YDNM Wallace 2011

yale daily news magazine Vol. xxxviii · Issue 7 · May 2011 · yaledailynews.com/mag

The Wallace Prize Issue

the poynter fellowship Bringing the best journalists of our generation into conversation at Yale

Photo: Richard Frank

recent speakers include

ira glass

soledad o’brien

tom brokaw

Event listings at opac.yale.edu/poynter.aspx

Christopher Buckley ’75.

Fareed Zakaria ’86.

Samantha Power ’92.

YOU? join US: MAG@YALEDAILYNEWS.com visit us: yaledailynews.com/mag

z uvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvu table of contents vuv 3 Non-Fiction: First Place

inside

beauty school drop-in

by Haley Cohen '11 D5D

Fiction: First Place

the ergonometer: a psychoanalytic history

by Lucas Zwirner '13 D 13 D The genesis of most apparatuses, the Ergonometer among them, stinks of psychological rot. It takes sensitive and careful analysis to separate inventions from their intricate histories.

Non-Fiction Second Place (Tie)

Fiction Second Place

why'd they bring you here, dorothy?

reading aloud

by Daniel Bethencourt '14 D 21 D

by Marina Keegan '12 D 28 D

The writer grows up with the rise and fall of the commercial rave scene in LA. But what did he like about these raves in the first place?

When Anna volunteered to read for the blind, she never thought she’d be revealing more than the text. Never thought she’d be undressing more than meaning.

Second Place (Tie)

Third Place

the other murders

all parts possessed

by Colin Ross '12 D 34 D When Annie Le GRD '13 was murdered, law enforcement quickly arrested a suspect. When dozens of other city residents were murdered, the response was ineffectual. Why?

by Finola Prendergast '12 D 41 D An anxious boy, his aggressive older brother, and their mother spend a day at the pond.

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Honorable Mentions

in sickness and in mental health at yale

by Lauren Rosenthal '12

digital leftovers

by Elisa Gonzalez '11

The Wallace Prize Issue

A reporter with a fear of makeup goes to the Branford Academy of Hair and Cosmetology expecting laughs. Instead, she gets an attitude makeover.

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Editors’ Note

nonfiction, fiction, poetry, art, design join the ydn magazine mag@yaledailynews.com

Magazine Editors

Zara Kessler u Naina Saligram

Associate Editors

Sijia Cai x Eliana Dockterman Jacque Feldman x Molly Hensley-Clancy Nicole Levy x Lauren Oyler Cooper Wilhelm

Design Editors

Raisa Bruner u Eli Markham u Christian Vazquez

Design Assistants

Cora Ormseth v Lindsay Paterson

Photography Editors

Christopher Peak x Sarah Sullivan x Emily Suran

Yale Daily News Editor in Chief Vivian Yee

Publisher Kyle Miller

O

ur first cover this school year featured a tomato thrown on top of a pile of canonical books. The story it accompanied was Jacque Feldman’s tale of time spent and lessons learned last summer on organic farms. The last year at the Yale Daily News Magazine too has in some sense been one of throwing tomatoes against the classics. We’ve redesigned our content and image, adding a number of new short features, printing on a glossy cover, and launching our own section on the YDN blog. But we haven’t strayed too far from our traditions. We continue to take pride in publishing some of the best narrative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry on campus. And we continue to run the Wallace Prize in fiction and non-fiction each spring.

As always, in our last issue of the school year, we are thrilled to present the work of this year’s prize recipients.

The Yale Daily News Magazine awards the Wallace Prize in fiction and non-fiction annually in memory of Peter J. Wallace ’64. Wallace was a member of the Yale Daily News Editorial board, and the prize in his name is endowed by the Peter Wallace Memorial fund, set up through contributions by the Wallace family and Peter’s friends and classmates. This year’s awards were given to eight winners, including two honorable mentions. Our winning pieces range from the adventures at a beauty school of self-proclaimed former tomboy Haley Cohen to Lucas Zwirner’s story about the invention of the Ergonometer.

On behalf of the staff of the Yale Daily News Magazine and our panel of judges, we would like to congratulate this year’s winners. We received an overwhelming number of outstanding entries.

In that vein, we owe our utmost gratitude to our judges — Mark Oppenheimer, Alfred Guy, Margaret Spillane, Brendan Sullivan, Helena Fitzgerald, and Meredith Kaffel — for their tireless work in reading and evaluating this year’s submissions.

We would like to thank all of our editors, writers, illustrators, photographers, and designers for a year of truly excellent work. And we’d like to wish everyone a happy summer, full of great reading and of course, a smashed tomato or two.

— Zara Kessler & Naina Saligram

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 7 May 2011

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Non-Fiction: First Place

Beauty School Drop-In A cosmetics-phobe gets an attitude makeover.

D

by haley cohen D

photos by florian Koenigsberger

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

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A

rtie sharpened the charcoal Wet n‘ Wild eye pencil as Sarah, Belle, and Katherine held me down.

“No!” I begged my friends.

“No, please no!” But they merely laughed and tightened their grips as I thrashed. To makeup obsessed sixth graders, glamorizing a bushy-haired, ice hockey-playing tomboy was too funny a prospect to abandon.

In middle school, puberty and its cruel sidekick, body odor, necessitated I shower daily to avert an insect following, but beyond that I deemed grooming frivolous, vain, and a lame use of time. Ten years later, my views on beautification have softened somewhat.

I occasionally blow-dry my hair straight and, when heading out at night, even apply eyeliner and mascara.

Still, I never waste more than nine minutes getting ready. I’m woefully impatient, but what truthfully keeps me from spending more time on my looks is the fear of looking like it. When I see women who are visibly made up, I automatically assume that they are insecure or conceited. Neither are labels I’m looking to wear.

Full disclosure? I’m also beauty illiterate. Nail polish finds its way into the creases of my knees when I do my own pedicures, my only adventure with a curling iron led to a tripped smoke alarm, and I once mistook liquid eyeliner for a fountain pen. Looking unnatural terrifies me, but I wouldn’t mind knowing how to subtly enhance myself. So a few weeks ago, after an experiment with blush left me looking like Elmo, I decided to seek guidance from a place where, on average, 480 minutes a day are dedicated not just to getting ready, but to methodically studying how to get ready. I decided to drop in on a beauty school.

Part of me actually wanted to learn the skills I lacked: to understand what hairstyle best suited my face shape, how to apply lipstick properly, what colors complemented my blonde hair and hazel-green eyes.

But, perhaps anticipating failure, a bigger, more selfrighteous part of me wanted to find a school that would affirm my assumptions about the beauty-focused. I wanted to believe my cosmetic cluelessness was a harbinger of good sense — that beauty students spent their time giggling, dousing each other with glitter, and debating the merits of matte lipstick, while as a Yale student, I focused on studying evolution, planning community service trips, and discussing Kant. You know, things that mattered.

Branford Academy of Hair and Cosmetology sold me immediately with its website. The intro page flashed photos of models in extravagant face paint

with hairstyles taller and wider than the fanned tail of a peacock. I had already begun dashing down the address when my speakers began playing the school’s jingle, a poppy number that could easily out-cheese a Kraft factory.

Branford Academy of Hair and Cosmetology, It’s so exciting when you see all the possibilities of having your own careeeeeeer, your future begins right hereeee, we make it eeeeasy for you to achieve your dreams.

At Branford Academy of Hair and Cosmetology… your future begins TODAY. The deal was sealed. The ditty still ringing in my ears, I grabbed my car keys and sped up I-95 North towards my cosmetological future.

Before

I

crossed

from

the

“Lakeview” strip mall parking lot into Branford Academy, I inhaled deeply, bracing (and secretly hoping) for lithe girls in pink dresses, florid perfume, and Rizzo-esque permed hair. Tattooed men in pressed black trousers, the pungent scent of nail polish remover, and disembodied mannequin heads greeted me instead.

Shocked, I made my way to the school’s main office to find Diana Leonardi-Discher, the school’s founder and owner. Dressed cleanly in a blue and white striped button down, black leggings, and platform motorcycle boots, Diana sat facing her computer, her electric-blue eyes fixed on a live image of the school’s clinic floor.

She alternated her attention between the video and an email that she pecked out with long, French-manicured nails. “The camera’s so I can keep tabs on the students while I do boring work in here. I’m nosy,” she said, shrugging.

Surprisingly, given her trade, Diana’s face showed only a few signs of re-touching: crisp black lines on her upper eyelids, the tell-tale crust of mascara on her lashes, and a thin, rosy ring of liner around her lips.

Of her beauty routine she explained, “I have to get two kids to school, and get to work all before 8:30 — there’s not a whole lotta space for me-time.” Sunday, her only day off, she goes barefaced.

A brawny male swaggered into Diana’s office and asked if he could clock in.

“Nope,” she said firmly. “It’s 9:15, you’ll have to wait until 10.” Students must log the number of hours they spend at school so Diana knows when to promote them to a more advanced grade.

After the rebuffed student stomped away, I remarked on the surprising number of males at Branford Academy.

“Oh yeah. We’ve got everything: manly men, straight men, girly girls, lesbians, and a few that don’t Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuuuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvu non-fiction: first place uvu 7 know what the heck they are. Some of my students are really clean-cut, snappy dressers, and some make you stop and go ‘Huh? And you want to go into beauty?’ But one of my most talented students right now is a lesbian with woah-mamma huge gauge earrings and tattoos up the wazoo. I learned long ago not to judge a book by its cover.”

But in Diana’s mind, appearance is still important.

“Look, I know it’s misguided, you know it’s misguided, but 90% of first impressions are nonverbal. It’s human nature to assume.”

As we chatted, I wondered whether Diana was taking stock of my appearance. Could she offer me any suggestions off the bat? She turned back to the screen as if afraid her assessment might offend me. “I can’t help it. When I look at someone I automatically see what he or she could do to improve. For you? Highlights, mascara, warm-toned clothing.”

As I examined my gray sweater against my pasty skin, a slight woman appeared at the office door and knocked lightly.

“Hi doll,” Diana greeted her. She introduced the woman as Sandy and explained that as a senior at the academy, she had already completed 1200 clocked hours of theory time and clinic practice. Sandy had earned two of those practical hours the previous afternoon by highlighting Diana’s voluminous shag.

Referencing her new honey-blonde do, Diana began: “Looks great. I love it. But now I’m going to critique it.” Without pausing, she continued. “If you don’t get the hairline right, it’s no good. You have to take into account the whirls and cowlicks — in your mind you have to construct a pattern. Foil first and make sure you get the paper flat. Pretend you’re Christopher Columbus — you have to figure out: how are you going to get a round surface flat?”

Sandy nods silently ­ — Diana’s authoritative speaking style discourages interruption. After 30 years in cosmetology, Diana knows what she’s talking about.

Diana’s beginnings in the beauty industry were far from glamorous. In her teens, whenever she broke a rule set by her strict Italian-immigrant parents — “whenever I talked back, gave a funny look, or so much as talked to a boy” — she was sent to her uncle Art’s barber shop in East Haven to sweep hair off the floor. Then one day, when a sudden flood of customers overwhelmed the small shop, Diana’s uncle slapped a pair of scissors in her hands and, pointing to a hunched gentleman with profuse ear hair, said, “Alright kid, make yourself useful.”

After that, Diana stopped sweeping and started cutting. Her technique was impeccable, her results handsome. Engaging with clients helped break her of Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

8 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z her crippling shyness. Still, Diana didn’t immediately recognize cosmetology as her calling. She loved cutting hair, but perhaps because her clientele was “older-thansin” and accordingly unattractive, Diana didn’t think much about the aesthetic side of hairstyling.

She didn’t pay much attention to her own appearance, either. Her parents forbid her from wearing makeup, and she usually pulled her curly platinum hair into ponytails. Her choice to attend State Beauty Academy came only after her father refused to pay for a liberal arts college. “I’m not going to work harder at your life than you are,” he said — a mantra that Diana often repeats to her students and three children. He demanded Diana learn a trade, find a job, and work until she snagged a nice, Italian husband to provide for her. She chose to pursue cosmetology, not because she loved it, but because “Bartending? Construction? What else was I going to do?”

Between 1983 and 1987, Diana took out student loans

to pay her way through cosmetology school, repaid those loans by working at salons across Connecticut, and married an Italian carpenter. But contrary to her father’s plan, Diana never leaned on her husband for financial support. Instead, she did the supporting, convincing him to quit his unprofitable gig chopping wood and start chopping hair. Diana gave him a cosmetology crash-course, and later that year they cofounded Joseph Anthony Hair, Nail and Skin Studio in Branford, just down Main Street from where Branford Academy now operates.

It was only while running Joseph Anthony that Diana came to love cosmetology. As she developed a loyal clientele, she realized she could make people feel better about themselves.

“I had people come in, feeling crappy, and 40 minutes later…Voila! A new haircut and their day was totally turned around.”

But running a salon was not without its frustrations.

Diana’s standards are as high and firm as a hairsprayed bouffant, and she was often unhappy with her stylists.

“I thought ‘I’m teaching them and I’m paying them?

Something’s backwards here.’” She urged her husband to let her turn the salon into a cosmetology school, but he refused. Seven years later, they divorced and her husband offered her a choice: the salon or their sevenyear old daughter, Jessica. The choice was not difficult.

Diana took Jessica, found a space in Branford, and in 1997, Branford Academy of Hair and Cosmetology was born.

Diana finished critiquing Sandy’s

highlights and motioned for me to follow her to the clinic floor. “We teach everything,” she told me, sweeping her arm around the small facility. “Manicures, pedicures, nail art, makeup, facials, massage, haircuts, hairstyling, hair treatments, client relations — everything you need to know to work at or own a salon.”

Besides the mannequin heads eerily screwed onto the backs of salon chairs, Branford Academy looked like your average salon. A bulwark of mirrors bisected the room, flanked on either side by spinning black leather chairs. Around the corner, past the row of sinks in a smaller wing, a student knelt buffing the toenails of an elderly woman in one of the clinic’s two pedicure chairs. The students practice mainly on mannequins and each other, but Branford Academy also has a following of live customers, drawn to the school for its steeply discounted prices and well-trained students.

Before students are allowed to work with clients, they have to complete at least 90 hours of classroom time, reading and memorizing a cosmetology textbook that covers everything from dandruff and body Vol. XXXVIII, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuuuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv non-fiction: first place uvu 9 waxing to the basic principles of electricity (helpful for understanding beauty appliances). Once students master the first half of the textbook they can work with live customers, but they need another 110 hours of classroom time plus 1300 practical hours before they can take the State Board Exam and become licensed professionals.

“Hey buddy,” Diana said, prodding the pedicurist.

“What’s with the pants?” The student was in jeans, a violation of Branford Academy’s all-black dress code.

Diana’s trade may focus on color and creativity, but her rules are black and white. Hair and makeup must

about that yesterday. That is a total myth.”

Though Diana hates reprimanding students, she fiercely defends her draconian teaching style. “Look, I know I’m being an asshole and some of my students will hate me for it now. But many of them work second jobs. They’re not going to go home and do the homework, so I have to make sure they learn here.

Eventually they’ll look back and realize I only wanted them to succeed.”

Diana says she draws her greatest satisfaction from watching her students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, “make something of

They are professional prettifiers and need to look the part.

But I’m in the business of brains. be done prior to arriving at school. No gum. No cell phones. No foul language. No…well, almost no exceptions.

“I’ll let you off this time, but next time I’m sending you home. And watch how much polish you’re putting on that brush.”

As we walked to a classroom across from Diana’s office, she volunteered, “I think my way of doing things is the right way. So sue me.” Breaking into a faux-evil voice, she cackled, “My main goal here at B.A. is to create an army of mini-mes.”

It was 9:30 a.m., time for Diana’s class. Branford Academy has five instructors on payroll to educate its 52 students, but Diana can’t resist teaching. For three hours every Tuesday and Wednesday morning, she takes a break from administrative duties and lectures the seniors.

She wished the class good morning, bade them to open their textbooks to page 220, and launched into her lecture.

“What are the purposes of hair?” Diana asked the class.

“Protection and adornment,” they recited in unison.

“And what, Sean,” she said, singling out a student with an ornate star-scape shaved into his head. “Are the only places we don’t grow hair?”

“Palms and the bottoms of the feet,” Sean said confidently.

“And what, Jessica,” she called to a petite girl in a trendy sweater. “Is the technical term for knotted hair.

No looking in the book!”

“Ms. Diana?” interrupted a burly student seated in my row. “Why does hair grow back thicker when you shave it?”

