Poem for Clara

In Paris we
screamed to see her, 17
49 and a hot bright
summer, we thought she
was a u
ni
corn the marvel with one horn
armored like a beast of the
...(k)night... they fed her
bread and hay and
examined her
nostrils with an air of
ex...cavation, the whole of
Europe entranced with this
blind tame creature
from someplace new and
exotic though she did
not smell of curry spices,
the one proof of a world bigger
than ours, worth saving
weeks of payment to see with out
own blind eyes.

Kill the Carrier

What could you do?
The ring was sweat and glory,
joy in your muscles, all strength and
testosterone, knowing you looked
a fool, not caring, because you could
wrestle him into submission.
But home was
all tight and quiet.
The boy
wouldn’t talk
(he would never follow in your armsteps,
you knew it, there was no hope--
all Nancy’s fault).
Your bed
was off-limits; she
relegated you to the couch
unless you had just won a fight, or if
the boy had had a good day.
Your blood ran fast and
furious. You knew
you would regret it, but
you did it anyway, clouded by
a desperate rage.
No blood, no gore. But their expressions
haunted you for hours, and so you
hung
by your own weights.

On the off chance anybody's interested in what I've been doing all June

Well, I've been writing a screenplay.
And it's been fun.
And now I'm done with it! (20,029 words, according to the site's official word counter.)
You can read it here, if you're interested.
Happy June!

In the Bathroom

“What are you doing?”

She felt a little insane.

“Jenna, are you nuts? Answer me! Jenna?”

She leaned against the bathroom door, the mirror pressing into her back, and listened to Olivia, frustrated as hell on the other side.

“Jenna, unlock the door.”

She wouldn’t do it. She would just sit there forever, until Olivia went away, and then maybe run to her room and sit naked cross-legged on the bed and pretend nothing had ever happened. She would burrow under her comforter and suffocate half to death, maybe knock herself out in the stifling heat, although outside it was December. Create her own deadly summer under the covers.

“Jenna? Jenna? Have you fallen asleep in there? For fuck’s sake, Jenna.”

She looked at her toes, wiggled them.

“Okay, Jenna, I’m going to come back in an hour and you better be out of there, okay? I want to watch a movie with you. We got some good ones at Blockbuster’s, me and Katherine, I mean.”

There was a pause, but she knew Olivia hadn’t gone anywhere. She could sense her one-hundred-and-forty-pound prescence breathing behind the door.

“Brian wants to come over and watch a movie with us if you’re okay with that.”

Brian-- oh, Brian! Too jovial, too wide-mouthed, too disgusting when he put his hands around Olivia and squeezed.

“Okay, Jenna, I’m going to go make some calls, I’ll be in the living room. Okay?”

Another pause in which she held her breath, held still as anything, until she heard footsteps padding away, quietly, oh, finally! She wanted badly to scream, but she knew Olivia would hear. She was so confined here. She wanted to climb somehow out of the little screened window and run, run, run away with branches scraping her thighs badly. She would step on every sharp thing on the way, of course, and then she would make it to the highway and lie there just on the side of the road and feel the wind of each car rush past her, listen to the thrumming of wheels on the concrete, listen to the honking whenever somebody spotted her, just a moonlit body splayed triumphantly on the beautiful ground. That would be wonderful.

Olivia was really gone. Good. Jenna pulled herself up, holding onto the doorknob, and stared at her reflection critically. She needed to lose about six pounds. She could see stretch marks on her hips. And was that another sore on her mouth? how could she ever go outside again until that thing went away? Her life was so small, so small, so insignificant, and here she was, right now, doing nothing with it, standing alone in her bathroom with the door locked by herself looking at her own body. Children were starving to death right now-- men were dropping by the dozens in war zones-- all her high school friends were out partying, getting drunk and having casual sex, the way they had all promised each other they would do once they graduated. And here she was, twenty, a college dropout, living with a couple of more successful friends. If she were to die right now, nobody would care. Maybe her mother would care, but she had Isaac. It wasn’t like Jenna was going to carry on the family name or anything.

Her head felt tight with boredom. She wondered if anyone had died of that. Probably; people had died of most everything. She closed her eyes and stretched up and thought that she would never do anything worthwhile in her life. The realization that right now she was doing nothing, nothing at all, was so frustrating. Dimly, she could hear Olivia in the other room talking softly on the telephone. Olivia was social networking. Jenna was doing nothing!

She spotted an electric razor (Brian’s!) on the shelf over the sink and grabbed it. She didn’t even need to shave, she had done that yesterday, in a better mood. But she felt like destroying. Maybe if-- but she couldn’t-- well, you know what, fuck it.

She knew she would regret it, but, like a Jeep in drive pushed down a mountain, there was no stopping it now. Trepidation boiled in her stomach. At least it was a feeling.

She took the razor to her head.

Turned it on.

Gioventù

Thumbing from your friends, you
Nothing-legs child of bums and guns, you
Never knew when you were wanted.
Peach-bullets settled in your lungs,
Dapper chestnuts in your cheeks,
Renal cortex scar-pitted, you were
An ovelty for autopsists.
Sleeves too wide.
You marched before shadows and
Stared cockeyed at Communists.
You led the Kennel Club and
Pissed in Eddie's boot; your
Pockets were navels and your brain stem was nervous.
Lined up in wince-rows.
You never read those papers. You
Never jawed those letters.

Machine of Death: Angelina Jolie

http://machineofdeath.net

Brad called. "Have you seen the paper?"

"No," she said, yawning. The baby had been crying all night and she was tired out. Brad was off shooting a movie in Monterey, and the nanny had gone to a wedding and Angelina had decided to stay (counteracting the Babel their lives might have turned into). "Is there something about us?"

"Front-page news. Go look."

"Tell me what it is, babe." It was cold out.

"I have to go," he said, too quickly. "Love you."

That intrigued her, though it made her stomach drop sharply too. What had the papers found this time? Pictures from Hugh's party last weekend? Oh, God. She put on a pair of slippers, shuffled down the stairs and out the door.

She saw it immediately and it gave her the kind of chills you only got when the news was completely unexpected. Plastered across the front page (of the Times, for Pete's sake) in huge block letters: MINNESOTA MAN'S FATE: DEATH BY ANGELINA JOLIE.

"Holy shit," she whispered, shook out the paper, stood there in the mud and crisp cold and read the whole article, back-page and all. A picture of her covered half the page, of course, looking less than her best in black and white. They never printed the pictures Angie really liked. And the article was about a thirty-six-year-old man named Jonas Singh who had taken that new blood test and gotten his result, and that result was "ANGELINA JOLIE." The mugshot of him showed a brown-skinned, white-toothed, handsome man, and he was quoted as saying, "At first I was shocked, then I was confused, and then I accepted it and got kind of excited. Death by Angelina Jolie is definitely an interesting way to die, and I admire her. I'm looking forward to finding out what it really means." He was married with a baby, worked as a photojournalist for his local paper, and had served a year in Iraq.

She had to go inside and sit down. The baby was sleeping, thank God, and so were the other kids. Good kids, really, they made her days. The paper was burning a hole in her hand. She had to call Brad right now. (God, next thing they were going to get quotes from Jennifer Aniston, Jesus, and Billy Bob and Jenny and Jonny and everyone, and they were going to be calling her and Brad all the time.) She pressed her fingers to her temples, inhaled and exhaled. She needed a smoke badly.

She speed-dialed his number. "Brad?"

"You read it," he stated. He was perceptive like that, one of his more charming traits.

"They didn't call, did they? Before they published it."

"Didn't call me," he said. "He's a photojournalist, so it probably got to the paper first. You know how some states are starting to pass laws that for certain jobs you have to have it done and make it available to your employer?" The rationality behind this was that your death might involve your work and then your employer was technically responsible-- if Jonas Singh had been fated to die in a plane crash, say, his boss might prohibit his flying anywhere for work. Angelina herself refused to take the test, not wanting to know. Brad had been dared by George Clooney (HEART FAILURE) to take it, had taken it drunk a month ago, and had triumphantly gotten NATURAL CAUSES. "That could mean anything," Angelina had warned him, more than a little jealous, but he had shrugged that off with the shit-eating grin of a man who knew he was lucky.

"Christ," she said in a small voice, "how am I going to kill this guy? I don't understand. What does that even mean?"

"I have no idea, Angie." He sounded impatient. Well, fuck that; he was the one who had brought it up; who cared about his movie, she was his wife.

"Brad..."

"Look, hon, can I call you back?"

What a bastard. Just because he had nothing to worry about, NATURAL CAUSES, he couldn't care less that the woman he called "love of my life" was practically accused of murder? She wanted to slam the phone down, but it was cordless and she had to satisfy herself with pushing a button instead-- poor substitute.


By the next morning, when the nanny came back, Angelina was a wreck. The kids had been darling as usual, but they were little and high-maintenance. The baby, croupy, had wailed all night, and just to top it all off, the phone had rung all night long. When Angelina had turned her cell on, she had 42 new messages: all family, friends, and lawyers. She ended up unplugging the landline and vomiting at quarter to two in the morning. Of course this had to happen when Brad was upstate. When else? She had not slept a wink that night. She kept seeing the young Indian man's face, imagining him with his wife and baby. And then she kept seeing the headlines spin out like in a movie, all about her. God, if she had to get the spotlight in the real, non-tabloid news, couldn't it have been about all her work in third-world countries?

