this is supposed to be your easiest year?” she’d asked him. He hadn’t been sure what to say to that.

None of that seemed to matter to IBM, any-

way. Lemyre’s paychecks kept coming every Friday, a USPS forward-mail sticker stuck to each one. He’d sent Chris an email to let him know his new address almost eight months ago, but had never received a response. That email had been his only correspondence with IBM since he’d arrived in Baltimore. He’d mentioned this once to his father, saying how strange he found it. “IBM’s a good company,” was all his father said. “They had a movie showing at the World’s Fair in, what was it…

65? 66? We had the Lincoln then… Lincoln Continental. A good car. I’m sure they know what they’re doing.”

Summers had been difficult in the old house. Julys in particular, Dr. Lemyre kept the blinds drawn and the windows shut just like he had when Lemyre’s mother had been sick.

The stale air that filled the house made for a kind of stillness over things that, no matter what, made Lemyre feel ten years old again; he would become clumsy, often missing stairs or tripping on the carpet. At night he would sweat underneath his sheets, and even when he opened the window in his room and put his face up against the cool wall next to his bed, in his dreams there was always something in the room at the end of the hall that he knew he didn’t like.

For whatever reason, in Baltimore that didn’t happen. The summer wind passed freely through the townhouse. Dr. Lemyre woke up early and left unfinished crosswords in the paper. On July 16th, neither one said anything.

Lemyre dropped the third TUITION check off at the bursar’s office on registration day that September, then sat down on a bench in the hallway outside to go through his syllabi and see how much he’d need to make the next BOOKS check out to. In the coming semester, he would have to do three neuro electives, begin his thesis research, attend the neuroscience seminar series, complete two more lab rotations, and pass the Oral Exam of the Doctoral Board. Most textbooks went for around

75 to 200 dollars a book, most classes required two or three books, plus study materials, lab supplies he was expected to provide, everyday classroom expenses…he made the check out for $2400, folded it up, then slipped it into his back pocket.

There was a Bank of America around the corner from the townhouse that Lemyre passed on his walk home from campus.

He waited in line behind a woman digging through her purse for her card. Over and over, the woman turned to Lemyre or to the teller to apologize, then back to her purse. A little boy standing next to her at the counter yanked as hard as he could at a pen that was chained to the counter. Finally, the woman found her card in her jacket pocket, laughed like this was the funniest thing in the world, and withdrew forty dollars. “Come on, Teddy—time to go!” she called the little boy, and the two of them left holding hands. In Teddy’s other hand, Lemyre could see the pen’s chain, dragging along the ground.

Lemyre stepped up to the counter and took the check from his pocket.

“Hi! Welcome to Bank of America,” the teller said. She raised her eyebrows. “Sorry about that.”

“Jacket pocket,” Lemyre said solemnly, and shook his head.

“Right! Always the last place you look.” She laughed. “And the weird thing was, I swear I saw her check there like three times.” She laughed again. Lemyre recognized her; she’d done BOOKS deposits for him before—she had a nervous tic, and sometimes blinked for too long. “Anyways…How can I help you this afternoon?”

“I just need to deposit a check.”

“Okay, no problem. Do you have a checking account with us?”

“Uhh, yeah,” Lemyre said.

“What’s the name on the account?”

“Edward Lemyre? L-E-M-Y-R-E?” “Oh that’s right!” she said. “You’re been here before, right? I remember because,” she 54

blinked, embarrassed but smiling, “your name reminded me of a lemur, haha.”

“What?” Lemyre said, laughing.

“Like those monkeys, you know?”

“I know the monkeys, haha,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that comparison before.

I don’t know whether I should be insulted or not.”

“I don’t know—I always thought they were kind of cute,” she said, and laughed again.

Lemyre felt himself blush, and looked at the ground. “Okay, Mr. Lemur.” She typed something into the computer and studied the screen. “Oh—You’re a student, right?” She blinked again. “Well, if you wanted, you could open a student checking account for free.”

“Oh, umm. Thanks, but, I don’t really know if I—” “Plus—I really shouldn’t tell you this but…” she leaned across the counter to whisper. “they’re running a promotion right now—$300 when you open any new account.” She leaned back. “Talk about easy money, I mean—how could you pass that up, right?”

“Right, yeah.”

“Okay, great; I’ll just get you set up here…”

Lemyre watched her type into the computer for a while, not looking at him. The typing stopped whenever she blinked; her body froze, and her face scrunched up in concentration waiting for the tic to pass. “And you’re done,” she said, finally, and looked back at Lemyre. “And—oh! I forgot to tell you the best part.” She reached underneath the counter and pulled out a binder that she opened in front of him. “With your new account, you get your choice of these,” she waved her hand in front of the page she held open, “lovely debit card designs.”

Lemyre scanned the page. The debit cards all had cartoon characters on them; a few he recognized—Fred Flintstone, Bugs Bunny— but most of them he’d never seen before.

“My personal favorite,” the teller said, pointing to a pink card with a white cat whose name Lemyre couldn’t think of. “Hello Kitty.

55

Love her—this is the same one I have, haha.”

“Oh, uhh. Yeah sure. That one’s fine.”

“Really?” She seemed surprised for some reason. “Okay, Hello Kitty it is. I like it—real men wear pink, right?”

Lemyre shrugged. Real men wear pink? It sounded like a saying.

“Okay…Gimme one second here…” She slid the debit card out of the binder and put it in a machine under the desk that punched his name into the plastic. “Hot off the presses,” she laughed when she was done, and handed it to him.

“Thanks,” he said. The plastic actually was warm. “And, uh, the check?”

“Right, duh. The reason you came in.” She laughed again.

Lemyre unfolded the check and looked it over. $2400. He ran the numbers in his head again, and thought about how much three neuro electives really cost, the doctoral board. About how this was supposed to be his easiest year.

“You know what?” Lemyre looked down the counter at where Teddy had ripped the pen free. “Do you have a pen?”

The teller watched Lemyre add an extra loop to the “2,” then scratch out the “two” and write “three” in tiny script above it. And suddenly he had a check for $3400.

He handed it to the teller. She looked at the IBM logo, then back at Lemyre, and back at the check. He knew that they both were thinking the same thing.

“Should I…put this in the new account?” she asked.

“Please.”

“Okay. That way if you ever want to access the money from this check specifically,” she blinked. He could see the outlines of her pupils darting back and forth underneath her eyelids. “You should just use the Hello Kitty card.”

“Thanks a lot,” he said.

“Thank you for using Bank of America. My name is Sonya, let me know if there’s anything

else I can help you with today.”

She looked at Lemyre’s forehead, smiling when she said this. To anybody watching, it would have seemed like they were making eye contact, but they weren’t.

Lemyre went straight home from the bank and told Dr. Lemyre to put a jacket on, and called a cab to Inner Harbor. They ate a late lunch at a seafood restaurant—Lemyre had lobster and ordered the crab’s legs for his father—and afterwards they went to the aquarium.

“Not as good as the New England Aquarium,” Dr. Lemyre said. “I mean, look! What the hell’s wrong with the penguins in this place?”

“They’re puffins, dad,” Lemyre said, reading the sign. “They’re different—these ones can fly. Penguins can’t fly.”

“Penguins can’t fly,” Dr. Lemyre said, annoyed, and started walking towards the escalator. “I’m going to the octopuses.”

The semester began. And while it seemed like the rest of the students had all come back from the summer with a new, more adult kind of seriousness to their studies, Lemyre remained the spoiled child of the group, less wunderkind now than leech on IBM’s nipple, and on the time and resources of his fellow students. Even though he spent as much time as the rest of them studying—more, even— when the others convened in the hall outside the exam rooms to “complain” about how tough that all-nighter had been, Lemyre could be found in the bathroom, looking down in the toilet bowl at his coffee-vomit, only now remembering the answers to questions he’d gotten wrong.

“Hey, uh—Ed, right?” Francis, another Neuroscience PhD approached him one day after Cognition II. “I just wanted to say, you know, I know that with lab rotations and lectures and everything, that, it can really be easy to feel like you’re drowning sometimes…but, if you wanted, I was just thinking—I have some free

time on Sundays, and I was thinking maybe I could help you with some of the material?

I tutor undergrads a lot—not that you would necessarily have to pay me, I mean maybe, but…yeah. Just wanted to put that out there.”

Francis smiled and patted Lemyre on the shoulder.

“Uh, yeah, Francis. Maybe. Um. Thanks.”

“Okay, cool. I’ll see you around then.”

Lemyre waited until Francis had turned the corner at the end of the hall.

On the wall next to Lemyre there was a cork-board where students could hang posters for activities and events around campus. “Photography Club,” read one. “Develop a Positive Self-Image!” With a pen, Lemyre scribbled out the club chair’s phone number at the bottom, and wrote its square, “16890035231979420416,” then he crossed that out, wrote “F U CK,” and turned and ran.

The semester ended. Lemyre, in a sleepless daze, walked out of his Physiology of Sensory Transduction final onto the empty campus of the winter-recessed Johns Hopkins, and it occurred to him that he’d forgotten to get his father a Christmas present.