Exasperated, Diana answered: “Luis. We just read Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

themselves.” About half her students enter the academy with “a closet full of bald Barbies” and a love for cosmetology already deep within them. But the other half enroll because cosmetology is the best of their limited career options. 90% of Diana’s male students never graduated from high school or attained g.e.d.s.

For them, as well as for many of the female students, cosmetology is a way to a more attractive life — physically, emotionally, and financially.

It seems the human desire to look

good is as old as we are. Strips of hide recovered near the skulls of newly evolved Homo sapiens, along with red pigment found near gravesites, suggest that archaic forms of hairstyling and makeup were developed as early as the Ice Age. A little later, around 4000 B.C., societies began to use cosmetics and coiffures not only for beautification’s sake, but also to indicate social and political standing. Egyptian noblemen sported elaborate hairdos beset with gold and flowers, while servants tied their hair in simple loops at the napes of their necks.

In ancient China, kings and queens used red henna to stain their nails, while their lower class subject wore pale colors or went au naturale. Wealthy Greek women painted white lead on their faces to blanch their skin of color — paleness separated the upper class from the commoners who toiled in the sun.

The demand for white skin remained high until the 19th Century and, in this alabaster obsessed age, the quest for good looks could kill, and often did.

European women in the sixth century bled themselves white; Renaissance women smeared their faces with a compound that frequently caused muscle paralysis; and Regency Women even ingested small quantities of arsenic to prompt paleness.

10 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z Queen Victoria put a stop to absurd beauty measures when she assumed the English throne in 1837. Under her prudish rule, makeup was deemed immoral and became closely associated with prostitution — no respectable Western woman would be caught dead in it. But even without the arsenic and lead of previous years, beauty still meant pain. In Victorian times, many women mimicked the effects of rouge and lipstick by pinching their cheeks and biting their lips before appearing in public.

Sore cheeks and lips caught a break during World War I, when women resumed using makeup. The sudden absence of men allowed them more financial and social freedom, and the development of cheaper cosmetics meant even working-class women could procure lipstick, colorful eye shadow, and powders.

The rise of Hollywood in the 1920s left laywomen star-struck, and they eagerly snatched up the products used by their favorite actresses. The same trend has continued to the present, with men and women alike striving for the tan, thin beauty ideal celebrated by the media and spending buckets of money to attain it.

They say beauty is only skin deep, but due to society’s

beauty obsession, so are the pockets of its moguls: today’s cosmetics industry is estimated at $18 billion.

Interestingly given its exclusive roots, today cosmetology is one of the most egalitarian fields in existence. Many states, Connecticut included, don’t require high school diplomas or g.e.d.s to start cosmetology careers. Even so, cosmetologists can expect to earn $30,000-$50,000 a year with tips and, due to a shortage of licensed salon professionals, the unemployment rate for cosmetologists is close to 0%.

As educational as it was listening

to the students rattle off facts about hypertrichosis (excessive growth of hair in odd places), monilethrix (beaded hair), and furuncles (localized infections of hair follicles), this information wasn’t increasing my primp proficiency. I asked Diana if I could fast-forward to the practical component. Since makeup was the Achilles heel of my already feeble beauty arsenal, we decided to focus our attention there and handle hair and nails another day.

Diana escorted back me to the clinic floor and called over a student named Kyona, who had been

branford academy of hair and cosmetology

Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv non-fiction: first place uvu 11 chatting with the receptionist about the stress of her evening gig as a psychiatric ward secretary. Diana explained that, in addition to her secretarial duties and attending beauty school, Kyona was also working as a professional makeup artist.

So long as they are older than 17, Diana accepts most applicants to Branford Academy. Her favorite students to teach, however, are those with a clear passion for beauty. Kyona was one of the latter.

Diana explained, “You have people walk in with no

up my nose. Powder foundation, she explained, creates a clear complexion without disguising skin as liquid foundation does. Next she grabbed a peach blush and with light circles rubbed it onto my cheeks.

For my eyes, Kyona picked out pots of bronze and mossy green powder whose shimmer quotient inspired my palms to start perspiring. She swept the green over my lids, and gingerly swished the bronze into the creases below my brow bones. Then she took a lighter, mint green and wiped it around my

‘I was trained to do makeup by a drag queen. Don’t worry, though, I’m just going to make you look real natural.’ makeup on — you know they’re not really interested.

Then you’ll get people strolling in like a hot mess — they’re probably not so interested either. But then there are applicants like Kyona — I could tell that the girl knew how to put it on from the moment I saw her.”

She motioned for me to sit down in a high chair by the manicure station, winked at Kyona, and told me to come find her when I had a new face.

Makeup, more than hairstyling or nail decor, had always made my stomach clench. Except in cases of alopecia universalis (complete hair loss) and anonychia (a rare disorder that causes infants to be born nailless), people are born with hair and nails. A full face of makeup? Not so much. While logically I knew that there was just as much potential to transform someone’s looks by changing their hair and nails, I still feared makeup more for its distortion potential.

Too much makeup, and I worried I wouldn’t look like me. As Kyona readied her foam squares and brushes, I imagined myself made up as a geisha, a Goth, and — oh god — Lady Gaga? Hoping to distract myself, I struck up conversation about Kyona’s start in the cosmetics industry.

“So, I was trained to do makeup by a drag queen,” Kyona started, but perhaps noticing the terror in my un-adorned eyes added: “Don’t worry, though, I’m just going to make you look real natural. A cute, daytime look.”

I breathed a small sigh of relief and loosened my death grip on the pen I was holding to jot down makeup tips.

Stepping back to determine a plan for her blank canvas, Kyona fished a “light-medium” compact out of her kit and tested its color on my hand. Pleased, she dusted pressed powder across my forehead, cheeks, and chin, sending a cloud of chalky-smelling residue Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

tear ducts and under my eyebrows “to open the eyes.”

She stepped back to assess her progress. Apparently deciding I needed even more sparkle, she snatched her brush and applied another layer of green.

Once satisfied with my lids, she chirped: “Time to enlarge your lash line!” Selecting a brown liquid liner from her box, she warned me that this was one trick I should not try at home. Liquid liner takes much more precision and experience to apply correctly. I chucked, recalling the time that I applied liquid liner to paper. For a moment, the sensation of the cool, wet pen against my closed lids helped soothe my nerves.

That is, until Kyona got to my eye’s outer corner and I felt the liner curl up dramatically. The language of my frantic thoughts, if uttered aloud, definitely would have gotten me sent home for the day.

Mascara came next. Kyona applied one careful coat of Maybelline’s Brownish-Black and separated the clumps with a Lilliputian metal comb. “And now the finishing touch,” she said, producing a tube of nudeish pink lipstick. She swiped the buttery formula over my pursed pucker and instructed me to smack. After 55 minutes and 34 seconds, my face was finally finished.

“Beautiful!” she said, clapping. “It’s just the right amount. People will say ‘Wow, you look pretty today!’

But not ‘Woah, who are you today?’”

I reluctantly wandered to the mirror hung above the manicure station. When I finally worked up the nerve to look at myself, I was shocked. My skin gleamed, my eyes bore only a slight resemblance to Cleopatra’s, and my lashes looked longer than the Nile. Yet, like an old friend, there was the mole on my left cheek.

I looked like me, only better.

Even though I loved what Kyona

had done (and was thankful for what she hadn’t), I knew immediately that I would never replicate it. No

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number of tips — “pick warm tones,” “hold the mascara brush like a pencil,” “don’t ignore the brow bone!” — would help my hand attain the steadiness of Kyona’s, or give my eyes her vision for contouring. Yet even if I could achieve her results, I knew I still wouldn’t.

Kyona and Diana showed me that beauty-oriented people could be substantive, smart, grounded and strong. My time spent at Branford Academy reconfirmed that assumptions based on surface information — a person’s career, style, or face — are often wrong. But, as Diana had said, just because we know first judgments are often incorrect doesn’t mean we’ll stop making them.

The students at Branford Academy want to look as though they spend time and energy on their looks.

They are professional prettifiers and need to look the part. But I am in the business of brains. When I first meet someone, I want him or her to see a girl who’s confident, approachable, and bright — not a selfadmiring blonde belle. I want to look presentable, but not so done-up someone might conceivably think appearance is among my top 10 priorities. Kyona’s work was far from gaudy, but it was still visible. From across a room I might look natural, but from across a desk during office hours, even my most absentminded professor would probably notice the sparkles blanketing my eyelids. And so, my nine-minute maximum would remain.

I thanked Kyona and plodded down the hall to

Diana’s office. She was seated at her desk, talking in a gentle voice to a young woman with a lip ring. The girl, who couldn’t have been more than 20, had been kicked out of her parents’ house and was running out of couches to crash on. She was worried she wouldn’t be able to pay tuition or finish school.

“Chin up, doll. We’ll make it work for you. We’ll make sure you graduate.”

After the girl left, she mused, “A lot of these students — they’re not looking for hand-outs, they’re looking for helping hands. There’s a big difference.”

Suddenly locking eyes on my face, she jolted in her chair. “Wow mama! Looks gooood. Now you just need a date.”

I laughed awkwardly.

“So, have you learned anything?”

I thought about telling her the truth: how she and her students had shattered my preconceptions about the beauty industry like a dropped cake of eye shadow; how much I’d come to respect her; or how ashamed I was of my original motivations for visiting Branford Academy.

I wanted to tell Diana these things, but I couldn’t.

So, after a long pause, I answered lamely, “Sure.

That using light colors on your inner eyes and brow bones makes eyes pop.”

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Fiction: First Place

The Ergonometer: A Psychoanalytic History D

by lucas zwirner D

The genesis of most apparatuses, the Ergonometer among them, stinks of psychological rot: only through sensitive analysis can we hope to separate inventions from their miasmic histories.

illustration by grace needlman Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

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he Ergonometer (Erg) was developed by William Cranston and his son, Willy, in 1928.1 The word is built from the Greek, ergon (work), and the machine is used to measure the output of a group of muscles. I will not go into detail concerning technique — stroke-rate, pacing etc. — because many of these developments antedate the historical period of the Erg’s invention with which we are presently concerned.2 Early Models Cranston senior was penetrated by the idea for the device for a variety of reasons, some of which, I will show, are inextricably linked to a sinister symbolic structure that has since remained a part of the Erg. But the mental machinations that first gave rise to the manifold plans are traceable back to the simple fact that Cranston junior, Willy, was a talented rower with no water in which to row. As a boy of twelve, Willy had been exposed to the science of rowing at his uncle’s lakeside villa in Massachusetts and had shown the requisite physical dexterity and mental bluntness — he possessed a large, sturdy glabellum with little behind it — to excel. Also, he was a depressive.3 But Minnesota, where Willy lived alone with his father (his mother had sadly and suddenly passed away when he

was only eight), contains much more frozen than liquid water. And after it became clear to Cranston senior, a perspicacious man with access to Willy’s copious diary entries, that Willy would have no success (in life) if he didn’t pursue rowing, he was possessed by this idea: he would create a machine that allowed his son to practice the sport on land.

The Rubber Band Model Cranston senior’s first model consisted of a single, thick rubber rope. He made the prototype out of many smaller rubber bands, which he braided together into large skeins before attaching them to each other; but the subsequent and official version was made from tempered South American rubber, which was being refined at a factory near Cranston’s house.

The model was simple: one thick, wide piece of rubber (approximately 3.5 ft. long and 8 in. wide) tapered into two mastoidal hand-holds (“utters,” presumably Cranston meant “udders”) at one end and had two small incisions at the other into which Willy could slip his feet. Willy was a large boy for his age, nearly six feet tall by the time he was 14, but he had small hands and even smaller feet, something that may or may not be a relevant factor in the following developments. (See Cranston’s notes, included below.)

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With hands on the udders and feet in the slits, the boy could pull up with his arms and kick down with his feet while lying on his back, which would simultaneously persuade his pectorals, his deltoids, his biceps, his quadriceps, his calves, and his abdominals into the clenched position. At the time, rubber had been used strictly for lower or upper body exercise, but it had not been employed to achieve both simultaneously.4 Thus, William had already made a dramatic step forward, a romping stomp upward, in the use of plastics and their derivatives in calisthenics.

But this first step on the long walk to follow also landed William on a dangerous and rotted subconscious stump.

First, the use of the band always began and ended in the fetal position for the boy: Willy would lie on his back, tuck his knees up to this chest and grab the udders in order to begin pushing out and flexing the muscles. Then he would inevitably return to the same position and begin again.

When he had finished exercising, he would be forced to assume to the fetal position one final time to free and remove his feet.

Regardless of the machine’s other infelicities, to which I will return, this fact alone belies a complex beneath Cranston senior’s seemingly benign plan. He had developed a machine intending to help his son, but his most natural solution was also one that repeatedly forced his son back into the womb, so to speak. The very point of the exercise was that Willy continuously be pulled back into the fetal position so that the process could recommence (so that the muscles could be properly aggravated). Thus commencement and termination both occurred in the fetal arrangement.5 (We would understand if the machine began with a fetal structure and helped the boy progress naturally toward adulthood, but can we accept this arrangement without prodding slightly deeper?)

And as it happens, only a slight prod reveals that this early model also malfunctioned quite often, most commonly when the band broke. This would always occur when Willy was stretched out from (temporarily free from) the fetal constraints, and consequentially, the band would snap back smacking him in the face. What might

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have only been vagaries of design before, now begin to crystallize: at the moment of release, the moment when the young Cranston breaks out of the imposed constraints, he is physically abused by the machine. Kraus’ standing model fails to explain this point.

The complex we see here is complicated because, not the father, but one of his creations is attempting to waylay the son. Put formally, one of the father’s creations is attempting to destroy the other (because it has the father’s tacit, subconscious, blueprinted support). Though we are in the realm usually termed callisthenic by its practitioners, psychologists will recognize strains of an artistic complex, whereby animate creation becomes subordinate to inanimate.

And if we glance only fleetingly at the name William gave the hand-holds — udders — must we not begin to suspect that his sinister inclinations were more entrenched in his psyche than he may have suspected, that they emerged from the body of his subconscious like an underwater flatulence at the moment that he first decided to help his son, and were only now beginning to burst onto the stagnant bathwater above? Should we not, then, look even deeper and see if we cannot find the source of his indigestion lodged in this design, maybe even tracing it to its location before its consumption by William? And maybe then, once we have located the foul piece of psychological pork or dirty salad, we can retroactively slip William an Imodium through analysis and prevent the rumblings that still plague users of the Ergonometer today.

Cleat Modification Because the machine was so obviously flawed,6 Cranston senior finally decided to make some modifications to the design: he fixed the rubber band to a cleat in the ground outside (that fetid fart is with us again). This was already a complicated process because the rubber band would rip if fixed directly to the cleat and it was unclear how he would reinforce the end without destroying the rubber. William finally settled on the idea of tapering the rubber at the end that had once had the incisions while strengthening it in

1. Michael Kraus, the only other significant commentator on the history of the Ergonometer, offers a different, but I do not hesitate to say, highly dubious theory that William and Willy were actually one person. I will return to this later in the paper, but it is worth noting that he cites the similarity in name — an American tradition that he has fundamentally misunderstood — as initial evidence for his claim. Kraus’ simple mistake has provided the foundation for his Masochistic Hypothesis, a historico-phychological explanation of rowing that points to a single origin in William Cranston, who, Kraus claims, designed the machine for self-abuse. As I will show, though ubiquitous, this dangerous thesis has little ground to begin with, and even less once we debunk some of Kraus’ outrageous later claims.

2. For a comprehensive description of these see: Glottle, A. A. Pacing your Stroke, Rating your Pace. Chicago: KE Sportspecific, 1984.

3. A diary entry November 1926 — “ I am depressed.” — clearly suggests this and the aforementioned mental sclerosis.

4. For those unfamiliar with the technique of rowing, it is a process both of pushing down with the legs and of heaving with the arms. Thus it requires strength in multiple muscle clusters. Again, see: Glottle, A. A. Pacing your Stroke, Rating your Pace. Chicago: KE Sportspecific, 1984.

5. According to Kraus, who must have taken the diagram sideways, Willy begins in a crouched position and then stands up, stretching his arms outward until he reached full erection (Kraus uses the German “ganz steif ”, which, like “erection,” preserves the innuendo). From here Kraus falsely argues that the symbolic substitution of pain for pleasure (muscle tension for orgasm) is a clear indication of William’s self-flagellatory instincts. He also suggests the similarity between the “loneliness” (“Einsamkeit”) of masturbation, which is similarly present in the machine. Naturally, had he turned the drawings ninety degrees to the left, he would have seen his mistake.