Brad called again. "Good news. They're gonna let me come down here for a couple days, 'til Monday."

"Thank you," she said, close to tears. "Oh God. Thank you, Brad."

"I'll see you in a couple hours, 'kay?" She heard him snap his phone shut and called up his wonderful face, those soulful eyes. She wondered if he had shaved since last week. She wanted to suck his cock on the kitchen tiles.

One of the kids wandered into the room, barefoot, sucking his thumb, the crux of angeli. Angelina picked him up and kissed his cheek, then let him down again to wander off, thinking about Jonas Singh picking up his baby and kissing its cheek. If this was a ploy to get her attention, like that guy who had shot a president to get Jodie Foster to notice him... well, it sure was fucking working. At least the nanny, red-cheeked and blessed with a thick Spanish accent, was restoring order beautifully quickly. Angelina had to hand it to Rosa, she knew what she was doing. Woman deserved every penny she got. The kids loved her.

She realized she was hungry; for some reason that had slipped her mind. She got up from the too-comfortable couch and got a carton of Ben & Jerry's out of the freezer (mint chip). Married women didn't have to watch their weight; on the other hand, she knew if she gained half a pound the world would start wondering out loud if it was a "baby bump." She'd seen that humiliation happen to better women. Sighing, she returned the ice cream to its rightful place.

Surely Jonas Singh was telling the truth. Things like this could be verified. They had to be verified if the Times had printed it. They could have held the guy down, tried his blood again. The machine always gave the same prediction. What if he'd used someone else's blood? (But did it really matter? After all, that meant someone was going to be killed by ANGELINA JOLIE, anyway.)

She found herself wanting to contact him-- "but wait," she said aloud, "that would just raise the chances of my killing him." But then after all, wasn't that unavoidable? The machine had never yet been wrong.

"Fuck it," she said, not wanting to think through this puzzle, this maze of red tape. She wished Brad was home right now so they could go lie in bed like people in a movie and talk it out, his hands behind his head, downy armpit hair tickly, and she would probably cry on him, like a movie, and in the end there would be a cut to the next scene, and Jonas Singh would probably be biking down a street in the early-morning-shooting sunlight.

How am I going to kill him? Jesus, how is it going to happen? She sank into the too-comfortable couch and closed her eyes. Is this some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, or would it have happened even if I'd never heard of him? She was reminded of Kirsten Dunst's apparent fate: OEDIPAL. That was all the machine had told her, and when Angelina had first heard that it had made her laugh. Apparently it had driven Kirsten crazy.

She wondered what her own fate was. Maybe now she would have to have the test done. Maybe it would say JONAS SINGH and that would shut everyone up. She doubted that, though; the machine seemed to be kind of a smartass to Angelina. "NATURAL CAUSES," yeah right. She hadn't wanted Brad to do it, hadn't wanted to be reminded of their mortality, even if the cause of death seemed innocuous enough. The whole idea of the machine was really kind of annoying, made her feel worried and queasy. She didn't like to think about death.

She thought about checking her e-mail and knew immediately that there would be over two hundred messages, and those only from her friends. Nevertheless, she turned on her Mac and logged in.

She checked her old e-mail address, the one she hadn't used in five years, first, because of a vague half-baked idea that her father would have written something. He hadn't, of course, and though she was over that she felt a distinct anger. She knew he had pored over the article, probably carefully with his reading glasses on, and she knew he wanted to say something to her about it but he wouldn't because of the stupid feud. Damn it. It just pissed her off was all. She wished Brad was back already. She wanted to call him, but probably he was on the plane. She hoped he was on the plane. She had suspected, lately, that he was screwing around on her, but she didn't want to think about it. Probably that was unfounded anyway, probably she was just being paranoid like always. Jesus, she couldn't think straight. She pushed herself up and got up, intending to take a long hot shower. She didn't want to see anyone or talk to anyone, but, at the same time, she kind of did.

Mostly she just wanted to talk to Brad. Or maybe her brother. Doubtless her brother had called, but she had unplugged the phone, and Angelina was not planning to return any calls.

She felt eyes boring at her through the thick curtains and knew it was the paparazzi, stationed out there waiting for any sign of movement. Jesus Christ, like she needed this in her life right now. She needed a bodyguard. She needed Brad, really, but she knew if she thought about him too much he would smell the desperation on her when he kissed her hello, and he would think she was a needy whiner. He had practically said as much about one of his exes once, and she had never forgotten it.

She walked up the stairs. The house was oddly quiet (but then it was very well insulated). She trusted Rosa with the kids; probably they were all in the playroom. Her nerves felt scraped and raw. She wondered if she had killed Jonas Singh already, somehow, without knowing it. Sometime last night, guilt had snuck onto her shoulders and was now wrapped around her snugly like a shawl. It was not going to go away soon. Maybe not ever. Oh, God.

Passing through their luxurious bedroom on the way to the shower (how much time had been spent in that bed? hours upon hours, but somehow not nearly enough), she paused and turned on the TV (high-def). She had been almost expecting it, but the shock slammed into her like a brick wall anyway when she saw her own face on the screen, an announcer glibly yammering behind it. "Minnesota photojournalist and war vet Jonas Singh got a shocker last week when he took the obligated death test and his paper said he was fated to die by ANGELINA JOLIE. After getting the same result four times, Singh, though utterly bewildered, seems to be dealing well with this news.

"The same cannot necessarily be said for Ms. Jolie, however. She has returned no calls and has not left the house since last night." The picture switched to a shot from outside Angelina's house, and with another jolt she realized it was live, it was being filmed right now. Her heart twitched. Jesus! She felt more trapped than she had felt in years, she wanted to flee, she wanted to die. Instead, she punched the TV off and stepped under the shower, shedding her clothes only after they were already sodden, turning the knob to the scalding side. She closed her eyes and felt the water pound her. She wanted to forget everything, to turn back the clock and live in blissful ignorance, to move to, maybe, Mongolia, where no one knew who she was. A nice place to raise kids, she'd thought when she saw the movie about the cute little children, and there was so much grass, a sea of prairie. She had taken her fame well, she thought, but this was too much. This wasn't happening to anybody else. It really wasn't fair, damn it. Why her? Why this, why now? Why hadn't the machine given Jonas Singh something vaguer? She wondered again what her own fate was, if she should take the test. Maybe it would clear this up somehow. She imagined talking to Brad about it, and she knew he would want her to: ever since he'd done it he had been trying to convince her to do it too. Well hell, maybe she would, maybe she would.

She stood there with her eyes closed, feeling her skin wrinkle, for a long time. She was roused from the trance only when she heard a door bang. There was only one person with a key to this house that banged doors. She slammed the water off, peeked out past the curtain, feeling the sudden cold on her skin.

"Brad?"

He didn't answer, but she heard the TV on. That was typical of Brad too. Whenever he walked into a room he had to flip on the TV, just in case. When he was gone the house was a thousand times quieter, in spite of all the kids. She wrapped herself in her wilted robe and ventured out into the bedroom, feet soaking into the plush wine-colored carpeting. "Brad?"

He looked up fast like he had been caught doing something he shouldn't have been doing. Then, just as quickly, his face softened. "Angie, baby." He went up to her, slim-waisted and looking delicious, and kissed her searchingly. "You're all wet, hon," he said when they broke apart.

She looked up at him, getting that dreamy movie-feeling she often got being with Brad, because she had first seen him on a screen, and she felt her eyes starting to water. "Brad, what am I going to do? What am I going to do about this?" She was so glad he was here; she felt the core of her melting with that gladness. "Did you see the paparazzi outside?"

He rolled his eyes and sighed. "Had to fight my way through em. It was terrible."

"Our house was on the TV, for Christ's sake. I saw it live. This is a fucking nightmare, Brad--" And now she really was crying, sobbing onto the hard muscles of his shoulder, like she was going to hack out a lung onto his plane-wrinkled button-up shirt, like she was going to spit up the way the baby did. He held her like a good husband, and he smelled wonderful, and that in itself made her feel a hundred times better.

"Shh. Hey, hey, Angie, listen, we're gonna work this out, okay? We can work this out. We can talk to this Indian guy--"

Angelina wailed something unintelligible.

"Hang on, Angie. Come on. Let's go make you something to drink."


Over blended margaritas, they discussed it.

Brad told her there was nothing they could do really, that there was no way of figuring out how she would be the cause of his death, how she would probably not be at fault, and how she should refuse to be interviewed. He thought Jonas Singh was telling the truth, and he thought maybe Angelina should meet him. He thought Jonas Singh was a pretty weird name, and he thought Angelina should take the blood test.

"Do you think it'll make a difference to the public?"

"Yes," he said with his honest face on, and that had her mostly convinced.

"Okay, fuck it, let's get it over with. Call up Dr. Faulkner."

"You want it done right now?"

She shrugged. She rubbed her eye and black came off on her finger: her mascara had run. "Whatever."

"This is really bugging you, isn't it?"

