The Opiate

Your literary dose.
Your literary dose.
Cover art: “Thou Shalt Not,” a 1940 photo by Whitey Schafer poking fun at the Hays Code restrictions
This magazine, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission. Contact theopiatemagazine@gmail.com for queries.
The Opiate, Winter Vol. 32
Editor-in-Chief Genna Rivieccio Editor-at-Large Malik Crumpler Editorial Advisor Anton Bonnici Contributing Writers:
Fiction: Camille Boulay, “I Make A Very Good Ex-Girlfriend” 10 Ben Rosenstock, “Reverse Engineering” 21 Megan Bowyer, “Shelf Life” 42
Ryder LeVieux, “My Thoughts Are Tuesday” 54
Poetry: Susie Gharib, “2023” 59
Steve Denehan, “The M4, Just Beyond Maynooth” & “Raining Frogs in Tokyo” 60-62
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro, “In This Electric City” 63
E Kidd, “Manifesto” 64-65
Cathy Allman, “The Fire We Spin Around” & “Truth, Beauty and Photoshop” 66-67
Colleen Surprise Jones, “Your taxi driver might also build you a house” 68-69
Lance Nizami, “Marked” 70
Mike Wilson, “Amateur Dick” 71
Barbara Tramonte, “Love Me” & “An Oft-Told Tale, But What Does It Mean?” 72-74
Mark Simpson, “More and more, it seems our errand is...to salvage” 75
Chiara Maxia, “99¢ Dreams” & “All Neon Lights” 76-77
Ron Kolm, “The Arithmetic of Faith” 78
Lorelei Bacht, “The Openness,” “A Labor of Love, Lost” & “Redefining It” 79-81
Criticism:
Genna Rivieccio, “Nightmare Alley: Never Reach for the Stars If You’re Not in the Sky to Begin With” 83
From the dawn of the written word, there has been some attempt or other by those “in charge“ to try to restrict, confine or otherwise redact the content entirely. Whether through outright censorship, or simply ensuring that literacy was a privilege of the rich...this beginning with that class’ “exclusive rights“ to wielding a printing press and the subsequent “status symbol“ that owning literature became. To be sure, he who controls the media controls the minds of the masses.
As the written form evolved into more modern mediums during the twentieth century, namely the Hollywood movie, it suddenly seemed more important than ever to The Powers That Be to put a lid on any “untoward” sentiments expressed in writing, therefore onscreen. An entity that was more than just a new means for mere “entertainment.” No, a screenplay had the potential to say and convey things that a novel never could. Because the contents of a novel were left to the reader’s imagination (and, try as the government might, the mind still can’t be censored). With film, it was all there—those words that a reader used to have to imagine before becoming a viewer.
And clearly, many a titan in the literary world must have agreed to a certain extent, for Hollywood was able to attract the likes of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler and even that too-good-for-anywhere-but-New-York puta, Dorothy Parker. They would all claim it was for the money, of course, but let’s not be fooled. They were willingly seduced by “Babylon,” filled with all its golden promises and beautiful people. And the writer is nothing if not a sucker for beauty. Not just because writers themselves are rarely known for possessing such a quality, but because they write, in part, in appreciation of The Aesthetics. Wanting to control and manipulate how the world is seen in every way. Even when it’s through a lens, darkly.
Needless to say, however, it didn’t take long for a palpable jadedness to permeate the underappreciated screenwriting set.
This being most snarkily exemplified in the line written by Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard and said by William Holden as failed screenwriter Joe Gillis: “Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.” Would that such deft “ad-libbing” could have been a reality during the Hays Code era, when the difficulties of getting a script past “the censors” proved all but impossible. Or, if not impossible, certainly demeaning to one’s art. Hence, the creation of an image like Whitey Schafer’s “Thou Shalt Not,” featuring all the things forbidden by the Hays Code in one “scandalous” snapshot. This included: 1) Law defeated; 2) Inside of thigh; 3) Lace lingerie; 4) Dead man; 5) Narcotics; 6) Drinking; 7) Exposed bosom; 8) Gambling; 9) Pointing gun; 10) Tommy gun.
These various “blanket” rules were already starting to be formed during the pre-Code era. But once studios were able to find their conservative man to enforce it all in the wake of the moral majority's outcry, there was no stopping the suddenly all-powerful, overpaid Will H. Hays. The very man the code was named “in honor” of. Unsurprisingly, he was a Republican. So Republican, in fact, that he was the chairman of the Republican National Committee and then the campaign manager for Warren G. Harding’s (we know how corrupt he turned out to be) presidential run, an obsequious role that secured Hays the gig as Postmaster General once Harding was in office. The latter’s election roundaboutly getting Hays involved in the infamous Teapot Dome scandal. For he ended up lying (or “withholding information,” if you prefer) when asked how much money oil tycoon Harry Ford Sinclair “loaned” to Hays and the Republican National Committee.
It was no matter, of course. He had a cush opportunity awaiting him in Hollywood. A still fresh and untapped resource for the exploitation of power. As is usually the case with new industries. And oh, how Hays was able to relish that power, serving as something of a precursor to the oppressive “politics” employed by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
What’s more, with the precedent of a 1915 Supreme Court ruling (Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio), it was
The Opiate, Winter Vol. 32 egregiously decided that the First Amendment should not extend to the medium of motion pictures. Despite how obvious it was that this was a form of artistic expression that commenced with writing, the Supreme Court justices of the day ruled that it was a “business” above all else. Justice Joseph McKenna (a very conservative bloke regardless of working for the presently illustrious-for-being-liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) was the one in particular who wrote that “the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit... not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion.”
A laugh on every level. Especially since, even if film was all business, it’s no secret that, in America, businesses get as much unrestricted freedom of “expression” as they fucking want (ergo, the imminent climate apocalypse we will be [and have been] enduring...save for those with money to insulate themselves from it).
In short, as it has always been, the people “guarding” and gatekeeping what can and can’t be said through art, well, they’ re the most nefarious of all. Yet those guards would instead pin that description on the writers and artists they seek to silence and subjugate.
Your loudmouth editor (though only in the written format), Genna Rivieccio January 13, 2023
’T
is not often that we see the backstage strings of fate at work. The ones we can, once in a while, sense but never get a glimpse of. We rock back and forth, between believing and lying.
Is anything truly at play here?
Do we ever control the narrative?
And when, and if, we finally do see them, the strings, the connections, the entire network, the mind-shattering earthquake we experience, is exactly like living out our own version of The Truman Show.
A trick has been played upon me and has revealed itself today.
I had no idea what was coming. I was focused, listening. Happy, even...which felt different. The teacher seemed friendly, well-disposed towards me; I was engaged, contributing and willingly participating in the class discussion she was leading. And then, out of nowhere, she
mentions an ex-boyfriend. An ex-boyfriend who was a sincere and sensitive artist, but who was also obsessed with soccer. Nothing. My mind doesn’t register anything. I am imagining a male artist playing soccer in L.A., where it seemed she had situated the story. But then she adds, “He would sooner skip out on an art event to watch Paris SaintGermain on TV.”
His name flashed before my eyes in neon, giant billboard letters, followed by a deafening crash. What did she just say? The crash had come from all the knickknacks I had carefully stored on the shelves of my subconscious. Shelves that I had built far enough from the doorway so that they never had to be consulted, but ultimately, not far enough that their contents couldn’t threaten some future, undesired crossexamination. They now cacophonously banged into each other like a bad brass band as they came clattering down and piled up into a large, indistinct mass. I hadn’t realized how much shit I’d been storing away.
A godly wind whooshed straight into my right ear, blowing out the candles in my cranium. One minute there was light, everything was working, and then: BOOM! Absolute darkness. The kind that swallows you whole and you lose all sense of scale. Not even a faint ringing or buzzing sound remained. Utter silence. I was gone. My body was still in the chair but my soul had plummeted thousands of feet deep into the murky chasms of my mind.
I was not in class anymore.
I yearned for quiet time so that I might finally lay all the wizardry of the universe on this page; my fingertips were itching to get their hands on a keyboard. Words knocking against the flood barrier of my brain, withheld for too long, begging to be unleashed and poured out in a torrential deliverance.
Hours later, I feel my steps quickening as I get closer to my apartment, my hands fumbling on the keys as I hurry to open the first door and then the next. I throw my raincoat off, and jacket too. I’m gonna be here for a while, I tell myself, might as well get comfortable. And then I blow my nose. I’m also gonna wash my hands because, after all, this is a sacred endeavor: writing the wizardry of the world.
I’m finally in front of my keyboard, and must focus to carefully consider every word that my fingers are typing, processing in real time what exactly is happening here as I have yet to grasp what the control tower is desperately trying to transmit.
What I know for certain is: last year, I was still dating a man that I had been sharing my life with for almost two years. +
He is an artist and he loves PSG. =
My ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend is my professor.
He may have mentioned in passing this one woman he’d dated briefly and perhaps even added an anecdote of some strange exchange
he’d had with her after they broke up wherein she never returned some of the books he’d borrowed on a trip to the library they’d taken together. She eventually returned the books to him, though many months later, perhaps even while we were together. In the meantime, the books had somehow disappeared from the library’s catalogue and Étienne found himself gleefully becoming the lucky inheritor of three anthologies of The Amazing Spider-Man comics, which sat freely on the only bookshelf in his studio. I see them so clearly now. Trophies from this past relationship. Her. Had he gloated when he told me he’d gotten to keep them?
I scavenge the deepest recesses of my brain, rummaging
Is she the Tuttle-lover that influenced him, or was he the initiator that found fertile ground within her to plant this categorical passion?”I Make
through the piles of clutter, desperate to recall what he’d said about her. At the time, a part of me just wanted to shut it all out. I didn’t want to hear him not-so-secretively boast about a past girlfriend, because that’s what he would do. He wouldn’t just tell me about his past. He would create strange little narratives that made the characters quirky and unique, as though he’d paid so much attention to them he could recollect their very essence.
Somehow, these women seemed to still be lurking in the shadows of his life. I had to prepare myself for the fact that, one day, one of them would come knocking on the door of the apartment which she thought was his home, but that we were now using as a shared art studio. I would listen with one ear to protect myself from getting hurt, from getting jealous, because that was surely what he was getting at. And now I regret not having listened. Was she also the girl who had borrowed his iPad? Was she also the one he had pointed out to me in the street after she’d passed and I couldn’t get a good look at? Was there some unfinished business between them? Because as I write this, my gut tells me yes. That their story got curtailed for a reason unbeknownst to me. The truth lies way outside my comfort zone right now. To find it, I would have to see him again. But it’s been five months.
Let’s review. Étienne introduces me to Catherine in January 2021. She’s a professor in the school where he is also teaching. The three of us work side by side in an art residency for six months and, all the while, Catherine encourages me to join her degree program. I apply. I’m accepted. She becomes my professor.
At school, the three of us navigate the nebulous social constructs of friendship, romance, employer-employee and professor-student relations. In the spring, Catherine hires Jane, who also becomes my professor. I instantly take a liking to Jane. She’s the real deal, tells me what’s good in my work and how to pursue it.
Jane is called upon at the end of the year to be a jury member for the graduating students. Her co-jury member drops out at the last minute and Catherine finds a replacement in a young curator who cannot refuse the job. For whatever reason, her name does not imprint in my mind. Étienne goes to the jury day. Although he has taught three of the graduating students for a semester and could be genuinely interested in how they fare, I suspect his real reason is to finally meet Jane, who I’ve repeatedly raved about and who he is convinced he already met many years ago while installing an art show she participated in. I get echoes of their encounter from both of them. He tells me she raved about me. And she tells me she spoke of me to
a professor of the graduating students about my project. When I tell her he is my boyfriend, she is surprised, and blurts out that she never expected me to be going out with someone who was such a nuage noir. I shrug and laugh uneasily. Why didn’t he introduce himself as my boyfriend?
I think nothing more of this encounter, we break up in midMay and never see each other again.
When I return to the city after the summer holidays, I meet with Jane, who I’ve managed to negotiate into replacing my previous thesis advisor. Somewhere in the conversation about the upcoming school year, Jane tells me about her experience in the jury last year. She mentions her co-juror. Again, I don’t register the name. She tells me that when she gave feedback to the graduates, the other woman would consistently take the opposite stance to whatever Jane had said. Jane felt this method could work well in a public debate about art, but that it had no educational value to the graduating students, who would be left confused and uncertain as to what their work meant or the value it had. She could tell the other woman had a burning desire pour étaler sa science. During the break, Jane, being the wise woman that she is, proposed to the other woman that she lead the way with her criticism, and Jane would go next, so as to maneuver the feedback into a cohesive assessment for each student.
As I write this now, I’m reflecting back on the complaints from the graduating students that endured grueling feedback in the morning session and observed a lenience in the afternoon. Which they concluded was completely unfair. It all seems to make sense now. I retrieve two obscure objects from the outrageous pile in my brain and set them on a shelf closer to the light.
Jane pursues her story, concluding that things worked out much better in the second half of the jury session and that she even ended up getting a coffee with the other woman at a later time in the summer. She told me I should take a class with her at school as she would be teaching this year, saying her knowledge on art would be really helpful to me for my thesis research. She also mentioned I should follow her Instagram account. I admitted that I do not have an Instagram account. Jane looked at me severely and said I would simply have to get one. “Not having an Instagram account in this day and age, for an artist, is like an artist not speaking English twenty years ago. It’s just not possible!” She finds her Instagram page on her phone and passes it over to me. The profile photo is of a cartoon I do not know, her name is S-something and I get stuck on her description: “Entertainment & Carnivals. Made-
up Melancholy Mechanization.”
I don’t understand. Is she really a curator?
- Camille BoulayOn the first day of school, I sit down in Catherine’s office and tell her Jane suggested I take one of S-something’s classes. I still cannot remember her name. I explain she was the other juror last year. Catherine has an a-ha moment and then proceeds to tell me that she was also one of her Fine Arts undergraduate students years ago and that, yes, I could follow one of her classes, but that I will already have an extensive reading list in Catherine’s class, so perhaps it is not judicious to overload. I tell her I could just audit. This would give me the flexibility to bail if I realize I’ve pulled a classic bite-off-more-than-I-can-chew move and find myself drowning around week two. We agree on the arrangement. I write the class down in my notebook, the name of the teacher, the classroom, the date and time. And then I promptly forget her name, again.
I miss the first class. I get up that morning and forget entirely that I had been making my case to be in this class just three days prior. I hesitate for a week after that. To go or not to go? I have a lot on my plate, can I do it? What are the benefits? I really could use the curatorial insights and access to the reading list. I need to cultivate myself, get to the juicy stuff fast.