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Only now did William really begin to demonstrate his

the motions of rowing. Soon he changed the handles from udders to grips upon his son’s request (are we surprised?) so that the entire process would faithfully resemble the activity after which it was modeled. (See below)

genius. As mentioned, he was faced with the difficult task of ensuring that the machine would pump both his son’s legs and his upper body. He had solved this problem earlier by making the band the only piece of equipment, but his cleat urged him to rethink the process.7 He first decided to place, at the base of the cleat, a cinderblock on which Willy could brace his legs. But this still only allowed the boy to work his arms; there was no mechanism for pushing with the legs. Here (the incredible moment) Cranston senior came upon the idea of placing a tarp under Willy, which he would lubricate with goose fat (Vaseline had yet to be invented). Willy would be able to push with his legs and pull with his arms while allowing his buttocks to slide back and forth on the tarp. Though this motion may seem suspicious, I do not want to overlook the massive stroke of brilliance.

Indeed, without knowing it, William had created a machine that not only worked the proper muscles but also mimicked

Needless to say, Willy loved the machine. He spent hours each day sliding back and forth on the tarp and grunting. It was also at this point that the machine received its tentative nickname: Erg, an onomatopoeic word meant to evoke the sounds made by the son. Naturally, it is only coincidence that this corresponds so nicely with the later technical term, Ergonometer, and I will return to the onomatopoeic fallacy later.

The cleat is significant here, specifically because the father had to change the shape of the rubber in order to stop it from ripping the hole. This led to an elongated noodle-end (for a moment we have an udder/noodle arrangement) and the noodle (need I even mention it) is fecal and phallic, resembling both a perfectly formed turd and a male shaft to correspond to the udders at the opposite end. The entire contraption was distended during use (by the son), and before the udders change hand-holds, we see the common cleat-teat relationship

6. We know from a diary entry that Willy lost his right eye to the rubber band: “My rite iy is gon.” Kraus mistakenly translates this, “Mein rictes ic ist wek” preserving the misspelling of “rite” and “gon” in the German “rictes” and “wek” but mistaking Willy’s botched “iy” for a strange English variation of the first person pronoun. Translated back into English, Kraus’s translation reads, “My rite I is gon”, from which he extrapolates that Willy lost his right, (that is, his correct) self and not his right eye. In this Kraus claims to find support for his fallacious theory that father and son were one person suffering from Bipersonal Disorder.

7. Because of the way he was reading the diagrams, Kraus took the cleat to be fixed in a wall. Willy would then hang vertically against the wall, hands on the rubber grips, and try to pull himself towards the cleat. Though Kraus’ misreading became the basis for another exercise, the Inclined Crunch, he entirely failed to grasp this step in the design process.

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We are now entering a veritable imbroglio of symbolically relevant information. The formal structures are in place and the particulars are rubbing up against them in a manner quite distinct from Willy’s smooth rump and the well-lubricated tarp, though the rump may have remained slightly chafed.8 But before dunking under the soapy bath water to find the miasmatic source of all this, I would like to sketch the subsequent changes in this machine so I can properly analyze the structures that gave rise to it.

Keys for this section: teats (*udders), fetal position, repeated remonstration (by machine user), and finally, physical abuse by the machine itself. Dichotomies: cleat-teat, noodle-udder, fecal-phallic.

Later Models It soon became clear that even this modified cleat version was faulty. After many hours on the machine one day — Willy had gotten quite strong — the cleat came loose, and, as Willy pulled back, it flew out of the ground and into his mouth, crushing nearly all his lateral incisors and frontals. For the sake of propriety, I do not wish to go deeply into this detail. I will allow the reader to delve in him- or herself: the father’s cleat crushing the son’s jaw.

William rushed his son to the emergency room, or so his notebooks tell us, and Willy remained there for two weeks while surgeons tried and failed to rebuild his jaw and replace his festering eye with a glass prosthesis. Willy, it turned out, also suffered from some strange sickness of the heart first seen on a systolary seismograph; and, mildly scrofulous in appearance when he arrived, the doctors tested him and found strains of a slimy substance in his esophagus. All quite hard to pronounce; nothing fatal.

The Salad-Spinner Model The salad-spinner was discovered in Minnesota around the time of Willy’s accident, and William had come into possession of the device almost immediately (it had already existed

for the best part of ten years in New York). William quickly began taking it apart with an eye to a new design, and he was most probably tinkering with it when his son was cleated, suggesting that Willy drove himself to the doctor illegally.9.10 The accident, in turn, galvanized William to complete the drawings for a new machine.

The first illustration, nothing less than a lucubration, is roughly an enormous salad-spinner on top of an even larger bowl of salad. The user would brace his legs against the bowl and pull back vigorously thereby spinning the large quantity of salad and forcing his pectorals, his deltoids, his biceps, his quadriceps, his calves and his abdominals into the turgid state. Here William was still convinced of the efficacy of the lubricated tarp, and he envisioned his son spinning the salad and slipping back and forth on the tarp (that foul odor). He did not recognize that Willy wouldn’t be using enough muscular power because the spinner would pull him back in with its own force.

In spite of his delusions about the tarp, William was visited by a stroke of genius in the field of energetics: he realized that the measure of salad would not only determine the resistance of the rope, but that the salad could also be used to feed the boy. By feeding the boy salad while he worked, Cranston senior also realized that he could measure his boy’s energy output. The amount that Willy would burn while using the machine would determine the number of calories (in leaves of salad). Soon William recognized that this could be done more effectively with other foods. Meat, for instance, would be harder to burn and less of it would be needed to provide the proper amount of resistance. Thus, his first drawing is of a meat spinner.

Cranston senior was full of promising plans, but he had a very rudimentary understanding of the digestive system, which was limited to the mouth, the stomach, and the rectum.

Willy’s knowledge, because of the basic biology he had learned during his intermittent visits to school, included, in addition, both of the intestines; he was (astonishingly) also aware of the osmotic processes that occur at the end of digestion in the larger intestine. Finally, and most importantly, Willy was able

8. Kraus argues that this model would have failed for the simple reason that Willy’s buttocks would not have moved properly (“hätte sich nicht richtig bewegt […] hätte sich garnicht bewegt”) on the given lubricant. Here he cites the 19th century French bird specialist, Debois, who, in a paper titled, Du Canard au Cygne (From Duck to Swan), argues that bird fat can only be used for cooking: “…et en tout cas le gras d’oie, c’est seulement pour faire la haute cuisine” (“…and in any case, goose fat can only be used for high cuisine”). This oversight in the father’s design, claims Kraus, can only signify that he was not actually creating a machine that could be used by his son to exercise but one that could be used by him (the father) as a kind of basic self-torture device where skin was rubbed from the buttocks. It has since been brought to light, however (see Mireland Fleicher’s famous Baking in 19th Century France) that Du Canard au Cygne is a French cookbook.

9. Corroborated by an entry in the boy’s diary: “Daddy dint take me.”

10. This is the last of Willy’s entries. Kraus postulates, and here I agree with him, that the user of the machine would have had such strong and chafed fingers from the udders that pens and pencils would have become ungraspable. (Here Kraus offers evidence from his own childhood: he didn’t learn how to write, he tells us, until he was nearly 12 because he spent so much time milking the family cow that his hands crushed every writing implement with which he was presented. In a footnote of his own, he jokes that for many years his parents thought he was mentally deficient.)

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Unfortunately, now that he had been awakened to the possibility of measuring his son’s output, he must have been unable to let it drop because his notes suggest new plans to keep the idea afloat. He decided to place the spinner on a tarp and place the tarp on an inclined surface with a receptacle at the bottom of the incline. The collection of Willy’s sweat in the receptacle could then be used to judge total energy output over time. Again, we can see the holes in William’s knowledge of human physiognomy and physical processes: sweat is relative to circumstance and individual (not to mention that it evaporates). Unfortunately Willy was not in possession of this knowledge either, so his father eloped with the plan. His written notes, which I have not included, go into excruciating detail concerning the proper time of day to exercise in order to keep sweat levels constant, as well as the important variables (time of year, diet, etc.).

Soon, however, William discovered a tidbit of information

— though things get messy here: how was the lubrication supposed to function without impeding sweat collection? — that he felt strange about asking his son to practice naked. Or rather, we can tell from the way he approached this project with gusto in his notebooks that he must have been deeply disappointed at having to toss aside fully unveiled plans only because his son required a coverlet in which to exercise.

But these hesitations only spurred William towards a modified blueprint for his new model, and incredibly, the first prototype followed on the heels of this disaster. He built the machine as planned, but instead of having his son practice naked, he swaddled him in layers of clothing, which he would weigh before and after the exercise to measure the sweat emissions soaked up by the cloth. (Swaddling: we have moved from the womb to the natal stage.)

William built the spinner using the larger tire of a pennyfarthing. He took the rubber off the wheel and in its place he wrapped a long piece of rope around the metal frame. A piece of metal tubing was fixed to the center hole of the wheel and rose up nearly two feet. He fixed another piece of tubing in the floor behind the wheel. A piece of rubber attached these two tubes so that the more the wheel turned (as Willy pulled it) the more resistance it gave. (William had effectively taken a salad spinner and turned it inside out.) (See below.)

from his drawings that he had ignored, suppressed rather: the machine would require Willy to practice naked in order for the sweat to flow directly from his body down the tarp in little rivulets and come together in a brackish pond at the bottom.

And we know from Cranston senior’s notes and drawings

The machine was so effective that Willy’s porous body relieved itself of 13 lbs. of liquid and remained in a soporific state for two days after his first exercise. Father Cranston, we know from his diagrams, made modifications: he added a seat that slid on rails, eliminating the goose fat, and created proper

11. Kraus spends an enormous amount of time expounding on this false explanation, and arguing that, though he acknowledges its falsity, he sees it as a clear indication that the creator of the machine was the same as the user, hence the emphasis on auto in the theory. But we must be clear here: even if the machine had been designed and used by one and the same person (though all the evidence says otherwise) that person would have been much less masochistic (according to the auto-fellatic claims) than selfish and self-serving. Kraus has looked only at the superficial structure of autoeroticism, ignoring the fact that it undermines his greater Masochistic Hypothesis. If the machine had painlessly created fractures in the lower gastralia so that its user could pleasure himself, how could it have been accused of rooting the sport in a tradition of self-abuse? It is much more reasonable to take this interpretation as evidence of the humiliation imposed by the father on his son. Rather than indicate that the two were in fact the same person, the auto lends itself to this interpretation: that the action forced on the son humiliated the father as well (we saw this once already when William turned away

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At this point the Erg reached the iteration that is best known today, and it also became a topic of interest for rowing enthusiasts around the country. But before I push on to the astonishing conclusion of this history, a very brief but informative digression is necessary.

Alternate (Slanderous) Theories of the History of the Ergonometer Though important, I hesitate to include the second of these in my research for fear that its vulgarity will offend the genteel reader, but I must. I must.

Onomatopoeic: As already mentioned, according to this theory, the Ergonometer had been developed to replicate naturally the sound made by rowers while they rowed. In this respect, the Erg, (claimed its competitors) was far inferior to the Arg, which was a more faithful representation of the sound made, but whose design was entirely based on a purloined facsimile of William’s blueprints. Needless to say, these rumors have been dispelled by the brief history above.

Auto-Fellatic: Purists — rowers who believed that water was the only suitable environment in which to practice the sport — quickly tried to show how both the Erg and the Arg developed from a project to enable auto-fellatio. Allegedly, the repeated pulling and pushing on the machine differed from the equivalent on a narrow boat, and as a result created minute fractures in the lower gastralia (similar to those experienced by the oviparous New Zealand Kiwi whose egg is nearly 1/3 the size of its body) and these eventually allowed for a deep doubling over of the torso. I go no further.

These theories, which plagued the initial popularity of the machine, soon fell aside; and after a brief latency period, the Erg was purchased and placed in colleges across America and England, later Ireland as well, though there was an embargo instated by England to give the two countries an advantage over the third (never officially admitted).

Regardless, the theories reveal the structure of the machine itself. The Erg’s very design, merely because it is conducive to the base auto-fellatic interpretation, is clearly dependent on a

subservient and destructive relationship between father and son. (We can only speculate as to the significance of the autofellatic interpretation in light of the fact that both father and son shared the same name.) 11 The Structure of the “Coach” Willy soon became an excellent rower in spite of the oral and ocular destruction precipitated by earlier versions of the machine. At this point he had become a veritable ogre. He was six-foot four and weighed nearly 250 lbs. In addition, because of his jaw and eye, part of his face had collapsed making his head appear even smaller than it did initially, the large forehead being the only remaining bastion for the possibility of sentient life. Naturally, this physicality lent itself to the sport.

With Willy’s fame came attention and questions, specifically as to how he had practiced while living in rural Minnesota.

Though he was unable to answer them, it was at this point that William fully brought his machine to the public, and there it was explanation enough. Swiftly dubbed the Ergonometer, it was subsequently perfected by large factories and distributed around the world.

From what we are able to glean, Willy was recruited by one of crew teams in England, though it has been impossible to determine which; his father seems to have stayed in Minnesota. Over the next three years, Willy established and broke a number of Erg records both in England and America, and in his final year of school in England, his father seems to have followed him there, having been hired as a coach.

Coaches today are often regarded structurally in terms of a symbolic relationship that mirrors and amplifies the fatherson dichotomy, but this is traceable through the development and implementation of Erg-style training. The way in which William Cranston’s invention pushed his son (without William prodding the boy himself ) is structurally similar to the way in which the Erg machine allowed the coaches to pressure young men while keeping a paternal distance. The Erg machine isolates the rower and makes what was originally a team activity into an individual affair, separating each person from the others and putting each in a symbolic relationship with the coach (who becomes father). Before the Erg, the team was in a professionally structured relationship with the coach

from the first sweat-accumulation design). And this second level of humiliation, felt by the father and rooted in an action he imposed on his son, suggests the very problem with the auto-fellatic theory: the father turned away from the design rather than go through the self-inflicted humiliation that accompanied forcing his son to experiment with the machine. Kraus’ explanation fails to account for the fact that the auto-fellatic theory is wrong, which he admits. If the two men were one, then this abhorrent theory would gain traction as a viable historical explanation, and as such, it would fully undermine Kraus’ Masochistic Hypothesis and undo the claims that support it.

12. See: Voekel, Raymond. Coaching Crew in America: 1930-1970. Schocken Books, 1985.

See: Smith, Ryan. The Great Divide: Changes in Coaching Policy during the Twentieth Century. KE Sportspecific, 1999.

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Also, once the machine was taken up, the nature of the kind of men in charge of rowing preparation changed dramatically.12 The older men living vicariously (but happily) through the younger men on the boats, were quickly replaced by bedeviled middle-aged men (forties) whose inability to compete paired with the opportunity to judge individuals on the team changed the practice of coaching. To clarify, before the Erg, the coach could not accompany the men out onto the water, so his role was inevitably limited to advice, etc. But after the new developments, the coach could be present at the moment of preparation and was therefore able to push each man unrestrainedly. Also, the Erg (which had been modified to allow the measurement of energy output within two years of its presentation) could now be used to judge and compare the muscle packets and pockets of individual men.

This dynamic between coach and team must have been further complicated when the relationship between William and Willy became evident during Willy’s last year of college, though we have no documentation. In the midst of many individual symbolic relationships, through a machine to the man who had invented the machine and was the coach (this adds a further knot), there was (obviously) an actual fatherson relationship. Willy and William, in turn, were forced to maintain both tiers of this structure — the symbolic and the particular — and the particular, as we have seen from the machine’s creation, had symbolic undertones as well. The maintenance of both halves of this structure must have bled into the team, overwhelming father and son. I say, “must have” because we have limited evidence for what finally ensued, though enough to include it here. 13 Towards the end of the season, it seems Willy’s father put Willy on an Erg that had been manipulated to show a lower output score. Willy worked himself to exhaustion trying to raise the score, reverting to the “swaddled model” in order to lose weight. Clearly, he did this last bit in a desperate attempt to prove his loyalty to a coach through the shared history he had with his father. But when this failed, the Cranston boy finally worked himself to death and was found swathed in layers of

sports clothing and bound in the fetal position by the rubber device he had constructed. (This is painful, so I will say no more.)

William (we are not positive it was actually William) adopted all the men on the English crew team during the time that Willy was working himself to death (though we do not know unequivocally that it was Willy). And finally, when Willy did die, William disappeared leaving a large group of fatherless men to create the hostile Ergosphere that we know today.