"Has anything like this ever happened to anyone before?" She was doing her best to keep control over herself, but it wasn't easy. Her hands were shaking.

"I... I don't--"

"Well, not to anyone as famous as I am, that's for sure," she snapped. "And I can tell you this, Brad, it blows. It fucking blows."

He poured her another drink.

"I'm afraid," she confessed, "that when I try and meet him he'll just die, I'll kill him somehow by accident. I don't want to ever meet him, really. But then, I guess I do."

Brad cleared his throat. "I'll call Dr. Faulkner."


Dr. Faulkner was a wiry man with a long bulbous nose and scrappy gray facial hair. He was the kind of man who looked like he knew what he was doing. He took Angelina's blood without comment, although his lips were pressed tightly together as though he was holding something back. Well, no surprise there.

The test was much quicker than she had thought it would be. Dr. Faulkner put the vial of blood into a slot in the machine, it made some clicky rattly machine noises, and within three minutes a slip of paper had slid out. Dr. Faulkner handed it to her face down, not looking, clearly a practiced hand.

Brad was there, his arm around her shoulder. "Do you want to look?" he asked her softly. She nodded, feeling like she couldn't breathe, flashing back to the pregnancy tests she'd taken several times, getting the same sort of tense important feeling.

She turned the paper, though her hands were shaking, and what she read was disappointingly anticlimactic. This was what her life was leading to?

"INFLUENZA, CAUSED BY RUPTURED SPLEEN"?

Dr. Faulkner was standing there trying his best not to look curious. Feeling pity, Angelina read it to him. "What do you think?"

"That's one of the more specific ones," he said after a moment, raising his tufty eyebrows. "And you know it could be years in between the rupture and the flu. Really, not such a bad prognosis."

She thought of Brad's again, NATURAL CAUSES, and that shit-eating smile he'd worn. Ruptured spleen, and flu. That didn't sound great, but it didn't sound so awful.

(Did it have anything to do with Jonas Singh? She had no idea. His name was already growing infamous in her mind.)

She looked at Brad and he kissed her neck. "I'm proud of you," he said, and her heart filled up. She loved that she had married the kind of man who knew she needed to hear that. She loved him wholly, right then, despite everything.

Right then, despite everything, it seemed that things would turn out okay.


After a few weeks, the news died down. Several actresses had babies and several couples broke up, and Patrick Dempsey, it turned out, was fated to die of AIDS, and everyone just forgot about Angelina and Jonas Singh.

Everyone but Angelina and Jonas Singh.

But she lived her life as best she could. She thought of him almost every day, but after a few months she could sometimes forget about him for a whole weekend. The kids were growing, and they were planning to adopt another one, and Brad finished his Monterey movie and was home for a while, and that was nice.

In August they decided to go to Disneyland, not so far from their home, after all. (Disney World was another story. Neither of them really wanted to fly to Florida with all the kids in tow, not yet.) They packed everybody into the van, Rosa too, and Angelina took the wheel, sunglasses on. It was a nice day for August, very hot.

She stopped at a red light almost halfway there. Brad punched at the radio, changing the station to some kind of reggaeton. One of the boys started crying, and Rosa hushed him. They had thought to bring Popsicles for the drive, and Brad had remembered a cooler, and so that had been lucky.

The light turned green and Angelina tapped the gas. At the same time, someone in front of her, facing the other direction, in the other lane, revved out, and lost his control somehow-- later Rosa said she had seen a duck in the road, but another witness reported the man had been on his cell phone-- and he weaved into the lane she was driving into. Before Angelina could even think, his little white Volvo had smashed straight into the front of the van. The glass smashed, the car made a sickly crunch, and the airbags puffed out. The children started screaming. Angelina felt a sharp terrible pain in her side, but not for long, because it wasn't long until she blacked out.


She came to knowing everything. When the doctor approached her, she said calmly, despite the whistling pain in the side of her chest, "The other man was Jonas Singh, wasn't he? Is he dead?"

"No," said the doctor, looking a little taken aback. "Not yet, at least. He's badly injured, in critical condition. It wasn't your fault, everyone corroborates that."

"My family, Rosa? How are they?"

"They're fine. Your husband's legs were broken, but he's in stable condition. Everyone who was sitting in the back doesn't have anything worse than cuts and bruises. You're a very lucky family."

"And me, how am I hurt?" But she knew the answer to that one already.

"You have whiplash and your arm's fractured, and your spleen's been ruptured. But you came out pretty well. You've been getting a lot of phone calls, Mrs. Jolie."

Angelina waved them off. "Thank you, doctor," she said. She felt, oddly, less upset than she'd thought she would; she felt like a crucial puzzle piece had just clicked into place. She wanted to go and talk to poor Jonas Singh before he died; hopefully he would hang on a few more days. Right now she was beginning to be really aware of her pain: a stinging in her neck, a sharp throbbing ache in her arm, and of course that odd leaky whistle in her side. That had to be the spleen, of course.

Now all she had to do was wait for the flu and live out her life.

malnutrition, Tom Hanks, myspace, violinist, battle axe, lactation, billboard!

The violinist was beautiful.

Ivan noticed this passively, just another thing to add to his list of what was in the world. "Beautiful violinist playing Beethoven." He rubbed his hands together in the dark of the concert hall, fought the urge to crack his knuckles. The man next to him was roiling and fat, breathing heavily and ogling the performer through a pair of opera glasses. On his other side was the flight of stairs, dimly lit from below. He wondered if there were any cripples in the front row. Probably they always had to pay extra because they couldn't climb the stairs, another point of unfairness in the life of an already disadvantaged person.

"I could be watching this woman play on YouTube," he thought vaguely. "I could watch thirty seconds of her on the little video, and then switch to my other open window, which would be my myspace account, and look at Karen's page and the pictures of her licking bottles of tequila. Instead I am at a real concert, in a real concert hall, watching a beautiful violinist solo live." The man next to him shifted a little; Ivan's arm was on the armrest and he felt the man's fat squick against him. He wasn't sure if he would have preferred to stay at home.

She played a last, lingering note, then took the instrument off her shoulder and bowed a little. The audience applauded thunderously; Ivan clapped, too, his palms damp. He pressed the button on his watch that turned on the light. It was nine-oh-eight. "I am sitting in a concert hall next to a fat man," Ivan thought, "while in Sudan children are dying of malnutrition." He had never been to Africa, but Karen had, and she had taken hundreds of pictures on her digital camera. She had called it "a trip" and "totally recalibrating." If Ivan had been home, he would have gone to Karen's flickr page and looked at some of the pictures, skinny beautiful children with bright eyes and shaven heads. She had gone to Africa more as a tourist than as a helper. Ivan couldn't blame her. He didn't really want to work, either.

The violinist was playing again. Ivan watched her appreciatively, watched the emotion in her bowing limbs, the shiny way her black hair hung, the flawlessness of her smooth Asian face, the speckles of light against her modest black outfit. He tried to imagine sleeping with her and couldn't. She was too professional. He could see himself sitting with her at the cafeteria instead. She would drink white tea and stir it with her left hand while talking dynamically of how the music felt to her, how long she had been training, how she felt in front of a crowd. And then she would ask, "Well, and what about you?"

Ivan wouldn't really know what to say to a professional Asian violinist. He stroked his little goatee and thought, "This makes me look even more like a college student." He thought, "I am a textbook college student." He was studying biology, writing his thesis on mammalian lactation. He tried to imagine himself telling the violinist that he was writing a thesis on mammalian lactation and shied away from the thought. "I'm not very impressive," he thought. "Not in this day and age."

The music grew louder, more frenetic. It made Ivan picture Vikings and pirates. He tried to place himself into the scene and discovered that as a Viking he would have been one of the slaves who rowed the dragon boats. (Was that how Vikings worked? Ivan couldn't really remember.) He could see the violinist being one of the military commanders, directing all the ruddy men who ran around waving weapons and screaming. He could see her hoisting up a battle axe triumphantly with her bowing hand and shouting, "Hail Valhalla!" (Ivan doubted he was getting Vikings right. Patrick was studying history, Patrick would know.) The lead pirate would look like Tom Hanks with a beard, disarmingly average, but then he would kick ass with a sword. He would talk more like that heroic astronaut guy than Forrest Gump, and he would swig rum constantly. Ivan grinned a little, liking this picture.

The fat man next to him grunted a little. "Pig," Ivan thought and then wondered why he had thought that. He tried hard not to hate fat people just because they were fat. It wasn't easy, because they were unattractive and seemed lazy and stupid, but Ivan knew it was wrong to assume that. "Some of my best friends are fat people," he thought wryly, but it was true. Karen weighed 254. He always thought of her when he thought of fat people, because she had mixed up his prejudices. She was smart and interesting and they talked a lot. They had slept together once, drunk, and Ivan didn't remember much of it although he knew at the time he had wanted to remember everything, knowing he would never sleep with a fat girl again. "You were good," Karen told him that Tuesday when he had asked her about it, and he had felt gratified.

The violinist stopped again. More thunderous applause; Ivan clapped hard. "Hail Valhalla," he thought. Someone, a shadow, hurried down the stairs past Ivan, and he caught a whiff of some indeterminate kind of perfume or cologne. He couldn't really tell the difference, something he had never told anyone, always feeling vaguely ashamed of that inability. "That person has to pee," he thought, and it made his own bladder twinge in sympathy.