He took the same route home he always did, across campus and down Charles street, but it didn’t take him past many shops—there was the campus bookstore, and its floorto-ceiling racks of John Hopkins Blue Jays sweatshirts, but he was pretty sure Dr. Lemyre had one of those already. He was about to turn off of Charles street, trying to remember whether 7/11 had Hallmark cards or not, when the Baltimore Museum of Art came into view, and with it, the gift shop.

He crossed the Museum plaza, past the dead cherry-blossom trees, and jogged up the stairs. A museum guard nodded to him as he entered, and gestured toward the ticket desk. “Oh, no…I’m—gift shop?” Lemyre stuttered. The guard nodded again, and gestured in the opposite direction. “Thanks.”

A sneeze echoed somewhere on the other side of the empty hall. Neither Lemyre nor the 56

guard said anything.

The shop was unremarkable, full of miniature Matisse reproductions, BMA-branded paperweights and pens, and boxes of purple crystals. Lemyre considered each and decided they were all too-obviously bought in a museum gift shop—the gift shop for a museum that his father hadn’t even been to.

He was the only customer there. A cashier stood behind the counter, looking at him now and then as he browsed. He flipped through some coasters printed with woodcuts illustrating different “views” of the Eiffel tower: a wagon-driver on a muddy road watching the sun rise behind the tower, a group of men standing at the base of the tower during its construction, Japanese lanterns strung across a river as the tower lit up the sky, a flock of ducks conversing on a riverbed with the tower so small in the background that it was almost invisible.

Lemyre had never seen his father use a coaster. He tried to picture him drinking anything—coffee, wine, soup—but couldn’t.

“Do you need help finding something?” The sound of the cashier’s voice made him jump.

“Hmm? Oh, no. I’m just browsing. Thanks.”

Lemyre put the coasters down and smiled at the cashier. She was older than he was, though not by much, with short hair, and a blue and gold tattoo that started on her collarbones and disappeared underneath a red BMA Gift-Shop t-shirt.

He browsed the knick-knacks a while longer then went to the bookshelf, and with his head turned sideways read the spines of each book. The titles passed in front of him meaninglessly in his tired delirium.He took small steps back and forth, snaking down the bookshelf until he reached Z, then stood back up. There was nothing.

A more familiar kind of tiredness came over him then. He yawned, and rubbed his eyes. There would be something else on the way home, some golf club or patterned tie to be left in a closet come New Years.

57

“Couldn’t find what you were looking for?”

The cashier asked as he was leaving.

Lemyre stopped. “No, it’s just… I was looking for a Christmas present for my dad. But I couldn’t really find…” His eye caught a golden book, wrapped in plastic, that had been left on the counter. “What’s this?”

On the book’s cover was a drawing of an elephant wearing clothes, sitting on a stool, reading from the same book whose cover he was on. Lemyre had seen the elephant before, a long time ago. The sight of it now reminded him of old sensations: rubbing his face on glossy magazine paper, pain in his legs as he kicked them over the edge of a wooden chair, a phone ringing behind a partition whose wallpaper was…carpets? And he could feel his father somewhere close, coming soon.

The sun taking too long to set.

“My dad used to have a picture just like this hanging in the waiting room of his office,” he said. “Does the elephant get sick? I mean, this elephant—is there a drawing of him where he’s sick? And there are hands? Hands, like…

It’s hard to explain.”

“It’s possible, haha.” The cashier seemed unaffected by the strangeness of his reaction. “This is leftover from an exhibition on children’s artwork that we did a couple months ago. Que fait Émile?—it’s like an early children’s encyclopedia that this aristocratic family in the 1850s commissioned Louis la Marche, a famous illustrator at the time, to make for their son, Émile. He’s the elephant, see?” She pointed at the cover. “Every page has Émile doing something that’s a different letter of the alphabet. Honestly, I’m kind of surprised that your dad had the poster—la Marche had basically faded into obscurity. I’d never even heard of him before the exhibition opened, but—he’s kind of a genius, don’t you think?”

“Do you—” Lemyre heard voices behind him speaking Italian, and turned to look at the family of tourists that had just walked in, two parents and their young son. “Do you know a

lot about art?”

“Some,” she said. “I mean, I went to school for it. Or—sort of.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I had a year left, but then this guy in New York told me he wanted to do a gallery showing with my work, so I told school that I wasn’t coming back for a semester. Then that didn’t really work out, and I took off another semester, and then another… and now, here I am: the museum gift shop, refuge of failed artists everywhere.” It sounded like she’d given this speech many times before.

“You don’t make art anymore?”

“No, I do. But—I don’t know, I haven’t finished anything I’ve actually liked in a long time.”

She thought for a second. “MICA was good because it gave you deadlines and forced you to actually finish your shit. But they also had this really specific way of thinking about things that was really fucking unhealthy. It gave me this, like, complex where now as soon as I get close to finishing anything, I just realize it’s terrible and throw it away. The only stuff I’ve made since I left that I actually like are just sketches, or the beginnings of these paintings that I know could be good, but won’t actually be, and so I just end up not finishing them. And it’s like—I don’t know.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, haha. Moral of the story is fuck art school.”

“Yeah,” Lemyre said. “But, don’t you—” There was a loud clang across the store. The Italian boy had knocked a book display off of a table with his backpack. His mother grabbed him by the arm, and began to reprimand him in harsh, whispered Italian as the father tried to put the display back together. The little boy started to cry.

“It’s okay! Don’t worry about it!” The cashier called to them, waving her arms. She gave a thumbs-up. “No problemo! uhh—Está bien!”

The father gave the thumbs-up back, and an apologetic smile.

“Sorry—” the cashier said, obviously flustered. “So, did you want to buy this, or…”

“Oh—yeah. Please,” Lemyre said.

“Okay.” The register clacked as she entered his purchase. “Your total is gonna be 32.18.

And we do take credit. And debit.”

Lemyre had two twenties in his wallet. His tongue felt stiff and dry, like someone had pushed a toothpick through it. He handed the cashier the Hello Kitty card.

“I went to art school, too,” he said, watching her run the card.

“No kidding! Where?”

“Oh—no, I—not really. I was joking.”

“Oh…haha,” she laughed uncomfortably.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Yeah… Well, um, here you go.” She handed him back the Hello Kitty card.

“Thanks.” He took the bag with the book in from the counter, and thought for a second.

“I—that was a bad joke.”

“Kind of, yeah,” she laughed again, a real laugh this time. Lemyre laughed, too.

He thanked her again, smiled at the Italian boy on his way out, and walked the rest of the way home. He wrapped Que fait Émile? in Rudolph wallpaper and hid it under his bed so Dr. Lemyre wouldn’t find it before Christmas.

He took his shoes off, then his pants, and got under the covers. He laughed into his pillow, and in a few minutes, he was asleep. He was never going back to Johns Hopkins. pt.2 In the spring of Lemyre’s second year at MIT, a family of raccoons had moved into the attic above his bedroom. Why, he’d wondered, had the raccoon parents decided that his attic was a better place to raise a family than their natural habitat, high in a tree? And then, did baby raccoons have no innate notion of “tree” as a place to be born—when they finally left the attic for the first time, upon seeing the oak tree in Lemyre’s front lawn, did they look back at his house in confusion, or did they look around at the suburban houses of 58

Lemyre’s neighborhood andand see a forest?

Lemyre, opening up a 0663 Corsair hard drive and seeing magnetoresistive heads for the first time, had been struck by their similarity to a raccoon’s brain. His theory was this: if the brain was like a computer that could read and write its own code, then it should be possible for that code to be transcribed externally and subsequently read by other brains.

When a baby raccoon sees a tree for the first time, its brain writes the code for “TREE” permanently into the raccoon’s memory. By isolating TREE in raccoon0 who had seen a tree, and inputting TREE into the brain of raccoon1, who had never seen a tree, it would be theoretically possible for raccoon1 to receive raccoon0’s memory of a tree without ever having seen a tree itself.

Dr. Lemyre had called an exterminator to kill the raccoons one day when Lemyre wasn’t home. But the questions had lingered.

January, Lemyre went back to the Bank of America.

“Hi Sonya,” he said, stepping up to the counter. “I have, uh…” He took the BOOKS check from his pocket. “Can I—pen?”

Sonya handed him a pen, saying nothing.

Lemyre watched a hand that didn’t look like his own write the check out to $40,000 and slide it across the counter. Sonya looked at the number and blinked—he struggled to make himself breathe normally—she opened her eyes, put the check in the drawer, and asked, pleasantly, if there was anything else she could do for him.

When three days had passed and IBM and the FBI hadn’t shown up at Lemyre’s door, he went back to the bank to ask what the balance was on the Hello Kitty account. Sonya typed something into the computer, blinked, then wrote a number on a piece of paper and handed it to him. $41,563.18.

Lemyre was shaking. He tried to stop himself from grinning but couldn’t.