I decide to go.
I show up to week two, and it turns out almost no one had been to the first class anyway—not even the teacher because she wasn’t in town. I get sent the link to the readings and become a part of the group. My first impression is peak curiosity at her Grade-A American accent even though she’s Swedish. She mentions she was an undergrad at our university and then got a Master’s from one of the leading and most expensive art schools in the United States...naming it would only be free advertising. I learn nothing more of her personal life to make sense of her flawless American accent. After an unusually long introduction of herself to us, we go around the table introducing ourselves to her. Before I can yank back the words into the netherworld of my brain, I blurt out that I am here on Jane’s recommendation, which is met by a slight tilt of her head and an ever-so-faint hint of irritation she hopes she’s concealing. I am fucked, I think to myself.
We move on. She’s a hardcore Richard Tuttle fan. She slides into a tangent, something the class soon finds out is a habit of hers, along with the self-indulgent, narcissistic anecdotes of her life, from the shows she’s seen to the places she’s traveling to, the whole lot sprinkled with a good dose of art celebrity name-dropping. Last summer,
she says she got into the most absurd drunken fight over Tuttle during a writing residency she was leading. An alarm goes off in my brain. Étienne was a huge Tuttle fan. I know this tune. I’ve heard this song before. Is it possible for two different people to speak the same way about the same artist? I take the new obscure object my brain has just produced and shelve it far from the doorway. Week three. We have to read Tuttle. I watch a link to a video she sends and realize that I have already seen it because Étienne had showed it to me. Again, I know this song. I feel a mixture of unease and power. Another object appears. I shelve it. I falsely convince myself I’m one step ahead of my classmates because I know this video.
In class, I stare at her in the throes of her intense passion for Tuttle as we attempt to desiccate his rather self-indulgent texts (definitely her art ancestor). Texts I am convinced are littered with childhood trauma, but she refutes my arguments in favor of an unverifiable statement that Tuttle writes beyond himself, about an Art greater than himself. I think she thinks that Tuttle has achieved what she admitted in class today is what she also aims to achieve with her own writing: removing herself completely from the text through the editing process so that she can no longer be discerned behind her erudite regurgitation of vocabulary and masterful copy-paste of citations. I don’t buy it. Writing style is just as revealing as content. I don’t believe anyone can hide, if that is what they’re trying to do.
I keep looking at her and think: she would be a perfect girlfriend for Étienne. She seems to like all the things that he likes, the same artists, they speak about them in the same way, they are both bilingual, studied in America without being from there...how could I introduce them to each other?
I catch myself mid-matchmaking my ex-boyfriend with my professor; a woman younger than me, who I don’t think likes me all that much. A peculiar, indecipherable person, with her odd assemblage of pink turtlenecks displaying Paris written across the collar, a striped pair of green and white pants with the cuffs rolled up twice and a pair of Crocs, each shoe sporting a set of five glued-on pebbles. Who is this person? And moreover, what is wrong with me for desperately needing to decipher her? I hate that she stands just beyond my grasp of understanding, I who pride myself on getting a feel for people in an instant.
You can imagine my horror when it dawned on me today, just a few hours ago, that they had, all this time, Already. Been. An. Item.
Like a movie that ends abruptly, or a vinyl that scratches to a halt, a giant chandelier comes crashing down on my body with such force that I penetrate it and stay there standing, imprisoned in its skeleton of crystals and fake candles, arms stretched wide like Jesus on the cross as I bleed and fiercely try to understand what kind of sick, sick, sick, sick joke this is.
Why am I being taught by the ex-girlfriend of my ex-boyfriend? A man I have yet to see again. Nearly five months of vital
uninterrupted physical absence from each other’s lives.
There was a likely chance of running into one another in the halls of school, as the year was about to begin. I quickly diffused my growing anxiety by sending him a message explaining that our meeting might be happening sooner rather than later, and that hopefully we could set the past aside and wish each other well. I wanted to regain the power I felt slipping away from me. This place was mine, just as much as it was his. I would not be deterred from feeling joy and pleasure and comfort at being there every day, if I wanted to.
The showdown never came.
Turns out, he teaches on Mondays and Wednesdays, the days I don’t have class. Some call it serendipity. I could go to the studio, but chose not to, instead opting to focus on my writing at home, in the peace and quiet I cannot find in the studio. A focus so razor-sharp,
I need privacy to conjure it, although I’m training like a ninja to conjure it everywhere, anywhere and at any time, like a secret superpower.
One month and one week pass. Still no sight of Étienne in the corporeal world, but he lives on through the internet. I receive several emails from him about a music video we collaborated on during a period when we were in love and happy to make art together. The client wants modifications. He wants me to confirm I’m okay with the changes. I am not. I offer some feedback, hope he can make the changes and stay pleasant. He prolongs the pleasantries. Says he agrees with me and will see what he can do. I wait. He sends me the newer version. It doesn’t fit my expectations. I decide to compromise. I make one remark, and drop the rest. Do I want to be negotiating over this video that, if I really wanted it to look like everything I hoped for, would require a much longer, tedious process of redoing some of the artwork completely? Thus, either meaning that I would piss him off the way I did when I gave him feedback for an art application we were working on together (because it wore him down to keep up with my standards of perfection) or taking things into my own hands, meeting up with him, borrowing his iPad and making the music video that I feel is representative of what I want to put out there. But this won’t happen. And though it irks me that this piece of art will bear my name but not my pride, life got in the way and I have to put it to bed.
The film will be released on November 4th. Knowing how little artwork Étienne is putting out at the moment, I know for a fact that he will be posting it on his Instagram, redirecting his thirty followers to a link of the clip. And she will see it. She will be bored one evening, scrolling through the numerous, yet carefully curated accounts that she chooses to follow, and she will stumble across his feed and click on the link, watching the film until the end, itching to leave a well-crafted critique in the comments section, hopefully reminding him of how he once felt about her prodigious self. The end credits appear: Daphne Dupont & Étienne Noël, 2021. She won’t fully process my name at first. It’ll take her a second. She’ll vaguely recognize it and wonder where she knows it from. And then it’ll hit her. She’ll remember I’m her student and she’s seen my name in her inbox. She’ll wonder how Étienne and I know each other and how she never suspected that I could possibly be acquainted with her sensitive artist ex-boyfriend who ranks PSG over art. In fact, almost the entire class knows our ex, as they’ve all had him at some point as their painting professor or been one of his unpaid assistants. I am clearly surrounded by foes.
During our next class, she won’t say anything to me, but will
wait for the break to bring it up. “Hey!” she’ll say nonchalantly, “I saw this music video online that you made with Étienne Noël. How do you guys know each other?” I will have to look her in the eye and think hard about what to answer. What can I possibly tell her that she won’t instantly debunk later, through him, or has even already debunked with him before asking me about it? Maybe I’m the fool. Maybe she’s known since day one. Maybe I’m late to the party. Maybe I’m Truman
Burbank in all of this.
She was there at the jury back in May, and so was Étienne. He never mentioned her. Never let on that he knew the other woman.
I will stand there, and the only thing I will be able to say is: “I don’t know him.”
His identity unravels before me. Who is who now? Is she the Tuttle-lover that influenced him, or was he the initiator that found fertile ground within her to plant this categorical passion? Was she the one who introduced him to Art21, Louisiana Channel and all the artists and books that he would go on and on about, but that I never saw him read himself? Or was he the one who spoon-fed her all of these things he was also once bottle-fed and was now contaminating yet another person with, faster than Covid spreads?
It dawns on me that maybe, all this time, I was vicariously dating her, through him, that he was just a construct of something that
“Now, I’m just one of the many women that was infected by his seductive act in a moment of weakness. I become part of his long list of dating history, the memory of me diminishing in importance as time goes by...”
The Opiate, Winter. Vol. 32
she’d made and left. Or maybe, he is the original and presents himself exactly the same way to every woman he meets. Now, I’m just one of the many women that was infected by his seductive act in a moment of weakness. I become part of his long list of dating history, the memory of me diminishing in importance as time goes by, fading in with all the other “quirky” women until we’re all just one big Past with a capital P, and he gets ready to present himself all over again as a PSG-loving Tuttle nut.
Maybe now I understand it could have never worked. Many of the artists and theories he overconfidently offered up in a one-man show of well-rehearsed lines, borrowing time and again from S-something’s intellectual articulations that must have played like music to his ears, would only slip off my body like a dead fish, hitting the ground with a slap.
The stars had conspired against me. Two great women, Catherine and Jane, both of whom I still think of as my allies, directing me straight into the lion’s den without so much as a warning. I had put off spring cleaning for much too long and was now being forced to declutter the shelves in the most inopportune manner, bright lights shining violently on all the mess that I had swiftly stored away and never addressed.
Inthe month after we broke up, everywhere I went I thought about how close she was. At home in Crown Heights, I’d think about how easy it’d be to walk six blocks down and be outside her building. If I went to a party, I’d go through the usual mental calculus of how many degrees separated her and the host, what the possible likelihood of her attendance was. But it wasn’t just when I was near her. It could be the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday, and I’d be at work in the Financial District, and I could see the path to her: walk to Wall Street, take the 4 train, get off at Grand Central, walk two minutes, take the elevator up to the fifth floor, walk along the left-hand hallway until I reached her cubicle.
I’d be back home in Wisconsin for the weekend, watching whatever was playing on IFC, and I’d think: I could call Delta and reschedule my flight for this evening. I could drive the twenty minutes to Dane County Regional Airport, go through security, sit at the terminal for half an hour, board, fly for two hours, land at LaGuardia, take the F train, transfer to the A, get off at Nostrand and walk four blocks. Walk
up the three flights of stairs, knock on her door, hear Fleetwood Mac playing inside as her soft footsteps approached. Jiggle the brass knob— I’ve been telling you, you need to get that knob fixed—and then open the door. There she’d be.
I saw it all plotted out ahead of me, wherever I went, a bright red laser beam drawn from me to her. And it didn’t matter how far I was or how unlikely or implausible it might be for me to get to her—I
could see that trail. And when I did, I’d start sweating everywhere, my heart would pound, I’d feel a churning deep in my stomach. The possibility of it seemed too real, too vivid. I could imagine it too clearly.
For the rest of our lives, until one of us died fifty or sixty years from now, we would both be stuck on this same hot ball of dirt, trapped together. And that trail would always be there. It would always be possible to get to her. And I didn’t know how I was supposed to live with that. ***
When I first met Courtney, I didn’t know if I would ever even like her. She told me five minutes after meeting me that we weren’t
“You
a nec-Reverse Engineering - Ben Rosenstock
compatible because she was an Aries and I was a Scorpio, which made a potential relationship between us “dangerous.” She had a tattoo of the word “smile” on her wrist. She couldn’t stop talking about how much she hated Katy Perry, in a way that made it clear she loved Katy Perry.
I met her on a Tinder date when I first moved to New York and was cripplingly lonely. Her bio made it clear we were nothing alike, but she was reasonably pretty and I’d gotten in the habit of swiping right on everyone. We matched, and talked a bit, and then met up the following Friday night. She was as pretty in person as she was on the app—tall, skinny, Black, sporting a pair of stylish specs with clear frames. But it seemed evident early on that it wasn’t meant to be. I wasn’t shocked (or even offended) when she left the date early for a work party.
I didn’t message her again. For the next year, I didn’t think of her. I worked my boring office job, masturbated until the idea of sex made me sick, drank whiskey while reading articles about global warming and got stoned while watching King of the Hill, courtesy of my drug-dealing neighbor, Kabir. Luckily, after about eight months, some of my old college friends moved here, freshly graduated from law school. One of them, Trevor, hosted a housewarming party at his apartment on the Lower East Side. And there she was.
She was standing by the table stacked with a pyramid of Miller Lites. I didn’t plan to acknowledge her presence, but I definitely needed a beer and, inevitably, she saw me.
“Liam, right?” she asked, an amused smirk on her face.
For some reason, I replied, “Yeah, have we met?”
“Tinder date. A year ago. Scorpio, right?”
I was hating this, but I did a shitty impression of Realization Dawning and said, “Oh yeah.” Then I surprised myself and added, “Aries?”
“You remembered!” Genuine disbelief.
“Why wouldn’t I remember? You did.”
“I mean, you were not into horoscope stuff. You were clearly not into the conversation at all. You looked ready to bolt two minutes in.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “That makes it sound like a onesided thing. You were clearly not into me, either. We had nothing in common.”
She shrugged. “You were cute. At least I was trying to make conversation. I was being polite.”
I’m cute? I thought. But I didn’t pursue that line of inquiry. Despite the years of living in a fraternity and observing the way my
“brothers” talked to women, I didn’t have a knack for flirting. “I hate that first date politeness,” I announced. “It wastes everyone’s time. Sometimes you just know it’s not going to work out.”
Courtney laughed then. “Okay, dude,” she said. “I get it. Excuse me, I see my friend.”
I walked down the hall to the bathroom and, as I pissed, I thought about the conversation I’d just had. Then I thought about the fact that I was thinking about the conversation I’d just had. Then I wondered if I’d acted like an asshole, and then I knew I was an asshole, and then I wondered why I was always like this. ***
I ruminated on things like that a lot after we broke up: the firsts, yeah, but more so the seconds. The first Tinder date—but more so Trevor’s housewarming party, the second time I ever talked to her. The first time we had sex, which was clumsy and uncomfortable and not very satisfying—but more so the second time, an hour later.
You start to pick up on these patterns, how none of the firsts ever seem to matter besides as a necessary precursor to a more satisfying second time. You get in this mindset that the first time anything happens doesn’t really count, that it’s just a little test, and nothing really solidifies until later on.
Breaking up felt different, at the start. We’d been together for three years, and while the possibility of marriage had never been raised—we were both reasonable people and it still felt too early for that—I felt this instinctive knowledge that we were meant to be together. I never really doubted that she felt the same.
I’ll never forget the day Courtney ended things with me. We were sitting together on my couch watching Seinfeld like we usually did—we were halfway through “The Shoes”—with takeout containers on the coffee table in front of us. I should’ve been able to tell something was wrong: her box of pad thai was still mostly full, and she was sitting up too straight.
We hit a commercial break, and I leaned forward to mute the TV, and then she said, “Liam.” I can still hear the exact tenor of it in my head, the kind of airy, too-light, too-casual quality, even though I didn’t recognize it as unusual at the time. It’s strange, the things that stick with you. None of the other devastating things she said that night have played over and over in my head like this has.