The violinist cleared her throat; the sound, miked, startled him. "Um, I'm just going to play one more. This, uh, this is a piece I wrote when I was on the train in Europe, to perform in Germany," she said. Her voice was deeper than Ivan had thought it would be; he wasn't sure his cafeteria projection washed after all. He could no longer imagine her, enthusiastic, saying things like "I was trying to get a teacher, and then, as if God had sent it, I saw an ad that was exactly what I was looking for, right there on the billboard!" Instead he saw her, faltering, taking intermittent sips of the tea, saying, "The people in Germany were, um, very nice, but they kept offering me beer and I just couldn't drink it. You know? Have you ever been?"

He rather liked this second violinist-self better. Ivan liked doubting people; they were less intimidating. He still couldn't imagine sleeping with her, though. He tried again and failed again.

The fat man coughed, once, kind of politely, quick before the song began, so as not to interrupt. Ivan felt a surge of quick, impermanent affection toward him. "This man and I are here together," he thought. He wondered why the fat man was here. Ivan was here because he had seen a picture of the violinist looking beautiful and a good pre-review in the paper. And the concert only cost seven dollars. He thought, "After she does this one, I'll go out and buy a soda."

The violinist began to play. Ivan closed his eyes, then opened them again. He liked looking at her, liked watching the light play over her shiny black hair and clothes. As the song progressed (quick, light, rather impressive), he tried to imagine scenes of a train going to Germany. He could, sort of, because she'd said it. He wondered if he would have thought of that if she hadn't brought it up. There was no way of knowing.

The song was over too quickly, and then there was more applause, even more thunderous; a few people whistled, and everyone stood up and clapped a standing ovation. Cooperatively, Ivan stood too, clapped too. He thought, "I think I'm going to buy a brownie too."

The bugs

It's a sunny afternoon in late April and I decide to go for a walk. Nothing major, maybe clatter down the street and trudge back up again, maybe lie in the grass a little, maybe, if it's warm enough, take off all my clothes and pretend some Pan is peeping.

So I let myself out the door and down the asphalt road. Some cars drive by and it's awkward; my dog, ancient and deaf, hobbles past and doesn't hear my call, but the man in the truck does, I think. I shake the thought out and walk back up the road. I'm out of shape, and my hamstrings groan, and I start breathing heavily from the mouth.

When I make it back to my yard I collapse onto the grass, fragrant and flowering, panting, and close my eyes. When my heart rate's dropped a little I crack them open. Lately I've noticed how my vision focuses on things that move, and I let myself enjoy this: my eyes sharpen and show me a dynamic ladybug, large and spotted, climbing up a blade of grass maybe three inches from my head. I watch it a little, appreciative. If there's any bug I find pleasing it's that one.

Suddenly I feel something tickling my hand. I look down, focus on another ladybug, tiny and bright red, crawling on my knuckle. I smile a little and let it cross my hands, a trek across plains. It repulses me a little when the insect tries to sneak its crumpled wings out from under its hard red casings. They're cute when they walk, but wrong when they fly, unnatural in their awkwardness.

I let the beetle leave and rest my face on my folded arms, relaxing a little. My vision sharpens, re-sharpens, re-re-sharpens, as I move my hooded eyes. Something catches my eye more than the rest, and I frown a little. It's a ladybug like I've never seen before, bright red but with a strange asymmetrical triangle on its back instead of spots. "Fucked-up ladybug," I christen it and wonder if it's the product of a genetic mutation, a tweaked amino acid. Utilizing biology.

I watch fucked-up ladybug struggle up its blade and then I see another one. And another. And another. All of a sudden it seems impossible: there must be a dozen of these little colorful beetles crawling around me, hideous garbage-bag wings hidden under their uniquer shells, eyes painted-on and white on their black bodies, six legs scurrying aimlessly.

And then another bug catches my eye, not more than two inches away, right in front of my nose, and this time I gasp. I've never seen anything like it before, don't know what it's called: an orange-bodied, praying-mantis-like inch-long creature with blue wing cases and small, intelligent-looking black eyes. Its feelers wave cautiously as it scales the blade of grass. I watch it, transfixed, wondering if it's real. It reminds me of a dragon, looks like it's about to take off any moment, unfurling and exhaling mysterious flame.

And now my skin is crawling. I'm lying in the grass, sun warming my hair, and there are insects all around me. I've never seen so many in one place in my life. "I must be high," I think, though I know I'm not. "This must be a hallucination," I think. There's no way it could be real.

I am suspended there for too long, learning the ladybugs, learning the other bugs, and then my belt pokes at my hip and the spell is broken, I hoist myself up and run for my house, let myself back in the door, careful to breathe as if everything were normal, careful to keep it a secret.

Run my fingers through my hair, though, just to make sure it's not alive.

Blink away the immediacy of six-times-hundreds flailing legs.

you are vegan and it is disorienting

you came over and we made zucchini.
you are vegan and it is disorienting.
you steamed the zucchini and it was green and soft.
i looked at you and your hair was very yellow and soft.
i looked at the clock and it was two-twenty-eight.
you were going to leave at five.
i felt uncomfortable because there were leftover meatballs in the fridge and also turkey and skinless boneless chicken breasts and milk and cheese and butter.
i did not feel ashamed of my meat and dairy products but i wanted to hide them from you.
you drank orange juice and talked about your ant farm.
i was bored and wanted to fuck on the kitchen counter.
we added paprika to the zucchini.
we added raw cauliflower sprigs.
i was glad i had bought vegetables.
you had brought a thing of yeast.
my kitchen was very bright and un-mysterious.
your skin gleamed and your eyes drooped.
i wondered if you would look different if you were not vegan.
you said that last night you had slept for fourteen hours.
you said you had found a pager and you wanted to page me.
i told you i would make you a mixtape.
we ate the vegetables and they had turned out okay and a little mushy.
we went to my computer and looked at my songs.
i made you a mixtape with a lot of classical spanish music on it.
i drew flowers on the mixtape with a thin-tipped sharpie.
i looked at your bony toes.

love triptych

I.
thinking about you
makes me
hungry,
and sometimes i feel sick.
your eyes, clear as an actor's, start a fizzing inside of me
and iridescent bubbles glimmer in my
alimentary canal,
shyly glowing a little, if you know where to look,
and it gets so i can't talk to you
(as if i could, anyway, come up with
something to
say).
more often than not i blurt an excuse and
flee--
cramming my mouth with pears and apples,
poor substitutes for your kisses.

II.
dear,
biting through your tendon
was a time of my life:
feeling the twist against my teeth,
the vital living flesh,
tatsing the iron blood as it coursed down my lips, your neck,
like some furious-german river;
your skin so tender and thin, your blood so pure, distilled as
bottled water;
the little gasp when i punctured
will stay with me forever,
aurally erotic legend.
and so will the knowledge that now, inside me, there you are,
atoms mixing with my own, molecules unwinding
and (kindly) rewinding again;
"you are what you eat,"
and i love you.

III.
onscreen,
the cleft in angelina jolie's lip
reminds me of you;
at home,
the plates remind me of yours, the first time i saw you--
cafeteria lasagna, that thick white industrial china
(easy wash).
when i'm driving sometimes i stop in the middle of the street,
horns our symphony,
catching sight of a boy in a beret biking
or a graffiti'd up stop sign
or, god forbid, a rainbow.
babe, you've ruined
a dozen songs for me;
two tv shows, four movies, make me curl up and cry.
and the phone, christ, the phone!
it can't ring without my first thought being of you.
too bad you won't let me call anymore.

pickering

Germany was home; I couldn't change that. Pickering thought it was abominable, which irked me. "I don't think less of you because you're from Rhode Island."

"Rhode Island didn't elect Hitler," he retorted.

These sorts of conversations usually degraded into exchanged "fuck you"s and "fuck your country"s, simmering baleful glares, and at least one of us stalking off. Once they had actually led to physical blows. This was because Pickering was a full-blown jerk. Among all of us, this was established; everyone by now had resignedly accepted his assholitude. Still, somehow, there was something about him which attracted me. I had always dated boys who had later turned out to be secret jerks, but never had I been interested in one while already knowing the extent of his stupidity. Thus, I reasoned, I was definitely not into Pickering. Not even a little bit. Hell no.

I went home and looked at atlases. Berlin, now divided. When I was seven I went there with my father for a weekend; I remember taking a day off of school for it.

'Rhode Island can bite me,' I thought, then pretended I hadn't.

In the shower that evening, the water bouncing and running off the oils of my skin, I mentally defended my country to him. I dug out all the national history we had made reports on in grade school from the crevasses of my mind, and presented it too proudly to my not-quite-friend, dodging all his arguments with the grace of a ballerina. (In my mind, that was. When I tried to debate Pickering for real, I was always the one who got red and flustered while he'd stare me down, he'd always keep his cool.)

He had a girlfriend, a peachy thing with an incongruous Bostonian accent, and when he kissed her in public I blushed for the both of them. They lived together and I knew they slept together, but fiercely denied it to myself. I was sure he was an expert in bed, but denied that too.