“Oh yeah—Sonya, look at this!” He unzipped his winter jacket to show her the button-down 59

he’d bought at the Gap the day before. “Real men wear pink? Remember? Haha.”

She blinked, and didn’t smile.

“Listen,” she said. She looked over his shoulder at the teenager in line behind him, then leaned across the counter, and spoke in a low voice. “It doesn’t really matter to me what you’re doing with these checks, but I really don’t want to know about it, okay? I should have told my boss already, but I didn’t.

So, please, let’s just not talk about it. Is that okay with you?”

“Oh,” he said. “No, I mean it’s not like it’s…

Yeah. Okay.”

“Thank you for using Bank of America,” she said loudly, smiling. “My name is Sonya, let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with today.”

About half of the $40,000 went towards an EEG that Lemyre mailed away for in a MedicalDepot catalogue. The machine, big and boxy, was delivered a few weeks later, and though the catalogue had advertised on-site assembly, the deliverymen who carried it to the basement told Lemyre that they didn’t know what he was talking about. Lemyre gave them each twenty dollars, then spent the next three days assembling the EEG in the basement without instructions.

Finally, when he had the machine running, Lemyre called his father down and attached electrodes to his head. “Blink” he told him.

“Again. Again. Again,” adjusting different settings. “Don’t blink.” Lemyre shined a flashlight in his eyes. “You’re blinking. Stop. Stop blinking.”

The first phase of the experiment was the construction of a system by which the brain’s signals could be input then transcribed to code that would be legible to Lemyre’s computer. The EEG was a good starting point, but too blunt of a tool; Lemyre had to develop a modified version of the machine that could translate the brain’s electrical signals and produce a scan several dozen degrees more fine than the one he’d first bought. This was ac-

complished through a rigorous development process: about nine hours in first half of the day in the basement with Dr. Lemyre hooked up to the machine spent isolating electrical signals produced when the eye looked at a series of objects with fundamental qualitative attributes—“red,” “big,” “me,” “not me”— lunch, then nine hours in the evening writing a program that could distinguish the output signals and synthesize multiple attributes to simulate recognition—something “ROUND” and “ORANGE” would, most likely, be a basketball.

One major breakthrough had been Lemyre’s realization that children would be ideal subjects for the experiment. Because they’d experienced less of the world, children’s associations with different objects’ qualities would come out clearer, not muddled by memory. It was when Lemyre showed his father something he knew he’d never seen before that the machine was able to get its clearest output—for this, Lemyre brought home Cabbage Patch Kids and Glo-Worms and Transformers, things that hadn’t yet been invented when his father was a child; conversely, he took photos of museum artifacts, carved ivory discs and painted stones whose functions historians still didn’t know. Sometimes, though, Dr. Lemyre’s brain would give false negatives—of course he recognized the Yale class ring he kept in a yellowed envelope in his closet, the one that Dr. Rivkin, his partner at the old practice, had given him just before he died.

The move to Baltimore hadn’t been easy on Dr. Lemyre; the familiarity of life in Cambridge had allowed for a kind of routine that had at least maintained appearances—even if he didn’t know the name of the street he was on, he could tell that it was a street close to home. With this comfort gone, he found it even harder to remember things, harder to remember to write down notes to remind him of those things. Eventually, he realized, maybe it would be better if he just stayed inside, rather than try and go out into the strange and terri-

fying suburb that looked so much like Cambridge but wasn’t.

And as Dr. Lemyre shut himself inside for longer, the townhouse began increasingly to take on the smell of urine. The old man didn’t seem to notice, or else his sense of smell had started to go, but the sour smell could be strong enough at times to make Lemyre gag.

He’d find a black moistness left behind on the couch cushion where his father had just been sitting, or a faint trail along the carpet outside his bedroom. Lemyre would spray the puddles with an odor remover he’d bought at the pet shop, crack a window, then go back to whatever he’d been doing. He never brought it up. It was better just not to talk about it.

That fall, Lemyre began taking the bus to poor areas of the city and putting up flyers around the schools, advertising $60 an hour for a “Johns Hopkins Based child-psychology study.” He received only a handful of responses in the first few weeks—phone calls from incredulous working moms who more often than not ended up no-shows. He tweaked the font on new flyers and added a comic he’d found of a sarcastic child on a psychologist’s couch. He ripped down guitar lesson and moving company posters that looked too similar to his own. After weeks of trial and error, he finally managed to book two fourth graders, Cole and Daniel—best friends—for standing one-hour sessions on Wednesdays at 3:30 with Daniel and 4:30 with Cole.

The boys’ parents were put off at first by Lemyre’s murky explanation of the project— he kept using the analogy of a “harmless electric chair” to describe the EEG—but once they were allowed to try it for themselves, they opened up to the idea. And it wasn’t long before they’d mentioned to the other parents at school the easy, if strange, way of making an extra $60 a week that they’d discovered. The parents who they told told other parents, who told other parents, and in a matter of weeks, 60

Lemyre found himself fully booked from 3-9 PM on school days and all day on weekends.

The kids were restless and unafraid to complain about the thick smell of urine in the house. While his father waited upstairs, chatting with the parents at the kitchen table, Lemyre took the children down to the basement and hooked them up to the machine. He showed them photos that he found in magazines and photography books at the library or taken from family albums that he asked the parents to bring in—slowly, he worked out which images yielded the most legible signals, among them: a blue triangle, a glass of water, a face without a nose, a stuffed lion, a starving dog, the child’s mother.

He began and ended each session with a page from Que fait Émile? “Look,” he’d say, and point at Émile. “The little elephant; pretend that’s you, okay? Are you pretending?”

He’d wait for them to say that they were.

“Good. What are you doing?” And the children would answer, sometimes correctly, sometimes with baffling answers (“I’m an actress in a movie,” one girl had answered to an image of Émile skating on a frozen pond, holding hands with his parents). At the end of the session Lemyre would show them the page again and repeat the questions; if the child didn’t answer exactly as they had at the beginning, the results were thrown away. Otherwise, no words between Lemyre and the child were spoken for the duration of the hour.

For two years, it went on this way. Lemyre collected the data from hundreds of children around Baltimore, refining his program, making it more articulate. He became a fixture in the landscape of after-school activities, something to be squeezed between swimming lessons and taekwondo. Kids asked their friends to come over and play—“Can’t,” the other would say, “I have Lemyre.”

And although the parents maintained an unnerved but friendly distance with Lemyre 61

himself, with Dr. Lemyre, they had no such reservations. There was a period of time, even, where it seemed like Dr. Lemyre’s kitchen table chats were as much a reason for the parents’ attendance as the money; Lemyre would come up from the basement at the end of the hour and find them in stitches, charmed by the seemingly endless supply of jokes and funny anecdotes that Dr. Lemyre had cultivated over the years, for him an essential ingredient of good bedside manner (jokes that, growing up, Lemyre had only ever heard from the hall outside his father’s office). But Dr. Lemyre’s forgetfulness and tendency to ramble, at first part of his charm, caught up with him month by month, and though the parents were understanding, by the end of the first year, Lemyre wasn’t coming upstairs to laughter anymore, but to polite nodding and uncomfortably eager goodbyes. Eventually Lemyre had no choice but to bring the chats to a halt altogether, when Dr. Lemyre confused one of the mothers for a woman who decades earlier he’d treated for breast cancer.

Lemyre woke up every morning expecting this to be the day that he would finally get the call from Chris, demanding to know how it was possible that he was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks, how information in the brain was processed by collective dynamics of large neuronal circuits, how the only employee he’d ever had could have betrayed him like this. But every Friday the paychecks came. And at the beginning of each “semester,” Lemyre made the BOOKS checks out to greater and greater amounts.

The hardware he needed to continue improving the EEG—three letters that described the machine in his basement less and less accurately every day—wasn’t cheap, and the hundreds of dollars in session payments added up quickly.

Time moved slowly and other things happened too.

“A man came by earlier,” Lemyre’s father told him one afternoon, not long after Lemyre had deposited his first hundred-thousand dollar check. “He was looking for you. I told him you were busy.”

“A man, dad? What kind of man—who was he?”

“I don’t know, a man! He was wearing a suit, you were downstairs. I told him you were busy.” Dr. Lemyre threw his hands up, annoyed.

“Well, what did he want? Why—you should have come and got me. Did he say who he was?”

“Some company. The city, I think. I don’t know.” Dr. Lemyre went to the kitchen sink and turned the faucet on. “It’s not important. I—Let’s…where’s my shoes? Have you seen them? I haven’t seen them.” He began to pace around the kitchen, looking underneath chairs, opening cabinets.

“Don’t worry about the shoes right now, Dad. Dad, listen—” Lemyre put a hand on his father’s shoulder to calm him down, but he pulled it away violently.

“Get offa me! My shoes. I’m looking for my shoes.” He tried to leave, but Lemyre stepped in front of him.

“Dad. Dad. Dad! Look! Look at your feet!

You’re wearing your fucking shoes!” Dr. Lemyre looked down, then back at his son. “Listen, I need you to remember. The man who came to the house, did he say he was from I-B-M, dad?”