There is no easy way to summarize the study of a phenomenon whose results have become so structurally ubiquitous. I would only like to suggest (and I hope I have shown) that the latter part of this history could have been predicted from the first three models according to my interpretation, and that the Krausian demonstration is unequivocally false.

The rubber band, the cleat, and the swaddled spinner are structurally significant enough to paint a picture similar to the one that history has shown us, if we understand the symbolic undertones; the William-Willy reduction to a single man gives us no hope of untangling the machine from its history.

It is my sincere belief that today, with a proper explanation in place, we can begin to look at the Erg in a new light and rethink the way it is implemented. Maybe this history will convince the reader (as it has convinced me) that the Erg should be entirely effaced and that a new device should be invented, based roughly on the models we have, but without their history. If this is done correctly, we will not only free the sport in general from the dangerous and false Masochistic Hypothesis that plagues it, but also from the true history, rife with destructive symbolism, which I have unveiled here.

I only hope that this paper will be treated with extreme care, as it could easily, if the ideas herein were disseminated, give justification to many latent feelings concerning the sport that have yet to be properly articulated under the Masochistic heading. I hope that this will reach only delicate eyes, and that facile fingers will undertake the appropriate actions before the repute of athletics in general is further besmirched by the public at large.

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13. I am delighted to be the first to bring this to light. In the aftermath of the event to come, we now know that the school took precautions — screening school publications and denying any affiliation with the event — to ensure that the scandal did not reach the public. But amid its fervent preparations, it overlooked an article published anonymously in the school’s satirical paper, which, because of the venue, never received the attention it merited. In constructing his theory, Kraus approached the school and offered to destroy this article, which the school was naturally happy to allow.

This was all included in a personal letter that Kraus wrote to the school after it refused to publish one of his articles. But because the members of the German Department specialized in a very particular Teutonic dialect from the Middle Ages, Humbrücke, they refused to read the letter, which was subsequently ignored. However, a scrupulous man, even if not a gifted thinker, Kraus made a copy of the letter for himself before sending it. Being interested in the subject, I was the first scholar to approach Kraus’ belongings and to find the letter. For the sake of propriety, I have left the school anonymous, and because I was never able to read the article, only the affirmation that it existed, I will leave the evidence in these final pages more ambiguous than in the rest of the paper.

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Non-Fiction: Second Place

Why’d They Bring You Here, Dorothy?

Two years of raves and adolescence in Los Angeles D by daniel bethencourt D

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his is the state of the commercial rave scene in Los Angeles: there are tides of dark jeans on pencil bodies with shy faces, and waves of exposed push-up bras on pale and tan chests, the bras laced or otherwise, most of them exuding that Halloween quality, like they might be some kind of joke. There’s a morbidly heavy man with a cotton-candy-blue koala doll clinging to his head, and a vacant-stared teen shaped like an upside down mop wearing a purple shirt that reads “i Get Down on the Dance Floor” [sic] in turquoise letters. There are women who wish they looked just a little more like hourglasses wearing neon-plastic glasses without lenses, and I have this weird feeling I could slowly poke my finger through the frames. There’s a skinny figure in a white canvas shirt who really might be Ziggy Marley, a rail-thin man in a pharaoh’s hat and a vaguely anorexic Asian woman in a bikini, whose front teeth slant slightly inward.

There’s a dirty-blonde and wild-haired woman who is

topless except for sparkling blue heart-shaped nipple covers. Every shirtless male striding under the sun is either flagrantly sporting a six-pack or outstandingly fat and beer-bellied. Gargantuan towers of speakers hang in the sky, and form a slow wide U with the butts aimed at us. A DJ repeatedly commands everyone to “make some fuckin’ noise,” while the sound waves’ ferocity ripples all forms of clothing. Two men try to piggyback atop a third, all of them tumble, and a Hispanic man with a shaved head and high-socks and shorts keeps barking “Hey! — Hey! — Hey! —” to every wave of the base, until it’s far, far beyond necessary. There’s also an obese man in a train robber’s bandana, with shades that form a thin black stripe, and he stands like a rampart and bobs his head and brim of neck fat up and down, as if that were his body’s full range of expression. Only a handful of figures are wearing earplugs because, you know, why.

I am at an event that’s more or less embodied by the

Everyone around me seemed irresponsibly young and death was very, very far away. maxwell lubin

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22 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z name Hard Summer, a sweltering open-air carnival, a fenced-in noon ’til midnight gala at the Los Angeles State Historic Park. A train once ran alongside this modest stretch of grass and sand, and you can still make out the rails muted by the desert’s dirt.

It’s the late afternoon, and all day I’ve been staring at the faces among the throngs of patrons I’ve passed.

I feel like they are dying. Is that possible? It feels like a day on the edge of the Earth, when the last sunset is coming, and everyone around me refuses to let it show.

Am I crazy? I watched a girl with chaotic black hair bob her body up and down like some kind of snake, while

we danced.

And high up on the adjacent soaring cement wall, the web-famous clip of a younger spryer Bill O’ Reilly yelling “Fuck it — We’ll Do It Live!” was glowing while his outbursts of “Fuck it!” and his hand slamming the desk and the pages of his script curling up in the air were timed with each thundering pulse of the bass, and then his thick nearly red hair rewound to where it had been and the papers flew back down to their place on the desk, the face still furious in reverse — and then the hand slammed down again, and the tuft of hair bobbed forward like a gunshot. Over and over again. It was

FlyLo’s music sounds like a tour through Charlie’s Chocolate Factory on Neptune. she was squeezing out hot sauce onto a paper carton of steak on cheesy fries. You can’t tell this mass of maniacal hands in the air that fun is not to be had. But everything feels wrong.

I want to take you back two summers ago, to the first time I ever did anything like this.

The event was the very first Hard Summer, held elsewhere downtown — at a narrow outdoor stretch of asphalt firmly walled in by reinforced fencing. (The adjacent Shrine Expo Center used to host the Oscars, before that moved to the Kodak Theater. Nothing in L.A. lasts forever.) Everything was blisteringly loud and colors were in flux — it was all effectively one ceaseless moment, and in its air I tasted sweat and cigarettes and asphalt and weed. Two crutches teetered high above the center of the throbbing mob, as if whoever brought them no longer needed them, as if this were an Evangelist healing and a very white youth in a brightwhite Hyphie jacket danced frantically for maybe five hours without pause, the sweat actually pouring down his face so he looked like the guy at the end of Airplane!

A girl in a black dress with thick legs and wild hair, the very pretty kind that does way too much weed, jumped toward him ass-first (have you ever seen anyone jump like this in your life?) and ground her ass into his crotch as her friends slapped their thighs in manic laughter.

The man barely changed his groove at all — I can’t be sure he noticed. A skinny Asian teen in a v-neck and backwards cap asked me to help him crowd surf; I held out my interlocked knuckles and pushed up on his go — and then I watched him plunge back down toward the asphalt a few feet away, and never saw him again.

The historically neon Felix the Cat sign grinned down from the night sky a block away, winking forever while

abstract art that made my heart shake in its cage.

I pursed my lips and jumped up and down until the soles of my feet were numb and vaguely pulsing. I punched my arm in a wide high circle and my shoulder burned, but then it numbed. My night’s lone concession to drugs was a meditated Red Bull when we stopped for gas en route, and I assumed that everyone around me was blown — but I felt alive. At home.

At some point in this seamless moment I stuffed a hand dewy with sweat into my pocket and wrenched out my phone — it was 12:06, a new day amid this madness, and back in there somewhere I had turned 17.

I held the phone toward my good friend Max, who had just heard an early “Yes” from Brown and was a peer-but-father-like figure for that point in my life — who had driven me there with his friends and would drive me back (sober) to his home in Beverly Hills to sleep, who would take care of me — he grinned and slapped me twice on the back and then stared just beyond me and cut through the din with a chilling resolute whisper: “Happy Birthday, man.”

The most widely attended commercial dance music event in the United States is the two-day bonanza called Electric Daisy Carnival (“edc”), which drew 185,000 patrons in total last summer to the L.A. Coliseum, where the usc Trojans play football. Presumably the festival-goers stomped on the place until it shivered to its Roman concrete bones.

Sometime during the second night that summer, a 15-year-old first-time raver from Merced County (a good five hours by car from Los Angeles) named Sasha Rodriguez collapsed on-scene, was rushed to intensive care and eventually died from symptoms related to Vol. XXXVIII, No. 7 May 2011

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Maxwell Lubin

mdma / ecstasy, the drug that fuels and defines and to this day cannot be shaken from the rave movement, the way you can’t shake amphetamine from the Beatniks.

It’s very much worth nothing that edc, the crown jewel and model (until now) for the country’s ravescene-turned-commercial, the kind of show not every tangential dance music lover goes to but knows — was a 16+ event, and yet Rodriguez had no ID when she entered the hospital. Which means she either lost it once she got inside, or someone took it, or no one at edc cared what age she was.

[Note: The risk of overdose is one reason why I never mustered up the bravery to take the drug myself.

More than likely nothing would happen except a highly orgiastic time, but I can’t quite relax and give myself up that easily — and then there’s the notion that once you “roll” nothing will ever be as fun as your first time.

Could I risk my life peaking now at nineteen, which is when anyone older seems to think it more or less peaks anyway?]

In the wake of Sasha’s death certain key people flipped out, or at least those in power really tried to do what everyone else would deem the right thing.

The Coliseum’s commission made up of city, state, and county power figures told edc’s creators they were “on probation” and banned any future events by the

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company until further notice, while the three festivals they couldn’t cancel — because clearly, contracts are a bitch — became strictly 18+ affairs. A story about the dangers of ecstasy made the front page of the Los Angles Times Calendar, though it led with a thumbnail picture and stretched down the right column and therefore avoided the town square hanging in streaming fullbodied color that could have happened.

And most interestingly for our purposes, the founder and manager of the Hard Summer series (a 40-something man with thick, slicked-back hair whose name is Gary Richards) abruptly shut down his own pre-Hard Summer concert that was scheduled two weekends later. Richards stated: “I don’t want anyone to think that this cancellation had anything to do with the events that occurred at Electric Daisy Carnival, because it didn’t.”

Then he stated that new regulations in response to edc would have led to “unforeseen costs,” which helped drive the cancellation. Whether or not his own press notes mixed him up because he really just wanted to dish the truth, but knew there was a line with his career teetering on it, his aloof yet alert tone suggests that his lawyers rang him up and let him know he should forget the gig if he wanted to keep the highest authorities and powers-that-be in Los Angeles from ripping off his testicles and roasting them on a public barbecue.

24 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z But I can only imagine how Richards felt: he had already endured a $1 million loss in 2009 when he was forced to shut down that year’s Hard Summer barely one hour in. The lafd decided that dozens of fans plunging maybe 15 feet down and onto other fans from the balconies of the Los Angeles Forum was, you know, ultimately lawsuit-worthy. And unsafe.

I was there and not concerned for my safety in the slightest: while waiting to get in I had been standing with friends in a line that trickled across a breathtakingly expansive parking lot, and I took pre-meditated sips of Monster with vodka out of a plastic water bottle, then methodically sipped some rum and musty looking pineapple juice from a 32 oz Gatorade. We stood in a circle and passed all this around. The sophomoric weight of this activity was not sinking in. I forced myself not to think about a certain pill. I was afraid of uncontrollable fun, though I felt that urge creep closer.

And then inside a single moment stretched on as colors bled and sonic earthquakes seared and pincered at my inner ears — I jumped and swayed into foreign sweaty shoulders where the mob came to a head against the stage, where the bodies packed against one another so I couldn’t raise my elbows from my sides. I can condense the night with the thought that if the lafd had been more freewheeling, dozens of others and I would have been squashed against the stage’s barrier and pancaked into the walls of the court where Magic Johnson and the Lakers once played, flat-ironed by our peers until our brains fizzed out our skulls. But I had just turned 18 and did not take any of this seriously, and everyone around me seemed irresponsibly young and

death was very, very far away.

Some eerie presence feels much closer now.

I’m extremely sober here, at Hard Summer 2010. Without trying I’ve seen at least nine policemen so far, always strolling around in bands of three — and back in ’08 I saw maybe two, and I know they didn’t pace around while looking so obviously worried. Throughout the afternoon I’ve also seen two paramedics (at different times) standing eerily still and upright just behind that organic space where the crowd thins to nothing, their nylon-white hands coolly at their sides, while in one hand they both were gripping a plastic blue box that looked fit for a caged-up dog. Their faces were stone and they might have been dead if their eyes weren’t so wired, aimed right at the flagrantly color-shifting stage.

I don’t know what that eerie presence is, but the world feels more real and more ugly. The grass smells more like dirt than like grass. The faces passing by are shaped into the distant precursors of frowns. And way out past these faces and into the sky, distant glittering towers of commerce seem frozen in their soaring ascent into space, all of them poised and watching carefully somehow from afar. We all know exactly where we are — at a grass park on the edge of Chinatown. Somewhere not that far away from here, a 15-year-old girl’s organs failed. Everyone here can ignore that weird feeling all they want.

The sky burns out into a musty brown, and then the sun slides down and so the grass and dirt and hordes of bodies are almost dim and colorless.

Maxwell Lubin

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 7 May 2011

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Just as the sun sets a black man of 26 named Stephen Ellison — stage name Flying Lotus, native of Los Angeles and great-nephew of John and Alice Coltrane (!!) — appears in a grey and black striped pullover and gold cross necklace from a strangely unlit corner of Hard Summer’s smaller stage, gives a muted warm wave and hunches over his Mac laptop, whose apple glows a very bright white.

Ellison is the kind of man who, when his mother died, infused the sound of her beeping heart monitor somewhere in his most recent album Cosmogramma, where presumably no one but him could ever hope to hear it. A Los Angeles Times reviewer called Ellison a Hendrix for his generation, but that seems too easy and wrong — Hendrix was breathtaking but self-destructing.

“FlyLo,” in contrast, comes off in interviews like Coltrane himself: inwardly bent on getting everything right, even when the others only think they hear noise.

Like Coltrane, Ellison seems like one day he might vanish for a while to play his sonic soul into the wind over a nighttime bridge, for God to hear.

FlyLo’s music sounds like a tour through Charlie’s Chocolate Factory on Neptune. There are turbines whirring and spaceships beeping and submarines rumbling and every noise feels somehow in it together, jumping in and out and playing up one another, an orchestra. The miles I travel through Ellison’s Symphony lead me soaring toward a metropolis that sparkles as it sprawls, and yet while embracing its darkest crevices.

FlyLo shows me a city I’d be proud to live in. An utterly beautiful way to exist on Earth.

As I drove beneath an L.A. sky chocked white with clouds on Sunday mornings, I would grip the wheel and stare ahead and imagine, to the tune of Ellison’s Symphony, that I was gripping the wheel just like right then — but that it was a clear weekend night punctured only by musty-orange streetlamps that glowed as they sailed by my window like phantoms, and that my car was outrageously slick and vacuum-black and purring, and that I was a bit older and more physically resonant and dressed in a button down and black watch with tight white second marks, none of which I could really pull off. I also imagined I was headed to my flat on the 80th floor at the city’s center for a party I was throwing, and that the flushed rooms glowed with sharp black steel edges and dim lights and wide soaring sheets of glass, lots of glass, and pearl-white silky soft carpet — and inside that sprawling apartment, just beyond the mingling faceless figures in suits and dresses that are cut like blades and out past the floor-to-ceiling glass that forms four walls which reflect just enough so I can Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

daniel bethencourt

make out a tinted version of my young and full-bodied self, glowing at the pupils and exuding possibilities — beyond that lies the metropolis at night, a blanket of light in the dark the way you think the world must look from space, accessible and unified and ready, out there, for you.

And just above the glass walls the clouds lie still and distended overhead, so close they seem to envelop the floor above.

It seems so highly necessary that Ellison, in Cosmogramma’s “Nose Art,” rips from the 1985 movie Return to Oz, so that through the track’s crackling vibrations and throbs you can barely hear Ozma say, “Why’d they bring you here, Dorothy?” and a delayed space later, Dorothy’s ethereal response: “‘Cause I can’t sleep / And I talk about a place that I’ve been to, but nobody believes it exists.”

So then at Hard Summer as the sky is almost pitch dark I see Flying Lotus bob up and down, his lips

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Maxwell Lubin

slightly pursed and eyes wide but set out a little like he’s always tired — as if he’s seen amazing things but hasn’t quite yet seen them all. He starts to sway from side to side with an arm cocked up and a shoulder punching slightly forward. His cross necklace flies out and away from him and shakes around while following his torso, glinting under whirring blues and purples.