“Court,” I replied mindlessly, staring at the Charmin
commercial on the screen.
“I think...I think we should, um, think about what we’re doing. At least think about it.”
“Hmm?”
“We’ve been together over three years now, and I don’t really know how I feel about it.”
As soon as she said it, I knew what was coming, and I remember having the thought, even then, that you shouldn’t be able to just spring this on someone. When you’re first starting a relationship, there should be mandatory biweekly meetings where you check in with each other, then eventually they’d decrease to monthly. You might be nervous in the week leading up to each meeting, but that’s good, it would prepare you for the possibility of breaking up. You’d at least know when the next big serious conversation would happen.
“You don’t know how you...feel about it,” I repeated, a little robotic, still staring at the TV even though I could see her facing me out of the corner of my eye.
“Yeah. I love you, obviously, and that’s not going to end anytime soon...but what are we doing? Is this, like, for life?”
“For life,” I repeated, and I scratched the back of my head, looked out the window. It was a full moon. No, probably a couple days away from full. “Well, isn’t that always a question?” I asked. “Were you thinking the same thing a few months ago?”
“No, it’s just that it’s been over three years now, and I want to be sure we’re not, like, wasting our time.”
“I don’t think we are,” I said. “I feel really happy with how everything’s been. It’s not a waste.”
Courtney gave me this pained look, and that’s when it really sank in: she wasn’t asking. She wasn’t asking if we were wasting our time—she was telling me that she was wasting her time. She was hoping she’d get an easy out, that I had the same conflicted feelings she did, that we could come to this perfect mutual understanding that our time was coming to an end. But I wasn’t going to let that happen.
“Did I do something?” I demanded. “I thought everything was good.”
“Everything is good!” she assured. “Everything’s been good for three years now. But we’re still young, and we shouldn’t be settled down this early, and we shouldn’t just—”
“Stop saying ‘we.’ You’re not speaking for me. This isn’t how I feel. I know I want to be with you. For good.”
There was nothing else for her to say then but what she said: “I
don’t know if I want to be with you for the rest of my life.”
We talked for around forty-five minutes longer. I know it was that long because Seinfeld was playing on mute in the background the whole time and, when she left, the end credits were beginning to roll on the next episode, “The Outing.”
The conversation itself had just gone in circles. Courtney had said, over and over, that nothing in particular was wrong, that she still loved me—if anything, she loved me more than ever! The problem was just that she wasn’t sure she wanted this to be forever. It had been a long time since she’d opened herself up to something different in her life, and she needed to do that, to see what was out there.
I got it, in theory. I knew it wasn’t about me specifically, really. It wasn’t, I don’t love Liam anymore. I don’t want to spend my life with him. It was more, I love Liam, and I might want to be with him forever, but I just don’t know yet. And I need to know for sure, if it’s going to be the rest of my life. I knew that, and I understood. But it was impossible to really believe it, in my heart. It was impossible not to take personally, and it was impossible not to believe everything really was one hundred percent over, no matter how many times I told myself she just needed time.
For a month, I felt totally hopeless. I thought things would get better after a few days, but they didn’t. Every day, I felt the ache of hunger in my stomach, but it wouldn’t unclench enough for me to eat very much. I got texts checking in: Trevor, Kevin, Dante, a coworker named Jesse. I went to the office enough, but definitely cashed in some vacation days and worked from home a lot. Courtney’s roommate, Jasmine, even texted me randomly, “I don’t know what she’s thinking. I tried to get through to her, but she wouldn’t listen. Hope you’re doing okay.” I was almost offended on Courtney’s behalf for that one. And then something happened one night while I lay there on the couch, despondent, watching some stupid rom-com. I’d gotten in the habit of doing that a lot in the past month: watching whatever shitty movie was on Hallmark or Lifetime, bad Christmas movies already playing nonstop in November. I barely paid attention to what was actually going on most of the time—it was a tranquilizing marathon of first kisses under the mistletoe, tearful breakups by the fireplace, passionate airport reconciliations, happily ever afters by the glow of the Christmas tree. In other words, it was exactly what you shouldn’t watch after a breakup, which is why I watched it exclusively. Maybe if I could adapt to this constant state of suffering and association, it wouldn’t shock me so much to see the things that reminded me of Courtney around the city: the bench in Bryant Park where I gave her a pep talk before a big job interview, a Marc Maron billboard in Times
Square that reminded me of her weirdest celebrity crush, hell, even the stupid Apple Store where we replaced her headphones that one beautiful, mundane day.
One night, as I watched yet another Lifetime movie like any other, I noticed something. It had probably happened in a bunch of the movies I’d half-watched, but the implications were only really occurring to me now.
And then I thought about all the firsts we’d had, all the seconds.
I thought about how everything only counted the second time. How maybe we’d spent three years of our life together, but maybe that was only really the first relationship; how the second time together would make three years seem like nothing more than a false beginning. And suddenly there was hope.
***
The movie I watched that night was called The Happiest Christmas of All. It starred some generically hot blonde woman and a generically hot brunette guy. The premise was this: the two generically hot white people start dating, but it gets serious really fast, and then Hot Girl gets scared, remembering her last relationship, which was abusive (the
“Out of the thirteen movies I watched...
of them end-
the same way: some serious, life-threatening catastrophe brought the two people back together. Mortal danger let them put their past mistakes behind them and start anew.”
ex-boyfriend is played by the one actor in the cast who isn’t generically attractive—in fact, he’s completely hideous, jarringly so). So Hot Girl breaks up with Hot Guy, and Hot Guy is super confused, then he finds out about Hideous Abusive Ex-Boyfriend (who, by the way, is randomly killed in a drive-by shooting in a weird drug subplot). On Christmas Eve, Hot Guy runs through the biggest snowstorm in Minnesota’s history to Hot Girl’s house, determined to win her back...and then he gets hit by a giant snowplow. He ends up in a coma in the hospital, and
Hot Girl rushes in, crying hysterically over his body and saying those magic words: “I never should have left you. I made a mistake, I made a mistake, I made a mistake! Please don’t die, I love you so much.” Then Hot Guy wakes up from his coma and croaks, “I love you too,” and the two hot white people live happily ever after.
It’s an incredibly manipulative, dumb movie, and it’s exactly what I needed to see.
For another two days, I sat on my couch, ordered Uber Eats, and watched more horrible rom-coms. Out of the thirteen movies I watched on those two days, three of them ended the same way: some serious, life-threatening catastrophe brought the two people back together. Mortal danger let them put their past mistakes behind them and start anew.
“Yes,
While I watched, I Googled. So many movies had this same trope. In Die Hard, John McClane wins his ex-wife back after saving her from the robbers. In San Andreas, Dwayne Johnson and Carla Gugino get back together after saving their daughter from an earthquake. In 2012, John Cusack and Amanda Peet reconcile after making it through an apocalypse together.
Thus began my fantasies. I left my apartment for the first time in days to get a pint of ice cream from the bodega and, even on the short walk, I imagined throwing myself in front of a nearby truck, ending up in the hospital. I envisioned lying there, in a coma, and hearing Courtney rushing into the room, sobbing, saying, “I got here as fast as I could. I made a mistake, you were right, I don’t want to be with anyone else. I love you.” It was a delicious fantasy, and the more of these garbage movies I watched, the more real it seemed. Yes, most of the movies that resorted to the trope were bad, but it made sense: petty squabbles and supposedly mature separations feel quaint and silly when something really bad happens. There’s nothing like a near-death experience to give you perspective.
For the first time in a month, I knew what I needed to do.
***
There were a number of challenges. I couldn’t just walk into oncoming traffic. It was too imprecise; I could end up either hurting myself too badly (dying) or not enough (breaking a leg). And it couldn’t look like a suicide attempt, because that would just be sad and pathetic. No, this would need to be done very scientifically. I needed someone else’s help.
But that, in itself, was a challenge. Who could I ask? I knew that if I asked Trevor, he would call me insane; he might even call the police. Dante? No, he wouldn’t get it either. Kevin might, but he still knew all the other guys, and this couldn’t get out. I needed someone who didn’t know my other friends, someone who I knew was openminded enough to understand my logic.
It hit me when I got home from work one night the following week. As I walked up to the third floor, I ran into my neighbor, Kabir, his arms around a big laundry basket. He was a short, stocky Indian guy.
“Liam!” he called out. “How’s it going, man?”
“It’s going okay,” I lied, pausing reluctantly. “You?”
“It’s all good. Hey, by the way, I meant to ask—you need anything anytime soon? I haven’t heard from you in a while.”
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“Oh,” I said. “No, actually I’ve been going easy on the weed lately. Making me kind of paranoid and shit.” That wasn’t strictly true. In the month since the breakup, I’d just found more comfort from drinking myself into oblivion than smoking myself into oblivion, even if the hangover was worse.
“Well, that sounds more like a strain issue than a weed issue. Have you tried the indica?”
“Yeah, listen, it’s not a strain issue. Everything just seems to be affecting me weirdly, I don’t know. I just felt like I should take a little break.” I was getting impatient. “But thanks, man. I gotta run, but I’ll see you around.” I turned and started walking up the stairs, not waiting for a response.
Then, the idea struck me.
I whipped back around and called out, “Yo, Kabir. Sorry about that. I’ve just been having a strange month. Can I buy you a beer or something later?”
Kabir looked a little confused, but then he grinned. “No sweat. Sure, I’d take a beer. Tonight?”
“That’d be great. Meet down here at nine or something?”
“See you then.”
***
Three hours later, we were sitting at a black leather booth in the dimly lit back corner of Two Saints, me with a Stella and Kabir with a pale pink cocktail. Even if I was stereotyping, it seemed out of character, a drug dealer drinking that, and already I felt my hopes for the night diminishing.
But I wasn’t the only one stereotyping. “Let me ask you something, Liam,” Kabir said after a minute of awkward, wordless sipping. “You work in finance, right?”
“Yep.”
“Why do you still live in this area then? I don’t mean to assume, but…you’ve gotta be able to afford somewhere much nicer, right? Don’t all you finance bros live in Manhattan?”
“Ah, well, I moved out here and didn’t have a job yet, so I went for the cheapest one-bedroom I could find. And I just haven’t moved since then.” I paused and thought for a moment, then decided to keep going. “But, to be honest, it’s mostly because of my girlfriend, Courtney. She lives only a few blocks away, and she’s happy where she is, so it was more convenient for me to stay in the neighborhood.”
“You haven’t thought about just moving in together?” he asked.
“Well, she’s actually my ex now... We’d talked about it, and I thought we were headed in that direction, but then it ended, so... Anyway, I’m sure you know as well as I do that the rent’s gotten way higher in this area in the past few years. Didn’t you grow up here?”
“Yeah, right down the block.”
“How long have you been, you know...?”
Kabir laughed. “Dealing? I started at twenty, so, like, almost fifteen years now?”
I nodded and didn’t add anything else. Kabir looked at me pointedly. Eventually, he pressed, “Is there something you want to ask?”
“I guess I was just wondering...”
“Spit it out.”
“Okay. Uh, no offense or whatever, but do you ever, like…I don’t know, does violent stuff ever happen while you’re working? Do you ever have to, you know, hurt people?”
Kabir laughed again. “I’m not hard like that, bro. It was always just friends, and then friends of friends, and I’ve kept those same clients for years, sometimes losing a few, sometimes gaining a few. I’m not about the gangster life. I’ve occasionally had sketchy situations, but it’s never turned really scary. What makes you think I’d have experience with that shit?”
I leaned back and sighed, deflated. “I don’t know, man. I never even bought my own drugs until I moved to the city, so you’re basically the only dealer I’ve ever really known. I clearly don’t know how this stuff works.”
“Yeah, I try to steer clear of that shit, man. I knew some guys in high school who got into more of the hardcore stuff, but I was never that desperate. My mom and dad, you know, they always had jobs, this was just an extra thing for me on the side when I was out of high school, and then I was kind of making a living for myself, so I kept going, doing my art in the background. And that’s how it’s been. Why are you asking about all this anyway?”
“Oh, it’s nothing, it’s just this dumb thing I was thinking about. Nah, I was just wondering.”
“Which is it? This dumb thing you were thinking about, or just wondering?”
I hesitated. I knew I shouldn’t say anything; there was no reason for me to tell Kabir, who’d basically just told me he couldn’t help me, even if he didn’t know what I wanted from him. In retrospect, it all felt so stupid. Why had I even thought of him in the first place? Just because he was a drug dealer? Because he grew up here, unlike every white New York transplant I knew in the city, dudes who’d never hit someone in
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their life unless it was pledge week at their state school? Kabir was a light-hearted guy, cool with everyone—of course he didn’t get in fights all the time, of course he wasn’t “hard like that.”
On the other hand, Kabir was a nice, open-minded guy. He didn’t seem like the sort of person who would call the police on me if I told him the truth. And I had nobody else to talk to, nobody who’d understand.
“Okay,” I said. “But you can’t judge me.”
“Let me guess,” Kabir said. “You’re trying to learn to fight?
What, picking a fight with the ex’s new boyfriend?”
For one unbearably awful split second, I considered the possibility that Courtney had a new boyfriend, that it really was about me this whole time, that she’d fallen in love with someone else. Then I dismissed that possibility. “No, it’s way worse than that,” I said.
Kabir squinted, pondering. “What, you want me to threaten somebody?” he asked, raising his drink to his lips.
“No, no,” I said.
“You want me to hurt somebody?”
I paused. “Well…sort of.”
Kabir set down his glass, hard. “Come on, man. You think I’m a hitman or some shit? Some mafioso?”
“No, no, I know, I get it. You said you don’t fight, you don’t get
“I
either hurt- ing myself too badly (dy- ing) or not enough (break- ing a leg). And it couldn’t look like a suicide attempt, because that would just be sad and pathetic.”Reverse Engineering - Ben Rosenstock
into violent stuff like that, I’m not asking you to do anything. I’d never ask you to actually just go after some random person anyway. It’s not that.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s…it’s me.”
“What? You want somebody to beat you up?” Kabir paused as I nodded. “What is this, some kinky shit?”
So then I explained. I started at the beginning, with the breakup, and told him everything: how I’d seen all those shitty rom-coms, how if I could just get put in the hospital and make Courtney remember how important I was to her, I could reverse engineer a happy ending. And everything would be okay.
I knew how it sounded as I said it, and I made a point of looking out the window or glancing around the bar as I talked, all so as to avoid direct eye contact with Kabir. I didn’t want to see what I knew would be there: shock, disgust, pity, maybe even fear.