“IBM?…” Lemyre could see in his father’s eyes that the letters reminded him of something. “IBM. I…my son works for IBM. A good company.” His voice trailed off. “I gotta…”

Lemyre let his father walk past him out of the kitchen, and turned the faucet off.

He cancelled his sessions for the rest of the day. It was probably nothing; his father had made up stories before. Just to be sure, he called Bank of America and asked to check the balance on the Hello Kitty account: $320,811.07, about what he expected. The

$100,000 check had gone through.

There were voices coming from the living room where Dr. Lemyre was watching TV. He sat down on the sofa, and the two of them watched a M*A*S*H marathon for the rest of the evening. “You know, Alan Alda actually served in Korea,” Dr. Lemyre said as the credits rolled between episodes. “Not a doctor though, I don’t think.”

The phone didn’t ring that night. It was the longest in two years that Lemyre had gone without working on the experiment.

The following morning was Saturday, Columbus Day weekend 1997. Lemyre was busy, making his way through a new class of incoming first graders whose parents had scheduled sessions back in September. Sessions ran from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day; the work was good, and took Lemyre’s mind off of things long enough for him to convince himself that his father had imagined the man at the door.

Monday at 3, he had a session scheduled with a boy named Joseph, a shy second grader who’d been in a handful of times before.

Lemyre liked working with him; he didn’t fidget or ask questions like so many of the other children, and from what Lemyre could tell, he didn’t watch much TV either. (Most of the data from the more TV-obsessed children had to be thrown away, as the computer still had trouble distinguishing between the brain of a child who’d actually seen, say, a horse, and one whose grandmother fell asleep on the couch watching old Westerns.) Joseph’s mother worked unpredictable hours as a token-taker on the Baltimore Metro, and although Lemyre had been trying to convince her to set up a standing weekly session with Joseph, she hadn’t yet gone for it.

Lemyre let the two of them in and made polite chit-chat at the door. Joseph’s mother declined the coffee he offered her, then he and Joseph went downstairs while she wait62

ed in the kitchen.

Joseph climbed up on the examination table by himself, and lay back with his arms folded across his stomach. As Lemyre applied the EEG gel to his head, Joseph started to giggle.

“What?” Lemyre asked, smiling. This was the first time he’d seen Joseph laugh.

“It’s cold,” Joseph said sheepishly, still giggling, and Lemyre laughed again.

“Okay,” he said when everything was set up. “Remember this guy?” He held out Que fait Émile? “That little elephant, pretend that’s you, okay?—Good. What are you doing?”

Joseph looked at the page a long time, then smiled, and said: “Émile sourit dans Lemyre.”

Lemyre blinked. “What?”

Joseph stopped smiling.

“What did you say, Joseph? It’s all right.”

Lemyre tried to force friendliness into his voice, but could see that he was scaring Joseph. He flipped the book around. There was Émile, standing in front of an old vanity mirror, makeup strewn on the dresser in front of him, lifting his trunk to flash a smile in the mirror.

At the top of the page, with a giant “M”: “Émile sourit dans le Miroir.”

“You speak French, Joseph? Have you spoken French this whole time?” His voice was raising. Joseph, eyes wide, didn’t move.

If Joseph’s data was corrupted, all of the work Lemyre had done since Joseph’s first session back in June would be worthless— not just Joseph’s, all of it. Five months, gone.

“You’ve been able to read what this says every time you’ve been here?” The book’s spine cracked as Lemyre shook it in Joseph’s face.

“I—get up, Joseph. I can’t use any of this. Get up. Get up!” Lemyre grabbed Joseph by the arm. He pulled him out of the chair. The little boy went limp.

He dragged Joseph up the stairs.

“Hey!” Lemyre shouted. Joseph’s mother looked up from the kitchen table, shocked.

“You never told me he speaks French! Why the fuck would you not tell me that!?”

63

“Put him down.” She picked Joseph up and held him tight to her body. “He doesn’t speak French. He speaks Creole.”

“Creole?”

Joseph was still limp in his mother’s arms.

His feet banged together as she rocked him, setting off the lights in his sneakers.

“Creole—I…Wait—I’m sorry. Hang on. Wait.”

“We’re leaving,” she said. “Don’t call us again.” She started towards the front door.

“Here, let me—can I at least pay you for today’s session? Please?” Lemyre searched for his wallet but his pockets were empty; he kept the stack of twenties he paid the parents with in a metal box above the refrigerator. Joseph’s mother was already at the door. “I’m sorry, I just—I’m going to have to redo a lot. Joseph’s data was important. I’m sorry. Please.”

“Goodbye,” she said, and pushed the door open. It swung shut behind her.

Dr. Lemyre, in all the commotion, had come out of his room and down onto the staircase where he stood, staring at his son.

“Fuck!” Lemyre shouted, then turned to his father. “Why does this house always smell like fucking piss!?” He went back to the basement, and slammed the door.

Dr. Lemyre didn’t say anything, but went to the kitchen and turned on the faucet. pt.3 Word began to spread among the parents that it wasn’t safe to bring children to Lemyre’s anymore. They said he wasn’t a real scientist, that he was a rich pervert who took kids to his basement and showed them graphic images, that his father was a retard who liked to grope women’s breasts. And worse. Parents who’d never brought their children in for sessions heard the overflow of playground talk and after school pickup-lane gossip and were relieved they hadn’t gone for the easy money.

Even those who had denied it, and any child who asked why they didn’t go to that man’s

house anymore was told to be quiet—what man’s house? Quit making up stories.

The only ones who kept coming were those who couldn’t afford not to. They showed up on time, polite as usual but less chatty, asking fewer questions. Some now insisted that they be allowed to wait downstairs with their children during sessions, and Lemyre, with barely enough data coming in anymore to keep the project going, couldn’t afford to say no.

During these supervised sessions, Lemyre had to run a rewritten version of his program that self-corrected; the data, otherwise, came out tainted, the signals stained mother.

Winter came. Lemyre didn’t tell his father it was Christmas. New Years Eve, he went upstairs to turn the TV to the ball drop, ready for a fight about why Dick Clark kept saying 1998, but Dr. Lemyre didn’t even watch, and instead spent the evening ripping up old newspapers.

The first Friday in January, a pale pink envelope with the IBM logo slid through the mail slot. Lemyre called his father downstairs.

“Open it,” he said, standing ten feet away in the living room. Dr. Lemyre looked around, confused. “The letter. Open it.” He pointed. Dr. Lemyre bent down to pick up the envelope.

“Wait!” he shouted, but Dr. Lemyre tore the envelope open and pulled out a white sheet of paper. Another smaller, orange slip of paper fell out and twirled to the floor.

“What does it say?” His father held the letter out towards him.

It was his paycheck. He picked up the orange slip of paper: “Happy New Year! IBM’s resolution is to go green and make the switch to envelopes made from 100% recycled paper!

Best wishes to you and yours in the new year— IBM Payroll Dept.”

Dr. Lemyre’s behavior had become increasingly erratic. He’d stopped speaking altogether, with the exception of some muttered phrases, or the names of dead uncles and old patients of his whose names Lemyre had heard but whom he’d never met, his mother’s name.

Sometimes, Lemyre would be in the basement in the middle of a session and a terrible howling would come from upstairs. He would leave the crying child strapped to the EEG and run up to the kitchen or the bedroom where Dr. Lemyre would be screaming, scratching paint off the walls or beating his head with his fists. The only way to make him stop was to wrestle him to the ground and hold him down until he tired himself out.

The two of them fought often—violence was the only way Lemyre could communicate with his father anymore. Even Dr. Lemyre’s weekly bath had become an exercise in violence; Dr. Lemyre was afraid of the water, and would claw at his son, trying to escape, Lemyre slapping him, pushing him back into the tub, shouting “I’m trying to help you!”

It was clear, though, that Dr. Lemyre no longer recognized his son.

Lemyre made the BOOKS check for that January out to $150,000. His plan was to start offering $100 a session, figuring the extra money might convince some of the old parents to come back. He’d called a few of them with the new offer already, but most had hung up as soon as he said his name. One father had said he was going to call the police; Lemyre was pretty sure he hadn’t.

He slipped the check into the pocket of his jacket and stepped outside. The evening winter air cleared his nose and improved his headache, and for the first time in weeks, the blue shadows of dead trees along the sidewalk no longer suggested broken bones or dogs’ teeth. The snow was uncharacteristically silent.

In the Bank of America entryway there was a homeless man who was slouched, keeping warm between two ATMs. A security guard in a black suit opened the inner doors and muttered something—a greeting?—that Lemyre couldn’t make out.

“Hi! Welcome to Bank of America,” the 64

teller said as Lemyre stepped up to the counter. Lemyre had never seen him before. He was a young guy—younger than Lemyre—with red hair and freckles. “What can I do for you this evening?”

“I just need to deposit a check.”