A steady pulsing rhythm melts to another, and the tiniest worry deep inside me starts growing: I can’t match the beats of Flying Lotus with neon plastic glasses and women in glitter-heart nipple covers. This scene belongs somewhere, but they don’t belong with Flying Lotus and his soundscape. I imagine Ellison would get more emotional mileage out of an audience in a blackened studio for a couple hundred only, where every strobe flash and knob twist and bass wobble jerks at people’s feelings, their bodies wobbling with him.

That would mean plunging into murkier depths, where strange creatures swim, and drift around with seaweed.

So this is the commercial rave scene’s central issue: if Flylo doesn’t fit into this culture, what does, and what will?

The answer lies within a classic raver’s mindset. And no type of raver could be more classic than a “Rave Mama” — a girl who dresses like scandalous eighth grader who one day dropped acid and fell in love with neon. Mamas suck on pacifiers ostensibly because ecstasy can make your teeth grind, and they stretch plastic stretchy beads

of “candy” around their arms and up to their shoulders until you can’t see their skin. There’s a ritualistic way of exchanging beads to friendly wrists through in-sync hand motions that spell out plur (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect — I know, I know), and once upon a time the transfer ended with a kiss, or make-out.

But ecstasy makes you fall in love while disabling erections, like some kind of twisted metaphor for prepubescent love.

The whole rave scene, from top to bottom, is an homage to and ritual for and ecstatic pledge and commitment to Staying Young. I mean, a pacifier.

And this is what Staying Young looks like: a funloving blonde who dyes her hair red and keeps showing up at these things for the loud dance music, even as the mob size and venue shrink and the walls grow dingy, even as the DJ and the men in wife-beaters grinding up against her with their hands tracing her hips and the number of pills getting placed on her tongue and heading down her throat, unfaceable truths, matter less and less — and the night’s end-time floats later and later, she dyes her hair orange, her hips clothed by dark jeans become light jeans with holes which become a white mini skirt and that of course becomes a pair of white spandex shorts with fishnets and that becomes an outfit of black lace lingerie, and now her hair is tied in pigtails and somewhere along the line she bought a pair of kneehigh hot-pink boots with wild jutting-out fur, and she

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvu non-fiction: second place vuv 27 spends less and less time looking over each man’s face when his hand touches her paler skin plus she now gets a few hands a night that grab a breast or grace the mons pubis and those hands always vanish, strobes whirring and clacking: amid the clamor of each nighttime moment she hangs near friends who provide support enough, and that moment wears on and numbs like anesthetic as she drifts past that blissful 4 a.m. threshold where late becomes early, and then to where the sun rises and then to where it’s actually bright again, all over again.

Now she has to climb back into a ‘96 dark green Ford Explorer and trek back to a home that looks like any of ours, a one-story in Echo Park or Gardena or a modest apartment in Culver City or a two-story in Santa Monica or a mansion in Beverly Hills or Hancock Park — and she’ll go to sleep thinking as little as possible and wake up and some thoughts will rush back, and she’ll do some kind of errand because someone told her to and then you’ll see this girl in the aisle with the cereal, inspecting a box by hunching over slightly like she might rather fall all the way forward to the ground and not get up, and even if you notice the orange pigtails, you’ll think even less about it than she does.

When you see her, keep in mind that in that kind of woman you may never find a loneliness more deep, acute, and thoroughbred in the United States in the 21st century.

FlyLo drops a hands-in-the-air rap track (“Nas is Like” by Nas), and now bodies are swaying uniformly, because everyone knows rap. Still shifting side to side, Ellison lifts his fists up in what looks like celebration. I frown and jut my lip to the side — it seems too easy. Like de Kooning doing street portraits. I squint at his face, which now peers down at the Mac. His brow is relaxed and his eyes stare straight like he’s calm, like everything is going fine.

It’s getting cold in the anonymous dark. I had taken my shirt off, and now the dry desert chill nips at my chest and the backs of my shoulders. I feel uncomfortably naked, and I start thinking. I think about FlyLo’s future, about Hard’s future, about the future of the fuzzy boots and nipple covers.

On this August evening, the commercial rave scene feels a lot like a teen girl’s reaction when she’s dancing manically in the darkness of her room, and then the lights come on. Right now this whole scene feels like it’s just starting to dive under the bed, to re-emerge as something with nothing of what it had two years ago.

FlyLo takes the mike he hasn’t used and holds a modest hand up and says, “This is my last song everybody,” and a mass of arms swings arcs in the air as the man onstage slow-punches the air. Stephen Ellison Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

might soon become a pinnacle of an artist. But his work can’t be the future of dance music. It’s probably just as well.

A Metro train glides by the park, its rumble drowned out. A train has gone by for what feels like every ten minutes, and sometimes the concert-goers closest to it jump around and cheer at it. But I look carefully at this train, and I’m startled to find that I can very clearly make out the faces of a few scattered passengers, seated and standing beneath the glowing ceiling. You’d think they must be pretty stunned to glide past a sound source like this without much warning, and some of them do stand with their faces pushed against the glass.

But a few others with graying hair and slumped figures sit and rest their heads against the nearest wall, visibly awake but staring straight ahead with the train.

This festival must be the loudest raucous they’ll ever hear on that Metro in their lives, but they stare on. They look far stranger than the ones with their hands cupped to the windows. It’s as if those staring onward can’t be bothered. They’ve seen it all before. To them, over time, they seem to know that everything moves along.

I drift out the gates just before the 12 a.m. end-time, having had my fill. I wade through the customary huddle of figures with earbuds in one ear passing out flyers. I turn them all down and realize I most likely won’t have to think about ecstasy for a very long time. Those thoughts are quiet now.

Past the figures with flyers maybe one dozen policemen, some very well-armed and armored, are idling along the sidewalk, as if unclear as to where the riot is. One officer is standing, I kid you not, atop a swatstyle truck and glaring down at me with his feet planted wide and arms crossed. I almost laugh, but it seems like the wrong move: right beside me on the sidewalk, an officer is clutching a high-powered rifle and strapped into a helmet and armor, staring at me carefully, slowly waving his hand in the direction I’m obviously going.

Up ahead and beneath the Chinatown metro’s railway, a benign man in a tan windbreaker (who as hard as I stare has no unique face) barks at the stream of trotting rave-goers with a megaphone. He’s roaring about his run-ins with drugs he doesn’t name, and overflows with lines like Heaven is by Reservation Only. I grin because this seems too perfect. I cross the street and stand far enough away and listen. The man’s marble-blue eyes are shining as he takes a break from shouting into the mike, but up close he looks somehow dead inside.

And I look back at the State Historic Park, and I’m thinking to myself: is this goodbye? Am I ready?

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Fiction: Second Place

REading Aloud

When Anna volunteered to read for the blind, she never envisoned skimming off her skirts along with the pages.

D by Marina keegan D

O

n Mondays and Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m., Anna takes off her clothes and reads to Sam. Reads him cable box directions and instant soup instructions, unpaid bills and pages from his textbooks. Each week she peels off her garments one by one, arranging them beside her chair with practiced stealth. Usually, Sam makes an exotic tea and they relish in descriptions from their mutual senses; it smells like cinnamon berries, it tastes like honey smoke, it feels warmer today. Both can hear its soft percolation, but only Anna can see its cloudy mauve whirlpool. Only Anna can see her wilting breasts and her varicose veins.

So she looks at him and he looks at nothing. And they let the words lift off the pages of the manuals and brochures and cereal box backs and float fully formed from the sixty something naked woman to the twenty something blind man.

Her doctor suggested it. The reading, not her wardrobe choice. Said something about the benefits of purpose or the advantages of routine. Anna was sick and she knew it.

Ever since her husband un-retired, she’d had an ache in her left knee joint and she sometimes felt nauseous. For four days last April, she was convinced unquestionably of her pulmonary tuberculosis; for three days in June of her Endometrial Cancer. She’d taken to leaving an old copy of The Diagnostic Almanac on her bedside table — flipping ardently through its pages. Naturally, she’d verify each hypothesis with recurrent appointments. Anna liked her doctor and his magazines, lemon drops, and pristine coats. Liked him enough to forgive his misidentification of her symptoms as “psychologically derivative.” Liked him enough to agree to volunteer at the city library’s Visually Impaired Assistance Program for “purpose and routine.”

Mona cao / staff illustrator

On a Monday at 4:28 p.m., Anna knocked on Sam’s apartment door. It was the same knock she knocked every week for twelve weeks — like she knew he knew she was already there. Her knee hurt and the building elevator Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuuuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuuvuvuvuvuvvuuvu fiction: second place uvu 29 was under renovation, so the two flights of stairs added a glisten to her forehead and a rhythm to her breathing.

She hated herself for it. Back when her back could bend and her toes could point, Anna could do Black Swan’s 32 fouettés en tournant without moistening her leotard — spinning and tucking on a single slipper. Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful. The was haunted her from mirror to mirror in her Westchester high-rise. People used to stare at her, envy her, pay seven dollars to watch her grand jeté at the Metropolitan Opera House. But not Sam. Sam never watched her do anything.

So twice a week, Anna didn’t watch herself. His place had no mirrors and even his fogged eyes were unreflective.

So when he opened his door, she focused on his face.

“Hi Anna,” said Sam. “Hi Sam,” said Anna. He reached forward, placing a hand on her elbow in his standard gesture of greeting.

“Your knee doing okay?”

“Well, not really,” she stepped forward, swinging the door shut behind her. “They just don’t know about these

its hanger. Tiny blue dotted labels speckled the apartment like some kind of laboratory. The microwave buttons, the light switches, the drawers, and the cans; all had their names displayed in bright Braille blue. A Malaysian tapestry hung above the sofa and an Andy Warhol print hung opposite the door. “For company,” he shrugged when Anna asked. “My mother’s idea.”

“Well, sit down, sit down!” He gestured to the exact spot of her usual armchair, turned forty-five degrees to the left and took six paces before stopping in front of the counter. “I’ve got a lot for you today.”

“I think I can handle it,” she said.

“Anna, Anna,” he mocked distress. “What would I possibly do without you?”

“You know perfectly well they’d just send someone else by.”

Sam smiled as he placed his pile on the table.

“I’m teasing you,” he said. “You know I love teasing you. Come on, sit down. I don’t want that knee of yours giving way. What was it? Pulmonary tuberculosis? Let’s

I dream backwards now. You won’t believe how backwards you’ll dream someday. things these days. Might be pulmonary tuberculosis.

They just don’t know.” She shook her head. “There’s a large brace on it right now, actually.”

There wasn’t a large brace on it, actually, but Anna liked the way it sounded. She also liked Sam. Sam wasn’t always blind; he’d managed a whole two years before the fog came. His visual memory puzzled him, tricked him, disillusioned him. Trapped him with a visual arsenal of table bottoms and grownups’ feet, forever restricting him from the bipedal perspective. He was a masters student in a divinity school just outside the city and at night, in the black, he moved about his apartment, tracing his fingers across the thousands of tiny dots of Jacob and Isaiah, Luke, and Matthew. Fingering the psalms and stroking the Gospels. Religious Studies he would clarify to friends and uncles and the women like Anna who read to him. “I study God, not worship Him.” Sam’s apartment lived an immaculate life. Clutter was more than an inconvenience — it was a hazard. Anna walked by the Bibles and Torahs and Korans convened with books on Indian cooking and music theory in alphabetized rows of ikea shelving. He’d built them himself. Felt every screw and every piece of artificial wood, sliding them together as Anna read him the instructions during one of her first visits. Everything had a location. Every utensil had its hook and every coat had

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not play around with pulmonary tuberculosis.”

Anna could see Sam’s grin, but she blushed anyway.

She sat down and studied him. The way his skin held taut around his forearms, the way his pants creased in as he walked, the way his hands pulled and pushed and shifted and organized, steadily, confidently, free from a seer’s incessant second glances or double checks. He was young, and his hair was thick, and his body still strong.

Anna thought he had a dancer’s body and imagined his hands on her waist, lifting her up above his head before placing her down as he jumped. She imagined his fingers tracing her fingers in backstage shadows, the pulse of the crowd turning air to endorphin. When high off the heat of their bowing bodies, all she could hear was the rhythm of their breath. The same breath she felt quicken when she sat in this armchair; when she slipped off her shoes and sat down to read.

“Alright then,” Sam handed her the pile of mail and bills and misplaced receipts. “Let’s start with the boring stuff.” He sat down at his computer, ready to translate her voice into his language of dots.

She read him an advertisement for car insurance and unbuttoned her sweater.

She read him a credit card receipt and rolled down her stockings.

Sam sat at his desk, blind. Sat typing and sipping

30 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z and small talking between his chorus of Toss it. Toss it. Keep it. What? Toss it. What? Repeat that. Don’t throw that out! Anna knew she wasn’t the strongest reader; she’d spent her childhood staring at mirror boxes not pages of books. But he never corrected her.

Never smiled into his keyboard when she struggled with entrepreneur, bureaucracy, Jesuit, psalms. Not like Martin. Martin would have said something, would have laughed. Laughed at his wife, who — “Oh, did I mention, used to dance at the Met.” Excusing her dinner party mispronunciation of bon appétit to platefuls of partners at the firm’s annual dinner. She’d said it again once they’d served the dessert, deviously looking him in the eye and smiling her victorious smile: “Bone appetite, everyone!

Bone appetite!”

But that was before Martin retired. When he left work to stay home and question the amount of mayonnaise in the tuna salad and why she let that damn Chinese family overcharge her for the dry cleaning. Before he reconsidered and, at seventy-one, went back to the firm.

When she realized that she’d liked when he complained about the mayonnaise and didn’t really mind that he was home for lunch.

One morning, Martin made Anna scrambled eggs before she woke up. She didn’t say anything when they tasted oddly sweet, but once she found the empty cream carton in the trash, they nearly cramped up laughing. The next weekend, Martin had taken her golfing for the first time. And later that summer to the city for a show. But he

On Wednesday at 4:22 p.m., Anna knocked on Sam’s apartment door.

“Hi Anna,” said Sam. “Hi Sam,” said Anna. He placed his hand on her elbow.

“Your knee doing okay?”

“Not really, Sam. They think it might be a sign of hemolytic anemia.”

“That’s terrible, Anna. Come on, sit down, sit down.”

She sat.

“I’m just tired. I’m tired all the time. I wake up, and I’m tired, I go to sleep and I’m tired.” She looked at him; he looked slightly to the left of her.

“You know I love having you here, but there are other volunteers in the program and if you’re too —” “No, please,” she interrupted. “Really, I’m fine.” Anna brushed past Sam and settled on the sofa. “Did I ever tell you I could do Black Swan’s 32 fouettés en tournant without breaking a sweat?”

Sam smiled.

“I’ll put on some tea.” The kettle needed washing and Anna was wearing a dress, so by the time he sat down at his desk, her clothes were already piled neatly beneath the armchair.

He looked at her. She loved when he looked at her.

Loved imagining Martin imagining him looking at her.

As he sat at his firm’s desk, too good to retire, staring at a case as his wife parted her bare legs in the apartment of a younger man.

Anna hadn’t made love since Martin un-retired. Or

She read him an advertisement and unbuttoned her sweater.

She read him a credit card receipt and rolled down her stockings. must have missed his keyboard and his meetings and his legal briefings because the following fall he went back to his office, his job, his early mornings, and late dinners.

Anna’s career had peaked in her twenties, deteriorating with her body, not expanding with her mind. She retired at 28 and worked in a studio for a while, but eventually settled into her house and her hobbies. His decision puzzled her. And sooner or later her knee started hurting and her nausea began and she got the Diagnostic Almanac and Dr. Limestone prescribed her “purpose and routine.”

Sometimes, in the shower, or in the car, or loading the dishwasher, Anna would wonder what would have happened if she had offered to read to Martin. Offered her eyes to cable box directions and instant soup instructions, unpaid bills and pages from his law books.

I’ll be your glasses, she would have said. That doesn’t say milk, it says cream.

for that matter since her knee started hurting and the nausea began. But her pulse would quicken like it did in her twenties. Sometimes, when she’d finished a sentence, or a letter, she’d pause for a minute, letting Sam’s clicking fingers catch up and close her eyes. Sam couldn’t see the way her breasts hung down in pockets of thinning skin.

Or the way her pubic hairs had begun to thin near the bottom. So she imagined that they didn’t and they hadn’t.

Anna just sipped her tea and let the years fall off her with her clothes. She was 25. Her skin was taught and her hair strawberry yellow. Her joints were smooth and her voice was crisp.