But when I finished, and I finally looked back at him, he had an unreadable expression on his face, almost too neutral. “This isn’t a death wish, right?” he said. “This isn’t some fucked up way of killing yourself—getting someone else to do it for you?”
“No, man. I don’t want to die.”
Kabir leaned back in the booth and sighed. He appeared defeated. “Listen, I wasn’t lying when I said I don’t get into altercations. I’ve gotten into maybe two actual, real fights in my life, and they were quick little street tussles that got broken up before they even really started.” He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable, like he was already regretting what he was about to say. “But I was really into boxing in high school.” ***
We decided to stage it as a mugging. For authenticity’s sake, this meant I’d have to sacrifice my wallet, including my driver’s license and credit cards. I’d also leave five hundred dollars in cash in the wallet for payment; Kabir asked for much less, but I wanted to compensate him adequately for what he was doing. After Kabir ditched me with the wallet, he’d empty the cash and scatter everything else in some dumpsters blocks away.
There was no need to lose my phone and keys; I’d leave them both at home, saying I got locked out of my apartment and was walking to Courtney’s place to get my spare set from her (the guilt she’d feel over this probably wouldn’t hurt). This meant the mugging would have
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to be somewhere between our two places, a six-block distance. This didn’t afford us a ton of space, but there were a couple of side streets that were dark and quiet enough to work.
Kabir’s boxing experience turned out to be perfect. He’d learned from his uncle as a kid, and actually went to a few championships in high school. Never won, but still. The point was, Kabir knew how and where to hit somebody to do a lot of damage without killing them.
We needed to take every precaution necessary, which meant we couldn’t be milling around the neighborhood together that night, looking for a spot. So we decided on a side street beforehand. While it was happening, Kabir would wear a mask and his old boxing gloves. We thought about just having him hit me with some other object—a metal bar or something—but he knew his own hands better than anything else. He’d have the most control this way.
Late on a Friday night at nine p.m., I left the apartment without my phone or keys, the lights and TV still on. I was slightly buzzed from a couple glasses of whiskey, but not too much.
The spot we’d picked on Lincoln Place was a dark little nook between two apartment buildings, blocked from most of the street by a leafless tree and the tall wooden fences on either side. After a few anxious minutes of waiting, I saw Kabir coming down the street dressed in allblack attire, with the standard ski mask and gloves on. Everything had been discussed prior to the “mugging.” I’d have to muffle my sounds as much as possible, because we didn’t want anyone to see us or call the police before we were ready.
I couldn’t detect his expression very well beneath the mask. “So. We still doing this?” he demanded.
I felt a sudden little trill of terror and my throat closed up, but I swallowed. “Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay. Well, I’m ready when you are.”
In response, I lay down on the dead grass, only partly illuminated by the moonlight slipping between the slats of the fence. I pressed my feet against the thick tree trunk in front of me and shifted around, trying to somehow get comfortable. The nook was pretty narrow, and Kabir only had a few feet between me and the next house over. I pulled my wallet out of my pocket and tossed it on the dirt nearby so Kabir could just take it when he left.
He knelt down and straddled me at the hips, tightening his gloves and wiggling until he had me firmly pinned down. He stared at me, waiting.
I closed my eyes and conjured an image of Courtney: lying in bed next to me, the sunlight filtering in through her white curtains, a grin on her face. I already felt myself drifting; if I could just hold this in my mind, I thought, it would all be okay. I heard my voice, somewhere far away, saying, “You can start.”
Everything exploded at once, fire suddenly engulfing my face, and immediately the vision of Courtney dissolved. I don’t know if I opened my eyes or kept them shut, but either way, all I saw was red, red like looking up at the sun with your eyes closed, then random little tendrils of green twisting around and writhing away to the sides. I wasn’t even sure if pain was the right word at first, only shock and disorientation. But after a certain amount of time—maybe just half a second, or maybe ten—it definitely became clear that yes, this was pain. And just as I started to process that feeling, I felt another explosion, this time from somewhere else. I belatedly realized that the first punch must’ve been on my right side, because this one felt like the opposite side, like the focus of all the heat and electricity was somewhere else. Miles away, I faintly heard Kabir saying, “Keep going or stop?” We’d agreed to check in after two punches.
My lips parted, and cold air came in, and somehow already the inside of my mouth felt utterly arid. “Keep going,” I said. “But go faster please.” For a moment I wasn’t even sure if I’d said the words out loud or just imagined them, but then I felt something somewhere shatter, and I knew it was happening again. In the distance, Kabir remarked, “Oh shit,” and I somehow had enough composure to whisper, “It’s okay, dude. Just don’t fucking kill me.”
For the next few minutes, or seconds, or something, pain rippled through my whole body. It was difficult to tell whether that was the same pain just worming its way down, or if it was new pain, but probably both. After a while, though, I got used to it, and I was able to focus back on Courtney. I thought about that second night I’d met her, when I’d eventually apologized for being a dick and we’d struck up a conversation that went surprisingly well. Our vibe was still a little antagonistic, but this time in a flirty way. At the end of that night, Trevor had teased me and said Courtney and I could have “cute little mixed babies.” I thought about that, the idea of Courtney as a mom to a cute little baby boy. I imagined him taking his first steps, Courtney recording it all on her phone with a bright, open-mouthed smile on her face. I imagined us taking him to a Yankees game, going on summer vacations to visit Courtney’s family in Virginia, spending snowy Christmases with mine in Wisconsin.
Apparently, while my mind was occupied, my body was still
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automatically reacting. “Hey man, you’re kind of screaming,” Kabir said, shaking me from my reverie. “Maybe we should stop. I think I banged you up pretty good.”
For most of this time, I hadn’t really been aware of whether my eyes were open or not, but I remember this moment, because I could see the mouth area of Kabir’s ski mask pulsing in and out as he caught his breath. “No,” I said. “Little more. I’ll be quiet.” And from then on I tried to stay in my body as much as possible, to keep my reactions to small whimpers.
At a certain point, I realized that even if I wanted to tell him to stop, I wouldn’t be able to anymore. I felt like a deflated balloon, like a sponge that had been wrung out completely and thrown in the dirt. I had passing moments of consciousness where I’d notice some part of my body, usually something specific, like the fingertips of my right hand pressed against my left hipbone, which meant my arms were crossed over my stomach. After some more time, I processed that Kabir wasn’t punching me anymore, that his weight wasn’t even on me—he was standing up somewhere nearby, and he’d said something to me and I hadn’t answered, and now he was talking to someone else, probably on his burner phone. I was lying there on my side, I couldn’t roll over to see or focus to hear, and something was running down my cheek and neck and it itched but I couldn’t reach to rub it, it might’ve been blood but it might’ve been tears because I was crying. ***
What I remember next is an otherworldly, blinding white light and the feeling that my body was being jostled around on a conveyor belt. It turned out to be an MRI machine, I’d learn later on. After that, I was lying somewhere with a man talking to me, saying words like “fractured cheekbone” and “severe contusions.” I wondered why he’d be talking to me when he knew I couldn’t grasp what he was saying. Oh, he’s talking to someone else, I realized. Oh, it’s Courtney, oh my god, Courtney Courtney Courtney Courtney. There were also a few other people there: Trevor and Jesse and my mom. Oh god, she didn’t need to come all this way. Several procedures had to be performed. Some of them happened before I’d first woken up, but I don’t remember even the ones that happened after. It felt, after a while, like I had to accept that I was going to live a life in blurs: white lights, random lightning bolt pains every once in a while, the occasional glimpse of a concerned face.
The first concrete memory I have is waking up to Courtney
standing over me. “Liam?” she said, alarmed. “Liam? Can you hear me?”
I nodded a little. It didn’t hurt so bad. “Liam, thank god. How are you feeling? Can you talk?”
I tried to speak and immediately coughed, pain shuddering through my whole body. “Fuck,” I whispered, shutting my eyes, feeling tears building up. I blinked them away and looked at her again. “Courtney,” I croaked.
Her eyes filled with tears and she reached down, clasping my hand, which felt okay. “Liam,” she replied. “How’d...they...find me?” I sputtered. “Someone saw you in the street and called the police.” “Who? Who called?”
“I don’t know. They were gone by the time the police got there. Do you remember anything about who did this to you? What did he look like?”
I shook my head slightly. “No. I don’t know, he was wearing a mask. I think he was Black. Kind of tall.”
Courtney nodded. “Okay. We’ll tell the police that.” I almost laughed. Right, a “kind of tall” Black guy in Crown Heights. That would narrow things down.
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“I got locked out of my apartment,” I explained. My voice was still really shaky. “I was on my way to your—”
“I know. You woke up once before, you were sort of mumbling about it. I went to your apartment, I have your phone and keys here and everything.”
“Oh,” I said. After a pause, I added, “Court.”
“Yes? What is it?”
“Court,” I said again. “Am I going to be okay?”
“Yes. Yes, baby, you’re going to be okay.” ***
It was three weeks after that when we had the conversation I’d been imagining for a month. We were sitting in the car outside of the hospital where I’d just had my tenth session of physical therapy.
Courtney and my mom had been trading off taking me, but my mom was just staying in a cheap motel, so there was only so much she could do—after a couple weeks I’d managed to convince her to go back to Wisconsin.
Courtney had insisted I stay at her apartment—even when I was starting to walk, it was slow-going, and it was easier to just crash at hers for a while, especially since we lived so close together and she could pop over to my place for anything I needed. Courtney was sleeping on the couch while I took her bed, and her roommate, Jasmine, came in from time to time to talk to me.
“Courtney,” I began, sitting in the passenger seat with my hand on hers to stop her from turning the key in the ignition just yet. “I only want to say…thanks for all this. You really didn’t have to do it, and I know it happened at a weird time. I never wanted you to get sucked into taking care of me.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “I’m here by choice. I care so much about you.”
“I know,” I said. “And I still feel—I mean, I care about you. But you shouldn’t have to deal with all this, like, a month after what happened between us. I know you were serious about it, and it can’t be easy for you to just be seeing me all the time again. I wasn’t that fun of a person to begin with, and it’s gotta be especially horrible now. You were clear about how you felt, and…I don’t know, I’m rambling. Sorry.”
“Liam.” She shifted in her seat and looked at me, and I felt a little ache in my chest. She was so beautiful. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “And, you know, like...the month before all this happened was
really hard for me. I didn’t just stop loving you. I tried to be upbeat about it, I tried going out and I even went on some dates—god, I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear that.”
“No, it’s okay. Really.”
“Well, my point is, nobody was like you. Every time I’d see a new person, I’d just be fucking sad...because they weren’t you. And, it’s like, I thought this was all the right thing to do because I wanted to try thinking about somebody else, to see if it was possible. But that didn’t happen. It was always you.”
I felt my heart hammering in my chest. “What do you mean?”
She looked nervous. “I didn’t know what I wanted. Even when I was still thinking about you, I was trying to convince myself, you know, this is how it always is. Breakups are hard, and you loved this person at one time, so that’s not going to go away right away. But then all this stuff happened...I saw you in the hospital again, and I was so fucking scared. And suddenly it all seemed so stupid, so silly. Why the fuck was I looking everywhere to move on and find some new theoretical person when the perfect person was here the whole time? Why was I trying so hard to, like, avoid it all? And even then I was still scared, because, like, what if I was just romanticizing it somehow, what if we started talking again and I realized I was right to do it, that we weren’t meant to be after all? But then you woke up, and we started talking, and even sitting there high out of your mind on morphine, you were still the same sarcastic asshole I always knew. The same dumb Scorpio I always loved.”
It’s strange to imagine something for months, and then to actually experience it. It feels surreal.
Courtney smiled then. I smiled too. “Winter Wonderland” was playing on the radio. It was Christmas Eve. ***
It’s been two years since that day. Things started happening fast after that. In June, my lease ended and I moved in with her. Two months later, we got our own place in Murray Hill. Two months after that, I proposed and she said yes.
The proposal wasn’t perfect. I was planning to do it at home on a Sunday night while we watched Seinfeld and ate Thai food, the ideal mundane-but-beautiful setting most evocative of us. And I wanted to reclaim that space, since for almost a year I’d associated it with the breakup. But Courtney told me she was going out for drinks with her girlfriends that night—she’d be around for a quick dinner, but after
The Opiate, Winter Vol. 32
that, she’d be leaving. Normally I would’ve just waited until the next night, but Courtney’s job had her working late during the week, and I wasn’t patient enough to hold out until the following Sunday. Luckily, I managed to convince her to try a new Thai place, and something didn’t sit well with her stomach—I’d made sure to order a different menu item for myself. She ended up rushing to the bathroom right before she was about to leave, and vomited on and off for an hour. She took a shower, chugged some water and slowly started
to feel better...though of course it was too late to still go out. So I lay with her in bed and comforted her while we watched Seinfeld, and then I went ahead and popped the question once I thought she’d recovered enough. And she said yes.
We got married eight months later, the following June. The wedding was in New York, and it was as beautiful as I’d always dreamed. My only disappointment was that Kabir couldn’t be there— he’d played such a pivotal role in bringing Courtney and me together again, and yet I couldn’t even tell my wife, let alone give a speech about it at the wedding. In the months before I’d moved out, I saw Kabir sometimes in the stairwell or at the laundromat next door. He always just kind of looked away if we made eye contact. I ran into him in the hallway on the day I moved out, and he gave me a nod.
Three months after the wedding, Courtney got pregnant. We hadn’t talked about becoming parents so soon—Courtney was just starting to settle in at her new job. She was still taking birth control.
“It’s
experience it. It feels surreal.”Engineering - Ben Rosenstock
But birth control only works, what, ninety-nine percent of the time? So she didn’t think it was that strange when she got pregnant. Besides, this was a good time to have a baby, I reasoned. After a long conversation about it, Courtney agreed. Now she’s three months pregnant, and we’re both thrilled.
If there’s something this whole experience has taught me, it’s that real life doesn’t always just naturally contrive things to work out in your favor. In real life, rarely does a random accident put you in the hospital at the exact moment somebody needs to see it. Rarely does a bad case of food poisoning keep you home on the exact night your boyfriend plans to propose. Rarely does your birth control fail at the exact moment you’re both secretly hoping for a baby.
In movies, these things happen because even if they’re unfortunate and unplanned, they need to happen to make everyone realize what it is they truly need. But in real life, sometimes you have to make those circumstances happen yourself.
I still think about that month that we were apart sometimes. I felt suffocated even being on the same planet as Courtney, like no matter where I went, I’d run into her. But I don’t feel trapped anymore. It feels good being in the same space as her, knowing that no matter where I go, I won’t be able to get away from her and she won’t be able to get away from me. It’s liberating to know that I would do anything for her. I’m sure she would say the same.