“Okay, no problem. I have a deposit slip here for you to fill out real quick.” The teller put the slip and a pen on the counter in front of Lemyre. As Lemyre filled it out, the teller drummed his fingers on the counter, reigniting Lemyre’s headache. “Okay…” he said, looking everything over when Lemyre handed it back. “Oh, hey—IBM! You work there?”

“No,” Lemyre said.

“Oh, really—I just figured, with the logo on the check.”

“Yes, I do, I mean,” Lemyre said. “I do work for them.” He tried to smile.

“Haha, one of those days,” the teller said.

“Yeah, my uncle used to work there. I always thought it seemed like a cool company—I mean, they made the computer that beat Kasparov. Deep Blue, right?”

“Deep Blue…?” He’d never heard of it.

“It’s honestly kind of freaky though,” the teller kept talking, not hearing Lemyre. “Computers smarter than humans. Robots that can beat chess masters. Won’t be long before the ATMs are in here behind the counter, and I’m out there, cuddling for warmth with that guy.”

He laughed and nodded in the direction of the homeless man. “Okay. I just need to see your ID real quick, and you’ll be good to go.”

“ID?” He’d never had to show ID before when depositing a check. “Oh—I know Sonya?”

“Oh no kidding! Yeah, Sonya’s great.” He smiled. “But—company policy. Especially on a check this large.” He shrugged and reached out his hand. Lemyre gave him his ID. “Oakwood Terrace? Right around the corner? I bet I walk right by your house on my way to work every day.” The teller smiled again, his eyes studying Lemyre, and gave the ID back.

Lemyre put his wallet back in his pocket 65

and turned to leave.

“Oh, hey! Check this out!” Lemyre looked back at him. The teller swiveled the monitor of his computer around to face Lemyre and tapped the logo at the top of the screen.

“IBM,” he said, whispering in a creepy voice, “they’re everywhere,” and laughed.

Lemyre forced a smile and kept walking.

“Enjoy the rest of your evening, Mr. Lemyre,” the security guard said, holding the door for him.

“Motherfucking shit fuck, Lemyre,” the homeless man said, as he opened the door out onto the street.

“What?” Lemyre turned to look at him.

But he was asleep. The ATM screens’ glare cast a pale blue on his face; he had the same thick eyebrows as his father. The same smell. “…Dad?” Lemyre said, but realized his stupidity immediately and left, back into the cold, not waiting for an answer.

The last day of February, 1998 was a Saturday. Lemyre only had one session scheduled, at 9 that morning. Then he spent a few hours inputting data, and, until two, tried to adjust some problems with the way the program was reading “EGGS.” He came upstairs and found Dr. Lemyre lying on the kitchen floor. He turned his father over. The face was blue, pooled with blood.

There wasn’t any pulse. He called 911 and the paramedics came. They loaded the body onto a stretcher and put it in the back of the ambulance.

He stood on the front steps, and watched them drive away.

He stood on the front steps for a long time.

There was someone coming down the sidewalk, their feet crunching on the day-old snow.

“YO—DEEP BLUUUUUE!” Lemyre turned to look. It was the red haired bank teller, waving, smiling. “I see you, IBM! Didn’t I tell you I pass by here all the time?”

Lemyre went back inside and listened from never end up filled. behind the door to the crunch of the teller’s He flew back to Baltimore that night and footsteps get louder, then fade away, and dis- took a cab home from BWI. Black ice had appear completely. formed on the townhouse’s walkway—he slipped, and almost fell.

“A pulmonary embolism” Sitting on the front steps, there was a packThe doctor had done his residency at age: a basket wrapped in plastic tied together Johns Hopkins. with gold ribbon. A sympathy gift from someone who’d missed the funeral, maybe? Lemyre unlocked the front door, and was hit by the Lemyre flew back to Boston with the body. smell of urine he’d almost managed to forget.

He arranged for a small service at a funeral He put the basket on the kitchen table. home not far from their old house in CamA note was hanging from the ribbon: bridge, a place he remembered passing on Olympic gold is for skiing, curling, and luge, his bike as a kid. He hadn’t been able to find but never for code, UI, or page views. his dad’s rolodex but had managed to get But we do things differently here at Big Blue… in touch with some of his father’s old colWhile the world was watching Nagano, leagues, some cousins. He’d even called Ted we were watching you!

Kennedy’s office and left the details with his secretary, but Ted hadn’t ended up showing.

Lemyre ripped the plastic open. Inside, There were only a handful of mourners, mostthere was a bottle of nonalcoholic chamly old doctors like his father, men who were used to death, who brought finger-foods from pagne with a gold label, a bag of chocolates the funeral parlor to the viewing area. One wrapped in gold foil, a little gold rectangle, a woman had cried, but she’d left early, and no box of Japanese cookies, and, wearing a red shirt that read “USA,” with a gold medal hung one there had known her name.

Lemyre went alone to the cemetery. He around her neck, a stuffed Hello Kitty.

Lemyre’s brain felt loose in his skull. It was stood off to the side and watched the workhard to breathe. ers lower the casket into the frozen ground.

Hello Kitty; his legs were shaking; he got The last time he’d been here, it had been summer. He’d been nine. There had been trees down on the floor, felt the cool linoleum and flowers, his grandmother. A stone angel against his cheek. The air down here was towering over him that for some reason he’d easier to breathe.

Hello Kitty; he looked at the legs of the thought his father had carved to look like his mother. There was just a small plaque now, kitchen chairs, the feet of the table; why was it so hard to breathe? sunken into the brown grass.

Hello Kitty; the legs of the kitchen chairs, the feet of the table; why did his face feel like EMILY LEMYRE HAROLD LEMYRE this?

1949—1981 1938— Hello Kitty; Hello Kitty; Whose job was it to fill that blank? His? Hello The gravediggers’ backhoe fired to life, startling a goose who’d been pecking at the foot of a tombstone. Lemyre watched the first scoop of dirt being poured, then the second, then he left. The blank, he knew, would

66

pt.4 “There are monkeys in the beginning who figure out how to kill people with bones. One of them gets attacked by a cheetah and then they just kill everybody with bones, and the monolith appears that takes them to the future. In the future everything’s space, but it’s like spaceships are the same as the bones were for the monkeys for people. It’s all symbols.”

Lemyre rarely left the townhouse anymore.

In the months following the funeral, he had redoubled his efforts on the project, given up sleeping. He was almost a year behind where he should have been by now. This, he recognized, was the result of his own stupidity.

He thought constantly about where he should have been; sometimes it was like he could see the other version of himself—the one who was a year ahead, who’d been serious, and smart enough not to make the same mistakes—working in the house alongside him, a diligent but invisible genius who moved at double speed and spoke clearly, the same age but a year older. Lemyre could copy him but could never catch up.

At the time of Dr. Lemyre’s death, the program had been able to functionally interpret most unsophisticated metaphors, and could synthesize second-hand code for images Lemyre had never shown the children at a success rate of about 60%. This was obviously lower than Lemyre would have liked, but with the flow of incoming data now only a trickle, and the dull pain in his blood getting sharper every day, he had moved the program into its second phase.

The next steps were simple enough; Lemyre had the designs basically worked out in his head already. He would build a kind of reverse-EEG which could input signals written by his computer back into a child’s brain.

Sourcing code from the data taken throughout the first phase of the experiment, the computer, using precise electrical signals more or 67

less indistinguishable from those organically produced in the brain, would be able to transplant memories from one child to another.

“Then there’s a part where this girl on TV is talking to her dad, and he asks her what she wants for her birthday. She says a bush baby.

The girl’s talking so weird for some reason.

She keeps looking away from the screen, and you can tell there’s someone she’s looking at who you can’t see. That’s not even a part of the movie that people remember.”

It went slowly at first, running tests with the new machine on the children when they came in for sessions and then on himself when they left. But faintly, faintly, images began to come through, memories of places Lemyre had never been, teachers he’d never had, giant figures towering over him and picking him up.

Some things now were the same as they’d been before: birthday party magicians and after school programs. He’d been to an after school program once when Dr. Lemyre was working late. A teacher he’d never seen before had thrown this soft ball at him really hard. The teachers were still like that.

He crawled underneath his grandmother’s porch and found the bones of an animal he thought might be a human.

He got nosebleeds that dripped onto the carpet.

He laughed at jokes. Moosician. Lawn mooer. Mooseum. Moo York. Was it different cows, or all the same one?

He learned the words for things: Texture.

Downtrodden. Kidneys.

He could spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

He tripped a lot. He crawled up stairs on all fours; going down was harder.

He sat in the back seat of a new car and counted tiny dots in the leather.

A teenager in a werewolf mask walked around the Halloween store. Lemyre jumped into Benjamin’s father’s arms, afraid. Benjamin and his father came in for a session.

Lemyre jumped into Benjamin’s father’s arms,

and they fell. Benjamin and his father left, and Lemyre didn’t see them again.

The memories were so real when he was hooked up to the machine, but slipped away quickly when he took the helmet off, like waking from a dream.

“So much of that movie people just don’t remember—it’s like they think it’s the monkeys, the spaceships right after that, then HAL, then the ending. But most of it is really just people talking in the spaceship and walking around.