That morning in her closet Anna sorted through options. Straps were preferable. Cottons and silks were quieter, skirts and dresses easier to remove. Buttons were practically essential. Her knuckles struggled with detail, mandating a patient delicacy in sliding the tiny polished

Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuuuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuuvuvuvuvuvvuuvu fiction: second place uvu 31 plastic through their knitted holders. She started with a hand on her neck, lingering on the divot above her collarbone before sliding her fingertips under the strap and letting it fall off her shoulder like a leotard. Sentence by sentence, she fingered the circles, tossing them aside with the periods, semi-colons and dots from the “I”s.

Sometimes though, the anticipation was too much.

Sometimes Sam would turn towards her at the right moment and her lips would part, and her back would hurt, and she’d lose her place on the page — looking back at Sam like she’d looked at Brian from Conservatory or Lev from her summer in Moscow or Martin before he’d taken the Bar. It was these times that she ached to rip off her straps and to let her buttons crack off like tiny moons.

“I miss dreaming forwards,” Anna said.

“What?”

“I dream backwards now. You won’t believe how backwards you’ll dream someday.” She cupped one of her breasts in her hand, sliding it up her body and closer to her neck.

“I didn’t think dreams had directions.” His broken eyes managed a smile.

“You’re teasing me.”

“Anna, I would never tease you,” he teased. She liked the way he said her name. It rolled it off his tongue to say I’m talking to you, to say I’m listening to you.

“I dream of the past, of things that could have happened, or should have happened or never happened.

You dream of the future. You’re so young Sam. You don’t realize it now, but you’re so young.”

“I dream in sounds and tastes and textures,” he said.

She paused for a moment, studying his half lidded eyes.

“Future sounds.” She reopened the book. “Future tastes and textures.”

Sam wasn’t lonely. Not completely. His mother came up from Jersey every few weeks, and some of his college friends still lived in the city. They’d warned him about enrolling in a “normie” program.

His college had been filled with dark classrooms and Braille keyboards, audio books and hallway railings. A college where students left their red-stripped canes at the bottom of the staircase, feeling forearms and cupping faces. Pressing together to the vibrations of the speakers, dancing and slipping back to unmade beds based on the smell of one’s hair or the curve of their wrist or the way their breath tasted. From time to time, Sam would sit awake in his living room, drink a Bordeaux and blast these half forgotten rap songs. He couldn’t stand to have a roommate, to subject some Westchester graduate student Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

to the role of perpetual babysitter. After all, he already had nannies. Women who came and read to him like he was some charity case. But Anna was different. She never asked about his classes or his family or what it was like to be blind. It wasn’t about him. She just sat down and read.

Read until her voice got dry or her eyes got tired and they would merely sit in silence for a while. She understood silence the way he understood darkness — running from neither as the sun set and the words ran out.

Sam stayed on his side of the room. He always did. After three weeks, Anna realized his pattern, and with it how easy it was to take off her scarf without notice. How easy it was to do the same with her sweater.

Her blouse. Her beige cotton underwear. Three months later the routine had evolved. At around 6:30 p.m. she’d excuse herself to the bathroom, bunch up her pile and emerge fully clothed and fully satisfied. Even as she sat in her kitchen, Martin-less. More satisfied that she was Martin-less. Itching as she ate her dinner to ask how his arthritis was, how his hemorrhoids were doing, and how

Mona cao/staff illustrator

32

vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv very exciting his day was.

One night, as she waited, Anna fantasized about choking to death. Martin would come home from work and find her dead on the kitchen floor, a giant slab of steak still warm in a puddle of watery blood, a single fatal bite missing from its side. Her funeral would probably have a slideshow of pictures back from the Opera House, perhaps her nephew would read one of his poems. Beef would be banned from all hors d’oeuvres. Didn’t you hear, people would whisper, that’s how she died. I just can’t imagine, they’d sob, died in her own kitchen. Anna wondered whether an article would run in the Times, or if she’d just get one of those oneliners in the Westchester Daily. Alone, in the evenings, when Martin was at the office and her daughter was

Mona cao / staff illustrator

living in London and her Portuguese cleaning lady was gone and her Chinese dry cleaner was gone and Sam was somewhere dark, Anna thought about such things.

Thought and thought until she felt the satiable company of the guilt she’d inspire and the soothing comfort that surely she’d be missed. But then she’d think more. Think and think until she started cutting her steak into smaller and smaller pieces, over-chewing each bite before she tentatively swallowed.

Anna read Sam a wedding invitation and peeled off her socks.

Anna read Sam a chapter from The Dao of Pooh and unclasped her bra.

The heating vent chocked.

The tea percolated.

The clock hit 6:30, and Anna went to the bathroom.

z

And so it went. Twice a week, every week, for twelve weeks. Anna bought a book on Malaysian culture and another on Indian cooking and another on the faith of Dao. Martin came home, tired, old, proud. And Anna told him about the drycleaner and the tuna salad and the similarities between Judeo-Christian monotheism and the singularity of Allah. But Anna was still sick, and she knew it. She told Martin, but he told her she was just bored. That she should just find more things to do with her day. That her knee was fine and the nausea was normal.

That night, she went to bed earlier than early and forgot to leave a towel for his bath or some water for his pills, lying propped up in bed beside her Almanac.

She purposefully climbed in on Martin’s side of the bed, pretending to be asleep for a whole thirty minutes before she heard him sigh, walk around the bed and lower his weight inside the cold half of the sheets. Anna pressed her face into her pillow and scrunched up her features. But Martin was snoring before he could feel the blankets shaking slightly up and down.

On Tuesday at 7:53 p.m., Anna was fantasizing about choking to death when her phone rang. No one called at this hour. Martin wasn’t home yet so she hoped it wasn’t someone trying to sell her something; somehow she could never figure out how to hang up on those people. She let it ring a few times just in case it was Martin dialing in his delay — she never answered right away, never wanted to seem like she was waiting.

She picked up. It was the annoying women who sat at the front desk of Martin’s firm. Occasionally, she’d call to say he’d be running late — that there was some meeting or that his car wouldn’t start. Anna hated when she called. She had bad taste in Christmas cards and had let herself get fat.

“Anna, hi, is that you?” She paused. Her voice sounded funny.

“Yes it is. Is Martin running late?”

She didn’t answer.

“Hello? Sorry can you hear me?” Anna hated the new phones Martin had installed last summer — she never knew quite where she should be talking into.

“Yes, yes, I can. Anna…” she paused again. “They told me I should call you…better than the police or something. I, I really don’t know how to say this. Anna — Martin had a heart attack.”

Anna swallowed.

“Where is he? Which hospital? Last time they took him to Pembrook and he had to stay the night. Is he on that machine yet? Let me…” But the woman interrupted her.

“Anna, I don’t think you understand. It’s not like that Vol. XXXVIII, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuuuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuuvuvuvuvuvvuuvu fiction: second place uvu 33 this time. He pressed the buzzer and we called 911, but when we got back in there he was…they tried…Anna, I, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

Anna was silent.

“Oh…dear…I, is anyone else home?”

“No.” “Anna…they did everything, really.”

Silence hung between them for a good ten seconds.

“You have a car, I presume, um, can you get to the hospital?” Anna could feel her throat tightening as the phone began to shake against her face.

“I…” Anna swallowed. “I’m not supposed to drive into the city at night.” She couldn’t think, couldn’t breath.

“Alright, um,” she heard muffled voices in the background. “We’re sending someone. Sit tight Anna, I…I’m so sorry.”

Anna hung up the phone and stared at her watery steak. Surely there was some mistake. The desk lady was crazy anyway. Martin would drive home in an hour or two, tired, hungry, and homesick. And Anna would make him eggs and lie next to him in bed and read him his papers or his letters or some entries from her almanac. And he would roll over to her side of the bed, and stay there forever. Agree to retire for good this time.

And then they’d play golf, and cook, and see a show in the city, and she’d read him the scorecard and recipes and the playbill.

Anna pushed her plate away, looking down then up then ahead — her features scrunched and paralyzed in silence. She lifted up her hands, clenching them slowly together. She stood up, walked into the living room and then walked back to the kitchen. Martin wasn’t dead.

He wouldn’t just die like that. People don’t just die like that. She pulled her steak in front of her, swallowing hunks whole, forcing down bites too large for her esophagus. Swallowed and swallowed and swallowed until it was gone. Until she hadn’t choked. Until she couldn’t swallow her throat’s other lump and let her wrinkled face sink to her hands.

Anna walked over to the phone, dialed Sam’s number and hung up.

On Wednesday at 4:42 p.m., Anna knocked on Sam’s apartment door.

“Hi Anna,” said Sam. Anna looked at him.

“How does your knee feel today?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is.”

Anna went inside and sat down.

Sam tilted his head slightly and chuckled.

“No tuberculosis or anemia or endometrial cancer?”

“No,” she said. “No there isn’t.”

Sam put on some tea and handed her his pile.

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

“I’ve got a lot for you today. Two of those Saint Augustine chapters, and I want you to look at this pile of coupons.”

She read him an advertisement for car insurance.

She read him a sheet of coupons for Walgreens.

She read him a page of Saint Augustine’s philosophy.

Sam’s clicking stopped. He looked towards her, as if listening for something, or smelling for something or tasting for something or feeling for something.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Sam stood up from his desk, went into the kitchen briefly and walked over to her side of the room. Sam never left his side of the room.

“I found this on the chair last week and I presume it’s yours.” Sam leaned against her chair, handing her a thin beige cardigan. Anna took it from him, careful to avoid meeting his skin.

“Thank you, Sam. I must have left it here on Wednesday.”

Sam wasn’t certain if he was looking directly at Anna’s eyes. He was never certain with her. He could only guess, wonder, speculate until he told himself he was being silly, being egocentric, being sick.

“Anna,” he repeated, reaching out slowly, hesitantly, before placing a hand on her shoulder — exhaling into relaxation as he felt the smooth linen fabric beneath his fingers. “You sure you’re okay?”

Anna nodded, knowing he could somehow sense the motion of her head. Then picked up the book, dislodging his hand.

“I’m fine, Sam. Really.”

She listened to the sound of the tea percolating and thought about their mutual senses; it smells like cinnamon berries, it tastes like honey smoke, it feels warmer today. “Did I ever tell you I could do Black Swan’s 32 fouettés en tournant?”

“No,” Sam went back over to his desk and resumed his clicking. “You’ve never told me that, Anna. That’s impressive.”

Then Anna read to Sam. Read to him as he turned her words into a language of spots. A language that she now knew he could read in the steam and in the tea and in the books and in his body. In the painting and the shelves and the music and the air.

Anna brought her mug to the sink before excusing herself to the bathroom. She didn’t let him hear her turn the wrong way —­­­but she knew when she clicked shut the front door that he’d know she’d never be back.

Knew because her sagging breasts and varicose veins were covered in cotton. Knew because he could hear her tears spot his book like Braille.

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Non-Fiction: Second Place

The Other Murders: The Forgotten Homicides Since the Killing of Annie Le How law enforcement and the media focused on the killing of a Yale student and ignored the deaths of more than two dozen other citizens D by colin ross D

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he police cars started to arrive around 10:30 p.m. Just one or two at first. The Yale Police Department patrol cars drove slowly down the deserted medical school campus streets until they made a left turn at Amistad Park, just across from their destination, the looming research building at 10 Amistad Street.

The officers got out of their vehicles and walked towards the building. They did not seem to be in any rush. One even cracked a joke to his pals.

“This girl’s probably in Vegas right now,” he said.

The girl the officer was talking about was Annie Marie Le, who was at the time a 24 year-old graduate student studying pharmacology at the medical school. The day was Wednesday, September 9, and Le was scheduled to be in New York on Sunday to attend her wedding. No one had seen her since Tuesday morning, and she had been declared missing that night.

Wednesday night, police were still looking for her.

When police notified media outlets of the disappearance on Wednesday, reporters at the Yale Daily News scrambled to cover the evolving story. I was in the ydn building at 202 York Street to check in

with my editors after the summer break.

I had yet to write a story that year. But as I was about to leave, I ran into two other student reporters who were hurriedly gathering notebooks and pens. When I asked what was up, they told me about the missing student and said they were heading to the research building where she was last found. “Want to come?” asked one.

Fifteen minutes later, the three of us were standing outside the front doors of 10 Amistad, waiting for something to happen. For twenty minutes, the area was deserted. Then the police showed up. As more patrol cars arrived, the officers formed into small teams and began searching various parts of the research complex: the parking garage, the courtyard, the park. Most officers converged in the lobby area, passing by us with barely a nod. The officers were methodical, but the atmosphere was hardly one of urgency. It was just another call, another problem to check out.

The next day, the ydn ran the banner headline, “Graduate Student Goes Missing,” and Yale sent out a campuswide e-mail about the disappearance.

By the end of the week, with Le still missing, national media and law Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuuuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuuvuvuvuvuuvu non-fiction: second place uvu 35 enforcement attention had already fixed itself on the case. All three networks ran stories in their morning news programs that Friday, some suggesting that Le might be a runaway bride. By the end of the day, the fbi had established a special tipline for any information, offering a $10,000 reward.

On Saturday, the Connecticut fbi Special Agentin-Charge, Kimberly Mertz, held a press conference about the case with top Yale officials. State police resources were soon deployed as well. The night of the press conference, state troopers were sent to a dump in Hartford to search through waste from the 10 Amistad building looking for evidence. The next day, New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington, the chief law enforcement officer in the county, inspected the scene with detectives.

When police found Le’s body the night of Sunday, September 13, the public and law enforcement attention only intensified. The four most prominent police agencies in the city — the Yale Police Department, the New Haven Department, the state police, and the fbi — all made finding the killer of

Hairs, bloodstains, and other dna pieces belonging to Le and a then-unknown male were discovered by police in the lab building. On September 15, police secured a warrant to take dna samples from Clark.

The samples were then sent to the forensics lab of the Connecticut State Police in Farmington. The lab receives pieces of evidence from criminal cases across the state, from discharged firearms to cheek swabs. Usually there is a waiting period which can drag on weeks or months depending on the lab’s backlog. But police agencies can request that forensic evidence be given priority for urgent cases.

The Le case was ruled an emergency and put at the front of the line. Investigators had their results less than 48 hours later. The dna matched and police arrested Clark in his motel room in Cromwell, Conn. in the early hours of September 17.

Two weeks later on Friday, Oct. 2, Yale University President Richard Levin sent a letter to University faculty and staff to reassure them of the thorough safety procedures and resources the University

Where New Haven stands out is in the ability of its

most violent criminals to evade prosecution.

Annie Le their priority. Over 100 investigators were working on the case, including fbi agents requested specifically from Yale to assist on the case.

“I can assure you no lead is going uncovered,” the fbi’s Mertz said at a press conference the day before the body was discovered. Publicly, nhpd detectives assumed a lead role in the homicide case, but Mertz’s agents and state police detectives, as well as Yale police, continued to be deeply involved in the case, both when it was a disappearance and then when it became a homicide.

The rapid and exhaustive law enforcement response led to the arrest, just nine days after the murder, of lab technician Raymond Clark. The combined law enforcement response produced an impressive dossier of evidence against Clark, which I would later discover was hardly the usual outcome of a murder investigation in New Haven.

State police investigators were the ones who first found bloody clothing at 10 Amistad, leading police to label it a crime scene for the first time. And it was fbi agents who conducted an extensive analysis of the suspect’s keycard to see which rooms he had been in the day of Le’s murder, evidence that was crucial to his eventual arrest.

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

had in place. The time had come for the campus to return to normal — a tragedy had occurred, but the alleged killer had been apprehended and there was nothing to fear. The national media had long since left the scene, though coverage still picked up whenever Clark made one of his many brief court appearances.

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eanwhile, the city too was returning to normal, which meant that most murders would go unsolved.

In fact, few New Haven murderers ever see the inside of a courtroom. This city of about 125,000 has, like many urban areas, a crime rate above the national average. Where New Haven stands out is in the ability of its most violent criminals to evade prosecution. In the last three years, more than 30 murders, out of a total of more than 50, have gone unsolved, meaning that about once a month in the Elm City, someone murders someone and gets away with it. Police say a good percentage of the crimes occur in the worlds of drug dealing and gang activity, where violence is used frequently and many triggermen are repeat offenders. As a result, their continued presence on city streets is all the

36 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z

hkh funeral services; center: truecrimereport.com; bottom middle: tributes.com

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuuuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuuvuvuvuvuuvu non-fiction: second place uvu 37 more dangerous.