Thereis only one set of shelves in my apartment, on the opposite side of the room to the bed. A few cupboards are dotted around the rest of the flat where you can cram things that you’d rather not look at, like old clothes and suitcases (items associated with something temporary), but the shelf is for things you want to display. Things which are more purposeful and permanent, that you have collected and carried around with you, things more specific to your person than your place or time. Sentimental items, books, collections of miscellaneous ephemera that you like the colors, forms and textures of. The shelves become a museum or an archive of yourself, and both what you display and what you choose to hide are very telling. A still-life painting to show your personality, what you find important or beautiful.
I sit on my bed, facing the shelves, and count out what I have arranged. Books. Collections of sticks and shells, taken from beaches and beeches near home. A trio of rocks sits like a coven next to a box of candles. Two cameras with their developed film huddle on the lower shelf. Some little figurines, toys. A long wire lamp curls its adjustable neck out of the shelf’s holes and rests against the wall like a climbing
vine.
My too-small shelving unit is set into the wall by the large windows which open onto the balcony. It is rounded, curved at the top like a fancy door, and it is straight along the bottom, with a second shelf added halfway up. The shelves are lined with green velvet, an uncanny attempt at grass (or splendor) which instead resembles a pocketless snooker table. The velvet acts like soundproofing. Lightproofing. Its fuzzy texture eats, diffuses, repels all the light, and the shelves become a black hole in the corner of the room, which sits embossed from the rest of the walls and furniture.
The shelves are so deep that they are almost square. The velvet and the curved wall trick the eye, and the shelves push surprisingly far back into a cavern under my sloped roof. The other cupboards and areas of the house are open about their shape and size, painted in a nice bright white. But with the shelves, it is uncomfortable to have to look at all that depth.
The more I put on the shelf, the less of the velvet I have to look at. So I have made sure they are almost entirely full. ***
I think of my shelf items as tethers. Weighty talismans tied to me with hand-twisted cord, which rope me down to the ground. They help me remember I have lived life outside of the present moment, and stop my soul or my spirit (or whatever the changeable and liquid part of me is) from floating off into space like the character in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Star Maker follows a man who climbs a hill in the middle of the night, lies back in the cold wet grass, looks up at the infinite dark and is celestially carried into the stars as a floating consciousness.
Whilst reading it, I was so in the book that I would almost crouch over it as I read. Neck cricked and sore, back tense, head directly over the book, which was flat on my lap or a table. The angle of my head felt so severe that the liquid stuff that is myself could pour out of my eye sockets, drenching the pages and turning the text soggy and unreadable.
I imagine that I am sitting on a small table with Star Maker. The room is huge and dark, and it looks like there is only one table in the whole place. It might be a café, or a bar, or a train station. I am curled over the book like a bent candle, and smoke pours out of my eyes and falls, hitting the pages of the book, spreading out over the text and tumbling off the edges of that paper world, onto the floor around me.
I am pouring over the book. Oozing onto the book, falling out
and melting myself all over the book and onto the floor as a humid carpet of billowing fog.
That’s what I am made of, and it’s seeping out. My soul isn’t sticky, it’s something that curls. I’m sure of it.
Star Maker is up on the shelf with the others from its (not yet complete) book collection, and when I look at it, I remind myself that I am a soul in a balloon which is tethered by rope to my zombie-like, blundering, round-and-full-of-heavy-clumsy-thumbs thing of a body. A floating pod of heady helium, tied to something more solid. Maybe I feel more like a dissociative identity case where, instead of five separate people, I exist as a Venn diagram of realities which don’t line up perfectly, and resign to living as the overlap between many different potentials. Fuzzy and faint possibilities hanging out the sides. Maybe in another universe, in one of those fringe lives, I would be a hiker, or a business major.
Every time I go to edit this text, I change my fringe possibilities. I recently saw a video or read a book or scanned an article headline that said, “Remember, your body is not just transportation for your head.” But it isn’t as easy as it sounds. I feel like I need to take a plug out of my neck, and all the liquid nitrogen soul stuff will drain down my throat to properly fill out my body and hydrate my skin.
Some friends and I used to play a game together where we would describe where we thought the “us” of us was at that moment. An exercise in describing lucidity. Pinpointing where the soul was in relationship to the solid body. This game was played on the cold floors of my old house, whilst one of us cried, and we drank shit red wine and dissociated wildly and watched a shit film before crying again and writing poetry with magnets on the fridge, then falling asleep on each other. Or dancing in the bathroom.
Where are you right now? You know, compared to your body? Where is the ghost bit?
Just in front like you’re about to fall forwards, or slightly to the left, unbalanced and uneasy. Sitting on my bed now, I am set slightly back from myself, sunk back into my eyes, with my brain pushing against the back of my head, and space at the end of my fingers like I’m wearing gloves a few sizes too big. Whilst I sit on this bed, I am overwhelmed by the feeling that I can really see the tip of my nose.
The top shelf only houses books. Science fictions, books on gardening. Books which could be described as science-fiction gardening.
Some which I haven’t even read yet. And they sit leaning on each other, with their spines facing outwards—sharp edge pointing accusingly towards me. Star Maker is there, along with catalogues from exhibitions, an old herbal and a large collection of John Wyndham books. Tales of plants and genetic engineering and Nazis. The covers match, all different illustrations of women and rats and tendril monsters. I have been collecting this series of illustrated Wyndhams for a while
now, and the set was recently completed with the purchase of The Day of the Triffids, which is my favorite. I always think that it is very fitting it was the last book of the set I found.
A lot of the collections in this little Shelf Museum of Me could go on forever, but some collections (like out-of-print books) can be completed. I own five editions of The Day of the Triffids; this is an example of a likely boundless collection, but the 1971 illustrated-cover John Wyndham science-fiction books are a finite, completed collection. I add the final book to the shelves. There is something very magical about completing something. Success in gathering—accumulating— very specific objects of a specific combination. Think about how many objects are in the world. The infinite categories of things, but here are a set of the same kinds of things, published in the same place by the
same people within the same year. This holds magic in some way, some kind of intent, and I feel it when I look at them.
It is no surprise to me that humans are wont to hoard things, and I expect I will start to do so more and more as I age. Magical hoards of collections.
With the addition of the final book in the collection, which is now sitting neatly with its siblings, something alchemical happens. Each page across all seven books becomes translucent and layered, revealing a mass of sacred geometries which opens a hole in the sky and draws down some unspeakable power for rearrangement.
A spell is cast. Starting from the spine, the chemistries of the books shift and flex, and atoms begin to writhe on their bonds, turning over in their cosmic sleep and waking up as bronze.
The burnished metal erodes out from the book spines, spreading and coating the covers of the books, fusing them together as one powerful talisman. The pages meld and grow together, and soon they are one huge pile of old and blue-tarnished bronze, heavy and pushing into the wood of the shelf. The shelf sags a little under the bronze weight, sighing and bowing to this alchemical feat.
Pages which were bent or folded become razor-sharp and thin as leaves. They stick out from the general bronze mass like points on a crown, some of the text still visible as dark etchings in the metal. This spell can only be cast once, the books now becoming unreadable as they are cast, too, in bronze and sit on the shelf as a stone. The metal reaches its fingers into the velvet of the shelf—puts its toes in the fabric grass— and fuses to it. This font crowns the shelf like a neolithic statue, a magical stone circle, a geological mystery, something which could only have been moved here by an ancient glacial stream.
I walk over to the shelf and place a hand on the bronze cast. It is still warm from its metamorphosis, and the colors of the tarnish shift a little under skin, react and coil away from my touch. I attempt to lift it from the shelf with no luck. It is stuck here. It feels so at home that if you managed to remove the wood of the shelf, burnt it away from underneath, or chipped at it with a sharp tool, I think the bronze cast would still be floating there. A glitch in a computer screen, which cannot be avoided, but bores a deep, dark hole into all your documents and videos. This bronze cast is attached to something other than the shelf, to the universe’s hardware, it is fused to this node in the atomic grid of spacetime.
Rummaging through a bag of sewing supplies from under my bed, I find a length of dark blue yarn. It is a little thin, so I draw a few lengths, pulling them through my fingers and stretching to the full width
arm span. Cut cut. I begin to twist these arm-wide lengths together into a fluffy domestic rope. I pull a small three-legged stool up to the shelves and stand on it to get a better angle, then tie one end of the blue rope onto the bronze cast, and begin to braid the other end into my hair.
From the bird’s-eye view of the stool, the tethers on the shelf increase their oddness. Less sentimental and grounding, more and more strange. Suspicious. They dance around a little, vibrate as I flit my eyes about them in an attempt to catch them moving against the dark.
At the back of the bottom shelf:
1. A 1957 Agfa Silette, second model. There is no autofocus and the camera is dirty and dull. The photos never come out aligned like I want them to be—the viewfinder is not set accurately. The ghost of the photo is always slightly to the left and forward of the camera body.
2. A 1980s Nikon with a large zoom lens is better. A gift.
3. A 1940s box camera that should be held at the waist, for photos which are better off blurred. The cameras act as dragon guards of the piles of developed film of various sizes, closed in plastic wallets. Shots of old pine forests dominate, a catalogue of gaps in hedges which look like door jambs, hollow empty quarries and vast, clear lakes. These bizarre liminal spaces look even more uncanny in negative.
I don’t think I should be storing them like this (the egg tray of my fridge door is full of rolls of undeveloped film at a more appropriate temperature), as a lot of the shots are now blurry or smudged, or the fixative hasn’t been washed off completely. The incorrectly fixed film is the most mischievous. The loose, ghoulish chemicals play out abstract scenes within the photo negatives, performing shadowy liquid theater for the audience on the shelf. Beautiful shots of the beach become cloudy and rain and fish thrash in lakes and rivers. Two lovers fall backwards into a patch of wet grass. Globs—lumpy, dark chemical spots—climb through hedge doors at a slow-motion pace, creeping over the forest floor.
Something oozes from your nose, and when you lift your fingers to it they are stained brown. The whole room smells like iodine and developer.
Two small porcelain figures sit idly amongst the forest of books. They are painted as Mary and Joseph, but here in this lush green velvet Garden of Eden, they play as Adam and Eve. They wander through the forest of books, looking up at the tall pages but never really noticing that they can’t read.
And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
The Adam and Eve figures have lived here longer than I have— it seems the previous tenant was religious to the point of peculiar
superstition—so the house is dotted with the remnants of Catholicism. Even the damp color of the green velvet shelves and the formality of the fabric have a Catholitic richness. The materiality of the bronze-magic felt very Catholic too.
I never met the previous tenant, but he has imprinted a strong shroud on the apartment, and I often find myself in the cellar combing through his things. Mismatched cups and saucers, broken plant pots and a green rug it took me a week to clean. Everything was full of dust, the old skin of objects repurposed as a skin-like blanket for forgotten treasures
in the basement. He left a jar of seeds in the kitchen drawer. For God, or something.
A small ceramic angel sits on the shelves too, perched against a glass of pencils and pens. The form this angel has taken is of a young baby’s head, complete with curly hair, and sprouting a large set of wings. I tap the baby’s head with my fingernail, and the tinny scratch of ceramic rings out.
This is either good or very bad luck.
Still on the stool, strands of blue yarn and lengths of hair weave through my fingers like a serpent and meld into one long braid. Fluffy and blue umbilical cording.
Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field.
“ThereLife - Megan Bowyer
The bronze omphalos and I connected through this crafty ritual.
I peer right into the depths of the shelves. They are full of junk. I try not to dwell, and get swampy in that thought. I think, You could make a pinhole camera out of that ceramic angel baby head, but that would definitely be very bad luck.
The yarn braid is finished, I tug on it to test its strength— sturdy enough. I stand my hand up on its middle and index fingers to make a little figure. The Hand Figure looks around, thumb tucked back to hold the other two fingers out of the way. Using my “leg” fingers, I walk the figure around the velvet forest and introduce it to the Adam and Eve figures (and to a particularly creepy Russian doll). The Hand Figure weaves in between books and papers, sniffs at an old horse chestnut and kicks a pencil like a rascal child. I walk the Hand Figure farther back into the shelves. I confront it with the green velvet force field of the wall, and will it to walk straight through.
And the serpent said unto the woman: ye shall not surely die.
I touch the scratchy velvet with my hand, and push on it gently. Each blade of fabric is felt on my skin; they sink into my pores like they were meant for each other. The fabric and skin grab one another like long-lost friends, scrambling in messy love.
This wasn’t what I expected a portal to look like. But it definitely goes somewhere. I push my hand farther into the shelves, and go back, and push back, and back, and back into something... mossy.
I can no longer see my own hand, and I also can’t feel it. There is nothing cold, nothing warm, nothing moving through there. I don’t feel as though I have lost my hand—that is, it hasn’t been ripped from me, pulling my cables loose and spilling my blood into the portal space. Just...nothing. I push my arm in farther, and start leaning forward into the shelves to get more reach.
Up to the elbow, my arm is in the portal like an opera glove, and my breathing is a little obstructed from stretching into the shelves. Yes, I think I can fit through the bottom and top shelf, so I shuffle forward as much as I can, and duck my head under the shelf with the bronze cast. Pushing a few objects out of the way (knocking over Eve/ Mary, apologizing, then sitting her and Adam/Joseph out of the way), I clear a path to the back of the shelves, following the trail of my own engulfed arm like a hound.
I crawl forward, slithering in between the shelves, and putting my other arm out in front of me to serve the serpent illusion. Two arms in the portal. I am pushing myself along with my legs on the
stool, feet beginning to angle, toes beginning to strain with my slow conveyor belt weight.
My head slips between the two shelves like a note under a door, but the arch of my back scrapes along the edge of the top shelf as I slide by. The pain of wood and bronze against bone ignites pins down my spine and I shiver off a strip of my skin. The vertebrae of my spine are revealed. Mountainous bone erupts. I slip into the portal space as something new.
I pull my legs up behind me, lifting my feet over the edge of the shelf and into the portal. As the upright soles of my feet pass through the boundary at the wall, my skin slips off without a sound, and I leave it sitting on the shelf.
It is not cold, not warm, and there is nothing moving through here. I am comfortable, perhaps curled up in a ball...or have my limbs stretched out in all directions?—it’s impossible to tell. I still feel connected to the bronze cast by my crafted rope, so there’s an implication I must have some body in here, but I can’t feel or see any physical framework to prove it. It is completely black in here—one little darkroom—so when I try to look down at where I last saw my body, I feel like I am looking down to the bottom of the sea, and the thought scares me for a moment. Closing my eyes does nothing to help as it makes no change to what I can perceive.