Pickering was thin, tall and European-looking, with pinched features and a brown-blond, scraggly goatee. He was barely in his thirties but already balding. I told him he looked Germanic, but, infuriatingly, he remained supremely unruffled. I couldn't push his buttons, probably because he knew that was the way to push mine. He made me want to punch things, to crack bones, but I spent hours imagining the freckles on his thighs, the taste of his sweat.

I knew he would stay faithful to the girlfriend; he was that sort. It made me angrier. I wanted to kidnap him, to force him onto a jet plane to my little country town in Germany, to fuck him on the grass until even he, so imperturbable, gasped for breath. I knew it would never happen.

I spent all weekend painting him in my mind. I wanted to break his heart.

the photographer

She lids her eyes seductively and watches him twist the lens a hair. He's squinting and his woolly curls half-obscure his face. The camera hides the other half. Irene fills in the blanks in her mind's eye. Mexican with a broad face and small passive eyes, a scar on his cheek, Raoul's face tells more stories than her own ever could.

"Good," he says with his slight accent. She watches the muscles of his arms and tries not to let her expression change, though her mouth wants to edge up into a smile. "Go ahead," Raoul adds and his white teeth reveal themselves generously beneath the camera. Irene likes that he can see that in her, likes how observant he is despite everything.

The flash goes off and Irene, experienced, doesn't blink, just watches the sunspot on her retina. It goes off twice more, and then he lowers the camera and she's rewarded with his face, just as she'd imagined it. Except there's sunspots covering bits of it, thanks to his camera.

"You think you can use those?" she asks, and wishes she smoked. How chic, how impressive it would be, just now, to light a cigarette and inhale like a girl from 1955.

"At least one of them should work. You did ver' well today. The company will like these shots." Raoul pours them both glasses of water; she sips at hers, thinking what an inadequate substitute it is for that rush of nicotine she's so often imagined (worried about blemishing her sharp, straight, white teeth, she's never even touched tobacco). She looks at the water, swirling, distorting, but she can feel his beady, watchful eyes on her and tries to curve like the gorgeous woman she knows she is. This is the first time she's worked for Raoul, and she likes him. He makes her feel appreciated. Her friend Ky told her once, knowledgeably, that women always like photographers and cosmetologists, because they make them feel beautiful. But she's never liked a photographer as much as Raoul, and Irene has been a model for two and a half years now, gone through a lot of people.

"You make me look good," she says, untying her kimono top and hanging it over her chair, and her canines, abnormally pointed, glint.

"You appeal to the market," he replies. "Good-looking, excellent cheekbones, the shadows fall ver' well-- it is less work for me. And there will need to be ver' little photomanipulation. You will sell many pairs of pants by yourself." He smiles at her again and gulps down water, throwing it down his throat like vodka. Idly, she wonders what kind of drunk he is. She wonders, too, how he is in bed. Gasping and hardworking, maybe, like the other round-faced Mexican she once slept with, a cute, honest painter with an easy smile and crinkly eyes. Irene decides she finds Raoul attractive, thinks maybe she'll give him a try. What's his last name again? Probably Gonzalez. They're all named Gonzalez.

"How long have you been taking pictures?" she asks, more out of politeness than real interest.

"I got my first real camera when I was sixteen. I went around taking pictures of everything I could see. And I never stopped, not even now. When I worked, I saved my money for better cameras, not for cars or clothes. Always the camera." She enjoys his soft slurred tones. She thinks that she needs to meet more immigrants. They're not as smart as real Americans, but they're good, humble people. That or desperate, dirty thieves and killers, of course. It goes one way or the other. Irene's maternal grandparents were Russian, and her father's father was black. It makes her beautiful, and because she was born in America, there are no negative side effects: she's just as quick, as fluent, as anyone.

"That's really dedicated of you," with just the right amount of earnestness in her tone. Raoul doesn't catch it, of course; Irene intends it to be too subtle for him. But he gets the undercurrents, and his thick eyebrows draw together furrily. He gulps down water like a man who can't get used to having enough, and thinks.

Finally his small eyes meet hers. "And how long have you been modeling, Irene?"

"Oh, a couple of years." She waves it off like it's nothing, making sure he notices the perfect shapeliness of her arm, the fine bones of her wrist. Her fingers are long and graceful. Her dappled body, in this light, is flawless, and she knows it, uses it shamelessly to her advantage.

Raoul knows it too. He drains his cup, sets it down on the table, stands and shakes her hand. His grasp is warm and dry, her own a little clammy from moisturizers and lotions. "Thank you for working with me, Irene," he says and pats her hand. "I hope to see you again sometime." And he starts to walk away.

She watches his rounded buttocks in his scuffed, big-pocketed jeans move as he walks away from her. His back to her. Confused, she starts to ask him, don't you want to stay, but she stops in time. All that comes out is, "Don't you--"

He turns and looks at her again. That broad, calculating, scarred face. Those little eyes, seeing everything. "Did you say something?"

She shakes her head, feeling her vixen hair whip coolly around her long graceful neck. "Goodbye."

He shuts the door quietly behind him, and she stays seated in her jeans and silk bra, hand still curved around her cup of water, speechless, not knowing what to think. For the first time in a long time, Irene feels stood up.

And by a Mexican, no less.

Marten's Birthday

We were celebrating Marten's birthday when the phone rang. It was right after we'd all sung to him, and he was opening presents, ripping with the enthusiasm of a newly thirteen-year-old boy. I'd always thought he was an unlikely kid, my cousin; the name Marten calls up visions of a towheaded Swede, but he is dark-haired and half-Filipino. Go figure.

Anyway, we'd all been exclaiming over a video game when the phone started to ring. "Go get it," Aunt Emily said to my dad, her brother. Dad went to get it-- he's that kind of guy, does what people tell him.

We watched Marten unwrap my present, a book. Eragon, some new hit fantasy novel all the middle-schoolers liked; the movie had just come out. "Thanks, Franny!" He came over to give me a hug. I hugged him back. He's a nice kid, my cousin. Unlikely, but nice.

"Happy birthday," I said.

Dad came out of the office holding the cordless phone away from him. I didn't notice at the time, but he looked kind of shocked. "Emily, you better take this one," he said, and something in his eyes made Aunt Emily take it.

"Hello?"

Marten moved on, tearing the paper off of a present some friend of his had given him-- he'd had a social party at the bowling alley the day before and saved the presents to open with us. I watched him. Until Aunt Emily said, "I'm sorry, what?" and something in her tone was so awful that all of us-- Dad, Mom, Rocky, Christopher, Uncle Ira, Aunt Libby, even Harry-- turned to look.

"Are you sure it's him?" she asked. Behind her tone was a quickly rising wave of horror and panic and loss. My heartbeat started throbbing in my throat. I was kind of terrified. I snuck a look at Rocky, grabbed his hand. He squeezed back.

"Okay," Aunt Emily said. "Okay. Okay. Thank you, um, thank you for calling. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye." She clicked off and looked out over us, her eyes darker than they'd ever been, and unfathomable. Shit, shit, shit, what's going on? I thought desperately, and fidgeted, and played with my big brother's sailing-tanned fingers.

"Well?" said Aunt Libby finally, tensely.

Aunt Emily gave Marten a darting glance. He was looking up at her, utterly lost, the gift from his friend forgotten. The room had a waiting feeling; all of us were holding our breath. We knew the news was bad, but we didn't know what it was. Was it some stalker of Aunt Emily's, having seen her in that brief modeling stint six years ago, violating a deserved restraining order? Had Great-Uncle Rocco (Rocky's namesake) been hospitalized again? Had Grandpa Jack died, or been diagnosed with cancer? Somehow this seemed even worse than those, worse than we could imagine.

Aunt Emily took a deep breath. It hitched in her throat and so did mine. I was nervous as anything. I thought irrationally of my crush, Dylan. That made me scareder.

"Tim's been killed," she said calmly. "Timmy's died."

Oh my God, I thought. Tim was her older son, my eldest cousin at twenty-four. He'd enlisted in the Army three years ago. Been sent to Afghanistan eight months ago. We'd all sort of assumed he'd come back, knowing it was impossible to live scared that he would be killed every day. Without talking about it, we accepted it, and set Timmy aside in our minds as someone we'd see when he got leave again, hopefully before a Democrat was elected.

And now he was dead?

Marten ran to his mother and buried his face in her chest. Pandemonium erupted quietly, in the middle of his pile of presents. The magic in them was gone, reduced now to unimpressive, inanimate things. We all drifted toward Aunt Emily, comfort vaguely in our minds, penetrating the fog of shock and disbelief. "It must be a mistake," I heard my mom mutter. "Some bureaucrat thing. It can't be, not our Timmy."

I tried to picture him in my head. It was hard; I hadn't seen him in about eight months. My mental image was grainy but clear enough: a dashing young guy, thick arched dark eyebrows, a closely-shaved head, strong chin, good smile. A little heavyset, a little shorter than average, a little singler than most of his friends, but hell, Timmy was a great guy. Really lovable, funny, smart. We'd been getting e-mails from him when he had the chance to send them, and it was always a treat to read his thoughts.

No more e-mails from Tim now.