Yet, the array of resources deployed in the case of Annie Le has never been brought to bear against this deadly crime spree. In the year after her death, only eight of 26 murders have been solved. The response to the Le case has exposed an ugly truth about criminal justice in New Haven.

John Timoney has served as the police chief in Miami and Philadelphia, and was deputy commissioner in New York. He has experience in cities with out-of-control homicide rates: he was brought into Philadelphia in the 90’s when the city faced a rising homicide rate and declining numbers of case closures. Timoney reversed both trends. But he’s never had to handle anything like the rates in New Haven, where the murder closure rate hasn’t come close to the national average of 67 percent since 2005. New Haven police are solving barely 30 percent a year, a poor reflection on the city’s law enforcement, in Timoney’s view.

“You should always try to keep it above 70 percent,” he said.

But although the nhpd’s homicide record is among the worst in the country for small cities, few hold the department accountable for the failure, a lack of accountability largely based on who the victims are and where their bodies are found.

“corridor” runs about thirty blocks down from the Newhallville in the north of the city, down through Dixwell, across Dwight, a neighborhood just west of Yale’s campus, and into the Hill at the southern edge of the city.

O

ne New Haven pastor preaches every Sunday from the center of the “corridor” in Dixwell. Bishop Theodore L. Brooks is the fifth pastor of Beulah Heights Church on Orchard Street. He has served there since 1988, when he took over from his father. He has seen the city’s communities flourish and struggle through the ebbs and flows of crime and violence. Brooks was in New Haven for the troubled years of the early 1990’s, when drug gangs literally controlled entire blocks, and 30 people were being killed each year. And he was there for the better years of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, when the dismantling of many of the gangs and a focus on community policing drove the murder count down, if briefly, to single digits.

Now, he is seeing another wave of violence and a lack of interest from the rest of the city.

“The murders of poor African-Americans in our society don’t merit attention,” Brooks says. “It is a tragic shame in American society.”

The response to the Le case has exposed an ugly

truth about criminal justice in New Haven.

New Haven is a city without an ethnic majority.

The city is about 35 percent black, 35 percent white, and 20 percent Hispanic and the rest a mix of Asian and other ethnicities. The mayor is white, the police chief Hispanic, and the corporation counsel black. But the city’s murders occur disproportionately, almost universally, in the black community. Over 90 percent of the city’s murder victims and perpetrators, at least the ones that have been caught, in the last two years have been black.

New Haven police officials often refer to the city’s “crime corridor,” where most of the violence occurs. When you hear the term, it sounds as if police have been able to pinpoint the city’s troubled areas so that they can focus on them. But to see the “corridor” on crime maps, frequently handed out by police, it is obvious that the circle drawn around the violent areas is largely a boundary around the city’s predominantly black communities. The

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

On Oct. 2, the same day Levin sent out the e-mail assuring the campus of safety, New Haven had its next murder. Police found Willie Richardson, 27, dead on a couch in his mother’s house in Dixwell.

He had been shot in the head. Police said they had a strong lead and a person of interest in the killing. More than a year later, the murder remains unsolved. It merited one story in the city’s most prominent paper.

The violence escalated as 2009 ended. By early January of 2010, six more black men had been killed. Five were shot to death on city streets, often at close range and in the head. One was stabbed to death inside a downtown nightclub. Bishop Brooks had had enough.

As a prominent community leader, the bishop also serves on the Board of Police Commissioners, the independent group of civilians tasked with overseeing the police department. The Board meets

38 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z once a month to hear from the chief and handle routine, internal matters like hiring, promotions and hear a general overview from the chief about the department.

There was a meeting scheduled for Tuesday, January 12 at 6 p.m. and this one was going to be a little different.

When I arrived at the front desk of the nhpd building, a harsh, bare building across from the train station, I was buzzed in by the duty sergeant, who gave me the usual eye roll and sigh of exasperation that a college kid thought he could do this job. I took the elevator to the third floor and walked into the small conference room next to the chief ’s office where the board met. I got more quizzical looks as I sat down in one of five seats reserved for visitors and signed in. Only the chief, James Lewis, whom I had met and seemed to like me, gave me a nod.

Lewis is a native of Wisconsin, which you can tell after two seconds of hearing him talk. A quiet, affable but firm man of 60, he had been brought out of semi-retirement to head the nhpd in 2008 because the department needed a force of stability after being rocked by a narcotics unit corruption scandal. The other board members and assistant chiefs chatted for a few minutes and then started

murders. The nhpd had gone to the fbi for help.

The fbi used crime-mapping technology to find all available warrants to serve in the area where the murders had occurred. The raid produced nine arrests and had furthered investigation into the murders, Lewis said. Brooks was still unhappy, but, for the moment, appeased.

Asked why the New Haven fbi had not become involved in the murder cases before, spokesman Bill Reiner said the fbi only intervenes in local crime when requested to do so by an institution, such as the nhpd, or, as in the Le case, Yale University.

The raid received scant coverage in the local media over the next few days.

“There’s a little blurb in the paper and the next day it’s gone,” Brooks said, referring to the murders.

“The Le case proves it — the death of a young black child, it’s not interesting for the media, no ratings in it for them.”

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he New Haven Police deeply resent the implication that race plays any factor in their investigations. The man in charge of the nhpd now is Frank Limon, who inherited the crime crisis just as it was heating up again in April.

Three more black men had been shot to death

“Shot in the front of the head, shot in the back of the head, everyone knows what’s going on, no one will say,” he said... the meeting. A reporter from the New Haven Independent and I were the only members of the media there. The meeting went routinely until the time came for the chief ’s report to the board. When Lewis fielded questions, Brooks quickly made his point.

“These black men are on a rampage,” he said.

It was a rare moment of discord in a usually collegial atmosphere.

Brooks went on to detail the crimes and call for action.

“Shot in the front of the head, shot in the back of the head, everyone knows what’s going on, no one will say,” he said to the chief, his voice rising.

Lewis must have known beforehand that the board meeting would blow up in his face, because he came prepared.

The chief, keeping his calm, announced to the room that Tuesday morning, 45 detectives and officers had raided locations in Dixwell and Newhallville to check on leads into the recent

over Easter weekend, just before Limon’s Monday swearing-in ceremony at city hall. Outraged residents of black neighborhoods crammed into city hall to urge action from the new chief. Police had still not arrested a murder suspect since they took Clark into custody the previous September.

Despite the outrage, the unsolved cases’ forensic evidence still had not gone to the head of the line at the state crime lab.

Yet, Chief Limon insisted to me that “We treat every murder the same way,” in an interview in his office at the nhpd building. Limon would not answer specific questions regarding the difference of resources in the Le investigation, saying that the case had occurred before he took over as chief.

Prior to coming to New Haven, Limon was a Chicago police veteran who had run the organized crime division, which focused on gangs in the city.

My questions put him in a delicate situation. He did not want to blame Lewis for the failure to solve the murders, but he still wanted to shift the blame for the Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuuuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuuvuvuvuvuuvu non-fiction: second place uvu 39 ongoing crisis onto someone else. In the interview, Limon and his Assistant Chief for Investigations, Thomas Wheeler, another Chicago veteran whom Limon had brought with him, opened by admitting that the city’s homicide situation was unacceptable, but also stating unequivocally that they would not talk about the previous administration’s anti-crime efforts. But he and Wheeler did end up blaming a lot of people by the end of our meeting.

First they blamed the state forensics lab.

“They are seriously backed up,” said Wheeler. “I don’t want to put a time on it, but backed up. That’s the problem in a lot of cases, we sent in evidence and we’re waiting to get it back.”

The State Police spokesman, Lt. Paul Vance, says otherwise.

“That is absolutely false,” he said in a phone interview. “We have a lot of evidence come in, but if a department tells us to prioritize something, we do it,” he explains. “They just need to let us know.”

He went on to say that the nhpd had not asked for priority status for any of the murder cases that year. “We’re happy to oblige, but just tell us.” The qualifications for giving a case priority status are that it be an emergency or other special case, like the Le case, said Vance. He acknowledged that the Le case had been “special” in large part because of the widespread public attention it received. Asked whether the other murder cases in New Haven since then would qualify, Vance paused to think.

“Well, I’m not sure,” he said. “Would you call those emergencies?”

Next in my interview at police headquarters, Limon and Wheeler did exactly what they promised not to do: blame their predecessor. As I was leaving the office, notepad folded up and pen put away, Limon joked about the situation he had gotten himself into.

“And you know, the previous administration really didn’t get a handle on those murders,” Limon said as an afterthought. I turned from the door and asked him what he meant.

“Well, when you don’t take care of cases like that, they tend to create a cycle of retaliation,” said the chief. “And that’s caused a lot of the problems that now I have to deal with.”

When I returned to my room, I shot off an e-mail to former chief Lewis, who had since become interim head of the Yale Police Department, giving him Limon’s quotes and asking for his response.

What followed were two angry phone calls from Limon and the City Hall spokeswoman demanding to know why I was trying to stir up conflict between Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

the two chiefs. Limon denied ever having said what he said and added that Wheeler would back him up.

I had no doubt his Chicago pal would do just that, and I didn’t have a recorder or any notes. In a story on the murders in the ydn, we ran a slightly toned down quote that Limon acknowledged he had said, about inheriting the problem, without mentioning from whom.

In the Le case, law enforcement tripped over itself to congratulate all the different officials and agencies that helped produce an arrest. With the other murders since then, no one seemed to want to be associated with them. That reticence extends far beyond the police.

A

t the interview, Limon hadn’t confined his criticism to law enforcement. When I asked him about public attention for the murders, he turned on me and the media.

“Well I don’t see you up there on Munson St.,” he said, referring to a crime hot spot. “When a Dixwell kid gets found lying on the sidewalk, where are you?”

In New Haven, crime and murder are covered by the media in very narrow and time-honored ways. When a murder occurs, the New Haven Independent, an all-online newspaper, essentially prints the press release distributed by the city about the crime. The New Haven Register, the city’s main print outlet, publishes a story about the victim that gives a glimpse of who the person was and sometimes even suggests what the motive behind the crime might have been, but never connects the crimes together into any sort of trend unless some official at a press conference does so first. The local television stations are little better.

The story was there for anyone who wanted it: no one did.

Senior Executive Producer Jim Murphy runs abc’s Good Morning America program and coordinated much of the network’s Annie Le coverage. As he put it, the incessant coverage the Le case received from its inception was a product of “time immemorial stories” — a beautiful, smart girl gone missing, the tattooed lab technician villain, the search for her body, the hunt for her killer. In other words, good TV. The other murders don’t make the cut.

“I’m not being callous,” said Murphy, “but there are circumstances that people become used to, they become, not accepted, but expected. Like car accidents, we expect them to happen, and we cover them when there’s some unique set

40 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z of circumstances in a case that goes against what people expect.”

Police have begun to make progress in the unsolved New Haven murder cases, but it has been slow-going. nhpd detectives have arrested suspects in eight of the murders since July, often with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals Service Fugitive Task Force, which has arrested the alleged culprits in hideouts in New Haven, neighboring towns and as far away as Elizabeth, New Jersey. Limon insists that increased communication between different parts of the nhpd, like patrol and investigations, have helped the closure rate. Indeed, the nhpd has twice caught suspected murderers by arriving at the scene quickly before witnesses can disappear or change their minds about cooperating, giving the detective bureau a short-term closure rate of over 50 percent for the start of 2011. Progress, to be sure. But longerterm investigations of the murders in the year after Annie Le are still lagging, though a few have resulted in arrests, with defendants still awaiting trial.

Part of the problem stems from a lack of initiative from city prosecutors. Dearington, the chief prosecutor for the county, said that his office tries to cooperate with detectives on as many cases as possible, but admitted that cooperation is not uniform. The Chief State’s Attorney for Connecticut has a special Cold Cases Unit with a high rate of success that operates statewide. But the city murders, although they certainly appear to be cold, are still only, at most, a few years old. The Cold Case Unit has handled recent cases at times, but usually works on murders that have gone unsolved since the 1990’s and 1980’s.

For now, there still seems to be no urgency

M

uch has changed since the end of 2010, when most of this article was written and reported, and much has not. What has changed is that the New Haven Police Department has solved more murders. Police say a newly reorganized Investigative Services Division under new leadership is responsible for the turnaround, though they also admit that they could not have made progress without tips from the community. Whether the department or the community is primarily responsible for the improvement, the change has been significant.

There have now been arrests in 13 of the 24 murders in New Haven in 2010 — an arrest rate of 54 percent. Chief Frank Limon has called this change a personal success. But the situation is still unacceptable. This year, detectives have only solved four of 13 murders, and though it is early in the

attached to solving the murder spree that continues to afflict New Haven’s black communities.

T

he Sunday before Thanksgiving, I went to the 11 a.m. service at the Varick Memorial ame Zion Church in Dixwell to speak with church leaders and residents about the violence.

The Revered Eldren Morrison and the churchgoers were welcoming, and some told me they had seen a shooting or knew a victim. Two others who work as probation and juvenile corrections officers spoke about their experience with those doing the shooting. They were critical both of fellow community members for creating broken families and of police and city officials for letting the violence continue as the murders went unsolved. “I don’t like it, but, frankly, it’s just gotten worse,” Tracey Harris, a supervisory probation officer in the city, said of the violence. “I just hope every day that it’s not my client next.”

In his booming voice, Reverend Morrison delivered a sermon that acknowledged that this was a community with problems and that part of the answer might be found in religion.

“I want to see the strippers, the thugs, the drug dealers in here!” he shouted to the congregation of about 300, who were on their feet clapping and shouting throughout most of the sermon.

But, Reverend Morrison said, the church could use some help. And that help could start with police devoting the same resources to murders in Dixwell as they do to murders on the Yale campus.

“Then we might have some peace around here,” the pastor said. “No doubt.”

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year to judge investigations, which can often take months and even years, the delayed police response is failing to create a critical deterrent effect, when criminals see a strong correlation between committing murder and being arrested. Even 2010’s improved arrest rate is still well under the national average of 67 percent.

This is not to take away from the nhpd’s accomplishments, which, in a department wracked by so much recent change and turmoil, have been impressive. But it is also hard to praise the nhpd when its officers have so much work to do and when the murder situation appears headed for a crisis despite their efforts. The 13 murders already this year put the city on track for well over 30 homicides — a number unheard of since the early 1990’s, when drug gangs controlled enitre city blocks.

— Colin Ross, April 2011

Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv fiction: third place vuv 41

Fiction: Third Place

all Parts Possessed An anxious boy, his aggressive older brother, and their mother spend a day at the pond.

D by Finola Prendergast D

maria haras / staff illustrator

T

he floating dock glared sunlight. Tommy lay on it with outflung arms, dripping a dark and sloppy T. The world was orange veined with red under his eyelids. A ways off, kids splashed and yelled and a mother chided someone lazily, but it wasn’t Tommy’s mother. He was alone. He had swum away when his brother Ryan had jeered “Mama’s boy!” right in his face.

The water shushed. It smelled scummy and rich.

The dock tilted gently, first to the left, then to the right.

What kept the dock from floating away? It sat on the pond like a dog inside an electric fence. But it didn’t have an anchor. Tommy knew so, because a bunch of Ryan’s friends had dared him and each other to swim under it. He hadn’t taken the dare: if you tried to pop out on the other side too soon, you could hit your head on the bottom of the dock and get knocked unconscious and drown. (That was another time Ryan had called him a “mama’s boy.”) But no one who had taken the dare had found a rope. The dock was floating free. Maybe while Tommy’s eyes were closed it had floated over the dam and away. . .

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Tommy opened his eyes. He was still in the middle of the pond. Far off on the main dock, a creaky platform that stood on stilts half-in and half-out of the water, some big girls were stamping their feet and waving at one another to jump, jump. Two of them had on bikinis. One of the bikinis was red with polka dots and one was lime green. The lifeguard stared at them stupidly with sun-blinded eyes. He was even bigger than they were: a high school boy. Tommy admired the yellow plastic whistle that dangled from his neck on a thick string.

A little beach lay beside the main dock. (Mommy was there, somewhere.) Dad said the sand had been “imported.” All the swimmers’ tramping feet had mixed it with the wet brown dirt and turned it gritty and gray.

One teeny girl with puffy orange arm floaters was squatting on the sand at the edge of the water and wailing. Tommy didn’t want to look. Instead he looked at the pond where it rippled against the dock.

It was brown and green and dull and reflected barely anything: the trees by the shore dropped shadows not trees across the water.

42 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z Maybe down near the bottom, where Tommy couldn’t see, schools of trout and bass and perch were tangling together. Maybe there were small freshwater sharks that ate the trout and bass and perch that no one ever saw. Maybe people would only discover the small freshwater sharks after the largest and bravest shark made up his mind to eat a tasty-looking kid.