Less of a portal and more of a pouch, the corner of the green velvet table, held in the net. The portal is a pocket and I am a sunken Magic 8 Ball. Not Likely. Keep Dreaming.
A pouch, a pocket, a bag, a nook. A womb or the inside of an eye or nostril but my own. I couldn’t imagine staining the space with the thought of someone else.
Since letting my imagination follow this path, I sometimes think that someone else might be in the portal hole. I hear clicks and creaks and whip my head around to see nothing but a dark green cavern in the wall. I sit in here for a while. Sometimes I hang my hand in the other world like I am feeling the breeze from a car window.
A glass bead brushes against the sides of a green velvet bag, hung off the belt of the world. Fingers idly dip into the pouch and push the bead around to fidget. Polishing its surface against the fabric of the bag. Removed from the bag as a tool for trade, threaded onto a string with other beads like it and worn around the neck of something important. Intimately resting against the soft, thin skin of the throat. A few years ago I had an intrusive thought of what would happen if you took a
glass bottle and brought it up to your eye with full force. Maybe the full bulbous eye would just dislocate and fall in, like those tricks with a hard-boiled egg. The socket would be left empty and bruised. Bottles and eyes and glass are all tinged with this weird, odd feeling now. It’s a recurring thought I’ve had almost every week since the vision was conjured, and the thought of a smooth glass bead so close to the throat feels like a challenge.
The tension is killing me and I stop thinking about it. Fold the thought back up like a pretty dress and tenderly put it back inside me, closing the latch with a click.
The emptiness of the pocket is so heavy that it feels as though the space is pushing up against me. Like this hole is exactly my size and not a bit bigger. This intimacy is almost exhausting, it is everywhere at once.
The feeling passes. The darkness coats my eyes like taut film, and I plan to sleep here for as long as it takes. ***
To adjust and get comfortable, I endeavor to set my face aside. The removal of my skin reveals my complex hardware. The skin segment had dried like plaster, some sections crumbling onto the green velvet, snow in the grass. Identifying features are treated with care. Lips are separated from the rest of the muscle mass with a clean, sharp blade and dropped into an open bottle of ginger beer from the night before. The bubbles are soft and small, pushing the lips around gently. Red goldfish with bloody fantails swirling behind them. The eyes are plucked with long acrylic nails. The false nails are so long they arch back into the socket with ease and crowbar the eyeballs out into the air without a sound. I catch them before they roll off and force them into another clear bottle on the table by the shelves. They pickle in saccharine white wine, and go glossy and pale. Snap my septal cartilage like a wishbone and it comes clean off, and sits rotting in some mango juice.
I look at the corkscrew and think about pulling my brain out of the new holes in my face. Maybe later.
Now open to the air, the lymphatic, blood and nervous systems begin to float off as strands of fiberglass that web the shelves in intricate patterns. Spiders settle in these new homes, maintain them, have children, die, live again, eat, run around, hide, die. What muscles are
left begin to fall off one by one as they dry out from exposure. Tense ligaments snap and fall limply. I just let these gather on the floor. Teeth drip from my open mouth and I plant them amongst my philodendrons, push them down into the soil until they are completely covered.
Severed from my face, my clean skull basks in the air. It is such a desperate relief.
My braided hair is melded to my skull; it has been slowly turning bronze.
A month has passed since my ghost bit has been in my body (the skin has dried on the shelf like an onion peel, and the ornaments and books are a little dusty. The house looks grayer than when I left it).
I sit in the shelf pocket and think about movies I have seen, playing them out in my head, or what used to be my head. Maybe I project them into the darkness, or sound them out like subtitles into the air. I think about arguments I’ve had that were my fault or her fault or their fault, and I feel the anxiety in the stove of my stomach and think about something else instead. I think about the [insert bad thing] and sometimes it is a welcome distraction because it fills my mind completely, but sometimes it makes everything a lot worse.
I try to decide what I will do later. Outside of the pocket. But it is becoming difficult to visualize the future when the present is so unknown.
I am hoping that time has stopped whilst I am in the portal (it hasn’t) so that I have all the time in the world to make some important decisions. I slip between waking and sleeping, oily, but both states are the same in here.
***
I hope that time has stopped.
I hope that time has stopped.
I hope that time has stopped.
I hope that time has stopped.
I hope that time has stopped.
I hope that time will stop.
I hope that time will stop. ***
Yes, I was really lucky to find it. Around 690, so not too bad I guess.
Yeah he’s great, his daughter is at art school so he understands how difficult it was.
Helped me carry my bags up the six flights of stairs. So sweet. Yes I think I’ll stay here. Yeah it feels like a home.
I’m very good at making myself at home. Thank you. Thanks. That’s actually my family’s, the green rug was from the basement though. A lot of the crockery is too. It’s a trove down there. Thanks. Yeah. The view is amazing.
Yes, I was really lucky to find it. I don’t know really. Yeah. Yes.
I think I’ll stay. It would be so stressful to find anywhere else to go.
Iwake up. It’s an unassuming morning...oh god, it’s Tuesday. Ugh, how I hate Tuesdays. It outranks Monday as the worst day of the week. At least Monday is fresh, providing hope that maybe something good can happen during the week...or at least not bad. It is hard to get out of bed after being in it all throughout Sunday, but it’s also a bit refreshing. Monday gets a bad reputation. I think it’s mainly because of the people who don’t like to wake up early. I understand, but Monday is a markable day, whereas Tuesday is, by my definition, completely unremarkable. Tuesday is stale. Tuesday is the cubicle of days, one of those housing developments where every house looks the same and everything is beige. Ah that’s it, Tuesday is beige. It’s not yet far enough in the week to almost be Friday; it’s not even Wednesday, when at least you can say that you’re halfway through the week, but it’s far enough from the weekend that you no longer feel that little bit of freedom. Tuesday also seems to always fall on the day before washing my hair, so I inevitably wake up with both slightly greasy and unpleasantly crunchy, dry tresses. Disgusting.
It’s gray outside. Not gray with the coziness of rain, nor the
happiness of sun—just exactly how a drab Tuesday is supposed to look. I open my sheer curtains to let in whatever light can come through the gloomy clouds. I need to find a way to get out of my funk. I should go for a walk, just to get some fresh air. Even if it’s Tuesday air.
In my closet is a new pair of pants that I haven’t gotten a chance to wear yet because it’s been too cold. Maybe I’ll just wear them. Who cares if it’s a bit cold? They are black, flowy and silky—a perfect combination to make me feel confident while simultaneously freezing my ass off. Plus, there’s nothing that sounds worse at this very moment than putting on jeans.
I get dressed, complete with my new silky pants. Overall, I’m happy with my outfit. In the mirror, I clump on some mascara that is unevenly distributed on my lashes, but I’m too lazy to fix it...never mind the fact that I don’t know how to. I bring my face to life with a touch of blush and put my favorite dark crimson—almost purple— lipstick on. The trick is to blot it because, otherwise, it’s too ridiculous, but not bad for a Tuesday morning. Do I dare say I look hot? I grab my keys, wallet and, most importantly, my AirPods as I head out the door. I feel slightly rejuvenated.
My music tastes are all over the place, but rediscovering old albums that I used to listen to when I was maybe ten has been my recent obsession. I guess my musical preferences are rooted in nostalgia. More specifically, the nostalgia of growing up in the early 00s mixed with parents that constantly played Neil Young and Natalie Merchant. Something about the familiarity of the words combined with not having listened to them in a while is so invigorating. I can sing along and not be bored; it’s wonderful. Lady Gaga is amazing, I have decided. The Fame is such a solid album, I’ll listen to it until it gets old—again. For a while, Taking the Long Way by The Dixie Chicks (or, now, The Chicks) was my go-to, but in a bookstore, of all places, “Paparazzi” was playing and the thought of reliving all those nights I would push back our sofa to the wall and force my parents to sit through watching my terrible choreography to every Lady Gaga song from that album was enough to inspire a switch in my album obsession.
I make my way up the street that leads to Montmartre; it’s lined with quaint little cafés and Parisians gleefully living up to every stereotype. The contrast of “LoveGame” blaring in my ears and an old man daintily sipping from a tiny espresso cup, while reading what is probably “high literature,” makes me laugh a little. God, look at that woman carrying so many baguettes. I love the French, they are so painfully French. The stairs up the hill make me sweat. I hate this kind of sweat, the sweat of a cold, gray Tuesday mélanged with exercise.
The kind of sweat where you are sticky, but still need a jacket. At least I have my cool, silky, new pants.
When I reach the top of Montmartre, I bypass Place du Tertre. I don’t feel like having a sketch artist guilt trip me while I say no to them attempting to charge me fifty euros for a bad drawing of me. It’s early enough that the streets are empty. Though they’re usually so crowded with tourists that my pace has to slow down to accommodate the man
holding everybody up to take a perfect picture, or the woman who made the mistake of putting fashion first and wearing stilettos that get caught in the grooves of the cobblestones, causing her to fear for her life as she teeters along. That’s another thing I hate probably even more than Tuesdays: slow walkers. Oh, and loud chewers. Nothing is more annoying than a person, usually looking at their phone, walking in the middle of the sidewalk, moving ever so slightly side to side with each step and making it impossible to pass, yet too slow to walk at a natural speed. Enjoying my ability to take long strides without stepping on the heels of tourists thronging the street, the walk down the hill takes less time than usual. I glance up at Sacré-Coeur. It’s quite beautiful in the morning light, with its great white dome glowing in a pinkish red. I really should stop and appreciate where I am more often. I think I’m becoming desensitized to Paris. Now, all I see are the little streams of urine, hopefully a dog’s,
probably a human’s, trickling away from buildings into the street. The stench of stale beer, coffee breath and cigarettes. Men with their pelvises thrusting uncomfortably forward, hands in their pockets ready to say gross things about my body as I walk by. Paris is better when you look up.
I don’t know how I arrived at Pigalle so quickly. I must’ve gotten lost in the windows of real estate offices, looking at all the apartment advertisements, so expensive that when I see a one-bedroom apartment for eight hundred thousand euros I think, Wow not bad, but I would decorate it better, the couch should go here and the dining table should go there. It’s a fun way to pass time until I catch my reflection in the glass and an irritated pimple on my chin makes me move on. I refuse to believe that I am not Bella Hadid today. Pigalle is always busy, but it has a fun energy. Neon lights in every direction, old ladies with their grocery trolleys walking past windows displaying Eiffel Tower-shaped dildos. I love it.
I have still failed to master the art of how to cross the street in France, even after three years of living here. When the light for the crosswalk turns red, you still have at least five more seconds to keep walking, and most drivers expect you to. However, when you just missed the green, but the cars haven’t started yet, are you supposed to cross or wait, even if there are still people in the middle of crossing? Usually, I just go for it. It’s a race for me, I’ve turned it into a game. Will I make it? Can I keep my pace and not stop to wait before crossing the street? It’s a bad game. I really shouldn’t play it, especially because “losing” the game results in getting hit by a car. But I guess since it’s worked out so far, I haven’t quit playing. For this entire walk, I haven’t caught a red light, or one that counted anyway.
I’ve finished my loop. The walk back is usually boring, I just want to go home at this point. I miss when I first moved here and I could walk all day, seeing a street and turning just to see what it had to offer. Now, this city exhausts me. Forty-five minutes of walking is enough for me. I’ve tried to find new ways to go back home from my usual loop that might make it more interesting, but I always end up lazy, taking the fastest way home, which happens to be the same way. My walk inevitably devolves into the constant refreshing of my health app every five minutes so I can check to see how many steps I’ve done. My thoughts are Tuesday today, negative and beige. I want to be back at my apartment. I was distracted from the gray sky and the Tuesdayness for a little while, but now, I just want to surrender to sulking in this unavoidably stale day.
I am writing an ode for you our approaching twenty twenty-three to appease the wrath in your genes, a hereditary trait, to appeal to the demented elements for much-needed clemency, to entreat the clashing warlords to cease their animosities, to spare our infants displacement and drowning across traversed seas, to annul the prophetic proclamations of a postmodern Madame Sosostris.
I am writing an ode for you despite our embedded despondency over the plagues that stride the avenues of underdeveloped and civilized states, over the darkness that envelops us at midnight and in the middle of the day, over the threats of imminent famine in an age of flagrant obesity, over the ugliness that pervades our lives, over the despair that pulsates in our veins, for I have pledged to deck with daisy chains your three hundred and sixty-five days.
This morning I was told that I can be scary that something in me can shift suddenly so suddenly
I balked held my hands up as claws let out a gentle roar I am not scary not a chance we talked I learned that I don’t raise my voice change my posture or my expression that although nothing changes something does and it is scary
I shook my head nonsense
I never scream never even raise my voice abhor violence cry easily whilst watching films reading books listening to music
I worship the sky fall instantly and hopelessly in love with songbirds fresh-laid tar
the sound of faraway, summer day music the smell of old pine pylons set against the horizon toast, slightly burned, the butter half-melted the miracle of a magnifying glass the satin sheen of new grass evening neon skylines twinkling and rain-soaked
then, this evening on the M4 just beyond Maynooth a guy cut me off in a souped-up BMW and I understood
The newscaster didn’t seem too concerned reporting with wide eyes and whimsy that thousands of frogs had fallen from the neon skies of Tokyo
I had heard of the phenomenon assumed it a myth until I saw the footage flailing frogs involuntary kamikazes dropping, falling, hurtling
most died on impact small, wet detonations a little girl was interviewed who had caught one in her hat very pleased to have a new pet a small amount survived taken, by tornados from their ponds and lily pads dragged across the sky to land, miles away in rivers, on soft grass in hats
I thought about it for a while wondered what next for the frogs that had made it I suppose that they just get on with it really
Here, where each street is named for Thomas Alva Edison, there are men in each pane of our windows, stabbing little flags into our assaulted lawn, marking where they will tear up the grass to replace the subterranean power line, all at our expense.
Everything is opposite now. Instead of my husband, I sign all the checks, lift the heavy packages, roll the chest-high rural garbage cans to the curb and back.
The summer we met, he carried my little brother home from the beach on his shoulders, our shadows forming a curly-topped tower.
He used to insist on walking closest to the street so if a car jumped the sidewalk, it would get him and not me. Now I jog ahead in my Birkenstocks (good for bunions) so he won’t run over my toes or bash my heels with his Rollator.