I looked at Marten. His thin shoulders were shaking in his new red snowcoat. Aunt Emily was caressing him, her hands touching his hair absently. She still looked out over us all, like she was an actress who'd been told not to look the audience in the eyes. No one knew what to do. Bad timing, I thought. Poor Marten. And his father, of course, had left ten years before. I wondered if Uncle Nick would even find out about his son's death-- Timmy's death, oh God, death. I imagined my cousin in a big army tank, patchily armored because the army was so underbudgeted despite the cost of the war, and some insurgent throwing a bomb out into the street, the explosion, Timmy in the driver's seat, his head blown off, the blood and brains painting the tank. I was still clutching Rocky's hand like a security blanket. I shut my eyes, and it was only when I felt the wetness on my lashes that I realized I'd been crying.

Harry started wailing, a thin baby cry. He wasn't even two yet. Aunt Libby picked him up gratefully, Uncle Ira cooing over him as well, trying to distract themselves. I heard Mom ask Aunt Emily in a low voice, "Do you want us to stay?" I peeked out to see Aunt Emily nodding vigorously. Poor woman. And Marten, his teen-birthday ruined, Jesus. I couldn't quite grasp it still. I kept picturing Timmy's brains plastering the window of the tank. He'd told me he was driving one two months before.

"Afghanistan," muttered Rocky. "You'd think it would be safer than Iraq."

Not for Timmy, I thought, and I remembered how when he'd graduated high school he'd told everyone to stop calling him Timmy, only Tim, and of course none of us ever remembered because we were family. I remembered when he'd phoned us and asked for a ride because he'd gotten too drunk to drive; the time when he'd come over and talked me through a bout of bad depression because a boy had made fun of me; the way we had used to talk on the phone, how he called me Francine, always, tenderly, in a cousin way. Oh, Timmy. I felt Rocky's hand on my head, felt my tears getting the dark wiry hair on his arm wet. I couldn't help it anymore; I started sobbing, for real, the way Marten was. The birthday party had turned to a party of mourning.

We stayed for hours, until it got too late and there weren't enough beds in the house. Aunt Emily apologized profusely, and thanked us for staying. Uncle Ira had taken care of all the calls to the other relatives. We didn't let ourselves think about Timmy's friends.

When we got in the van to go home-- Rocky, Christopher, my parents and me-- Dad drove shakily, erratically. Mom was tense next to him, barking reprimands for leaving his high beams on, for forgetting his blink signals. Finally Dad snapped, "For Christ's sake, Wendy, my nephew was just killed!" After that we were all very quiet. All three of us were in the back, Christopher in the middle, my little brother, and he had taken our hands and we sat in a chain and tried not to think of Timmy's life spraying all over his shattered windshield.

"Some birthday for Marten," Dad said as we pulled in to our driveway.

We all went to bed, and I couldn't sleep that night. I stayed up, wanting to call Dylan and tell him, have him comfort me, but I never called Dylan and we weren't really friends. Wanting to call Kylie, but she went to bed early. Wanting to call someone, anyone, but it was actually almost twelve and it was a school night. I couldn't face school and I knew it. More than anyone I wanted to call Timmy, who'd never minded the late-night calls. Timmy could tell me the truth, that he was alive and fine, what a fantastic birthday gift for Marten, a living brother after all!

But in Afghanistan, he was unreachable. And in Heaven (if there was such a thing), well, maybe he could hear me, but I couldn't hear him back.

I crept out of bed, padded my way to the computer, a desperately hopeless idea in my mind. Christopher was sitting there, the glow of the screen lighting up his face. He turned to me guiltily. "You should be sleeping," I said hypocritically, unable to think of anything else to say.

"Sorry, Franny. I..."

I looked at his screen. He was writing an email. "Who're you writing?"

"Timmy," he mumbled, not looking at me.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He was Marten's age, had turned thirteen in July. I wanted to tell him I had had the same idea, but I couldn't get the words out of my mouth. They sat there, heavy, below my tongue. I couldn't even spit out a simple "good night."

I went back to bed, curled up in fetal position under my covers, and shut my eyes. And for the first time in years I really prayed. Not the hopeful, shallow prayers I always offered up in church (God, get Dylan to like me; Jesus, make the pimple on my chin go away), but real prayer, the spiritual kind. My eyes were squeezed shut and I called up my pictures of God and His Son, like a good Episcopalian.

And in my imagination, Jesus Christ looked like Timmy.

"

Shit. What have I done? My hands are strange(rs) to me.

The Frosted-Glass Table

She sat at the small round table holding his cigarette. The tabletop was of frosted glass and she imagined insects trapped, preserved, in it. She gingerly put the cigarette in her mouth. She didn't have a lighter, she didn't smoke anyway. She was wearing a white dress which had already gotten dirty from her frantic application of makeup that morning.

The chair was the kind with strips of wood along the back and the seat, and they cut into her. She felt uncomfortable. She wished Jan would come back already. He had just gone to get them drinks, surely that couldn't take so long? They were outside and the sun was very hot and even the cool-looking frosted table burned a little to the touch. She was getting thirsty. By the time Jan came she would be thirsty enough to finish both their drinks, and then he would have to go get more and she would have to be alone again. Next time she would go with him, she decided.

There were not many others at the outdoor tables. An elderly couple: the man with a small moustache, the wife with a large pink hat. An attractive young couple, the woman with lustrous dark hair, the man with a soul patch and bottle-green eyes. He had his arm around her and they were drinking from the same tall appealing drink, with two straws. She wished Jan was like that with her, though he was no longer her boyfriend. She wished she had a boyfriend. Jan was awfully insensitive that way, always talking about Katya.

Perhaps he had run into Katya and that was why he was taking so long?

When he returned, she decided, she would depart for the bathroom and take as long as possible-- to pay him back. Let him stew uncomfortably in the frosted-table heat. But she knew really that Jan would not take it the same way she was. He would smoke of course, and drink, and observe, and think about things in his mind, and maybe hum a little, and the time would fly by. No, then, she would stay with him, pester him. But that wouldn't faze him either. Oh, Jan was impossible!

Without conscious effort her fingers had started to shred the white unlit cigarette in her hands, and she wrenched off the filter and tapped out the tobacco onto the glass table. A fly buzzed by and she imagined it imprisoned in the table, as if it were amber. She shredded the white cigarette paper and felt a little like crying.

Footsteps behind her, and she resolved not to look-- hoping hoping that it was him but she needed to not seem so needy. But they clopped past her and she looked up and it was a blond man, long-haired and big-shouldered, in a sweater. Where the hell was Jan, then?

A small girl walked by with her parents. Each of them was holding one of her hands and at intervals they would swing her up between them, the girl chortling with pure delight. Alice tried to remember her parents doing that with her, and could not. She remembered it with her little brother, but not with her. She wished Jan would come. She needed to catch up with him, anyway. She hadn't really talked to him in at least two weeks, though it felt like forever; they had kept making dates and canceling them. The cigarette dust was all over the frosted-glass table, and she swept it into a little pile. The sun went behind a cloud and she felt a little better, and also a little chillier. Jan's coat was hung on his chair and she considered getting up to wear it, but it required too much effort, and it would be awkward then when he came back.

More footsteps clopping by, and again she did not look. Jan, Jan, please let it be Jan finally! And then a tenor voice, very pleasant: "Sorry I took so long. Ran into a friend at the bar. Hand me a smoke, will ya?"

He dropped into the seat across from her, with the coat, and she could not quite bear to look into his pleasant ruddy face. He set down two tall lovely drinks with umbrellas on the dirty frosted table, and pushed the one in the yellow glass to her. "Pina colada for you, daiquiri for me." He pronounced it "dahi-kee-ree," and she was too amused to correct him.

"Thank you," she said, cool as the lovely drink, which she sipped not-too-eagerly from a great curly straw. "Who'd you meet?"

"Peter. This guy who used to work with me, before I quit at the Hammond place. Do you have my smokes, Alice?"

She looked regretfully at the table with its little pile of cigarette remains. "You gave me one, but um..."

Jan went shocked. "You didn't smoke it, did ya?"

She thought about claiming that-- surprise him a little-- but it was too obvious a lie. "Shredded it," she confessed.

He grinned slanty. "Never mind." He found one in his coat pocket and lit it with a sigh. They sucked at their drinks.

"How is Katya?" she asked at length. She could not bear not knowing, and he was so carefully not mentioning it.

His face softened a little, eyelids drooping, and he took a big gulp of dahiquiri. "Oh, she's fine. She got a promotion. She told me to not even try any more. She's in love with some dick at work."

"I'm sorry," she said, trying to sound genuine although of course she was as full of glee as the little girl being swung by her parents.

He stubbed out the cigarette on the frosted-glass table, doubling suddenly as an ashtray (how silly that they didn't have them, actually, at this kind of place). "Yeah, well. She's not so swell anyway. I don't mind."

She spun the little umbrella from her pina colada between her fingers. Soon, she knew, she would shred its paper too.

A fly lit on their table, and lightning-quick Jan smashed it onto the glass. "Sorry," he said sheepishly when he saw her expression. "Reflex. Couldn't help it. Sorry, baby."