Maybe.

A water strider, blurring into sight, paused by the dock. Its thready legs made an X, and its feet made tiny white dimples on the surface of the water.

Tommy’s face pulled together in disgust. Once he had seen a pack of them surround the dead body of a June bug floating on the water and suck at its insides with their sharp mouths until its shiny armor crumpled like an empty soda can. He had thrown a stick, and they had scattered.

Besides, how could they skate around like that and never sink? Dad had explained it to Tommy once, but the explanation had words like tension and vortices that only made Tommy more suspicious.

Would it try to climb aboard the dock? Tommy could stop it. Maybe he should grab one of its needle legs and throw it across the water. Maybe he should make a tidal wave with his hand to swamp and drown it.

A splash! An arm glittering with drops flung itself onto the deck. Its muscles twitched, a soaked black cap of hair was levered into sight, and then Ryan was clambering onto the dock, which rocked complainingly under him. The pond smell that was

Tommy had said nothing.

“What —” said Tommy.

Carl grabbed Tommy’s wrist. Tommy saw his own whitish indoors skin bulge out even whiter around Carl’s freckly red-knuckled fist. It hurt the way things always hurt before a bruise shows up. Ryan was still grinning, wide and stiff, like Tommy’s plastic T-Rex with the tiny arms.

Carl grabbed the other wrist and pinned both wrists behind Tommy’s head and knelt on them.

Tommy realized that he should have run away, or started struggling earlier.

He wriggled and twisted to and fro. Knives were stabbing madly up his arms. His heels slid on the planks. A pain below joined the pain above: a splinter sliding into his big toe. The deck rocked under him, like it had taken his side — but it wasn’t enough on his side to buck Carl and Ryan. They were too heavy.

Above Tommy the sky was a clear-cut blue against the birds and branches and it was very, very far away.

Ryan was working his wet swim trunks down over his butt. Fabric slapped his knees. He tugged his penis free of the waistband and aimed.

Hot pee clattered against Tommy’s belly. It rata-tatted like faucet water in the kitchen sink or like shower water against the shower floor. It would have felt nice, if it had been water.

Tommy struggled in a rage. His skin under Carl’s knees twisted. Carl was too big, two years older, or maybe three if Ryan had been telling the truth.

Tommy’s guts heaved and shriveled. Without noticing

Maybe she wanted to rough up Ryan, to prove something. But she couldn’t differentiate her grip. always faintly everywhere clung strong and ripe to his body. He was grinning.

“Is it time to go home?” Tommy asked.

The other side of the dock — the water strider’s side — dropped. Another set of arms, another hairplastered head. Ryan’s friend Carl was mounting the dock.

Carl had brown hair and brown eyes and a round fatty face that could belong to anyone. He was pretty big for a fifth grader, Tommy guessed, but that was the only interesting thing about him you could see.

Ryan had told Tommy that Carl should have been in the sixth grade, but he’d been held back at his last school for “disciplinary problems,” which meant stomping on a kid’s thumb until it broke. Dad had told Ryan that lying was a sin and to go to his room.

when, he had started barking in a weird hoarse voice: “Stop! Stop!”

All of a sudden the weight on his arms vanished.

Ryan was pulling up his swim trunks. He and Carl were laughing.

Tommy roared and tackled Ryan into the pond at a run. The water struck them and washed over them, swallowing all the shrieks and calls of the beach, all the noise except the rushing of water around them.

Plunging downward, Tommy grappled with Ryan’s shoulder and found his head. Grabbing the head twohanded, he shoved. Ryan went down, he went up. He rocketed to the surface, spitting and shaking water from his eyes. Anger was burned brightly in his head.

He felt cleaner.

He held Ryan under as long as he could — pushing Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv fiction: third place vuv 43 the head down with his hands and kicking back at Ryan’s thrashing legs. Still it was just a couple seconds before Ryan exploded sputtering to the surface.

“You could’ve drowned me!” Ryan shouted. He was wearing a red, bulge-eyed face. That was the face he wore whenever Tommy broke a rule he thought was actually serious.

Currents sliced through Tommy’s toes as he trod water. It tickled. He concentrated on the feeling because he couldn’t answer Ryan back. Pee had never killed anyone, but he didn’t think he’d been wrong.

Losing patience, Ryan walloped onto his stomach and stroked hard for shore and Mommy. Angry froth kicked up behind him. Tommy followed, breaststroking, wondering what she’d say and how she’d punish him. I won’t say sorry, he told himself. His stomach cramped with nausea.

Mommy was lying on the gritty gray beach. A towel wrinkled under her. It was printed with huge, bubbly flowers in orange and pink and purple.

Packing it in the wicker beach basket that morning, she had whispered, laughing, in Tommy’s ear: “It’s aspirational.” He hadn’t understood, but he’d laughed with her anyway.

Big sunglasses with red plastic rims covered up her eyes. Her hands rested flat on her belly and her jaw had gone soft. Is she asleep? Tommy saw Ryan think it too. He stumbled and paused in his barefoot, highkneed march over the uneven wet sand. Then he shouted: “Mom!” She sat up slowly. “Hey, sweeties,” she said.

“What’s going on?”

“He tried to drown me!”

“He peed on me,” Tommy muttered in rebellion.

“What?” Mommy said. She grasped delicately one frame of her sunglasses with four fingers, pinkie sticking up like it was teatime. Then the sunglasses were crowning her head. She did things like that sometimes — fast enough to be magic.

Her bare eyes stared at him, narrow as pencil lead.

“He peed on me,” Tommy repeated in alarm.

“He held me under, I could have drowned,” Ryan insisted.

Mommy turned to Ryan. “Good.”

‘G

ood,” Evie said.

She had been half-asleep when they approached her. The dark-lensed world made a night of sorts, a night with which she’d fooled the shame that daytime naps dug up in her.

In her daydream — or true dream, she wasn’t sure — the coming baby, about whom they’d told no one, not even the boys, had appeared as a grayYale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

eyed woman with no name. Evie had wanted to call her Temperance. Arthur had said that Temperance was a horrible, old-fashioned name to stick their daughter with. “We should call her Aimee,” he said.

(In the dream, Evie could hear the trendy spelling.

She had scoffed.) “Mom!” the woman had demanded suddenly; Evie had woken and remembered the child was three weeks in the womb, unborn and unknown.

Now the boys were staring at her with saucer eyes and wet open mouths. That was her familiar mouth, mirrored, multiplied: dark pink and too wide for the faces in which it was set, the lower lip pushed into a congenital pout. The pointed chin was Arthur’s, the cleft in it hers. (Could she say that it was hers? In fact she didn’t know if a lifetime with this body — neonatal jaundice, teeth shed and grown, skin over the ribs stippled with shiny dots from chickenpox and errant fingernails, two fillings in the back molars, ears pierced and hung with ornaments, muscles torn and strengthened from her years of soccer, the chunk of thumb absent where the box cutter had slipped, the wrist that had fractured when she was shoved onto the asphalt of that parking lot, hymen broken on her wedding night like a contract of blood brotherhood, belly twice stretched and twice deflated – if a lifetime made it hers, or if ownership reverted to the mother who had provided it, to her mother’s father, to her mother’s father’s father, back and back forever and all one’s parts possessed by God knows whom. Well.

She would say hers.) They had her muddy irises. She stared back at them, tried to stare in. But they were opaque. They reflected her “Good.”

Then beneath skin and puppy fat, facial muscles pulled and set into legible patterns. Ryan’s brow lowered, his lips pursed, and his nose retreated wrinkling up his face. “But what if he’d pushed me under the deck or knocked my head really hard? You said we could drown from that.”

Meanwhile Tommy had tucked his chin to his chest, in shame, yes, but perhaps also in atavistic instinct to protect his throat. He strapped his arms round himself in a furious hug. From the way he refused to look at her, Evie knew he still believed he would be punished and was rebelling against punishment. “Carl stood on my arms and you peed on me.”

Why did they have to repeat themselves? The situation was lurid and awful enough as it was. Ryan had decided to humiliate his baby brother, to degrade him physically, basely — scatologically, though Evie’s horror could not reside in that, surely, not in the mere primitive idea of contamination. Not so very long ago Evie had changed Ryan’s loaded diapers

44 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z

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maria haras / staff illustrator

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Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011

z vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv fiction: third place vuv 45 while whistling. Not so long ago she had shown Ryan (positioning his arms just so) how to support the baby’s comically outsized head. Ryan had sung tuneless renditions of the Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi theme song to lullaby the baby after dinner. He had, for a few months, stopped begging for a Golden Retriever puppy just like the one Matt Peterson got for his birthday, Mooooom...And, now, this. Yet Evie was not surprised.

She could imagine it perfectly. All those days when her mother had left Evie with her giantess cousin Sophie while she and Aunt Helen went to “events,” for instance: the pinches, the slaps, the terrifying chokings, the way Sophie used to pin Evie and drop loogies on her face and chest that she scrubbed hysterically in the bathroom afterwards so that Mama wouldn’t see them and be disgusted. How would it have been for Tommy? The looming shape so close above you that it blotted out distance. Pain and fear crowding you into your body. Your back scraping wetly against wood, splinters pricking you like thorns, like gravel.

Someone choosing to make you dirty. Your ignorance as to why. The cowardly suspicion that you have somehow deserved it. Squirming, pushing desperately against the hands that hold you down and feeling no give at all, you might as well do nothing, weak as — well, as a child.

This had been only child’s play. Evie had overreacted. Hardly the first time, right? She was such a fearful mother. (Perhaps that was the true fear of motherhood: not that your child would be snatched up by a monster, but that your child would grow up to be one.) Every day kids played games that appeared quite freakish but, if considered closely, lay well within the bounds of childhood viciousness.

Right?

“What you did was wrong,” she told Ryan while rising to her feet, “and disgusting.” The word was so heady she had to repeat it. “Right now you disgust me.”

Ryan flinched back. Evie was a bad mother. A bad, bad mother — God. Tommy’s guilt was transmuting slowly to joyous wonder on his round little face. He knew now, she could see, that he would not be punished.

And was it wrong that — without loving Ryan any less, loving both her boys equally, loving them both with a mother’s inexhaustible non-zero-sum love — that Tommy was her favorite — not in spite but because of his weakness and backwardness, because of the small swaying belly that protruded just a little over the thick elastic waistband of his green swimming trunks, because he made it so honestly and unabashedly clear that she was his favorite?

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

Evie’s mind reared back from the question.

(Disgusted.) “We’re going home,” she said.

But the boys still stood there slack-mouthed. So she grabbed them, each by one arm, and began to pull them toward the packed-dirt parking lot. She was holding them too tight: their flesh ridged between her fingers like Play-Doh. Maybe she wanted to rough up Ryan, to prove something, like I’m still bigger, you jeering little gangster.

But she couldn’t differentiate her grip. Right and left tightened alike; Tommy whimpered too. (She was ashamed and vicious in her shame.) Her Hawaiian print towel she left on the beach. In the end, it was dumb, and she had no hands left to carry it.

F

rom his bed Ryan could hear Mom and Dad talking in the kitchen. The family house was small, wooden, and historical — French settlers had built it in the 1700’s, Ryan had done a report on it last year — so winds and voices were always seeping into Ryan’s bedroom through cracks in the floor. Mom was speaking in quick bursts that made all her words blur together. When she ran out of breath, Dad would start up. His light voice ticked steadily as a metronome.

(Ryan had taken piano lessons when he was littler.

Mom had wanted an artsy, talented kid, he guessed.

He had never been any good at it. When his teacher, Mrs. Dombrovskaya, a large and graceful Russian woman with fat hands leaping quick as squirrels over the keys, had told him to play “with passion,” he banged out obnoxious noise. When she told him to play “softly, softly,” he touched the keys so wimpily that they stalled halfway down and no sound came out at all. Frustrated, he banged them: the obnoxious noise returned. “To find right pressure,” Mrs. Dombrovskaya used to say, “is puzzle for brain.”

Well, Ryan never figured out the puzzle. The only thing that kept him from going crazy during those Monday lessons, trapped in that little living room — with the walls all covered in black-and-white photographs, and the lumpy carpet that smelled like stale church incense — was the solid tick, tick, tick, tick of the small metronome that sat on top of the piano.

Mrs. Dombrovskaya made him listen to it whenever his tempo wandered off; sometimes he played too fast, fingers stumbling over a bright black sharp and tripping each other up, just to hear the noise.)

Mom and Dad weren’t fighting. Ryan could tell, even though he couldn’t make out individual words.

When they fought, Mom usually cried, and Dad’s voice dialed its beats per minute way down. They were talking about him, probably: about what he’d

46 vuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuvuv z done. Ryan kicked off the sheets sticking to his legs — summer was too hot for sheets anyway — and got out of bed as quietly as he could. (One time, he had tried to figure out which floorboards in his room creaked, so he could sneak around better at night. It turned out all of them creaked.)

When Ryan on tiptoe reached the dark top of the stairwell, Tommy was already sitting there in a lump of shadow, his feet braced on the top step. He jumped when Ryan sat down next to him, but didn’t say anything. Technically they were still in a fight: Ryan hadn’t said sorry for real yet. (Dad had made Ryan say

of everything? Other kids did it all the time! The noontime heat had pressed hard on his shoulders and it had taken all his effort to stand up straight. He had wanted an adventure, a test of his bravery — and then Carl had startled him by saying: “Your brother is hogging the dock. Wanna do something about it?”

Ryan had remembered how much he hated Tommy sometimes, how chubby and scared Tommy was, how he was always agreeing with Mom even though it meant he’d stay a loser forever...Afterwards, Carl had disappeared in just the same way he had appeared.

“They’re talking about us,” Tommy said. “We’re

She was afraid of him — like he had transformed into a gigantic, nasty millipede wriggling all its legs all over the back seat. it, which didn’t count.) But Tommy couldn’t snitch on him for payback when they were breaking the exact same rule at the exact same time, so Ryan didn’t worry about getting caught. He just listened.

“I can’t believe it,” Mom’s voice was saying breathlessly. “What if I ruin them? What if I’ve already —” She gasped like a hooked fish.

Tommy was staring at the yellow shadow of light at the foot of the stairs, where an open door connected the living room to the kitchen. The whites of his eyes glistened in the dark. His breath sounded raspy and wet, as if he had been crying.

“No,” Dad said, “that won’t happen.” Ryan could imagine just how he looked when he said it: elbows braced on the table, face calm as lake water, eyes holding Mom’s to convince her. Sometimes Tommy called Dad “The Robot” under his breath; Ryan thought it was a dumb insult, but he could see how Tommy had come up with it.

“How do you know?” Mom said.

Tommy whispered: “Are they going to get a divorce?”

“No,” Ryan whispered back.

“Where did Carl go?”

“What?”

“Where did Carl go?” Tommy repeated. “After you swam back to the beach.”

“I don’t know,” Ryan said. He had completely forgotten about Carl, Carl with his big, anonymous circle of a face. Carl had appeared behind him just when Mom had forbidden him, for the third time, to dive off the main dock. “It’s too dangerous,” she had said. “No way, fat chance.” Ryan had been grumbling with impatience. Why was she so scared

the ‘them.’ She doesn’t want to ruin us.”

“What does that mean?” Briefly, on the car ride home, she had stared at Ryan in the rearview mirror like she was afraid of him — like he had transformed into a gigantic, nasty millipede wriggling all its legs all over the back seat. Maybe he had been ruined somehow. He felt like that sometimes, when he couldn’t tell that something was wrong till after he’d done it. But why was it her fault?

Ryan felt more than saw Tommy shrug: a shoulder, shifting up and down, rubbed his. Then the shoulder was bumping against Ryan’s as Tommy started to shake, hard. He was murmuring something too soft to hear.

“Hey, what’s up?” Ryan whispered. Tommy didn’t answer, so Ryan hugged him round the shoulders and scooted closer to hear.

“I’m sorry,” Tommy was saying. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Why were they like this?

“Hey,” Ryan said, “no. No. It wasn’t your fault. It’s my fault, okay? It was a really dumb prank. C’mon, it’s not your fault, stop crying.”

Tommy just kept shaking and shaking. Even after Mom and Dad stopped talking, and the yellow shadow at the foot of the stairs vanished, and Ryan’s butt went tingly, then numb, he didn’t stop. Ryan didn’t know what to do. For a long, long time he sat, but in the end he left Tommy there and went to bed.

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Vol. xxxviii, No. 7 May 2011