This morning, he thanked his long-dead mother for sending us freshly baked kipferl, her Viennese crescent cookies. He chewed air, licked the vanilla sugar from his fingers. American born, he has taken to pronouncing his brother’s name with her accent.
A Halloween skeleton guards a koi pond. “I have to protect my fish family so herons won’t eat them,” our burly neighbor explains.
It seems another lifetime since my husband stood beside me at the birthing table, easing my cracked lips with chipped ice, commanding me to push, push.
Inside, light flickers, séance-like.
Nothing makes me happier than this, Getting up at seven in the morning Cramming all these pencils in my bag and Smelling human shit on my commute.
Ooh, is that a random piece of wood? Someone with no pants is sitting by it But it beats a thirty-dollar canvas I can’t fit that on the metro
Lovely! No one’s even here and I am Forty minutes late. I can hardly Wait for class to start so all my peers can Give me feedback on my painting! Oh joy!
Ninety minutes later, everyone is Looking with that staple zombie stare, Half the class has left to go get coffee, Other half you’d think their tongues got sliced, What a tight-knit team we have in painting!
Bliss, Professor does that quirky thing where No one listens as he name-drops artists I will never research, that he went to school with. What a monumental tangent, teacher! Then you ask me after fifteen minutes, “Does that make sense?”
What a rascal, whippersnapper you are! Love the way you make my eyes glaze over With an unmatched efficacy. It’s a Little game you play, correct? You make Learning so labyrinthian, and I’m the Starving rat inside your maze, no exit.
That’s the point of art school, isn’t it?
That’s why I do art, at least, you fucker!
Every day I wake up feeling giddy Knowing that I’m wasting all my money
Dying, getting nowhere, learning nothing. That’s a manifesto, baby!
You were young, and after three Jacks he said he loved you. He touched you awake in places you didn’t know.
Decades later, the same man after three Jacks tells you everything wrong with life is because of you.
You can’t sleep, and he won’t remember. You hear his irregular breathing, replay the weeks of his chemo.
An owl calls from a tree. The clock on the nightstand ticks on, like years.
The next-door neighbor has Alzheimer’s. The caretakers flame her floodlight all night long. That fluorescence slices between the bottom
of your pulled-down shades and the sill. The house that holds the body of the woman whose mind has left has stumps of fallen trees.
Poison ivy intermingles with English along the overgrown border of ground cover. Her damaged windows need to be replaced.
The pane fog looks like frost-crusted glass. The quiet between her house and yours is so loud you wonder what the silence wants to say.
She was born in a delta of three rivers. He’d been a native of that river which had caught fire.
But physics is not biology. Equal and opposite reactions happen between two bodies.
Their past dissolved into next, torn like a lost lotto ticket, scattered as a broken strand of pearls.
Their wounds trailed like the wake of a trawler. They argued through that slipstream of eras and ages, cities and places they tried to call home.
And yet, each next morning while they walk, she aimed another attempt to compress the radiance of sunrise with a snapshot.
Later, on her laptop, she added light, deepened color to her ever-changing obligatory daily photo but the beauty never matched After Effects. After edit attempts, like clockwork, she once more clicked: Restore to original.
Your taxi driver might be the one who builds you a house
He brings the nails But also takes you to where you’re going You thought you’d purchased a ride But you purchased a home You thought about a home before the ride But ordered the ride before the home And were comfortable with the nails he brought before he offered you a ride He came to build you a home You thought about needing a home before purchasing the ride The taxi driver saw you coming You saw the home before the ride
You were surprised he offered you a ride He brought nails and you forgot about the ride And remembered you needed a home And accepted the nails thinking that’s what you ordered You believed the home was more important than the ride Your destination wasn’t at the end of the taxi But at the end of the ride The destination paid for the home That’s why he brought the nails
The taxi driver saw you coming You saw the nails before the ride You saw the home before the ride
The taxi bought your home
The taxi brought you home But you were going somewhere else You reached the destination by accepting the nails The destination isn’t the nails
The destination brought you home
The destination brought you home
The destination bought your home You needed the taxi driver to get you there The destination brought you home
“Sun-Son” by Colleen Surprise Jones 18” x 24,” acrylic paint on canvas, 2020
First, you want the tattoo
Then, the tattoo wants you, and so it keeps you— Labeled; from this point on, you’re labeled You’re stamped; your stamp is permanent, a “skin ID” that’s called “charisma”
Charismatic you, colorful you, rebellious you Express yourself in pictographs, you make yourself the canvas
The images live on; they live, on you
You: the Art Show, you: the mobile Gallery
You: the one who’s owned by the tattoos.
I scrawl a message on my mother’s hearse but the glass won’t take my pen—also I don’t know what to write
I must find an art store, buy posterboard and markers tie tin cans to her long black tomb on wheels
and find cars that I abandoned escaping bad guys after surveilling their mansions at unmapped locations
Ruth Bader Ginsburg picks me up in her faded gunmetal coupe At night, we cruise strip malls, hunting art stores Days we spend on highways, driving backwards because we sense the missing cars are behind me
I stand halfway up the steps of church Sullen parishioners eye me with suspicion I tame my tongue, ask for Christian charity explain I’m circumspect because I’m a private detective—can they help me find an art store? One of them snarls like a gargoyle Look it up on your phone!
I can’t, the bad guys took it meaning I must have been their prisoner
Memory fails me—some P.I. am I! What else happened that I can’t remember?
Stretch your arms Toward me or Against me, A good And bad Pas de deux
Tensions fly This way and that No softness No Mami Making food For us anymore No. Let’s figure out How to use friction
There was the beach In the backseat Of my notebook
My dreams The organza of those Panties Purchased at the drugstore
The frill So stiff Like our pursuit
*previously published in Umbrella Factory Magazine
Thank you for submitting to Girdle We very much appreciate the opportunity to read your work
We read your poems with interest, but have decided that they do not meet our current needs
How could I know your current needs? Unless, of course, I am in your inner circle and know the dates of your upcoming dental appointments and/or recent traumas
We know this is a particularly difficult time to receive this kind of news
Huh? It is the type of news I most receive
Please know that your submission was read with care and appreciation Sending work out is always an act of courage
Really?
Perhaps it is an act of amnesia or stupidity It seems especially so now
We admire your courage
I have been calibrating my courage for a few decades Final conclusion; I don’t have much
But, thank you for the honor of considering your work We wish you and your poems the best And thank you again for thinking enough of Girdle to send us your work
Sounds a bit backhanded Full disclosure: Not sure what I think of you either *previously published in Umbrella Factory Magazine
Precisely. Although few places to do it—the recycling center closed, trash heaps buried and properly venting, their cold blue methane flames signaling their end, possibly ours, the possibly salvaged hauled off, we’re told, to landfills far away so don’t worry.
But those of us who know our errand is to salvage, worry. As I am right now, frantic for some detritus. I’m thinking of making some, casting so that I may reap the salvageable and be saved.
Then I’ll join the ranks of seraphim. I’ll burn with love for the salvageable, calling out to others like me, the whole Earth is full of glory. Oh, beautiful ruins, the errand’s never run.
Note: the title is taken from Campbell McGrath’s “Angels and the Bars of Manhattan,” featured in Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems.
Chiara Maxia
twilight on the parking lot objects in mirror are closer than they appear objects of desire are closer than they appear Shopping windows reflect demons laughing back at us selling fast fashion expensive visions of hell Sony screens broadcast female bodies made in Taiwan opening their legs in 4K
Peppermint-flavored pocket-size Virgin Marys Jesus-shaped popsicles to melt in mouths thirsty for salvation and cheap thrills out of stock American dreams we inhale neon dust we exhale dirt and one by one we drop dead
Chiara Maxia
there’s nothing human in working ten hours a day, five days a week to make money for someone else COCA-COLA MEANS I LOVE YOU or to drive forty-five minutes to go and forty-five to return JUST DO IT especially when it rains BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTH IT like that scene from The Deer Hunter but I paid for the bullet THINK DIFFERENT how long have I been stuck here? IT’S FINGER-LICKING GOOD this can’t be real I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER this isn’t reality SPEED LIMIT 45MPH YOUR SPEED 86MPH SLOW DOWN SLOW DOWN SLOW DOWN SL—
The Archangel Michael Kneels before God
Sitting majestically On his throne
And whispers to him, “Sir, Mr. Einstein Was just quoted as saying, ‘God does not play dice With the Universe.’ What say you to that?”
God looks down at him And then smiles A perfect smile As he picks up His dice.
Tossing pebbles into the sea, while you construct precarious pylons on the mat, I attempt a definition. Infidelity as a stretch of sea, an inlet deep, a runny scar extending far into the land of previous promises. You claim a mere divergence of viewpoints, invent rotating moral compasses, as watercolor grays begin to condense into rain. What sort of a conversation? I grab a bag of crisps, but cannot keep silent. At first, I thought your affair a chasm, a deep hollow, an underground, for the burial of our dead, our unnumbered— the hopelessness of a mass grave disturbed. Then, a whiter shade of winter settled, some Buddhist joy, or whatever: the bay that extends between us—if we cannot bridge it, perhaps we can explore its depth, its width, invent an instrument of measure. You call it unscientific I call it what else do you bring to the table? What if this: a bay alive, teeming with fish, thousands of juveniles—a gulf rich with the possibility of renewed perspective. I do notice when you listen, a cue to roll on words like waves: perhaps it is a bosom, then, a homely fold, haven for boats adrift, perhaps, perhaps: we could relearn to be of each other.
Following the map of your sleep, I found it buried in your bed, and I took it. Through the curtain, the eye of the moon said: nothing.
I put it in a jar and buried it behind the birch. The cuckoo was singing—
can you call it singing? In any case, I clutched a spade and set to work.
I did not mark the place, but I counted: thirty steps from the creek—in any direction, and about halfway from a twig. I think.
It is better off buried there than stuck with you, my dear—and I have made a decision. I do not feel obligated to explain it—you may read about it in the morning papers.
There is no time, or appetite, for much of anything, these days:
ten years in or just about, having failed to schedule romantic stuff of any sort, having sort of prioritized the kids, we sit and watch movies, a rerun of our previous marriages—or is it?
The hands. They tell a different story: one of microscopic, but indomitable longing for the other. We touch. We touch. Infinite possibilities open up at our fingertips: a miniature dance of static, an electric contact of pulp, nails, joints—it is all here.
The larger animal contained in its extremities, the hard, the soft, the bread, the shell, the apologetic—
how you can tell a person by the shape, by the wet and warm of their hands.
His searching for mine. Many times, I have repeated this simple experiment: if I open my hand, will he take it? He did, he did, he did, he—
AlthoughWilliam Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley might presently be best known for Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation (eclipsing the now oft-forgotten 1947 film noir edition starring Tyrone Power), it is the book that remains among the greatest twentieth century examples (including George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying) of a common literary theme: never try to reach above your station. Lest you get knocked down even further below the point where you started. To Stanton Carlisle, such a possibility is unimaginable. His life too full of promise, his focus too razor-sharp. But most importantly, his ability to con the hoi polloi is what’s sure to get him far. Especially in the carnival circuit. The place we’re first introduced to him assisting the ringleader
of the outfit, Clem Hoately, in a presentation of the grotesque “creature” referred to as a “geek.” Far from being a nerd or bookish type, a geek is a man who has sunk so low in his existence that he’s willing to eat the heads off snakes and chickens in order to survive. That is to say, receive the basics of food and lodging in exchange for such degradation, plus a bit of alcohol—that being the most important element. The greatest “enticement,” if you will. If perpetuating one’s self-destruction can be deemed as such.
In Gresham’s novel, Stan leans more toward Bradley Cooper’s
portrayal than Tyrone Power’s, but still has something that neither one possesses: the ability to translate and transition his “mentalism” into a church, of sorts, with a very devout following (this being an absent story component in both film adaptations). In some sense, Gresham was presaging L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, a “philosophy” Gresham himself briefly became convinced of before writing it off as another “spook racket” of its own kind. But before Carlisle transforms “reading people” into a so-called religious experience, he soaks up all the knowledge he can as an early twenties acolyte of the carnival. Particularly from the older, more seasoned Zeena, whose talents Stan sees as being squandered merely because she feels obliged to keep
looking after Pete, her husband and erstwhile partner in a mentalist act based on a fine-tuned code that allows Zeena to communicate details about a person in the crowd that tip Pete off to the correct answer.
In Pete’s present alcoholic state, he has been reduced to writing answers down on a chalkboard beneath a trick door in the stage as Zeena feigns arcane awareness of various general specifics of the crowd members’ lives. All ultimately the same, as Pete will attest, showing Stan as much with a stock reading. One that Stan actually takes as genuine when Pete mentions Stan running on a hill with a dog. The dog that instantly comes to mind is his childhood best friend, Gyp, an emblematic canine that reappears many times in the novel while only being mentioned once in Edmund Goulding’s adaptation (written by Jules Furthman). And yet, the purity and innocence of such a creature is notable in the novel because it serves as possibly the last time Stan felt empathy or mercy for any innocent. When the only pure being in his life is extinguished by his own father, however, Stan turns cold. Especially since the event is tied to his mother leaving with another man named Mark Humphries on the same day. Indeed, it was the cuckolded rage of Stan’s father being taken out on the dog instead of Stan, who wasn’t at home to bear the brunt of the beating, that did Gyp in. The sting of his mother abandoning him instead of bringing him along was bad enough, but losing Gyp was like losing a part of himself. Arguably his last shred of humanity.