Not that much really happens. When people watch it again they’re always surprised how boring it is. A lot of people fall asleep.”

For all the rapid progress Lemyre was making, there was still a kind of bug in the program that he was struggling to work out. At the moment of memory writing, there would be an intense sensation of contraction, like there was someone putting so much pressure on the subject’s head that the skull had turned soft and hands were passing through it, squeezing the brain. It wasn’t painful, exactly—in fact, it was a familiar feeling that reminded him of something he couldn’t place— but each time the program ended and Lemyre felt the hands loosening, the basement he came back to seemed smaller than the one he’d left, more space now between the walls and the paint, and the back of his mouth and the tip of his tongue.

Most of the children didn’t like the squeezing sensation; some would cling tightly to their parents when it was time to go to the basement, and would be pried off only by promises of ice cream and stupid things on the ride home. The parents, torn between Lemyre’s vague reassurances that the helmet was completely harmless and the perplexing descriptions their teary-eyed children gave of “the pinching thing,” took issue at first with the new sessions, asking why Lemyre couldn’t just keep showing the kids pictures like before. Most of them left; some of them stayed, not able to pass up his new rate of $400 a session. It wasn’t like he was saving

the money for anything else.

“Have you ever heard of what HAL stands for? I-B-M. It’s just one letter—if you add one letter to every letter of H-A-L, it’s I-B-M. I-B-M. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck you! Stanley— he—FUCK YOU. Stop fucking…Don’t watch me.

I know you… why did you do that? I know you. You didn’t have to do that.”

It had taken him some time to work it out, but Lemyre was certain: IBM had killed his father, and now they were killing him, slowly, using the same poison. Why they didn’t just get it over with, he hadn’t yet figured out—one theory he had was that they were filming him to make a tape that they could show to new employees: The Hazards of Corporate Theft.

They often broke in while he was in a different room to knock over stacks of paper or to turn on lights that he’d turned off earlier. When he heard them he ran upstairs and kicked open the door, but they were always faster.

Sometimes all they did was open drawers, or leave bizarre things—old bananas, half-empty bottles of ketchup—in the refrigerator. He found a microphone they’d hidden inside the doorbell. He pried it off with a screwdriver and buried it in the yard.

The fingernails on his right hand kept growing longer. He let them—if he ever accidentally had a thought that wasn’t relevant to the project, he could just dig his nails into his palm. It helped. Sometimes, he was able to forget about them.

“I’ll give you two million dollars. I can give you two million. In dollars.”

The house got hotter. The smell of urine began to fester and swell in the heat. Lemyre opened the windows, and tore down the blinds, but even when the wind was so strong that it blew inside and slammed the bedroom doors shut, the smell lingered. It clung to the carpets and sunk into the fibers of his pillowcase. For a while he thought the odor was hiding in the air inside his lightbulbs; he unscrewed them all and put them in a garbage bag with a brick that he dropped into a pond 68

at a nearby park. He covered the clock on the stove with black electrical tape. He bit his fingers and the insides of his cheeks.

It was hard to tell the days apart. They were all so long.

Slowly, the parents stopped showing up for sessions. Lemyre almost never answered the door anymore—when he did, he mumbled things they couldn’t understand or shouted at them and made them empty their pockets. Sometimes in the middle of a session he would leave the children in the basement to come upstairs and watch TV. Sometimes he would open the door, hand them the $400, and close it again without saying a word.

Sometimes, he would write things down: phone numbers he’d never dialed, words that rhymed with presidents’ names, the time, lists of each room in the townhouse by number of objects starting with the letter “R,” by number of distinctly colored fabrics, by number of right angles. He would hammer nails into his bedroom walls to keep the paint from coming off. He flipped the toilet seat up only to find urine already in the bowl, unflushed, as if there were somebody else in the house. But the it was too dark for it to be anybody’s but his.

“They take him to this room. This, like, French room. Every time he looks, he sees his dad getting older and older. They don’t, um… he’s not allowed to leave.”

Lemyre woke up in his father’s bedroom.

The alarm clock was blinking 12:00. It was cloudy outside, and drizzling. Cold air blew in through the open window. When Lemyre stood up to close it, he stepped in a puddle on the floor.

He hadn’t been allowed in his parents’ bedroom when he was little. Some afternoons, when Dr. Lemyre was at work and his mother was on the sofa downstairs sleeping, he’d open the door slowly, to keep it from squeaking, and sneak inside. He remembered it as always being dark, even though it must have been the daytime, and clean, the bed always 69

perfectly made, like nobody actually slept there. He used to stand in the middle of the room and try to make himself completely still, not even breathing. He was convinced, for some reason, that if he could trick the room into forgetting that he was there, then it would change back to the way it “really” was. More than once, he’d thought that it had worked, and that he’d seen what rooms looked like when there was nobody inside.

What he remembered most about that bedroom, though, was a dark walnut dresser whose drawers he would press his face against, smelling the lacquer and trying to picture what the top looked like—he knew that that was where his father kept a cigar box full of cufflinks and half-dollars, where his mother kept her makeup brushes. That same dresser now was in the corner of the room, a pile of water-stained magazines and a broken clock radio on top, all but a few of the drawers’ handles missing.

He shivered, and opened the top drawer. Inside, lying among the hardened dress socks and weathered briefs and the pocket watch with the missing chain that Dr. Lemyre had stopped carrying years ago, there was a .A !

What was it called? The thing. The thing! It was itself—the thing was its own word!

But the word was gone, a hole now in the dresser drawer. Other words teetered on its edge: blue, green, white, deflated. And the smell—pungent, awful sweetness, stronger than the urine, stronger than his father’s socks—it rattled acid liquid in his stomach that sloshed up to his throat and twitched his tongue with sour that was close, but, no, that wasn’t it.

He touched it. He pushed his finger inside and felt the wrong stuff there, dry, dead folds that sucked up words. He took it from the drawer, and it turned to foldy mush in his hand.

The hole’s inside out, he said itself.

Nothing.

“Basketball?” he said, and threw it on the floor.

“Nope.”

“I feel like I’ve seen you around at soccer practice?”

“But you never even played soccer, Blue Green White Deflated Foldy Mush Splattered On The Floor,” the said.

“That’s right! I didn’t!” Lemyre shouted.

And suddenly things were too far apart.

There were letters in the corners of his eyes; he turned to look; they darted from the center. It was a hallway. He started spinning, chasing them, and he was dizzy, but he caught one: DARK WALNUT. He remembered this. The shell was hard. The nut was rotten.

He tried to run, but fell down the s….the !!…the stairs, and it was all too blurry, and the of the hallway were , (colors) and there was whistle , and things were too far from their and s He squeezing.

He woke up in a sleeping bag, his face stuffed into a pillow, hiding his giggles as Nicholas’ mom came in to check on them— last time you guys. time for bed. seriously.

He pressed his face harder into the pillow, unable to stop, his laughter making the pillowcase warm and wet. He was howling, giggling so hard his belly hurt, the muted hoots of laughter that to his own ears seemed uproarious only making it all funnier somehow.

Eventually, he got tired; the giggles trickled out slowly, coming back now and then in little bursts, and when they were gone, he turned over. The room was dark. He could hear Nicholas’ breathing, slow and deep. So it was seriously time for bed. Seriously. There were shadows on the ceiling—the blinds, and the tree branches outside, swaying slightly, like scribbles on lined paper. He listened to Nicholas’ breaths and the wind outside that blew cold air in through a crack in the window and watched the scribbles’ swaying, spelling, Moldy orange.

Lemyre woke up in the basement, the smell

of piss stabbing its way into his nose, remembering.

“The black rectangle is a symbol. Of how it turns into the future, like, when it’s between two eras, it—” “I’m sorry. The time allotted to dial your party’s extension has been exceeded. Please hang up, and try again. Thank you for calling IBM Customer Support.”

Lemyre watched on TV as Al Gore stood shaking hands with IBM CEO Louis Gerstner at a press conference in San Francisco; beginning in November, the Department of Energy would start running on the IBM supercomputer Blue Pacific. He was so tired.

There was a knock at the door.

“Hi, Dr. Lemyre. How you doing today?” A man was on the front steps, his hands resting on a young girl’s shoulders. Lemyre had never seen them before, but waved them inside.

Without a word he went down to the basement and started up the computer.

He clicked through files with names like “Ricardo_Last_day_of_5th_grade,” “apple_ picking_mom_and_dad,” “s88888888,” “fear_ water,” and tried to remember the secondary brain vesicles of the hindbrain. The metencephalon and the…what was it? The something-cephalon. He heard a creaking sound behind him and turned to look. A little girl was standing on the steps, wearing a blue dress.

“Hi,” he said, and smiled at her.

“Hi, Dr. Lemyre,” the little girl said. She climbed up on the table next to the computer and kicked her legs off the side, watching him.

“Oh.” Lemyre realized she was waiting for him. He applied globs of gel to her head then put the helmet on her. She looked silly in the helmet, a bulb with wires curling off. “Okay.