She looked at its flattened body and it made her think of her imaginings before, the amber, the preservation. But this fly would be scraped off the frosted table within hours by some busboy. No posthumous remembrance for him, except Alice's.

She let the paper crumbs from the umbrella float to the frosted-glass table surface and looked just to the right of Jan, at the happy young couple, and felt nostalgic and a little sad and wanted to kiss Jan on his big pink lips, but the table was between them and they had been over since March, and now it was hot out and the drinks were very cool and the fly was squashed and rotting and nothing was better. Nothing would be better for a long time.

I really liked The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen

When Stephen woke up in the Maine-chilly sheets he knew immediately that he would have to write later that day. It wasn't that he felt it itching in the back of his mind the way he did sometimes when the novel was new and fucking exciting, or when he knew he was on the verge of discovering a plot twist that would change the entire thing. But he knew that he had to clock in some four hours this morning, just like always, or he would get behind. The story was in one of those goddamn doldrums; he hoped he could work through it today. ...After a shower.

He rolled over and looked blurrily (blearily) at Tabby's back, hunched away from him, naked. He hadn't been on such great terms with Tabby lately. She supported him, sure, of course, like always, but she was a little pissed off because he didn't like her new idea, the one about Marcia and the babies. Tabby was a first-class woman but her writing was like a fucking soap opera, Stephen thought. She'd only started writing after meeting him, he reminded himself, feeling a little vindicated and, what was the word, generous almost. He had to encourage her, sure. She was like a child. A slim-shouldered, intelligent, funny, dramatic, stubborn child.

It was five-thirty and Stephen had gone to bed at two but he wasn't tired. A perk of getting old, he supposed. He didn't mind getting old, really; his talent and his fame were only growing, and the kids (first-class kids, really) had finally left home. He reached out onto the little rickety Guatamalan table by his side of the bed-- Tabby had her own on the right-- and plucked up his glasses, those awful ones he'd worn since '72. By now he felt they were almost synonymous with his name-- a fucking household name by now-- and even, he thought secretly, with the whole genre of horror. Stephen could no sooner get laser surgery-- and this was a fucking great analogy-- he could no sooner get laser surgery than he could chop off his hands.

He put them on and the world came into clarity, except for a large irritating smudge on one eye. Stephen rubbed at it ineffectually and cursed quietly. Finally he threw the spectacles down on the pillow. Fuck it, Tabby could clean them when she woke up.

Stephen rolled out of bed into the cold. (Maine! ah, Bangor, Maine, he had no choice but to live here now, the place was such an inspiration-- but even though he had no choice he kept telling himself he would never want to live anywhere else, not even Hawaii or Fiji or Florida.) He turned on the shower. It was April and it took some ten minutes for the water to heat up. While he was waiting, Stephen shaved and took a leak and brushed his teeth and sneaked a glance in the mirror. Without his glasses, with reality blurred, he could handle the mirror. But he didn't much like the way he looked when he could actually see. Now Tim, his character, he definitely liked looking in the mirror, the jackass. Tim was a good-looking bastard. Wouldn't it be jarring though if one day Tim looked in the mirror and saw someone else, someone ugly and scary? It would totally undermine the usual legends of beasts not having reflections. Perhaps this new beast would only be a reflection. Hmm--

And then finally the shower was steaming and Stephen stripped off his yellow boxers and stepped in, oh, fuck, scalding!

Entropy

How quickly he joined the past tense!

You could have almost marveled at it, if you were disposed to doing so. One moment the man is alive and well and kissing his wife goodbye and wincing at his sunburn as he pulls his sweatshirt over his back, and the next is "Did you know him?" and "He was a good man" and "They're going to bury him in Minnesota, that's where his family was from, you know." Suddenly no longer there, no longer actively affecting others. Affecting others with his absence instead.

Birth, you thought, was not really like that at all. Birth and death were the bookends of life (or were they? These debates on when life really started were confusing, and was it at conception, at birth, three months in, or what?), but birth was gradual. Giving birth took hours and the pregancy took months. Death was the opposite. Death was decisive, death was quick and sudden and irreversible. One was dead when the line was flat, when the heart stopped beating for good, when the chest stopped rising and falling, when the eyes stopped responding to light. Death was harsh and obvious, and after the first few hours when you thought they could still save him, bring him back, life-changing near-death experience you can laugh about a little and all that, well, after those few hours you gave up and let them pull the plug and sat in shock for a while on the plastic chair and then you went home and when you woke up you expected him to be there and then you remembered that he wasn't.

But it took a long time until you really realized that he was gone forever. You knew it on the surface, and you knew that it was going to hit you for real sometime, but nevertheless when it happened you reeled from the blow, you pushed it back, you tried to make it more gradual (like birth). You did what you were meant to at first, wore the black and acted somber and even cried dutifully somehow, but not with those wracking sobs that hurt your chest that came later, though you tried to stop them. Denial was less painful, denial made more sense. Birth was gradual, thus death should be. So he wasn't really dead.

The gravestone said "rest in peace" but that just made you mad. Rest in peace? Why rest in peace? The man lived in peace! Why rest in peace? His life was not war. His life was great. He was happy. Why not take someone miserable instead and bring him back? Rest in peace, well, maybe he is, but peace isn't what he wanted. What he wanted was to live. He was a man with a love of life in him. Take somebody else, that kid who's always whining about wanting to just leave this world, the old man who's blind and degenerating, someone not in the prime of his life. What was he being punished for? He didn't want to die. Why did he die?

And you just couldn't wrap your mind around it, because there was no reason. "God's eternal plan," they said, but what was it then? Why did God's eternal plan involve him dying just then? You couldn't see his death affecting something major. It made those who knew him sad, but it didn't change the world, not in a huge way. It was senseless and stupid and impotent and why would God do something like that? Didn't Nietzche say that God is dead? Maybe God is dead, that makes more sense than the death. But the driver didn't mean for it to happen, of course, he's broken up about it, and why should there be an accident? In a sane world accidents do not happen. It's not that they weren't careful, both of them. It was just bad luck, really. Awful luck.

But that's not fair, you thought. Luck? Since when is luck what determines someone's life? (It happens often really, you guessed, what with the preemies and cancer and bombs and all, it's all luck of the draw, but somehow that logic doesn't work when it comes to accidents. Accidents just don't make sense at all. Accidents should stop existing.)

And when you looked at the grave it just made you mad because the death did not make any sense and you wanted him to come back and it wasn't fair and you didn't understand it and it wasn't fair. You had to move on, of course, and you managed okay, but thinking about it was despairing a little because clearly you just didn't get the way this world worked, because his death didn't fit anywhere in your comprehension of the world. It was a bad blow. It was entropy.

Heracles

The baby was large for his age, always. But very good. Very quiet.

He liked the cat, liked to cuddle with it. Kind of sad, actually. One night he took it with him to bed. Cuddled it, you know, squeezed it. We woke up in the morning, went to check on the baby. Covered in blood. Poor thing. Blood and fur. He'd squeezed the poor cat to death. It couldn't escape. It had exploded, or something. We cleaned it up. Rather horrified, really. That was when we really first realized how strong he was. He didn't know his own strength, of course. He was a baby!

But then of course the thing with the snakes, that didn't surprise us at all. A good baby. Just very very strong.

the attacks

The doctors didn’t like the seizures-- they scared them-- so they gave me medication. It worked just fine, it worked great. No more seizures for me, no more panic for them, for my teachers and my brothers and my parents and my classmates.

But I didn’t get the feelings when I was taking the medication. No one really got my seizures, I think. They saw me thrashing and screaming and breaking sticks in my teeth, or whatever. I was never conscious of that. What I was conscious of were the feelings, so beautiful, like being catapulted up into the atmosphere. I felt dizzy and lightheaded and not in my body and amazing, and I could see anything I wanted to see. But mostly I didn’t want to see anything because I was too busy flying. While my body was letting its instincts run it, my mind and soul were somewhere else. Heaven, maybe.

I got to experience Heaven on earth, and the medication stopped it.

I didn’t want others to worry and freak out and force it on me, so I kept using it when they were around, except sometimes when I forgot. But when I was alone I would never take it. And because, I think, the seizures built up when I was taking the medication, sort of like they were piling up against this barrier, when I took it down by not taking the pills (three a day) I would generally get one within the hour.

Oh it was beautiful. My God, I pity all of you who’ve never had one. The experience is like nothing. Mind out of body, you can do anything you want, anything. None of it is real, I guess, but somehow it still is. Maybe it’s like breaking into an alternate universe. Maybe something very like magic. It makes you feel like a little kid, learning the world all over again.

It’s hard to describe in English, I guess, because you don’t have your body-senses. No eyes ears nose tongue skin. No vision hearing smelling tasting feeling. Instead it’s something else, something like all those at once plus more. Like being dead, maybe, since your body isn’t there. I’ve never met anyone who’s had a near-death experience. I hear you rise up and you see a light, or something, and that isn’t what I feel. I feel more like I am the world. Like my atoms have dispersed and I am a little bit of everyone and everything. Spiritual hackneyed stuff? Maybe, but it’s true. And I guess they fear it.