At one point, Stan confesses to his psychologist-turned-lover, Lilith Ritter, “…damn her, she left me with the old son-of-a-bitch to rot in his goddamned hick town. I wanted to go away with her and see something and maybe get into show business. Humphries had been in show business. But I was left there to rot with that Bible-spouting old bastard.” The chip on his shoulder that commenced in childhood (when most shoulder chips begin forming) wasn’t solely because of that abandonment though. No, it also stemmed from the inadequacy all children can sense vis-à-vis the realization that they don’t come from money. And that without it, their parents serve as a harbinger of their own future miserable, rundown aura. Thus, the seed for reaching beyond his station in life is planted early, prompting him to bark unapologetically at Lilith, “I’m a hustler, God damn it. Do you understand that, you frozen-faced bitch?” Perhaps that was the line that cinched Cate Blanchett’s casting. Either way, Stan continues, “I’m on the make. Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough. When you get that you’re the boss. If you don’t have it you’re the end man on the daisy chain. I’m going to get it if I have to bust every bone in my head doing it. I’m going to milk it out
of those chumps and take them for the gold in their teeth before I’m through… They’re all Johns. They’re asking for it. Well, I’m here to give it out.” Such a “brute” (read: honest) character was a little too crass for Hollywood, even in a film noir. So it’s no shock that Power’s interpretation of the character is far gentler. Both in comparison to the Book Stan and the Bradley Cooper Stan. What’s more, the 1947 version of the movie from Goulding came out during the Hays Code era, which meant a lot of superfluous highlighting of the fact that Stan was forced to make an “honest” woman out of Molly after the other carnies “intuited” he had his way with her. Such moralizing in moments like these, and at the conclusion of the film, are what detracts from the merciless darkness of the tale and its unflagging commentary on humankind itself. Indeed, there are far more liberties taken in the 1947 edition (including a rosier conclusion) than in del Toro’s—this likely being why he felt obliged to remake it into something as dark and “depressing” (better known as: real) as it should have been in the first place. However, one added piece of dialogue from Furthman that really hits the nail on the head with regard to the entire theme of Nightmare Alley occurs during the final exchange of the 1947 film. In many ways, it’s as iconic as Joe E. Brown’s Osgood Fielding III in Some Like It Hot replying, “Nobody’s perfect” to “Daphne’s” (Jack Lemmon) admission that “she’s” a man. In a similarly indelible moment, someone asks the carnival owner after seeing the state of Stan at rock bottom, “How can a guy get so low?” (something Stan himself wondered at the outset when saw the geek). The owner replies matter-of-factly, “He reached too high.” Of course, considering the era in which this version of Nightmare Alley was released, such propagandist rhetoric clearly serves as yet another emphasis to the lower classes not to get any “funny ideas” about trying to topple the rich by attempting to “steal” a piece of “their” pie. With every such “man-reaches-too-high-then-hits-rock-bottom” narrative serving the same purpose. That is to say: reiterating falsely placating notions in the vein of, “Be happy with what you have,” “You get what you get and don’t throw a fit,” “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” etc. All of these messages conveyed via an advisory tone about what happens to a social climbing person like Stan who can’t be “content” with the rung he started on. By the same token, capitalism ironically assures that “anyone” can get a piece of that pie if they just “work hard”—instead of taking it by rogue force like the actual rich and their ascendants that established the generational wealth of their heirs.
This is perhaps why Stan’s embodiment of the everyman trying to pull himself up by his bootstraps with undiluted ambition is an
unwitting cautionary tale from someone who experienced it himself: William Lindsay Gresham. The similarities between the author and Stan are certainly undeniable. And Gresham, toward the end of his life, even wrote down on a piece of paper, “Stan is the author.” Stan is Gresham. Like Stan, Gresham became transfixed by the carny life. In the latter’s case, after seeing a sideshow at Coney Island. And, just as Stan, Gresham was also a philandering husband and an alcoholic, and himself dabbled in something like being a “Spiritualist minister” (or at least being attracted to one) when he started to gravitate toward L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics “spook racket.” But the most similar-in-natureto-Stan attribute was Gresham’s unstoppable downward spiral once the drinking took complete hold of his life. As his health increasingly deteriorated, he decided to go whole hog on the proverbial bottle, checking himself into the very hotel where he wrote much of Nightmare Alley so that he could overdose on sleeping pills and concretely prove that New York is the source of all misery by dying there. And yes, perhaps he wanted to recapture the glory days of his early career in some way by returning to the Dixie Hotel (which later became Hotel Carter a.k.a. one of the dirtiest hotels in the country, with roughly nine deaths occurring there before it shuttered, including Gresham’s suicide). With such insight into what it’s like to ascend so high only to sink so low, Gresham paints Stan’s story with perspicacious insight and symbolism. Including the geek that the reader is introduced to at the very beginning, remaining somewhere just beyond the periphery of the story throughout it all.
Just as the geek is a blatant foil for Stan—or rather, Future Stan—so, too, is Pete. Although once “great,” he’s been diminished to being Zeena’s lush of a husband-turned-patient. And she his willing nursemaid. Pete is an augury of the man Stan will become as much as the geek, even when he leads Stan to believe that he can actually “see” who he is upon giving a “stock reading.” One that Stan initially falls for until Pete confesses that his method for “reading” is simple: “Everybody had some trouble. Somebody they wanted to kill. Usually for a boy it’s the old man. What’s childhood? Happy one minute, heartbroke the next. Every boy had a dog.” He then starts to become too inebriated to say much more, just as Stan has the epiphany that Pete is right. Everyone is the same (no matter how special they think they are), with the same general backstory, to boot. And they’re all just begging to be seen, to have it told back to them as proof of being seen. As the Pete of del Toro’s Nightmare Alley says, “People are desperate to tell you who they are.” In the way they dress, talk, the accessories they wear. All one needs to do is prey on that if they want to make a “little bit” of money.
As Stan surely does.
That’s why he can never grasp the reason behind Zeena and Pete holding back on making their audience members believe in the ability to communicate with the dead. For that’s where the big bucks would come raining down. As Bradley Cooper’s Stan asks, “Is it so bad to give [someone] hope?” Pete says, “It ain’t hope if it’s a lie.” And here we must go back to how capitalism is itself a spook show in this respect. For it gives the commoners hope that they might one day be able to climb to the same heights of wealth as the very people who control the rigged system. Thus, early on in the book, Stan wants to set himself apart from this ilk by looking down on them as “chumps.” Chumps practically pleading to be taken for a ride as he thinks, “Poverty-struck bastards—they all wish they could do it. Make money out of thin air… This is the life. While they’re watching and listening you can tell ‘em anything. They believe you. You’re a magician.” Selling them the magic of what they want to hear.
It’s also no coincidence that Nightmare Alley takes place at a moment in time between the destitution of the Great Depression and the economic boom caused by the advent of World War Two. Accordingly, the book mirrors the “one minute you’re up, next minute you’re down” (and vice versa) essence of capitalism, carny life and Stan himself. Stan who allows the most classic of the deadly sins—hubris— to take hold the higher he thinks he’s climbed (complete with “landing” Molly as his wife and partner in the evermore popular mentalist act he’s ripped off). But he should have listened when both Pete and Zeena warned him about what can happen when a man starts to believe his lies—the ones he peddles in the name of “making money.”
For, although Zeena tells Stan she’s always preferred the “mental business,” she knows better than to ever attempt trying to cadge more cash from people through a spook racket. Besides, “pure” mentalism is enough for her being that, as she puts it, “Folks are crazy to have their fortunes told, and what the hell—you cheer ‘em up, give ‘em something to wish and hope for. That’s all the preacher does every Sunday. Not much different, being a fortuneteller and a preacher, way I look at it. Everybody hopes for the best and fears the worst and the worst is generally what happens but that don’t stop us from hoping. When you stop hoping you’re in a bad way.”
When Stan then inquires as to whether Pete has lost hope, Zeena admits, “Sometimes I think he has. Pete’s scared of something—I think he got good and scared of himself a long time ago. That’s what made him such a wiz as a crystal-reader—for a few years. He wished like all get out that he really could read the future in the ball. And when he was
up there in front of them he really believed he was doing it. And then all of a sudden he began to see that there wasn’t no magic anywhere to lean on and he had nobody to lean on in the end but himself—not me, not his friends, not Lady Luck—just himself.”
This take on Pete’s current state from Zeena gets repurposed by del Toro through Pete’s very mouth when he cautions Stan (after discovering his protégé trying to peek at his code book while he’s slightly
passed out), “This book, it can be misused. It’s why I stopped doing the act. I got shuteye. When a man believes his own lies, starts believing that he has the power, he’s got shuteye. Because now he believes it’s all true. And people get hurt—good, God-fearing people. And then you lie. You lie. And when the lies end, there it is. The face of God staring at you straight. No matter where you turn. No man can outrun God, Stan.” Stan politely agrees with a conciliating, “Yes, sir.” The next day, Pete is dead at Stan’s own “accidental” hand, as he mistakenly furnished Pete with a bottle of wood alcohol as opposed to the kind a man can actually drink. “Mistake” or not, many can see the subconscious desire on Stan’s part to kill Pete off for the sake of getting the book, as well as his claws deeper into Zeena so that she can help him perfect the code act that she would formerly only do with Pete.
“...for most, that ultimate fear is
And everything we do, every action we take is part of some bid to further delay or avoid it. This including the constant chase for money, which we’ve been told repeatedly equals power. And power ought to equal a better chance at fighting off the reaper.”Nightmare Alley: Never Reach for the Stars... - Genna Rivieccio
The higher Stan gets in his line of work with Molly, the farther up he wants to go. Always wanting more, more, more. Again, this is all part and parcel of the black hole within people that arises from being brainwashed by what capitalist society puts value on. It doesn’t help that Stan’s childhood was devoid of love from both parents—his mother selfish and his father stern. Del Toro’s Pete therefore presciently remarks, “If you’re good at reading people, it’s mostly because you learned as a child trying to stay one step ahead of whatever tormented you. Now if they really did a number on you, then that crack’s a hollow. And there’ll never be enough. There’s no fillin’ that in.”
Dr. Ritter ascertains this defect in Stan when he shows up to her office. In both movies, this happens after she tries to expose him as a fraud at one of his shows with Molly while being in attendance with Stan’s eventual mark, Ezra Grindle. In the book, Stan goes to therapy of his own volition, his mind plagued by something he can’t pinpoint. In part, it’s the repressed guilt about killing Pete, but, more than that, it’s the metaphor of the book’s title. The phrase “nightmare alley” being manifested in the description, “Ever since he was a kid, Stan had had the dream. He was running down a dark alley, the buildings vacant and menacing on either side. Far down at the end of it a light burned, but there was something behind him, close behind him, getting closer until he woke up trembling and never reached the light.” Stan knows that all the people he cons have their own “nightmare alley” as well. An ultimate fear that stalks them into that dead end with no escape—for most, that ultimate fear is death (a “classic” story trope that was recently revived in another adaptation of a different go-to novel of the twentieth century: Don DeLillo’s White Noise). And everything we do, every action we take is part of some bid to further delay or avoid it. This including the constant chase for money, which we’ve been told repeatedly equals power. And power ought to equal a better chance at fighting off the reaper.
Dr. Ritter detects Stan’s nightmare alley and so much more as she quickly turns him into her unwitting puppet while effortlessly making him believe that he’s the one calling all the shots in their joint operation: conning the big fish that is Grindle. Unfortunately, Stan still needs Molly to succeed at the con, for she’s meant to act in the role of Grindle’s one true love, Dory, who died during a back (/nightmare) alley abortion that he ordered her to get. Grindle’s fear of never being able to “buy” a deceased Dory’s forgiveness is alleviated when he’s duped into thinking Stan is a real deal medium who he can pay to get Dory’s spirit to forgive him. Moreover, believing that a spirit world exists also allows Grindle to be comforted by the idea that death isn’t the end. For
that’s what all humans want to believe—and, accordingly, how religion has managed to survive as a spook racket along with capitalism.
In a 2010 review of the reissued book from Richard Raynor for the Los Angeles Times, he described that human desire to give credence to a “great beyond” as an aspect of not being able to “stop ourselves hoping, and fearing, that there might be something beyond that wall” in the inexorable nightmare alley of Death. Raynor also wrote, “The plot turns the Horatio Alger myth on its head and the psychology leans on Freud, but the torment, the pervading sense that the human creature lives in a trap he or she is doomed never to escape… underpinned by the premise that the human animal is alone, helpless in the face of destiny, stumbling in the dark, down the nightmare alley toward the inevitable wall of death at the end.”
But oh, there’s so much degradation to endure before at last reaching that end. As Stan finds out on his way down the ladder, left with no choice but to become a hobo flitting from one city to the next. That’s how he finds himself hopping his way right onto a train with a fellow homeless Black man. One who isn’t at all quick to buy into Stan’s fortuneteller yarn. This being Gresham’s way of implicating that the Black man knows better than anybody that hope is a racket that white men love to traffic in. Irritated by being “seen through,” Stan seethes, “Listen, kid, you got everything figured out so close. What sense does it all make? What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world? Some guy that likes to tear the wings off flies? What use is there in living and starving and fighting the next guy for a full belly? It’s a nut house. And the biggest loonies are at the top.”
Seeing his genuine rage, the Black hobo softens toward Stan, who persists in “rambling” (a.k.a. truth-spouting), “Stars. Millions of them. Space, reaching out into nothing. No end to it. The rotten, senseless, useless life we get jerked into and jerked out of, and it’s nothing but whoring and filth from start to finish.” Stan, barely letting the Black man get a word in edgewise, goes on, “It’s a hell of a world. A few at the top got all the dough. To get yours you got to pry ‘em loose from some of it. And then they turn around and knock your teeth out for doing just what they did.”
Finally, the Black man is able to interject, “…they ain’t going [to] have it forever. Some day people going to get smart and mad, same time. You can’t get nothing in this world by yourself.” Stan responds, “You sound like a labor agitator.” The Black man laughs, “…labor don’t need agitation. You can’t agitate people when they’s treated right. Labor don’t need stirring up. It need squeezing together.” Although the
“fraternal” conviviality between them lasts for a brief time, Stan is more than slightly miffed when the Black man can see through his bullshit with the fortunetelling gambit by balking at his “impression” that he has a scar on his knee. The Black man retorts, “Sure, I got scars on both my knees. I got scars on my ass, too. Anybody got scars all over him, he ever done any work. I been working since I could walk.” As was the case for most working-class people of that time period. Children put to work by their parents to help feed the mouths of the even younger children in the family. And even now, those who aren’t in a position to “relax” in their youth are often forced to work at a high school age. All of it amounting to just what Stan said about this life, for those born to a certain station, being nothing but “whoring and filth from start to finish.” Can anyone blame Stan for being so ruthless when it came to wanting to avoid that life? Even if some sick part of him had been conditioned to get off on the whoring. The core of that issue is addressed in the same aforementioned L.A. Times review, when Raynor describes Gresham (de facto Stan) as “restless, endlessly seeking, never quite finding, an addictive personality always on the edge of disintegration.” And yet, manic and constantly dissatisfied or not, aren’t we all on the edge of that same disintegration? Maybe that’s why we keep buying into the drug called “hope,” which exists on the flipside of fear. Hence Gresham writing, “The geek was made by fear. He was afraid of sobering up and getting the horrors. But what made him a drunk? Fear. Find out what they are afraid of and sell it back to them. That’s the key. The key!” As that key, Nightmare Alley provides all the fear one needs to never bother “reaching for the stars” again.