Uh…” He’d seen her before. “Tulip?”

The girl laughed. That wasn’t her name.

“Sorry,” he said. “What uh…what do you want to remember?”

“Ummmm,” she thought a moment. “Wait… shouldn’t we do the elephant?”

70

“The elephant?”

“The elephant. You know.” She said this like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Oh yeah, right.” He took the gold book from the desk next to his computer and flipped through the pages. He’d never noticed before that it was an elephant—for some reason he’d always thought it was a little boy. “This?” He held the book open in front of her.

“Mhmm,” she said. “I can do that.” She said it matter-of-factly, bragging.

“Do what?”

“That.” She pointed at the page. The elephant was standing in the middle ring of a circus, juggling three balls as clowns and lions looked on, admiring him. Émile Jongle au cirque. “Remember? You showed me.”

“I taught you how to juggle?”

“Mhmm,” the helmet bobbed up and down when she spoke. “I came here and we looked at that picture of the elephant doing it and then I went home and I showed my mama how I could do it. She didn’t believe me, but then when I showed her I could she called my grandma and my daddy to come and watch me do it.”

Lemyre didn’t know what to say. His mind began to race, the shock of what Cece was saying making everything sharper again.

Was it possible that she’d picked up the juggling motor-memory somewhere in the background noise of a child who’d gone to circus camp? Or even—could the brain activity of the child imagining herself as Émile be conversing with the computer’s signals, synthesizing nonexistent memories?

“Can you show me?” he asked, looking around the basement for something she could juggle with. “Here—um,” he took three chocolates from the box that had come with the gift basket. “Do these work?”

“Mhmm,” she said. Lemyre took her helmet off then helped her down from the table and handed her the chocolates. “Okay, ready?”And, without waiting for an answer she started.

She tossed the first chocolate—Lemyre 71

watched the little golden sphere float up then hang in the air where it seemed to pause a second waiting as her left hand threw the next one up—they passed each other on the way down, just as her right hand threw the final chocolate, and for a second all three of them were there suspended juggled golden chocolates juggled by a child who couldn’t juggle, and then the first one hit the ground, and then the second, and the third.

“Oh!” Cece cried. “Wait! I could do it before!

I could! Wait. Wait. Let me do it again.” She picked the chocolates up. Gray dust from the basement floor clung to their golden foil.

Cece tried again and again, throwing the chocolates into the air, never managing to catch even one. She became frustrated.

“Wait. Wait, watch,” she’d say, then drop them all and let out a tiny scream of rage.

“Cece. Cece. It’s okay,” Lemyre said. “It’s okay. You don’t have to.”

She was about to try again, but stopped when she saw Lemyre’s face. “I could before,” she said, looking down at the floor. Tears were welling in her eyes. “I could.”

“I know,” Lemyre said. “That was really great.”

“No,” she said, clenching her fists. “It was really stupid. I could before—” “It wasn’t stupid,” Lemyre said. “Really, it wasn’t.”

Cece didn’t say anything. The ceiling creaked overhead as her father crossed the kitchen and filled a glass of water.

“I’m really proud of you.”

Cece looked up at Lemyre. She was confused. He was smiling, but he was crying. pt.5 A package arrived at IBM Cambridge that November, addressed to “Christopher Ward, Dept. Head, Systems Research,” with no return address. The mailroom clerk, not recognizing the name, typed it into the computer.

“Hey, Neil?”

“What’s up, Rog?” “You mind taking a look at this real quick?”

Neil put down the bundle of envelopes he’d been rubber banding and looked over Roger’s shoulder at the computer.

“So, I have a package for a guy the system says hasn’t worked here since September ’93?”

“Can I see it for a second?” Roger handed Neil the package. “Hmm. No return address.”

“I know.”

“Systems Research? Never heard of it.”

Neil clicked his tongue, thinking, spinning the package around between two fingers. “Here— check who the current department head is.

You know how to do that?”

“I thiiiink sooo…” Roger clicked around, typed, pressed enter. “Here… Edward Lemyre?

Lemire? Department head since…September 1993.”

“Hmm. And we don’t have a forwarding address for…Christopher Ward?”

“No—kind of weird, right?”

“Not necessarily. It happens sometimes.

You see that a lot when someone dies and IBM doesn’t have a relative on file they can contact. Anyway, it’s been, what, five years?

More? We can probably just go ahead and delete him from the system.”

“Okay…And, how do I do that? Haha.”

“Haha, that’s right. You wouldn’t know how to do that. It always feels like you’ve worked here for longer than you have.”

“You’re telling me, haha.”

“Right? Haha. So, all you do is click here… and here…yes I’m sure…”

Neil clicked through the computer for a while, saying nothing. Roger itched the burn that covered half his face.

“Okay, got it. So, um. What should we do with this?” Roger held the package up.

“Oh, right. Umm. No return address? Might as well send it to Lemire—I mean he is technically the department head—or you could DLO it. It’s your call.”

“Oh—okay. Thanks, Neil.”

“No worries.”

The red haired teller worked on Saturdays, and Tuesday through Thursday. He liked having Fridays off so he could stay out late on Thursdays, and Saturdays were okay, because the bank closed at two. He wished, though, that he could have worked on Sundays.

On Sundays, no matter how good the last week had been or the next week was supposed to be, this kind of almost-sadness would wash over him that he couldn’t understand. It was like a nagging feeling that he was supposed to be doing something else, or like he’d just finished crying even though he hadn’t. It was like there was an organ bleeding that he needed removed. It was particularly in the winter when it wasn’t snowing, particularly at dusk when the cars turned their headlights on. He knew that if he could only work on Sundays, he’d have been able to keep himself busy enough to make the day pass quicker, and to maybe escape the feeling altogether.

Sometimes, on Saturday nights, if he’d gotten drunk enough or if he was with a girl that he felt like he could tell anything to, he’d try and explain the feeling. But what do you call that? Wanting so badly for tomorrow just not to happen, stealing stronger sleeping pills from bathroom sink mirror cabinets.

The strangest part, though, was that everybody he told knew exactly the feeling he was talking about. “I hate that,” they’d always say, before he could even finish trying to explain. On Sundays, it seemed, the whole world walked around reminded of what they’d forgotten Monday morning—that between the weekend and the week, there was a third thing. But there wasn’t any word for it.

And then they’d always joke, something like, “sounds like you might have picked the wrong line of work,” and he would always laugh.

72

It was a Wednesday morning, though, in February, that the red haired teller was walking down Oakwood Terrace, squinting against the glare of the sun’s reflection on the snow, when he passed 272, and had a thought.

“Hey Sonya,” he said, walking into the bank, taking off his scarf.

“Gooood morning,” she said, already chipper, typing something into the computer.

“Hey—do you remember that guy who used to come in? Young guy, worked for IBM—like twice a year he would bring in these ridiculously large checks?”

Sonya stopped typing. “Um, maybe,” she blinked. “I’m not sure—I’d have to see what he looks like.”

“Really? You don’t remember that guy? I swear to god you used to always take care of him. I feel like he even asked for you by name once.”

“Yeah, I don’t know, maybe.”

“Well—I was just wondering if you’d seen him. I feel like he always came in in January, and I didn’t see him last month—I mean, maybe he came in on a day I wasn’t working, but—I passed his house on my way here. The walkway wasn’t shoveled and there weren’t any footsteps or anything. Just seemed weird.”

“How do you know where he lives?” She looked at him.

“I—we just talked about it once…I don’t know.”

Sonya blinked, and started typing again.

“Maybe he moved.”

“Yeah, probably.”

On his walk home that day he crossed the street to the same side as 272. He stopped in front of the walkway, almost slipped on the icy snow, and kept walking. The lights had been off.

Every day on his way home from work now he’d do the same thing: stop in front of the townhouse, wait a few minutes looking in the windows, get cold, and keep walking. The only change he ever noticed was pink envelopes that were sometimes left on the front 73

steps; more snow would fall, and the envelopes would disappear, either buried under the snow, or, more likely, he thought, taken inside on a day he hadn’t been working. Or maybe Sonya was right, and he had really moved away. After a while, he stopped crossing the street, and only looked at the townhouse when he passed it.

But the snow began to melt in March. And as the weather got warmer, the red haired teller could make out the shape of something that had been buried in the snow. Now and then it would snow again, wetter, bluer, March snow that sometimes turned to rain but never stuck, and by the end of the month there was a crumpled package, covered in dozens of wet, pink envelopes, sitting on the steps.

He left work Saturday afternoon, and started his walk home. It was the first day of the year warm enough to wear his denim jacket, and he walked slowly, now and then looking up at the sun. Water trickled from the few lonely piles of slush still left on the sidewalk, leaving the brown grass soaked, splashing echoes in the sewers that rang throughout the neighborhood. He passed 272 and decided, finally, that he would do the neighborly thing and knock—just to let the guy know that he had a package.

He crossed the street, jumped over a puddle next to the curb, and went up the walkway to the front steps. It was colder in the shadow of the townhouse. A group of kids was yelling and laughing on another block somewhere.