My mother’s name is Marilyn and I had my first epileptic attack at age four. My poor parents freaked out utterly. My father’s Allan, very practical. They took me to the hospital, of course, and they said it was a flaw in my brain and that they should have told us earlier when they did the scan for Down Syndrome and it was unforgivable that the doctors in Sigourney County didn’t. That was where I was born. They gave me medication too, but even at that age I didn’t forget how much I liked the attack. I tried to tell my parents and they wrote it off. So I only took half my pills. My parents didn’t know, they thought I needed stronger medication or something. I flushed the other pills down the toilet.

I had two brothers, then three. The third one, Benson, was born when I was six. The other two were older than me. When I was ten, Paul was twenty-one, Leon fourteen. Benson four, of course. Strange for my parents, having four boys so spaced out. I think they always wanted a girl, but it wasn’t to be. I think maybe they spaced us out so in the hope that they could have a girl that they could raise all to herself. Instead they had to raise four boys over the course of what, forty years? Unbelievable. I don’t think I could do it for the life of me. They were brave.

We had a dog, I remember, until I was nine. Lucy, she was called, a golden retriever. She was run over by a car in 1998 and I was devastated. I had taken my medication that day and I had attacks anyway, two, bad enough that I was rushed to the hospital. I guess it was an escape for me. They said it was stress-induced. But in the attacks I had seen Lucy and I had made peace with her death somehow, and I didn’t cry over her after that.

I never had much luck with animals really. I always wanted pets, and we had them often. I’d bring home frogs and worms and things and tried to care for them. They’d usually run away or die and I’d have another attack. Things like that hit me hard. Leon said I was a sissy, Paul, always gentler, that I was the most sensitive of us four. Benson was a violent boy, which made it worse. He’d always hurt things for the fun of it and laugh. He was cute, with chubby cheeks, and he liked to hurt things. I hated it and I hated him. I’d try and induce attacks sometimes, to get away from him, that brother of mine, no true brother of mine, I always thought.

Leon was a little bit harsh. He knew the role of older brother well and he played it well: diffident, cool, always leaving me out of things, teasing occasionally, but mostly sticking to his own business. It was okay with me. I’d never known a world without him, and so of course I was quite used to him.

Paul was the best of the batch. He was genuinely sweet. Always dating someone. When I was thirteen and he was twenty-four he got married to a great girl named Debbie, and within a couple years they had a baby, my first nephew, Stephen. Adorable, of course. They were the perfect family. Then they had a girl, Patty. I think my parents were jealous. They were always trying to be doting grandparents, even while they were still raising Benson and I.

Benson was a handful, but my attacks really bothered them, I think. None of my brothers had diseases. Sure, they got hurt and they got sick, but my parents could deal with kid problems. With epilepsy, not so much. I wonder how bad they would have been if I’d had something worse-- multiple sclerosis, maybe, or muscular dystrophy, or autism, or leukemia, or another tragic child illness. They got lucky: four children and nothing worse than epilepsy, easily medicated.

I tried to tell people how I liked the attacks sometimes. Mostly they’d just look at me like I was a completely masochistic freak that deserved to be locked up. Paul, predictably, was the only one that listened at all. When I was done trying to describe it-- I was fifteen or so, he was twenty-six and a father-- he looked at me seriously with those great blue-green eyes he somehow inherited and said, “Monroe, it sounds amazing. I’m almost sorry I don’t have it.”

“You ought to be,” I said, fifteen, clear-eyed, murky-skinned. “But no one gets it. It’s not even in textbooks or anything.”

“Maybe you’re a unique case,” he said. “Maybe you’re the only one, ever. Imagine that.”

When I imagined it it made me really very lonely.



I pictured my girlfriend, soulmate, lover, wife as an epileptic too. Beautiful, of course, hourglass, and smart and we could time our medication and ascend together and it would be the most intimate thing ever known, the two of us up there in everything, in each other, in everything. I guess I was a romantic. I knew it wouldn’t come true. I didn’t know who I’d fall for; I only hoped it would be someone who would understand at least. I hoped even more it would be someone who sort of knew what I meant. Because I would feel so terrible if she hadn’t felt it. With family I could deal with it; with friends-- well, I never really had friends. But with the love of my life I would want her to experience it so badly.

What if Paul was right and I really was the only one?

How awful that would be!

Benson was the selfish brother. Everyone told me I was more generous. “He may be afflicted,” I’d hear my parents say of me, “and a little antisocial, but Monroe’s got a heart of gold really. He’d give anyone the shirt off his back.”

It was true. I wanted others to share my wealth. I wasn’t wealthy really, but I felt it. I’d offer my sandwiches and quarters to hobos. I’d drop my candy money in donation boxes sometimes. I was naive, especially as a child-- but even when I got older and more experienced and knew the world better, I still couldn’t resist giving things up for others, whether it made a difference or not. It made me feel like I was making a difference, and that meant a lot.

I was empathetic, too, because of the epilepsy. And, my high school colleagues claimed, straight-edge. I didn’t want to do drugs, because what if they messed it up? And from what I heard they were nothing like as good as the attacks. If it didn’t make you one with everything, if it didn’t make you feel like you had died and gone to heaven, I wouldn’t try it. I was tempted by heroin a little, but the addictiveness and danger kept me away. Why bother when I already had an internal drug that surfaced often, sometimes (if rarely) when I most needed it? With no side effects except maybe inciting a little fear in others, maybe coming back to reality a little bruised and broken? More than worth it for the ride.

I figured out fairly quickly that the attacks were usually stress-induced. Problem was, I couldn’t induce stress in myself. My body wasn’t stupid; it wasn’t that easily tricked. Generally I had to take my medication, for one thing, and sometimes even when I held off on it the attacks didn’t come, because I wasn’t really scared or upset. When Lucy died that did it. When any of the animals did. Benson incited attacks sometimes, the way he acted. That kid was a monster. My parents figured it out though, and stopped it. Which was good in a way, but also bad, because I wanted the epilepsy so badly.

When I was seventeen Paul and his wife and two children were in a car crash. All of them, as it turns out, were fine-- the worst injury was Debbie’s broken collarbone-- but I had one of the worst (best) attacks of my life. I woke up in the hospital sore all over and they told me I’d been writhing for thirty-nine hours. “How are Paul and everyone?” was the first thing I asked. “Well,” they said once they figured out what I meant. “They’re doing quite well.” Paul, on crutches, came in to see me. “Nice to be in the same hospital as you, buddy,” he said. “Man, you know you’ll never be able to drive with that epilepsy. Why don’t you take your medication?”

“I did,” I said. “When I’m really stressed I get attacks anyway. And they last longer.”

Paul knew my secret. “Well, okay, kid. I’m sorry the accident brought that on.”

“It’s really fine,” I said.

Paul winked at me. “Come visit me and Deb sometime. We can jam the kids in one room. It’ll be really fun.”

“Maybe I’ll take you up on it sometime,” I said.

In college I majored in psychology, which was strange. I learned a lot and got a kick out of diagnosing people, particularly Benson, who at the time was hitting puberty and causing a lot of trouble. The kid lit trash cans on fire, he beat up younger children, he smoked and drank and, he told me once, snorted cocaine. I knew my parents had raised us as well as they could, and us three older ones had turned out fine. Leon had dabbled in drugs a little, but not irresponsibly, and by now he was in his twenties and had settled into drinking now and then. He was seeing a vibrant, beautiful black girl by the name of Mona and she would break his heart every couple of months, then come back to him. Whenever it happened he’d go off drinking and make a fool of himself. Paul told me he talked to him about it, and Leon saw sense, but he just couldn’t help it. He was crazy about Mona. I think he was hoping to get her pregnant so she would commit to him. Funny, because up until then Leon had always been the commitment phobe. He’d never even finished an extracurricular program, let alone found a steady job.

When I was twenty-four I met a girl who offered me sex. What could I do? I was a virgin and a little bit ostracized for it. I accepted, but we had hardly begun when I got a major attack. To my credit, I’d warned her before, but I woke up in the hospital, the frightened girl, face running with caked makeup, beside me. “Monroe? Are you okay?”

“Sorry,” I croaked. “Maybe some other time.”

Soon after that Benson was caught possessing crystal methamphetamine and tossed into jail. We couldn’t afford the bail, which was just as well. I worried about him-- not because he was in prison, but because of the others who were there. I was afraid they’d corrupt my brother more. He was a screwed-up kid, but he was my little brother, and he’d worshiped me when we were very little, and we had played games together, and I guess I loved him.

My brothers were really the only people I ever loved. My parents too, but that wasn’t the same.

I never did find a girl. Am still a virgin, actually. No one really knows or cares, especially me. What do I need a girl for when I’ve got my attacks? They’re far better than sex, I know it. Even if they only come at the worst of times. So what. I’ll take what I can get.

Neither of Paul’s kids are epileptic. I almost wish one was. I’ve been searching out others on the Internet, contacting them, asking about their experiences. Some are sort of similar to mine, but none are just the same, at least not yet. Paul was at least partially right; I’m unique. Sometimes it gets me depressed and I feel awfully lonely, and then, if I haven’t taken the pills, sometimes an attack whisks me away and I dangle above the world, not part of it and yet part of it all, and I don’t care anymore. I don’t care anymore at all.

a line

It makes you feel like a little kid, learning the world all over again.