He bent down to pick up the package, imagining what he would say if someone answered.

When he lifted the soaking wet box the bottom dropped out. The cardboard turned to a mushy pile in his fingers.

“Shit.” He dropped the mush on the ground, and wiped his hands on his pants. He looked down the street. A woman was walking a cockapoo at the end of the block. She turned the corner.

The doorbell was missing, there was just a frayed wire sticking out of the wall. The red

haired teller knocked, then waited, listening, but didn’t hear anything, and knocked again harder. “Hello!” He shouted. “Hello!” What had that nickname been? “Yo! Uhh, IBM!” No answer. He tried the knob—unlocked. “Hello!”

He pushed the door open a crack. “Hello?

Anybody home?” He opened the door wider.

What was it?

“Yo, are you—oh fuck!” The smell of rotting eggs and urine knocked him back, coughing, eyes watering. “Shit!” He staggered back, retching, to the sidewalk, and took deep breaths of fresh air until he didn’t think he was going to vomit anymore, then he ran to the bank to call 911.

The next day, he went to the police station.

He sat at a desk next to a pudgy cop who’d given him a photocopied Witness Statement Form, and was now clicking through files on his computer, not looking at him. The form was basically just a piece of lined paper with a box at the top for his name and address, and small block letters below: DESCRIBE THE INCIDENT. As he wrote, his hand started getting sore.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to write this much—college, probably. It wasn’t natural. And the longer he wrote, the sorer his hand got, the shorter his sentences, the worse his handwriting. By the end of the statement, his hand was cramping badly, his letters just squiggles. He threw the pencil down, and handed the form to the police officer.

“Okay,” the cop said, reading it over. “This looks good. Thanks.” He put it on top of an open folder on his desk. “You should be all set. You know how to get out of here, right?

Those doors there?”

“Oh—that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Oh, cool. Okay, thanks.” The doors the cop had pointed to were glass; through them, he could see the front lobby of the precinct. A

woman in a bike helmet was gesticulating wildly, on the verge of tears as she described to the policewoman sitting behind the front desk whatever it was that had happened to her.

“Yo—can I ask you something?” he said to the policeman.

“Shoot.”

“So—” he looked at the young cop sitting at the next desk over; the policemen stared intently at his cell phone’s keypad, taking a painfully long time to type a text message.

The red haired teller leaned in closer to the pudgy cop. “What the fuck was up with that smell—I mean, that wasn’t normal, right?”

The cop closed the folder on his desk and tilted back in his chair. “Sewer gas.”

“Sewer gas?” he laughed. “What the hell’s sewer gas?”

“Toxic gas—builds up on broken septic pipes and leaks into the home.”

“Jesus—” He shook his head. “Wait—I was breathing toxic fumes?”

“Nah, I wouldn’t worry about it. I mean, you barely breathed any, but—” He looked over at the texting cop, then made his voice quieter. “Yesterday we sent in a couple of EMTs? Guess they didn’t know much gas there was— one guy opened the basement door, took one whiff, and bam,” the cop snapped his fingers, “down—like that. They had to drag him out.

Still in the hospital today.”

“Holy shit.”

“Mhmm. They’re working on getting the septic out, but it’s bad. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to tear the whole house down once the investigation’s over.”

It had been light out when the red haired teller had arrived at the precinct. Now, it wasn’t yet night, but the sun was gone, and the world outside was blue. The walk home was long. It felt like winter.

His hands ached from the cold; he stuffed them in the pockets of his denim jacket, and 74

thought about the woman with the cockapoo.

He hadn’t mentioned her at all in his statement—what if she’d been important? Her coat had been brown. She’d gone a few steps out of her way to avoid a puddle in the middle of the cracked sidewalk. The cockapoo had been pulling on its leash, trying desperately to run ahead of the woman into the street.

Wasn’t that important?

“Hey! Excuse me?” A car pulled up next to him. The driver shouted from the window.

“Hi—do you know how to get to Green Mount Ave from here?”

“No. No idea, sorry.”

“Okay—thanks!” The driver turned the radio up—they were listening to that song, babadeebabadae, what was it called?—and sped away.

The taillights disappeared behind a hill down the road, and then the music, trailing just behind, was gone.

Half an hour later, he turned onto Oakwood Terrace. He crossed the street, but didn’t slow down as he passed 272. It was covered in orange police tape, and the windows had been boarded up with plywood. The pink envelopes were still scattered on the front steps, but the ruined package, he realized, was missing.

It was a house he’d never been inside of. It was on his way to work.

He kept walking, past 270, 268. The townhouses on this block were all identical. Most of them had their lights on; he glanced into the windows and in some saw people moving behind the curtains. Dim figures eating dinner or not eating dinner. Some of them, he probably knew from the bank. Geoffrey, Michael, Erin, Lila, Jenathan, Christothew, Lid, Ralph, Willibith, Snow, Eerlim, Reemil, Millear, Lireem.

“Oh yeah,” he said.

He got a ride home with his cousin, took a shower, and ate dinner with his wife and two daughters—there was an argument at the dinner table, one of his daughters apparently unable to put her phone away for half an hour while they ate—then he sat on the couch and drank a beer, and watched Sahara on USA. When the movie was over, he turned the lights out and went upstairs.

His wife was in bed, asleep already. Miguel Gustavo kicked off his shoes, and tiptoed slowly across the wooden bedroom, trying to keep the floor from creaking. He’d just barely made it halfway, when his foot caught on something in the middle of the floor. He stumbled, his heavy steps rattling the house.

“Mmm,” Andrea groaned, annoyed in her sleep. Miguel Gustavo didn’t move, and waited, listening for the deep breaths that he knew meant sleep.

Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness; the purple silhouettes of the bookshelf, the bathroom door, the blinds came into view. He looked behind him to see what he’d tripped on—it was the pair of pants that he’d left crumpled on the floor earlier that evening when he’d gotten in the shower. He remembered something.

Miguel Gustavo grabbed the pants, and when he heard Andrea’s snoring again, snuck from the room, downstairs to the kitchen where he took the USB from his little pocket.

He held the flash drive up to the light over the sink; the plastic was more chipped than he’d realized, and there was mud caked in the silver port. He scraped the mud out with a fork, breathed on the silver end a few times and wiped it with the bottom of his shirt.

Three small letters were etched into the plastic: IBM. His daughter’s laptop was on the kitchen pt.end of the story table where she’d been doing her homework.

Miguel Gustavo opened it. He didn’t know the Ray paid Miguel Gustavo one hundred dol- password. He tried three guesses—the dog’s lars for the day’s work, and dropped him back name, his mother’s name, and the dog’s name off at Home Depot at around seven thirty. again with a 1 at the end—then gave up, and 75

went upstairs to get her.

Annoyed, Miguel Gustavo’s daughter turned the laptop away from him when she typed in her password then stood over his shoulder, watching him. He plugged the USB in, and the computer fan kicked on, whirring as the laptop struggled to read the flash drive.

After a few seconds, a message popped up: “Error: Device Not Recognized.”

“See?” his daughter said, still fuming from the fight at dinner. She pulled out the USB and snapped the laptop shut. “Good night.” She stomped upstairs, clutching the computer.

Miguel Gustavo looked at the flash drive on the table, considering for a moment whether it was worth getting his wife’s computer from the bedroom, but decided against it. He was tired. He had to get up early again tomorrow.

He put the flash drive in a drawer where the family kept Canadian pennies and dried up rubber bands and chargers for old cell phones and a retainer and a calculator and a digital camera and a photo of a family that had come in the picture frame when they’d bought it. He turned the light off. Quietly, he went back upstairs.

76

77

78

79

80

81

OLIVIA HAMILTON

82

83

84

85

OLIVIA HAMILTON

86

87

AMY GREENSPAN

88

WRITERS Lena Rubin ~ cargocollective.com/lenarubin Natazsa Gawlick Michael Tingley Floyd Clemens ~ thesilenceoftintin.tumblr.com Alex Geisel ~ clandestinerecords.bandcamp.com/album/nos-wyl Jack Petersen ~ jackpetersen.com Elie McAfee-Hahn ~ suneinyneeenan.github.io/Enhydrax/

ARTISTS Olivia Hamilton ~ oliviasagehamilton.com/cvbio Aida Hasanovic ~ aidahasanovic.com Niclas Hille Dante Capone ~ dante.anthony.capone@gmail.com / @cap0.0 Leah Jacobson Ko Takasugi-Czernowin ~ https://soundcloud.com/kotakasugiczernowin Amy Greenspan ~ amygreenspanart.com Bea Korsh ~ https://beakorsh.com Andrew Dembling Zuzia Czemier

Graphic Design Aurela Berila All 3D Graphics modeled, lit, and rendered by Andrew Dembling, Dante Capone, and Niclas Hille (the best roommates I ever had hehe).

~ Thank you for reading!

If you want to get in touch with any of our contributors, or to contribute something to the magazine, please email thegalvanistmagazine@gmail.com 89

90

91